The apology Lance Armstrong will never give

This is a really great read: the "apology" we have all expected, been waiting for, even hoped for.
Pride goeth before the fall.
A sad tale all around.


The apology Lance Armstrong will never give 

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Be True to Yourself

 As an aging but still competitive runner for nearly 30 years, I was surprised when my "other" sport - marathoning" - made headlines recently for an unusual reason.

Last month, The New Yorker published an article on the Michigan dentist Kip Litton, who digitally fabricated an entire marathon and outsmarted computer timing systems. Then Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican candidate for vice president, misstated the finish time of his only marathon. He told an interviewer he had run “a 2-hour-and-50-something” marathon when his actual time was 4:01:25. That was roughly equivalent to a golfer’s claiming a 3 handicap when his typical round is 100.

We have rarely encountered tales like Litton’s and Ryan’s. For true distance runners, to lie about time or distance is to lie to ourselves, to diminish the importance of the many sacrifices we make to reach the starting line. Focus and discipline form the core of a runner’s being; they are what make us put on a reflective vest and run six miles into the sleet at 6 on a dark winter morning.

There are no shortcuts to marathon success. Our race performances are sacred, but it is acceptable to refer to a marathon time up to, say, 3:13:59 as a 3:13, or 3:13 and change.

When we began running marathons, Alan Sillitoe’s novella “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” was the phrase most often used to describe our pastime. How things have changed. The New York City Marathon on Nov. 4 has attracted 48,000 entrants. Yet we marathoners remain in most ways a small tribe. Only 0.5 percent of the United States population has run a marathon.

And we know one another because we have regular tribal gatherings, road races, every weekend in cities and towns across the country. We love to share our experiences. What fun would a race really be without the camaraderie, and excuse-making, after the finish?

“I went out too fast.”

“The big hill came at the wrong time.”

“I could have run 30 seconds faster if I had taken more fluids.”

 We’re not saying that runners are fundamentally more honest than other people. But what we do, how we do it and whom we let into our world hold us to a certain unspoken but widely understood and accepted standard.

So we nodded knowingly when Litton’s fellow runners said he hadn’t appeared on road racecourses at certain key points. And when Ryan’s transgression was first raised by Bill Walker, a 63-year-old former Marine Corps officer and registered Republican with a personal-record marathon of 2:29. Walker picked up on Ryan’s vague contention and questioned it on a LetsRun.com message board. From there, a team of Runner’s World editors, tribal chieftains you might say, did the necessary fact-checking.

Nonrunners often imagine that people can cover 26.2 miles only because they have lean, muscled legs and a highly developed cardiovascular system. Nothing could be further from the truth. The runner’s most important organ, by far, is the brain — the source of our dreams, drive and determination. Almost a century ago, the great Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi said: “Mind is everything; muscle, mere pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.”

At different times and in different individuals, the mind of the marathoner ranges widely: from steely toughness, to sparks of creativity, to generosity on a grand scale. Sometimes, it surprises us.

In the first mile of the 1979 Boston Marathon, Dr. George Sheehan fell into step with a Bowdoin College student, Joan Benoit, and they agreed to run together. As the race unfolded, Benoit held second place among the women, the spectators shouting, “Second woman, second woman!” George got caught up in the excitement. As the miles went by, he began to feel that he belonged there with his new friend even though his 44-year-old legs were moving faster than they ever had. Benoit went on to win the marathon, and George achieved a personal record.

In 1984, Benoit won the Olympic marathon trials 17 days after arthroscopic knee surgery. She captured the gold medal in the first women’s Olympic marathon several months later. To induce a relaxed, confident mental state while running on the steamy Los Angeles freeway, Benoit imagined herself home in Maine on one of her favorite coastal byways.

Running teaches all of us that goal-setting, persistence and tackling one mile at a time can lead to unimaginable achievements. Lessons are learned on the road, day by day, from personal feedback and experience.

As Dr. Jeff Brown, a Harvard psychologist and an author of “The Winner’s Brain,” said: “Negotiating a marathon requires many of the same mental characteristics needed in life. You have to control your emotions at times, activate your motivation when you’re down, and develop resiliency in the face of difficult conditions.”

