The Long Slow Distance
103 FOLLOWERS
The Long Slow Distance follows the training of Amy Friel, a Canadian distance runner and freelance writer. The daughter of a nationally-ranked middle-distance runner and granddaughter of a Canadian marathon legend, Amy’s writing chronicles the personal journey of a young athlete struggling to make good on her family’s storied marathon legacy.
The Long Slow Distance
3y ago
From fierce competitors to narrow-minded coaches to (in all likelihood) you, Alexi Pappas can outrun just about anything.
In her new memoir “Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas”, the Olympian-turned-actress-turned-writer shines a spotlight on the things she can’t outrun — namely, the loss of her mother, Roberta North, who died by suicide when Pappas was five years old. Her mother’s absence — and the particular pain inherent in the way she died — casts a long shadow over Pappas’s life, colouring not only her sense of self, but her sense of what’s possible in a chaotic ..read more
The Long Slow Distance
3y ago
As I write this, March 2021 is twelve days out. Our collective month of panic-bought toilet paper and the jerry-rigged home office returns to us in time’s flat circle. We’ve stopped calling it “the new normal” — after a year, nothing about this is novel anymore.
When the pandemic hit, I decamped from my cramped downtown Toronto apartment to my partner’s place uptown. I was training for the Chicago Marathon, a regimen I reluctantly abandoned after reading the words “droplet dispersal” and “slipstream” one too many times on Alex Hutchinson’s Twitter feed. The sidewalks, now all but deserted, no ..read more
The Long Slow Distance
4y ago
The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees will not be sending athletes to the Olympic Games, scheduled to begin on July 24th in Tokyo. Instead, they have called upon the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to postpone the Summer Games for one year, citing concerns for both athlete safety and the safety of the general public amid the coronavirus pandemic. Their calls for postponement have been echoed by Australia’s chef de mission, Ian Chesterman, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, as well as countless athletes and fans around the globe.
Yesterday, IOC President Thomas Bach released a p ..read more
The Long Slow Distance
4y ago
It likely isn’t news to many (or any) of you at this point that Newfoundland’s Dave Freake is presently serving a four-year ban for doping violations.
The violation was not, as Freake previously claimed to the CBC, the result of unintended exposure to a prohibited substance by way of an over-the-counter nasal decongestant. Rather, according to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, Freake’s May 26, 2019 in-competition urine sample revealed the presence of ephedrine, recombinant EPO, 2-4-dinitrophenol (DNP) and GW501516, better known as Cardarine. He will be ineligible to compete until Octobe ..read more