There's no such thing as a bad carbohydrate.

Prior to the 1976 Olympics, I was a 5,000m runner.

Train at the same pace day after day, week after week, year after year, and that's the kind of running the body adapts to. But break out of that comfort zone with a little speedwork now and then, and the body will learn to deal with the new demands.

The key to running a good marathon is to not listen to anyone's advice the last week before the race. That's when people tend to do stupid things that disrupt all the input and training of the previous months.

I know runners who have suffered a tick bite and ended up with Lyme disease. Ill take an angry moose any day.

So here's my advice to city planners. Make your city runnable. Runners are the first wave of troops bringing human activity back to the urban core of any city. Where we go, others will follow. The connection between runnability and livability is so clear (at least to me), that it's surprising that new developments consistently leave pathways out of the plans.

In those long, lonely miles you put in during the off-season, and in those knife-in-the-gut repetitions and hill repeats that buckly your knees - at that moment in almost every race when you ask yourself how much you're willing to hurt to catch one more runner - you can draw strength and inspiration from your running mates.