Or as Oprah Winfrey (ugh...) put it after completing the 1994 Marine Corps Marathon in 4:29:20, “Running is the greatest metaphor for life because you get out of it what you put into it.”

As aging marathoners, we know that our slowing times don’t diminish us. Like many of our friends, we run and compete for personal reasons. We have learned to take the measure of ourselves, and not to let others define who we are.

Decades ago, George Sheehan, the philosopher-king of running, often said, “Success rests in having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you were destined to be.”

When we run, we will ourselves to be the best we can be. That is all that matters. Our tribe expects nothing less. 

See ya in Boston

Johnny boy

We all suffer – either the pain of discipline or the pain of failure and regret

So, i stumbled across the article below in the NY Times today - having lived there for nearly 3 years, I still read the paper every day online; some habits are hard to break.
A while ago, I wrote a long piece on running "into the dark zone" - athletes know and fear that place; the place where you fear to tread, but, have to go to succeed [esp at the elite level]. You know that once you are there, you are going to hurt - and hurt bad(ly), no "ifs, ands or buts". 


Here are 3 great quotes (in no particular order) I use to motivate myself, and those I (used to) coach:


*Remember, you only die once.

*There are only two options regarding commitment: you’re either in or you’re out. There’s no such thing as life in between.

*Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.  Muhammad Ali

Finally, as the founder of Ironman, John Collins, once noted: "you can quit, and no one else will care and you will always know..."


All of which are a perfect segue to the vid above and article below...
enjoy the read.


Johnny Boy

New York Times

How to Push Past the Pain, as the Champions Do

By GINA KOLATA

My son, Stefan, was running in a half marathon in Philadelphia last month when he heard someone coming up behind him, breathing hard.

To his surprise, it was an elite runner, Kim Smith, a blond waif from New Zealand. She has broken her country’s records in shorter distances and now she’s running half marathons. She ran the London marathon last spring and will run the New York marathon next month.

That day, Ms. Smith seemed to be struggling. Her breathing was labored and she had saliva all over her face. But somehow she kept up, finishing just behind Stefan and coming in fifth with a time of 1:08:39.

And that is one of the secrets of elite athletes, said Mary Wittenberg, president and chief executive of the New York Road Runners, the group that puts on the ING New York City Marathon. They can keep going at a level of effort that seems impossible to maintain.

“Mental tenacity — and the ability to manage and even thrive on and push through pain — is a key segregator between the mortals and immortals in running,” Ms. Wittenberg said.

You can see it in the saliva-coated faces of the top runners in the New York marathon, Ms. Wittenberg added.

“We have towels at marathon finish to wipe away the spit on the winners’ faces,” she said. “Our creative team sometimes has to airbrush it off race photos that we want to use for ad campaigns.”

Tom Fleming, who coaches Stefan and me, agrees. A two-time winner of the New York marathon and a distance runner who was ranked fourth in the world, he says there’s a reason he was so fast.

“I was given a body that could train every single day.” Tom said, “and a mind, a mentality, that believed that if I trained every day — and I could train every day — I’ll beat you.”

“The mentality was I will do whatever it takes to win,” he added. “I was totally willing to have the worst pain. I was totally willing to do whatever it takes to win the race.”

But the question is, how do they do it? Can you train yourself to run, cycle, swim or do another sport at the edge of your body’s limits, or is that something that a few are born with, part of what makes them elites?

Sports doctors who have looked into the question say that, at the very least, most people could do a lot better if they knew what it took to do their best.

“Absolutely,” said Dr. Jeroen Swart, a sports medicine physician, exercise physiologist and champion cross-country mountain biker who works at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa.

“Some think elite athletes have an easy time of it,” Dr. Swart said in a telephone interview. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And as athletes improve — getting faster and beating their own records — “it never gets any easier,” Dr. Swart said. “You hurt just as much.”

But, he added, “Knowing how to accept that allows people to improve their performance.”

One trick is to try a course before racing it. In one study, Dr. Swart told trained cyclists to ride as hard as they could over a 40-kilometer course. The more familiar they got with the course, the faster they rode, even though — to their minds — it felt as if they were putting out maximal effort on every attempt.

