Running by Feeling, A Year on the Racing Comeback Trail

By Brian L. Clarke

Running by Feeling is a memoir and a training system. It's the story of Brian Clarke's racing comeback at age fifty, after an eight year hiatus. It is also a new and radical description of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966359593
• ISBN13: 9780966359596
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Competitive Running Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

He knows what he's doing...

I've had the pleasure of training with Brian's running group for the 2003 Honolulu Marathon and for "fun runs." After picking up this book, the concepts behind the training became so much clearer. The training worked because I had built my mileage base with the marathon training and then added speedwork with the fun run training. Brian adds a personal narrative that should be of interest to competative runners because of his description of the psychological aspects of racing. What I really liked about this book is that Brian tells the whole story. He doesn't leave out the mistakes he's made, and I feel that the consequences of those mistakes really illuminate his message.The workouts Brian described are not for the novice runner (that's me). I can't imagine running twice a day. However, his description of the hard/easy system and how to log your workouts is good.

Clarke gives the formula for perfect balance in running

A few decades ago, most runners undertrained. It wasn't until the 1960s that megamileage became common among distance runners. Now, the tendency is to overtrain, which leads to both physical and mental breakdown. Clarke's book is about achieving optimum balance between energy and effort. It's about coordinating the effort with the energy that allows for adaptation, i.e., better performances in the sport. Clarke offers a matrix in which workout effort is classified in varying degrees on one side and in which energy is classified across the bottom. There are 30 possible combinations of this effort-energy matrix. Clarke says that only five are optimum adaptive workouts. The runner who want to improve should gain a lot from reading Clarke's excellent work.