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 Here’s a subversive notion. If you are an Australian marathoner looking to make the jump from national to world-class, are you better off staying at home than heading to London, Berlin, Fukuoka or Osaka. For years now, the answer to should I go...
It doesn’t take much to send me racing off down memory lane. This could be because the past is the only place where I’m still running PBs. The impetus this time came from a query as to whether I might have a copy of the 1978 City-to-Surf race results. I...
Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe Sometimes, when we laud athletes for consistency, it seems we are damning them with faint praise. It’s as if excellence can’t really be excellence if it is repeatable. There’s some logic to that. Things cannot be outstanding unless they stand out. What they usually stand out...
Ryan Hall: best actor in a supporting role | A Column By Len Johnson Ryan Hall never quite achieved the stardom for which he seemed destined, but if the best actor Oscar somehow eluded him, the American marathoner certainly has a sound claim to a gong as best actor in...
Given the painfully slow historic process of admitting that women were capable of running long distances, would it surprise you to learn that women led the adoption of annual Australian cross-country championships. Yes, it would, I’m presuming you replied. It certainly came as a shock to me. Yet, in 1960,...
In October, 2018, Jack Rayner hit a sweet spot. Running in the inaugural Commonwealth half-marathon championships (has there been another ne: I’m not sure), Rayner went boldly with the pace set by a pack of Ugandan and Kenyan runners all bringing much more impressive personal bests to the starting line than his modest 63:19.
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe Most years a runners’ panel is part of Falls Creek Running Week. It was again this year, featuring rising middle-distance star Georgia Griffith, Olympic and world championship distance representative Dave McNeill and London 2017 marathoner Brad Milosevic. Chris Wardlaw was the MC. Inevitably,...
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is the 2000 Coen Brothers comedy about the adventures – misadventures, mostly – of three escapees from a chain gang on a quest to regain the proceeds of a robbery committed by one of them. It is a satire loosely based on Homer’s epic Greek...
A Column By Len Johnson When David McNeill ran 27:45.01 in the Payton Jordan meeting in Stanford this May, his performance had a certain Dickensian element. To cite the opening line from A Tale of Two Cities , it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The...
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...
                   

Brilliantly

SAFE!

2022