Then Dr. Swart and his colleagues asked the cyclists to ride the course with all-out effort, but withheld information about how far they’d gone and how far they had to go. Subconsciously, the cyclists held back the most in this attempt, leaving some energy in reserve.

That is why elite runners will examine a course, running it before they race it. That is why Lance Armstrong trained for the grueling Tour de France stage on l’Alpe d’Huez by riding up the mountain over and over again.

“You are learning exactly how to pace yourself,” Dr. Swart said.

Another performance trick during competitions is association, the act of concentrating intensely on the very act of running or cycling, or whatever your sport is, said John S. Raglin, a sports psychologist at Indiana University.

In studies of college runners, he found that less accomplished athletes tended to dissociate, to think of something other than their running to distract themselves.

“Sometimes dissociation allows runners to speed up, because they are not attending to their pain and effort,” he said. “But what often happens is they hit a sort of physiological wall that forces them to slow down, so they end up racing inefficiently in a sort of oscillating pace.” But association, Dr. Raglin says, is difficult, which may be why most don’t do it.

Dr. Swart says he sees that in cycling, too.

“Our hypothesis is that elite athletes are able to motivate themselves continuously and are able to run the gantlet between pushing too hard — and failing to finish — and underperforming,” Dr. Swart said.

To find this motivation, the athletes must resist the feeling that they are too tired and have to slow down, he added. Instead, they have to concentrate on increasing the intensity of their effort. That, Dr. Swart said, takes “mental strength,” but “allows them to perform close to their maximal ability.”

Dr. Swart said he did this himself, but it took experience and practice to get it right. There were many races, he said, when “I pushed myself beyond my abilities and had to withdraw, as I was completely exhausted.”

Finally, with more experience, Dr. Swart became South Africa’s cross-country mountain biking champion in 2002.

Some people focus by going into a trancelike state, blocking out distractions. Others, like Dr. Swart, have a different method: He knows what he is capable of and which competitors he can beat, and keeps them in his sight, not allowing himself to fall back.

“I just hate to lose,” Dr. Swart said. “I would tell myself I was the best, and then have to prove it.”

Kim Smith has a similar strategy.

“I don’t want to let the other girls get too far ahead of me,” she said in a telephone interview. “I pretty much try and focus really hard on the person in front of me.”

And while she tied her success to having “some sort of talent toward running,” Ms. Smith added that there were “a lot of people out there who were probably just as talented. You have to be talented, and you have to have the ability to push yourself through pain.”

And, yes, she does get saliva all over her face.

“It’s not a pretty sport,” Ms. Smith said. “You are not looking good at the end.”

Surf's Up

To the casual spectator, surfing seems to involve primarily balance, grace, nervy insouciance and a certain laid-back, ineffable oneness with the powers of the deep. But a series of newly published studies of the actual physical demands of surfing reveal that other, sometimes surprising aspects of fitness may be as important to surfing success as the ability to judge and remain upright on a swell.

For the first of the new studies, which was published last month in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, scientists at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand recruited 12 professional New Zealand surfers and asked to follow them throughout several competitions.

Studying surfing is a tricky business, since it requires tracking people who are in rapid motion far out on a billowy sea. There is no reliable lab-based treadmill equivalent to riding a wave, which is one of the reasons little surfing science has been completed to date.

But the Auckland researchers overcame that obstacle by fitting the surfers with tiny, sophisticated and, of course, waterproof heart rate monitors and GPS units and then simply letting them ride. The surfers wore the various monitors during three heats at two separate competitions in the surf off the New Zealand coast.

The scientists were hoping to determine just how much time the surfers spent in each of the various elements that make up surfing, including paddling to waves, bobbing about in the water waiting for a wave, riding that wave and then recovering from the ride. They also wondered how strenuous each of those activities was - a state that would be indicated by the surfers' heart rates.

What they learned was eye-opening, says Oliver Farley, a doctoral student at Auckland University of Technology and himself an avid surfer, who led the study.

Surfers, for instance, spend very little time actually surfing, if surfing is defined as riding a wave. Only about 8 percent of the time that the surfers spent in the water consisted of time atop a wave. Rides were short but fast, with average speeds of more than 25 miles per hour and top speeds approaching 30 m.p.h.

