Hi, I'm Ash.
I was drawn to running in my late thirties — inspired by friends and family for whom it seemed completely irresistible, who made it look like the most natural thing in the world.
What started as following along grew into something genuinely, quietly my own — a chance to disconnect from the noise, to notice the changing seasons: migrating birds, the first frost on the trail, the way light shifts through the trees as the year turns. To let the miles be just the miles. Running has a way of doing that: softening whatever you carried in, and leaving something a little lighter on the way back.
Along the way, it deepened a genuine curiosity — how the body adapts, where the mind decides to quit or keep going, the fascinating and sometimes counterintuitive interplay of physiology and perception. I found myself as drawn to the research as to the running itself.
Running also carried me through some of the harder days. That kind of thing stays with you. And it brought me community — the people who run, the shared obsession, the conversations before and after the miles. Miles & Methods sits at the intersection of all of it: fitness, science, a love of design and ideas, and community. It's my small way of giving something back.
Why I Built This
There are brilliant, passionate researchers doing fascinating work on the science of running. Most of it stays buried in academic journals — rigorous and important, and largely out of reach for the everyday runner who just wants to understand why their easy pace matters, or what the evidence actually says about recovery.
My background in computer science made the path feel obvious: use the power of AI to make that research more accessible. Miles & Methods gathers recent work, uses AI to surface and summarize the key ideas, and organizes it around what runners actually care about — training, recovery, longevity, and the mind.
The goal isn't to prescribe answers or shortcuts. It's to make the evidence approachable — a gateway to these research papers and food for thought for your next run. A reason to ask better questions. A nudge toward curiosity rather than certainty.
The Categories
Browse research by topic. Click a category to explore papers on the Research page.
Training & Performance
Optimizing your running, pacing strategies, and performance gains
Recovery
Sleep, nutrition timing, active recovery, and injury prevention
Longevity
Long-term health, aging well, and keeping the miles sustainable
Mind & Perception
Mental experience, effort perception, and the psychology of running
A Note on Evidence, AI, and Curiosity
Knowledge about running doesn't arrive fully formed. Some insights emerge from formal, peer-reviewed research. Others appear earlier, in preliminary findings or emerging data. Understanding evolves over time—iterative, imperfect, and shaped by context.
AI is used to help surface and summarize this information. These summaries are not final interpretations, prescriptions, or recommendations. They are meant to support curiosity: to make complex work more approachable, highlight patterns, and invite deeper exploration.
The most useful summaries don't close the conversation — they open it. If something here nudges you to read an original study, question a familiar training habit, or pay closer attention to how your own running feels, it's doing meaningful work.
All content on this site is educational, not medical advice. Training and health decisions are personal and best made thoughtfully, with professional guidance when appropriate. Individual posts are labeled "AI-assisted" to indicate that summaries are generated with AI and presented as interpretive research musings.
How It Works
The site continuously scans credible scientific literature relevant to running and endurance training. AI-generated summaries are updated regularly to reflect newly published or emerging work. I review and curate editor's picks to highlight research I find particularly worth a runner's attention.
"The body adapts. The mind decides. The science helps us understand why."
— Ash, from one runner to another