By Jaryd Clifford - Runner's Tribe
One week after Melbourne's historic Olympic Park bore witness to its final Zatopek 10,000m in 2010, a motley crew of nineteen runners and two pacemakers filed onto Geelong's Landy Field to toe the line in a comparatively modest race of the same distance. With...
A column by Jaryd Clifford – Runner’s Tribe
On the start line amidst the shadows of descending dusk, Keely Small stood in the wings of history. Her head held aloft, arms slightly parted from her body, her eyes stared fiercely ahead, unblinking and determined. She was only fifteen. For this fleeting...
Written by Jaryd Clifford - (c) Runner's Tribe
Everyone knows David Rudisha, but only some people know James Turner. This is a loss for the Australian running community. Let me tell you why.
At the 2016 Paralympic Games, twenty-year-old James Turner dominated the T36 800m, a race for athletes with cerebral...
The Leonora Golden Gift is famous for attracting the best of the best. Every year the small mining town plays host to the most talented runners in the country as they fight for the coveted road mile title and a piece of the $50,000 prize purse. This year is...
Philo Saunders set to challenge Bernard Lagat’s World Record – “I’ve never thought about how old I am. Just how well I’m running.”
Written by Jaryd Clifford - Runner's Tribe
It is a cold morning in Flagstaff. A group of runners emerge onto a quiet mountain road in the surrounding forest. The...
A column by Jaryd Clifford – Runner’s Tribe
Dreams and nightmares are conflicting phenomena. One is what we endeavour for, the reason for the toil; the other is simply what we hope never takes place, the dreaded disaster. In running, they are untamed beasts, bestowed with unbridled power, wilfully determining the...
Written by Jaryd Clifford - Runner's Tribe
Adam Didyk & Team Tempo: Putting South Australia back on the running map
It was a brilliant stroke of genius during a despondent period that propelled Adam Didyk down the path of coaching. At a dinner table in 2007, uncertainty filled the conversation. He...
James Hansen, the sixty-ninth Australian to run a mile in under four-minutes, waited in the wings. He covered every move, stalking the leaders with flawless precision. It is easy to spot him amidst the fray, built for the brawl, his arms swinging like a barrage of punches. Hansen, now aged twenty-five, has run in six Australian 1500m finals, never medalling. This race, the 2018 Commonwealth Games trials, would be the most agonising. For a fleeting moment, with only fifty metres left to run, he hit the front. Besieged by the nation’s best milers, he dared to dream of winning. It was not to be. In the final strides, it all unravelled, swamped on the line in an unforgivable falter. For the second time in his career, he would finish fourth, only five one-hundredths-of-a-second shy of the medal he so desperately wanted to win.
As Michael Roeger’s body ground to a halt along the Embankment in London earlier this year, the crowd hushed, their breaths held in unison as they bore witness to the dramatic cruelty of the marathon. Mercilessly, it seemed, the historic distance was only moments away from claiming yet another...
The Leonora Golden Gift kicked off on Thursday in spectacular fashion. Under the guidance of professional running coach Raf Baugh, a record number of local school kids – aged five to eighteen – took part in an athletics clinic preparing them for the weekend’s races. The day proved to...