Riders spent far more time paddling to the waves, with that activity accounting for about 54 percent of their total time in the ocean. The rest of each session was spent maintaining position while waiting for a wave or in brief, intense bursts of paddling to catch a wave.

Perhaps most surprising for people who think surfing looks calm and meditative, surfers' heart rates soared to a chest-burning 190-plus beats per minute during the competitions and rarely dropped below 120 beats per minute. The surfers also covered considerable territory while paddling, averaging more than half a mile during each heat, or about a mile and a half per competition.

In other words, surfing is a considerable workout requiring high-level aerobic endurance, Mr. Farley says, given that the heart rate stays above 120 beats per minute at least 80 percent of the time, and given the amount of time spent paddling.

But surfing also requires muscular power, particularly in the upper body, he continues. In the second of the new surfing studies, also conducted by Mr. Farley and his colleagues and published this month in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, elite surfers visited the group's lab and lay on a bench equipped with a kind of a flywheel and paddles. The surfers turned the paddles rapidly with their arms to simulate ocean paddling.

All of the volunteers were strong. But, as it turned out, those who could generate the most wattage while paddling were also the highest-ranked surfers in the bunch.

Presumably, Mr. Farley says, their muscular power allowed them to paddle back to the waves more quickly after each ride and ultimately catch more waves, translating into competitive success.

What these findings mean for recreational - or wannabe - surfers is clear, if daunting: Before investing in a board or a beach vacation, visit the gym and the running track, Mr. Farley says. Do "press-ups, bench presses, squats, abdominal crunches, pull-ups," and general arm exercises, he says. Consult an athletic trainer at your gym if those terms are unfamiliar.

"Then," Mr. Farley says, "move into power training," like jumping onto and off boxes or stair steps, followed by "surf-specific training, such as paddling with resistance," preferably in a pool but alternatively on a rowing machine in a gym. Meanwhile, put in hours of running, bicycling or swimming to build the endurance required to reach the good waves.

All of which can make surfing sound rather grueling, even dull. It is, after all, a sport that when broken into its component parts involves only, as Mr. Farley writes in his July study, "intermittent high-intensity bouts of all-out paddling intercalated with relatively short recovery periods" and "breath holding."

But anyone looking to understand the addictive, heady allure of surfing can find scientific evidence of its appeal hidden in Mr. Farley's work. When the researchers parsed the surfers' heart rates during the competitions, they found that pulses did not peak during paddling, no matter how hard the riders were scrabbling to grab a wave. Instead, their hearts beat most rapidly just as they finished riding each wave.

Se ya in the water

Johnny Boy

We are from Mars, Olympic Athletes are from Venus

Gorgeous, well-muscled bodies rotate, glistening in slow-motion like roasted chickens on spits. Exultant trumpets sound, heralding another day of this portentous international event. The NBC sports anchor Bob Costas unpacks his (oh, so very American) adjectives, straining to capture the deeply felt emotions, the global camaraderie, the shared desire for greatness unfolding before our eyes.

And as the 2012 Olympic Games unfurl across our TV screens, it occurs to me that I’m four years older than I was the last time I watched these beautiful young masochists in action. These athletes spent the past four years enduring torturous training schedules: they woke up early to swim in chilly pools, ran up sandy hillsides, ate 12-egg omelets and stacks of chocolate-chip pancakes, taped up their swollen ankles or blistered feet, met with sports psychologists to quell meet-day jitters and slept the dreamless sleep of gladiators (sometimes, but not always, in high-altitude-simulation chambers).

Meanwhile, I spent those same four years growing older, less nimble, less quick. I woke up late and grumbled through my warm shower, went for the occasional run instead of meeting impending deadlines, put in 40 somewhat inspired minutes at the pool and slept the plagued sleep of the oldish, doomed to never warrant exultant trumpets or Costas’s linguistic acrobatics.

