A Column By Len Johnson

Len Johnson wrote for The Melbourne Age as an athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games.

He has been the long-time lead columnist on RT and is one of the world’s most respected athletic writers.

He is also a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) and trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella among other running legends. He is the author of The Landy Era.

A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This definition is attributed to Albert Einstein. It has also become such an over-used cliché, according to the smarty-pants people at news and opinion website Salon, that further use...
No 10,000m at Pre', plus Rio medals returned. A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe No Mo' Ten Pardon me. The realisation hit late. It is the eve of the Prefontaine Classic and I have just noticed there is no 10,000. It may not have the storied history of our own Zatopek...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe Al Lawrence, who died earlier this week after a prolonged battle with pancreatic cancer, was arguably the best Australian distance runner most of you have never heard of. Born in the Sydney suburb of Punchbowl, a member of Botany Harriers, Lawrence spent most...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe  Last weekend, 5-7 May, was one of those times when, to dip our lids to Roy Slaven and H.G.Nelson, “too much sport was barely enough.” To recap, we had off-field shenanigans with the John Coates v Danni Roche election for the Australian Olympic...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe  Here’s a multiple-choice question: It’s 3am; the next-door neighbour’s party is in full swing, the music boring its way into your brain. Do you: (a) bury your head deeper into the pillows; (b) ask him to turn the music off; or, (c) ask...
A Column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe  When someone refers to a cat-and-mouse struggle, there is usually only one possible outcome (spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for the mouse). Especially when it is a marathon, and the ‘cats’ in question are Tirunesh Dibaba and Kenenisa Bekele, both with claims...
A Column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe  There wasn’t much reason to remember the 1970s – apart from the fact that we could. It was the decade we regained our memories. It followed the ‘60s and, as everyone knows, if you can remember the ‘60s, you probably weren’t there. Athletically,...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe  When Nike announced recently that its ‘window’ for the attempt to run the first sub-two hour marathon was 5-7 May, an intriguing possibility was raised. The date dead-centre in the window, 6 May, is the sixty-third anniversary of the breaking of another famous...
A Column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe Crikey. No sooner do we write in defence of Matt Centrowitz’s tactics in the Rio Olympic men’s 1500 metres final than we get an Australian championships replete with races run on what we might now call the Centrowitz-Kipyegon model: slow as a...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe Ladies and Gentleman, we present for your entertainment a battle for one of the heavyweight titles of athletics – the world cross-country championships. In the red corner, the defending champion, a course over 10 kilometers, multiple laps over a flat (and maybe a...