| Running Fast and Injury Free by Gordon Pirie |
| 1 | Running Fast and Injury Free by Gordon Pirie (Edited by John S Gilbody) (c) 1996-2002 Dr John S Gilbody Table of contents Forewords Acknowledgements Prefaces Gordon Pirie's laws of running Chapter one -Introduction Chapter two -Why Athletes Fail Chapter three -Injuries, Technique and Shoes Chapter four -Training Chapter five -Weight Training Chapter six -Diet and Vitamins References Foreword Letter Published in the Times (Thursday March 5, 1992): Pirie: Forgotten Man of Athletics Sir, Under the heading "Athletics honours Pirie" (February 26) you report the tributes paid to the late Gordon Pirie at the memorial service in St Bride's Church, Fleet Street. |
| 2 | As well as his contemporaries, the athletics establishment, both past and present, and the press were well represented. It is regrettable that this acclaim and recognition comes now, after he has gone, and was not expressed when he was alive. The country he served so well on the world's running tracks thought him unworthy of an honour, while the establishment found no place for his profound knowledge of the sport and his boundless enthusiasm. |
| 3 | It must baffle his many admirers world-wide that Britain offered him no official coaching post. The argument was put forward in your sports letters (December 26) that the regular award of honours for sporting achievements did not begin until the Sixties, after Pirie's time. This is not correct. In the Queen's Birthday Honours list of June 1955, Sir Roger Bannister, a contemporary of Pirie, was appointed CBE for his services to amateur athletics, clearly for achieving the first sub-four-minute mile the preceding year. |
| 4 | In the same list, George Headley, the West Indian cricketer, was created MBE. Picking at random, one finds in the New Year's Honours of 1958 a CBE for Dennis Compton (services to sport), a similar honour for Dai Rees (golf) and the MBE for the boxer Hogan "Kid" Bassey (for his services to sport in Eastern Nigeria). Rather ironically, in the same year, Jack Crump, the secretary of the British Amateur Athletics Board, with whom Pirie was often at loggerheads, was appointed OBE for his services to athletics. |
| 5 | Pirie's services to sport far exceeded those of his British contemporaries; athletes or officials. He was a giant of his time and it was his name that drew crowds to the White City and inspired the later Bedfords and Fosters. One suspects that he ultimately paid the price for speaking out and for being of independent mind without the necessary Oxbridge pedigree. The answers lay among that assembly gathered in St Bride's, and ought to be revealed. |
| 6 | Mrs Jennifer Gilbody Acknowledgements I would like to thank Miss Patricia Charnet, and my mother, Mrs Jennifer Gilbody, for their encouragement during this project. At last I have fulfilled my promise to Gordon to fine-tune, medically validate and publish his work, though I am sure were he here he would have some words to say; probably "about bloody time"! Purley 2nd XI, 1946 (Gordon on right handside) Preface Gordon Pirie lived with us for several years up to his death in 1991, and had a profound effect on us all. |
| 7 | Of many things about Gordon, what particularly impressed was his physical fitness, and desire for perfection with all things athletic. A good example of this was the time he did some lumber jacking in the New Forest in Hampshire, and proudly boasted how many more trees he cut down than men thirty years his junior. On another occasion, I inadvertently agreed to join Gordon "for a run" on a disused section of railway track, thinking myself moderately fit. |
| 8 | Being half Gordon's age, I was somewhat taken aback when, in the time it took me to run one length of track, Gordon had run three! Associated with this, which was humiliation enough, were various comments about my running shoes and running technique (or lack of), as one might imagine. The original manuscript of this book was written by Gordon, in typical fashion, in 24 hours flat. The 5.-inch diskette on which the computer file was saved had been tucked away in a sports bag until Gordon rediscovered it, and somehow got folded in half. |
| 9 | As a result, it took a full weekend to retrieve the data, and I had to cut out the magnetic media from within the diskette, replace it into a customised new diskette, merge snippets of uncorrupted data into a single ASCII file, and then laboriously convert the file line by line into a recognised wordprocessor format. During this process, Gordon looked on with an enigmatic smile; he always did like to set challenges, however impossible! Revision and editing was started shortly before Gordon's death, and the manuscript transferred to our possession, with Gordon's express desire that the book be published by us in order to assist the training of a new generation of runners. |
| 10 | Overall, to get from that early stage to the present book has taken five years of work, and has been a sizeable project for me, albeit one which I was of course determined and happy to achieve. As you will see, the book is highly controversial, with some radical ideas (one of the reasons it has had to be self-published!), but I believe it is a fitting tribute to Gordon Pirie, which should give an insight into why he was such a successful runner, and perhaps even an opportunity for others to emulate him. |
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