Yet this summer, I’ll once again gladly listen to how arduously these elite athletes have trained, day after day, in their quest for perfection. As I hear how doggedly they’ve resisted the urge to quit, I’ll feel just like Ferdinand the Bull from Munro Leaf’s classic children’s book, who preferred to sit quietly under his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers as he watched his peers snort and clash horns and dream of the bullfights in Madrid. Sure, these Olympic athletes could have sat quietly like the Ferdinand the Bulls of the world. But they refused to be comfortable, to relax, to be ordinary. They wanted to run and jump and butt their heads together, and we want to watch them do it.

If the ’70s and ’80s were marked by a heightened appreciation for hedonism, then the ’00s and ’10s have cultivated our fascination with masochism. Most of the activities that are considered pure and noble today have a hint of self-abnegation to them, if not an outright embrace of pain and agony. There’s a religiosity to the ways that elite athletes are celebrated that echoes our embrace of natural childbirth or fasting, revealing a shared belief that pushing your body to extremes bestows a higher consciousness that’s impossible to achieve through other means.

The seeds of the current moment were planted in 1980, when ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” first broadcast coverage of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship from Hawaii, and, covering the same race years later, memorably captured the women’s leader, Julie Moss, collapsing and crawling across the finish line in second place. By the late 1980s, everyday fitness enthusiasts had traded in their pink leg warmers and leotards for high-tech spandex, abandoning Jane Fonda’s upbeat aerobics to worship at the Michael Jordan church of extraordinary physical exertion. With its “Just Do It” slogan, Nike (and its ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy) recast exercise not as a casual activity but something at once grittier and more spiritually uplifting, a fundamental prerequisite for living the good life. Lance Armstrong took Nike’s religion to the next level, achieving prophet status in part by proclaiming his belief in the catharsis of suffering. In his book “It’s Not About the Bike,” Armstrong writes that he’s “into pain” because it’s “self-revelatory.” “In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious, and I wonder each and every time how I will respond.” To “Livestrong” (as the bracelet saying goes) means not just to push through adversity but also to relish it.

From Armstrong, the pain-torch has been passed to extreme athletes like Dean Karnazes, who, in his book “Ultramarathon Man,” describes a 199-mile race in California from Calistoga to Santa Cruz that required him to run through the night, eating a large pizza and an entire cheesecake for sustenance as he ran. Dashing hundreds of miles over snow-covered mountains and through blazing deserts brings about intense, otherworldly highs, according to Karnazes. Yet he seems to savor the lows even more: the debilitating cramps, the temporary blindness, the blisters that had to be treated with Krazy Glue and covered with duct tape midrace, or that time, after a race, that he vomited across the dashboard of his new Lexus.

Instead of concluding that Karnazes is suffering from some unclassified personality disorder, many greet him with the kind of awe and reverence typically reserved for minor deities. This admiration becomes more pronounced when you swap out the high-tech shoes and the new Lexus for bare feet and a mystical tribe living in the Mexican desert. The ultrarunner and purist Micah True, celebrated in Christopher McDougall’s “superathlete” bible, “Born to Run,” was encapsulated by Barry Bearak of The New York Times after True’s death in March: “To many, he represented the road not taken, a purer path, away from career, away from capitalism, away from the clock.”

Rejecting mainstream society isn’t what it used to be, in other words. Turning your back on the rat race is no longer the purview of layabouts like Ferdinand, but has become the target of his more aggressive brothers, who find inner peace from clashing horns all day. While finding some “purer path” once harked back to Timothy Leary (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”), Karnazes and True don’t promise drug-enhanced catharsis in a groovy back room so much as a hippie version of Navy SEAL training, slogging up and down hills until you’re forced to question the meaning of your existence.

In some ways “Born to Run” and “Ultramarathon Man” and “It’s Not About the Bike” are the modern versions of “The Psychedelic Experience,” with tripping on hallucinogens replaced by (enlightening) leg cramps and (illuminating) heat stroke. Hard-core masochists serve as our John the Baptists, preaching the glory of self-denial. Given the backdrop of fast food, megaplexes, giant TVs and triple Frappucinos, it makes sense that we glorify the selfless, barefoot, bean-eating runner. But does this fixation on suffering mark an advance from our indulgent days? Or would Timothy Leary say that after years of exposure to “the carnival of televised athletic and political spectacles,” our culture has transformed the spiritual path into a (literal) treadmill?

