It's difficult to be consistent with training when you work eight hours a day. Now imagine being one of the best runners in the world, attending three Olympics, and breaking a world record while maintaining that work schedule.
Ron Hill is little known in Costa Rica, but he was one of the greats back in the seventies. He was the second man in history to break 2 hours 10 minutes in the marathon. Perhaps the most exemplary thing about this English runner is that throughout his athletic career he maintained a full-time job. In fact, he is one of the elite runners with the highest academic credentials, with a PhD in textile chemistry.
Many of us complain because we can't squeeze in an hour a day to go running. And it's true, after all, work grinds us down eight hours every day, plus the time spent commuting, plus family and friends and everything else. But the truth is that if Ron Hill managed to fit 180 kilometers a week of training into all that, we have no excuse for not fitting in at least an hour a day. His highest mileage week reached 264 kilometers, an average of 37 kilometers per day.
This is a typical training week for Ron Hill
Hill wasn't a natural runner either. It wasn't until he entered university, at age 19, that he started running seriously. Then he began progressively improving his times and participated in the Olympics of 1964, 1968, and 1972. His obsession with improving more and more led him to raise his training loads to levels that began to negatively affect his health. Even with colds, sore throats, and lung infections, he remained faithful to training. He ignored, like most runners of that era, that illnesses are a clear symptom of overtraining. Later (much too late) he acknowledged that he had made the mistake of training excessively.
Hill also holds a curious record: the longest streak of consecutive days running. In 2014 he completed 50 years of running every day, without rest, at least a mile a day (but the average over all those 50 years exceeds 10k daily). In total he has run more than 250 thousand kilometers, enough to lap the Earth more than six times. Anyone up for taking that record from him?
