Gordon Pirie - Running Fast and Injury Free

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORDS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACES

GORDON PIRIE'S LAWS OF RUNNING

CHAPTER ONE - Introduction

CHAPTER TWO - Why Athletes Fail

CHAPTER THREE - Injuries, Technique and Shoes

CHAPTER FOUR - Training

CHAPTER FIVE - Weight Training

CHAPTER SIX - Diet and Vitamins

REFERENCES

1996-2004 Dr John S Gilbody

FOREWORD

LETTER PUBLISHED IN THE TIMES (THURSDAY MARCH 5, 1992):

PIRIE: FORGOTTEN MAN OF ATHLETICS

Sir, Under the heading Athletics honours Pirie (February 26) you report the tributes paid to the late Gordon Pirie at the memorial service in St Bride's Church, Fleet Street. As well as his contemporaries, the athletics establishment, both past and present, and the press were well represented.

It is regrettable that this acclaim and recognition comes now, after he has gone, and was not expressed when he was ahve. The country he served so well on the world's mnning tracks thought him unworthy of an honour, while the estabhshment found no place for his profound knowledge of the sport and his boundless enthusiasm. It must baffle his many admirers worldwide that Britain offered him no official coaching post.

The argument was put forward in your sports letters (December 26) that the regular award of honours for sporting achievements did not begin until the Sixties, after Pine's time. This is not correct.

In the Queen's Birthday Honours list of June 1955, Sir Roger Bannister, a contemporary of Pirie, was appointed CBE for his services to amateur athletics, clearly for achieving the first sub-four-minute mile the preceding year. In the same hst, George Headley, the West Indian cricketer, was created MBE.

Picking at random, one finds in the New Year's Honours of 1958 a CBE for Dennis Compton (services to sport), a similar honour for Dai Rees (golf) and the MBE for the boxer Hogan Kid Bassey (for his services to sport in Eastern Nigeria).

Rather ironically, in the same year. Jack Cmmp, the secretary of the British Amateur Athletics Board, with whom Pirie was often at loggerheads, was appointed OBE for his services to athletics.

Pine's services to sport far exceeded those of his British contemporaries; athletes or officials. He was a giant of his time and it was his name that drew crowds to the White City and inspired the later Bedfords and Fosters. One suspects that he ultimately paid the price for speaking out and for being of independent mind without the necessary Oxbridge pedigree. The answers lay among that assembly gathered in St Bride's, and ought to be revealed.

Mrs Jennifer Gilbody

1996-2004 Dr John S Gilbody

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Miss Patricia Chamet, and my mother, Mrs Jennifer Gilbody, for their encouragement during this project. At last I have fulfilled my promise to Gordon to fine-tune, medically vahdate and pubhsh his work, though I am sure were he here he would have some words to say; probably about bloody time!

Purley 2nd XI,

1946 (Gordon on right handside)

1996-2004 Dr John S Gilbody

PREFACE

Gordon Piiie lived with us for several years up to his death in 1991, and had a profound effect on us aU. Of many things about Gordon, what particularly impressed was his physical fitness, and desire for perfection with aU things athletic. A good example of this was the time he did some lumber jacking in the New Forest in Hampshire, and proudly boasted how many more trees he cut down than men thirty years his junior. On another occasion, I inadvertently agreed to join Gordon for a mn on a disused section of railway track, thinking myself moderately fit. Being half Gordon's age, I was somewhat taken aback when, in the time it took me to run one length of track, Gordon had mn three! Associated with this, which was humihation enough, were various comments about my mnning shoes and mnning technique (or lack of), as one might imagine.

The original manuscript of this book was written by Gordon, in typical fashion, in 24 hours fiat. The 5 *4-inch diskette on which the computer file was saved had been tucked away in a sports bag until Gordon rediscovered it, and somehow got folded in half. As a result, it took a fuU weekend to retrieve the data, and I had to cut out the magnetic media from within the diskette, replace it into a customised new diskette, merge snippets of uncormpted data into a single ASCn file, and then laboriously convert the file line by line into a recognised wordprocessor format. During this process, Gordon looked on with an enigmatic smile; he always did tike to set challenges, however impossible! Revision and editing was started shortly before Gordon's death, and the manuscript transferred to our possession, with Gordon's express desire that the book be pubhshed by us in order to assist the training of a new generation of mnners. Overall, to get from that early stage to the present book has taken five years of work, and has been a sizeable project for me, albeit one which I was of course determined and happy to achieve.

As you will see, the book is highly controversial, with some radical ideas (one of the reasons it has had to be self-pubhshed!), but I beheve it is a fitting tribute to Gordon Pirie, which should give an insight into why he was such a successful mnner, and perhaps even an opportunity for others to emulate him. The reader may be interested to know of Gordon's two other books Running Wild (pubhshed by W H Ahen, Eondon, 1961), and The ChaUenge of Orienteering (Pelham Books Eimited, 1968). In addition, the writer Dick Booth recently published a detailed biographical account of Gordon's life, entitled: The Impossible Hero (Corsica Press, Eondon, 1999), which is available from http://www.bookshop.co.uk and http://www.amazon.co.uk. I should also mention extensive discussions about Gordon based on interviews (complete chapters) in Alastair Aitkens books Athletics Enigmas (The Book Guild Etd., 2002) and More Than Winning (The Book Guild Etd., 1992).