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...
A Column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe While we’ve been wondering who might ever beat Mo Farah, not to mention how they might do it, a quiet revolution has been going on in distance running. That would be women’s distance running we are talking about. World records are being broken,...
Something to be said for insomnia There’s not much to be said for insomnia. Nothing to be said for it, in fact, for those who suffer from the full-blown sleeping disorder. There’s little more to be said for the occasional sleepless night either, except that cable television offers options that we...
Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe The Gold Coast marathon is approaching veteran status. Who would have thought? Not only that, but the event is looking pretty good as it closes in on its 40th staging and 40th birthday. The first Gold Coast marathon was in 1979, so the fortieth race will...
Last week was a good week for remembering that sayings become clichés because there is more than an element of truth to them. First as we – we Victorians, especially – endure a winter without cross-country, suddenly, in the last week of July, cross-country was coming at us from all...
Round about the time the coronavirus pandemic went truly global, and was seen to be ‘a thing’ which might adversely impact the Tokyo Olympic Games, a Japanese government minister lamented that the Games were afflicted with a 40-year-curse. “It’s a problem that’s happened every 40 years – it’s the cursed...
First, let’s have the good news. And, yes, even in these bad times there is still some good news. Five Australian athletes – world champion javelinist Kelsey-Lee Barber, walkers Dane Bird-Smith and Jemima Montag, and runners Jessica Hull and Stewart McSweyn – have been nominated to the team for next...
Sixty years ago, on 6 September, 1960, Herb Elliott won a gold medal in the 1500 metres at the Rome Olympic Games in a world record three minutes 35.6 seconds. Sounds a little mundane when you write it like that, doesn’t it. There was nothing even remotely mundane about Elliott’s...
A Column By Len Johnson The one flaw in Ron Clarke’s career was the lack of a championship gold medal. Long before his passing earlier this year, however, it was pretty well universally acknowledged that the manner in which he re-imagined and re-shaped track distance running more than made up...
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say, and the idea of the Ekiden relay has long since gone international. Well, at least to Victoria, anyway. Athletics Victoria paid homage – or should that be hommage – to the tradition of Japan’s road relays by adding an Ekiden to...