WEIGHTY MATTERS
I ran the Kepler challenge in December 2007 in 7 hours 55 minutes. I couldn’t have been more satisfied with the time.
The hardest part of that run for me wasn’t the grunt getting up Luxmore or the trickiness of the switchbacks on the way down to Iris Burn Hut.
It wasn’t even the emotional challenge of facing the final basically flat last 30km. It was one comment, made by a passing tramper around the 50km mark.
I was pretty brittle at that stage, it was the longest I’d run and I was doing it hard. This guy took one look at me and said: “Look at you, I didn’t expect to see a big fella like you out here.”
A simple, innocent comment. I was about 94kg when I started that event and 178cm tall. That gave me a BMI of 29.7, which is neatly but not usefully characterised as ‘overweight’, and only a rounding error away from ‘obese’.
The tramper was not being cruel of course – he was just reacting to seeing a larger frame amidst the more typical long-distance trail runner body type – lean and keen.
In fact, if you look closely at the vast majority of elite long-distance runners you tend to see a concentration of leanness, the average BMI is between 19 and 21.
Eliud Kipchoge, that machine who just set the marathon world record at 2:01:39 has a BMI of 20.1, at the very bottom end of ‘normal’, bordering on ‘underweight’ by some classifications. These runners do not tend to carry extra muscle or fat for instance, because unlike most sports long-distance running is very closely correlated with body mass – in general
