Runner’s Life Newsletter

Highlights and stories from March 17 — March 30, 2024

Jeff Barton

Published in

Runner's Life

5 min readMar 31, 2024

Welcome to the Runner’s Life newsletter!

If you’ve missed previous Runner’s Life newsletters, you can find the archive here. This week, we bring back the featured writer section, a regular part of previous newsletters.

Our featured writer this week is Normi Coto, PhD.

Normi began running in high school for the wrong reason: she had a crush on a boy on the cross country team. By the time she realized the cute boy would never be her boyfriend, she had a new crush: running. Continuing to run through college, Normi ran her first marathon (Disney) in January 1996. However, her physician-father insisted that she have an EKG first and warned her that she may never have that third child she wanted if she ran the marathon. She had both the EKG and the third child, a boy born in October 1996. Normi ran through three pregnancies back when running was as misunderstood as women’s health.

Running has been the one constant in her life. As a result, she has had her litany of injuries: Morton’s neuroma, plantar fasciitis, fractured femur, gluteal tendinopathy, and more. During her most baffling injury, chronic calf tears, she learned about zero-drop shoes, barefoot runners, and proper running form. Simultaneously, Normi was working on her doctorate in Writing and Rhetoric, but she still had no dissertation topic. In a moment of insight, she took her running injury experiences and married them to her studies in rhetoric, producing her dissertation: Persuasion by Word of Foot: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry into Barefoot Running as a Health Practice. Although not a barefoot runner, she took up the practice during her research and made it up to three miles. Acorns, aka Nature’s Legos, drove her back to shoes.

Normi has run six marathons. She’s most proud of qualifying for Boston twice and running it once (2001) and finishing her first ultramarathon (50K) last year. Her favorite distance is the half-marathon. She is most jealous of those runners who have daily access to mountain trails, but she won’t complain about living on the Chesapeake Bay.

Normi is an English teacher by day and a writer by night. She writes about running, writing, prayer, rhetoric, and mindset; also, this year she’s writing about her year-long experiment with living alcohol-free. Her blog, Run and Be Brave, focuses on running and all the ways it spills into and enriches every part of our lives.

You can contact Normi at her website Run and Be Brave or by email.

Her Featured Stories

Running and Menopause: The 9 Ways I Made It Through the Roughest Running Year to Date

The Agency of Running Shoes

Got Writer’s Block? Find Water

Note: Amby Burfoot’s weekly newsletter, Run Long, Run Healthy will return next week. Previous editions of Run Long, Run Healthy newsletters can be found here.

Featured Story

Are the Boston Marathon Qualifying Times Fair For All Age Groups? by Brian Rock

“In two weeks, the eyes of the running world will be on the Boston Marathon.
The majority of the runners — about 22,000 — gained entry into the race by running a qualifying time at another marathon.
About 11,000 runners also ran a qualifying time, but were turned away. And many thousands more likely missed their qualifier by a few minutes.
For all those runners watching from home on Patriots’ Day, there is, of course, hope for next year. But as the attention shifts from this year’s race to qualifying for next year, the conversation will center around qualifying times — and whether they need to change to avoid deep cut-off times.
Lately, I’ve been working on an analysis of marathon times in order to better understand age grading and to offer alternative methods to compare race performances between athletes.
As part of that research, I’ve collected an extensive sample of race results that would allow us to examine the question of Boston qualifying times based on the data.
So are the Boston qualifying standards fair — or do they advantage certain groups of runners over others?”