Tina is a professional distance runner, Great Britain Olympic hopeful, and 11-time All-America Track and Field/Cross Country athlete for Ferris State University.
She's run in two British Olympic Trials, finishing 3rd in the 10k in 2012 and 5th in the Marathon in 2016.
Her personal bests, as you can imagine, are out of this world:
Earlier this year, Tina made a stunning announcement that she was taking a hiatus as a pro runner. She's recovering from amenorrhea (she didn't have a period for 9 years) and is hoping to start a family soon.
But she realized that she just didn't enjoy her running anymore.
Every run was a struggle. She dreaded upcoming workouts and just wasn't excited about training anymore.
I consider this to be an unspoken problem in the running community. Amid calls for consistency, putting in the work, and training "no matter what" there lies a deeper issue: once you've done that, when is it ok to stop?
Tina is on the SR Podcast today to talk about her journey and give hope to runners everywhere whose hearts just aren't set on hard training anymore.
This is an honest, real, and personal conversation that I hope you enjoy.
I invited Simon Marshall, PhD and his wife Lesley Patterson to talk about practical strategies for building confidence, reducing pre-race anxiety, and managing fears.
Their new book The Brave Athlete is a handbook for the athlete's brain, showing you how to:
This husband and wife team is quite the duo. Simon is former professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of San Diego and a professor of sport and exercise psychology at San Diego State University.
Currently, he's the performance psychologist for BMC Racing - a World Tour professional cycling team.
His wife Lesley Patterson is a dominant triathlete, having won three world off-road triathlon champions and an Ironman Triathlon. A professional mountain biker, she's also a former national champion in cross country.
And I think all of us get how important our brain is to our running.
How many times have you been halfway through a long run and dreaded every step?
How many races have you wished in hindsight that you had sucked it up and ran harder instead of settling?
It's happened to me more times than I can count. And it happens to world-class athletes (like Lesley, which we talk about) all the time, too.
This podcast will show you how to turn your brain into an asset, rather than a liability.
What we put into our bodies has a profound impact on our ability to train effectively.
In short, if you care about you running, you have to care about your eating habits.
And I've brought a Registered Dietitian on the SR Podcast to help.
Over the last few weeks, I've surveyed the Strength Running Twitter and Facebook communities about dieting, weight loss, nutrition, and race fueling.
I collected about a dozen of the best questions and got my friend Anne Mauney to help me answer them for you.
Anne worked with me to create one of SR's flagship programs, Nutrition for Runners.
She's one of the busiest RD's I know with a private practice in Washington, DC and a popular lifestyle blog. She also gives healthy eating presentations and workshops to organizations like Whole Foods.
Her work has been featured in Glamour, Self, The Washington Post, and Fitness Magazine. When she's not helping athletes improve their diets, she's usually running around DC or tackling yet another half marathon.
There are also two more Q&A podcasts that we did together - download them here for free.
On this episode, we cover a lot of questions:
Enjoy!
Usually, I fire off answers as fast as I can. Whether that's on Facebook or Twitter, I try to be as responsive as possible.
But sometimes, life gets in the way. I simply don't have the time to answer all of your questions - especially when a single SR email goes out to about 80,000 runners...
That does not, however, mean I'm not paying attention.
In fact, I often save your running questions to get to them later. And that's exactly what we're doing today.
Joining me as the SR Podcast's first co-host is my friend, fellow coach, and ultra runner Doug Hay.
Fresh off his sub-15hr run at the Ultra Run of Champions (snagging him a sweet belt buckle!), Doug is helping us get to the bottom of some of your toughest questions.
Let's dive in.