From Vancouver to Uganda to Peru and then to Italy. Kieran Lumb is making a name for himself as one of Canada’s best junior runners, regardless of the terrain, and has travelled the world in 2017 sporting the red and white kit.
The 18-year-old University of British Columbia student goes all-terrain when it comes to athletics. He’s a top-10 performer at cross-country among juniors in Canada, a member of the national mountain running team and a heck of a 5,000m athlete, a 14:17.25 runner (which is 2:00:32 marathon pace to put it into perspective) to be exact.
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Apparently, he’s pretty good at ascending ski jumps too.
In 2016, he set a course record at the Red Bull 400 in Whistler, B.C., covering the world’s steepest 400m race, at an average grade of 37 per cent, in less than four minutes. He is not returning to Whistler to defend his title. That’s because, rather fittingly, he is racing for Team BC at the Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg.
In recent months, Lumb has competed at the IAAF World Cross-Country Championships in Uganda, the Pan American U20 Championships in Peru as well as his recent travels to Premana, Italy for the World Mountain Running Championships. He’s run for most teams that a junior runner can possibly qualify for. Impressive considering that entering university in 2016, he wasn’t even part of a formal track group.
For mountain running, and for the Red Bull 400, Lumb says that he did a lot of long runs and hikes in the mountains with friends. “I enjoy spending time like this and I think it’s really important to enjoy the process, not just the result,” he says humbly.
“I did the long runs and hikes in combination with some short 1-2-minute higher intensity uphill road biking intervals which I found to be quite similar to the steepest parts of the [Red Bull 400] course in terms of what muscle groups were being used,” he says.
Lumb comes from an intriguing background. He’s a past provincial champion, and national medallist, in cross-country skiing and figured those talents, paired with his running talents, would be well-suited for a high-intensity event like the Red Bull 400, arguably more of a climbing event than it is a running event. Like any intense mountain race, Lumb recommends taking small quick steps and to maintain high leg turnover. (World-class stair climber Shaun Stephens-Whale has similar suggestions.)
Think a 400m race is short enough that pain will only set in during the late stages? Think again. Even an experienced vertical running specialist like Lumb, 30th at the 2017 World Mountain Running Championships and North American, Central American and Carribean cross-country co-champion, was pictured with a pain-face at the Red Bull 400, which this year goes off Aug. 5.
Created in partnership with Red Bull
