Ultramarathon Daily News Tuesday, July 16

Mornin’ y’all. I’m Laura Parson, an ultrarunner and professor HQ’ed in Auburn, Alabama, where I replace altitude training training with summer mid-day humidity training. You can read my writing at Salty Running where I mostly write race reports and talk about my FKT attempts to raise money for Girls on the Run. I’ll be taking over the news here a few times while Eric is on vacation.

Let’s do this.

In case you missed it, the Fast Women newsletter has updates from across the running world. This week’s edition includes updates on Katie Arnold’s New York Times article on her Leadville win last year and directs attention to the updated “geeks only” section of the Leadville website with updated splits from the 2019 event.

Promoting a healthy body image – In light of Amelia’s post about her struggles with an eating disorder, and the prevalence of EDs across genders in running, Blair talks about how (not) to promote a healthy body image in response to a reader question. It’s a tough issue for sure, but we can start by disconnecting appearance from performance (and value). In that same theme, TrainingPeaks posted an article about how to prevent Relative Energy Deficiency In Sport (RED-S) from a coaching perspective. I find the conflation of sex and gender in the article problematic and suggest that isolating and targeting women athletes contributes to the stigma, but there are some good tips and thoughts.

Keep it slow: More goodness from David Roche on the importance of keeping your easy days easy. Seriously, though, stop comparing easy day stats on Strava (unless you’re competing for slowest pace while still maintaining forward motion).

Need some summer reads? Check out the list of Adventure books (most published since 2000). What books are missing from the list?

Teen is running 130k to raise awareness of murdered and missing indigenous women – and this isn’t his first run. 15 now, he has does this run every year since he was 11. At fifteen, I had yet to run a single loop of a track without being quite positive this was the end, before the end. Pretty amazing kid.

Need a new trail (or destination inspiration)? The Outbound Collective has a list of the best trails in every state. What did they leave off of the list?

IRunFar: The science of staying cool – Extensive review of how to stay cool during and after a long run (or race). Good review of the basics and some next level shade for your next run.