Steve Chilton's Blog: Goodreads Author's Blog, page 6

Paperback book launch, 22 July

There will be a book launch event for the paperback of ‘All or nothing at all: the life of Billy Bland‘, on Thursday 22nd July 2021. It will be at the Skiddaw Hotel (Greta Suite), Keswick, from 6-30 to 8-pm. I will be talking about the book and doing a Q&A with Billy Bland. There will be a few books for sale/signing as well. No booking required, just rock up.

[It would be good if folk would let me know they are coming, though]

It will be quite a low-key event, as I still have concerns...

Billy biography is in paperback

It was great to open the first box of paperback copies of ‘All or nothing at all’ recently. It looks absolutely grand, and will be published on 15th July 2021.

It is now available to pre-order. Please use your local independent bookseller, who should be able to arrange a pre-order for you. It is already available to re-order directly from Sam Read Bookseller, with the added bonus of them all being signed copies, by my own hand. The pre-order page is at: https://www.samreadbooks.co.uk/prod...

In profile: Gavin Bland (part 1)

To win a British Championship you have got to be dedicated. If I didn’t give the time to it there was always a runner who was better. When I was super fit I was as good as anybody. I had to do a proper winter’s training if I wanted to do well. I don’t miss training when I am not doing it, that is my problem. When I was injured, I didn’t miss racing. When I was fit, I would rather race than do three weeks training. I’d race myself to fitness.

That is the intro paragraph to the latest in a seri...

Pysiological testing of athletes

I have written a short article with some thoughts on testing of athletes, particularly with regard to older athletes and issues around that aspect. It was prompted by a desire to get a leading Veteran athlete into a lab and have them tested – both as a measure of their base physiology and also to hopefully use the data to help their current training.

The full article, entitled ‘Some thoughts on physiological testing of athletes’, is available to read – as a PDF file/download.

Thanks to...

Two recent great books on endurance/ultra running

Recently two great books have come out that give a real feel for the effect that the (covid) lockdown situation has had on runners, and particularly how it has been the catalyst for some of them to turn their attention to attempting new records for the classic rounds and off-road endurance challenges. They are Damian Hall’s ‘In it for the long run’, and Ally Beaven’s ‘Broken’.

Damian Hall has been a journalist much of his life and has shown he can research and weave stories, but can he w...

Yay! Bookshops re-opening

With the next stage of relaxing the Covid lockdown (in England) most bookshops will be re-opening to customers on Monday 12 April. One thing this does mean is that if you haven’t had a chance to have a look at our photographic book ‘Fell and mountain running: through the eye of a lens’ then you can if you visit one of these four brilliant shops:

Bookends (Keswick and Carlisle), Sam Read Bookseller (Grasmere), Fred Holdsworth (Ambleside) and Pete Bland Sports (Kendal).

Do take a look at the...

Sub 7 Sub 8 Triathlon Project

In February 2020 it was announced that there was a project being setup to beat the existing Ironman (triathlon) records for both men and women. Not just beat them but smash through the 7 hour barrier for men and the 8 hour barrier for women. The first impression is that it is mirroring the Nike Sub-2 and Ineoes 1-59 projects setup recently to see if someone could beat the 2-hour barrier for running the marathon distance.

There is not much information available yet, but it seems to be setu...

Fell running books

Where can you get hold of my books?
The latest one, Fell and Mountain Running: through the eye of a lens has until recently only been available from the authors. But now it is available from four independent sources, as detailed below.
(Click for book link):
Bookends (Keswick)
Sam Read’s Bookshop (Grasmere)
Fred Holdsworth’s Bookshop (Ambleside)
Pete Bland Sports (Kendal)

All my other four books are all available too, and may be found at any of those outlets listed above, plus many more goo...

Blog 2020: most visited pages and most downloaded content

It seems a good time to review this blog from the weird year that was 2020. As it happens, I did the normal number of blog posts over the year, almost three per month.Two other stats: referals came from Facebook at a 5:1 ratio over Twitter (which surprised me, except that Twitter is one account, whereas I can post notifications in a number of FB Groups). Visitor’s came from 75 different countries, with USA and Ireland being distant second and third places behind the UK.

MOST VISITED PAGES

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Self-publishing. It ain’t been easy

My fifth book is co-authored, but unlike the other four is self-published, and is just out. I thought I would record what the latter part of the process of self-publishing has been like, as it was certainly interesting, and not perhaps what I was expecting. Covid-19 and Brexit both hindered things quite a bit.

It all started in November 2019, so has taken just over a year from idea to fruition. The book is a hardback celebrating the great fell and mountain photographer, Pete Hartley. The firs...