How I Fell in Love with Running (and You Can, Too)

If you’re a beginner runner, it’s hard to imagine loving running sometimes. It can seem that there are slightly bonkers people who were born loving running, and then everyone else. With me and running, it certainly wasn’t love at first sight. Running was someone else’s thing, and I didn’t really want much to do with it…

First Olympic Triathlon – Nailed It!

I completed my first Olympic Distance triathlon – The Cleveland Short Course – last weekend. I had a (mostly) marvellous time and I am so happy I womanned-up and took the plunge. The Practice Swim My main reservation about the triathlon was the open water swim – having not had a chance to ever practice, I…

How To Train For Your First 5K

Training for your first Race for Life 5K or 10K is a seriously brilliant idea. Being a beginner runner is challenging no doubt, but you can see improvement day by day, and you carry such a sense of pride from it. That is, if you train properly and give the event a little bit of…

To Tri and Fail, or not Tri at All?

I am currently contemplating my first ever DNS at a race. This would be a first for me – I’ve had tantrums by the side of the road in a marathon, I’ve nearly been sick during a half, and I’ve slogged myself ragged and missed my target time by 17 measly seconds in a 10K….

Turmeric and Citrus Spiced Almonds

Turmeric is the ‘It spice’ of the moment, and with good reason. The curcumin that gives it a shocking yellow colour has been linked to health benefits ranging from heart-health and digestion-settling, to even fighting cancer. The only way it can be improved upon is to combine it with the nutritional ‘It food’ – almonds!…

5 Amazing Vegetarian Carb-Loading Recipes

If you’re doing a race this weekend, you should be thinking about how you’re going to fuel your run. Carb loading, to be precise. A few days before a race, you need to start thinking about eating extra carbohydrates to give your body the stores of glycogen to avoid a mid-marathon meltdown. We prefer complex…

Vegan Almond Butter Ice Cream, with Cherry Swirl

I am seriously proud of this Almond Butter Ice Cream recipe. It’s totally dairy free and free from refined sugar but it’s as delicious as anything you would get from a gelataria, I promise. I am often proud of what we accomplish with Veggie Runners, but this one is totes my Atticus Finch, my…

Happiness Podcasts Rocking My World Right Now

Serial was a gateway podcast, right? We all got hung up on it, worked out how to get our hands on the goods for the first time, and now we’re mainlining them for hours a day, anxious for our next fix. I feel the same way about podcasts as I did when I rediscovered the…

26 Ways Skiing is exactly like Training for a Marathon

I just had a spectacular week skiing in the French Alps – huge amounts of food, even more exercise; the highest of highs and the lowest of lows; decked out head to toe in sportswear. And I thought, “Hold on, I’ve been here before. More than once. Skiing and training for a marathon are literally the…

Szechuan Tofu with Mushrooms and Baby Bok Choi

Have you ever chewed Szechuan peppercorns by themselves? They make your tongue tingle, a feeling like licking a battery. It’s like nothing else in the world – you can see why Szechuan foods are sometimes labelled “Numb and Spicy” when translated from Chinese. Don’t worry though, in this vegan and gluten-free recipe, the feeling is…

5 Amazing Reflective Accessories for Runners

Hey, you, runners! You are great, you are powerful, you are better than you were yesterday. You are, however, NOT INVINCIBLE. This winter, I have been seeing a lot of runners out in head-to-toe black, no reflectors, headphones in and it gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. We need to have a talk about reflective gear….

Get Faster, Fast! How to smash your marathon PB in 2015.

This guest post comes from the fantastic Laura Fountain, the brain behind Lazy Girl Running and half of our favourite event of the year, run blogging conference Write This Run. Having run ten marathons, she knows a thing or two about training. When I heard her Marathon Talk interview and found out that she had…