About Enjoying Your Running...
Image: Cliff Calderwood before the start of the Falmouth Road Race in 2019
My name is Cliff Calderwood, and I developed this website for people like you, people who love to run and are interested in information that helps them enjoy their running and life even more.
I feel you can tell a lot about people by their beliefs, and I’m not being religious here. So, to tell you about myself, I’ll share my central running beliefs with you. They may not all work for you, but it never hurts to try new things out to see if they fit, and if they do, adopt, and if not, adapt them or move on – it is how we grow as a person.
- I believe there’s a strong connection and balance between our joy of running and our joy of life. It took me many years to realize this, but now I pay attention to it each day.
- I believe that resting my body is as essential as exercising it, which is a factor in my quick recovery from hard training sessions and races, and in remaining competitive in my age group.
- I believe in listening to my body at rest and playing (yes, running is play for me). This does take some practice in our distraction-riddled world, but it comes back to the connection and balance I mentioned earlier.
- I believe in stretching before and after my run. It’s not all about keeping injury free but also preparing my body and mind for the exertion and then the wind-down.
- I perform most of my workouts (80%) at an easy pace but interject speed or a tempo pace for 20% of my training, so I experience the pace of a race or faster to improve and prepare.
This is usually the section where the convention says I should share my qualifications and experience to justify why you should spend any more time on this website. I could take pages of narrative telling you my life story and how I got to this point in my running journey. I could bore you with details about the meandering road from a severe and intense teenage runner to running some of the fastest race times in the seventh decade of my life. But the fact is I’m just like you – stumbling through this running journey, trying this and trying that and discarding what doesn’t fit and adapting to what helps. I could probably learn many things from you if you would share.
So, you have my name and can Google me – there are a few other Cliff Calderwood’s, but I tend to monopolize the first page on Google. I’ve had a few “lives” over the years but have always been a runner as well. I now live on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and do most of my training and racing here. It’s a beautiful environment to live and run.
Join the Run to Enjoy Life Community
This website is a growing library of information about running for all capabilities and stages of a runner’s journey. Like my Run for Joy book, this website has the underlying theme of how we can take the lessons we learn as runners into our daily lives to enrich ourselves, our families, and our friends with the same level of joy. I believe when all is said and done, that is what life is about.
There are many shades of the running journey. Some days the road is bright, fun, and effortless. Other journey days are dreary, boring, and hard going and we can’t wait to reach the end of the trail. There is something here for all shades of the journey.
Finally, I want to encourage you to join the "Run to Enjoy Life" community. There you can easily get quick answers and help others in the community. You can also let me know what information you’d like to see on the website and how you feel it can be improved as an ongoing destination for you. This is a Private Facebook Group and I'm in there daily answering questions. Just click the button below to request to join.
Cliff Calderwood
cliff@runtoenjoylife.com