Televised Olympic coverage tends to gloss over the inherent masochism of elite athletes, infusing talk of self-sacrifice with nostalgic, frothy prose that hints at a borderline sexual fixation on youth, strength and beauty. While Olympic commentators might inquire about the details of Usain Bolt’s diet or Michael Phelps’s workout regimen, they do so with a casual levity that attempts to lighten up the somewhat depressing realities of Olympic training, as if eating hundreds of grams of protein and then swimming for five hours a day is just the sort of wacky shenanigans that whippersnappers get up to these days in pursuit of gold. But viewers don’t experience such details as depressing. Rather than suspecting that Olympic athletes are victims of some top-secret Pentagon experiment testing the effects of extreme boredom and exhaustion on young patriots, viewers savor each detail (Usain Bolt eats dozens of chicken nuggets and does weighted lunges with dumbbells), workout magazines reprint every line (Phelps swims 50 miles a week, does lots of “explosive lifting” and listens to Notorious B.I.G.’s “Sky’s the Limit” on his headphones to get pumped up), and each item is analyzed in exercise forums across the globe.

It’s common, in fact, to find the merciless tedium of elite athletes’ workouts exalted as if they were direct routes to enlightenment. We’ve always been fixated on individuals who exemplify extreme, borderline masochistic virtue, but these days, instead of marveling at the self-control and resolve of Catholic nuns reciting hours of Hail Marys or Buddhist monks meditating in caves for months, we rave about the guy who conquered K2 without oxygen or the woman who completed the Marathon des Sables, a six-day, 150-mile race through the Moroccan desert. These athletes now belong to a new kind of holy order, reminding mere mortals that, through absolute faith and belief in your abilities (and, oh, yeah, nonstop arduous workouts), you can rise to unimaginable heights of physical mastery.

If we experience such athletes almost as holy men (and women), then it’s no wonder that their autobiographies often read like prayer books. Michael Phelps’s “No Limits: The Will to Succeed,” which captures his drive to win eight medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, echoes the reverent tones of a Catholic congregation reciting the Apostles’ Creed. Declarations of faith (“Nothing is impossible,” “I know I can still swim faster”) upstage every plot point. Eventually, specific victories seem to melt into a haze of Phelps, climbing in and out of the pool, reminding himself that he can achieve anything, anything, anything.

But even as we relish the religiosity of Phelps’s belief in himself and savor Costas’s carefully selected superlatives for the victors, even as we lean into the brutality of the Olympic spectacle as a means of heightening the stakes and building suspense, we ultimately recognize these athletes as almost a different life-form. While elite athletes once may have represented some ideal embodiment of dedication and tenacity, after decades of higher and higher standards, they now seem more like creatures from a distant galaxy. Of course we can’t relate to human beings who have essentially dropped out of life to train around the clock since they were little kids, or to run hundreds of miles straight through the night while eating entire cheesecakes. But that still sounds better than sitting on the couch, growing steadily older until the 2016 Olympics.

In this way, the Olympic Games — like the details of Armstrong’s or Phelp’s grueling regimens — are an aspirational spectacle. We enjoy the notion that we could one day become something bigger, better and brighter than we are now, through sheer force of will. It’s a flight of fancy that pairs nicely with cold beer and salty snacks, the way the sound of distant butting and snorting pairs nicely with the smell of wildflowers.

When asked a few years ago what he would be if he weren’t a swimmer (and the world’s most heralded Olympic athlete), Phelps answered, “Probably a couch potato.” And if anyone ever asks me what I would be if I weren’t a couch potato, next time I think I’ll say, “Oh, probably an Olympic athlete.” An equally unlikely answer. But isn’t it nice to imagine so, like Ferdinand the Bull, from such a comfortable spot under the cork tree?

**And, how about yesterday's Men's 10,000M - holy mother of god, that last lap!! Mo Farah, GOLD, Galen Rupp, Silver...simply chilling finish! Love the sheer joy and disbelief etched on their faces as they cross the line - and realize what they have done.

run fast
Johnny Boy

Paddles or Propellers? Delineating the Perfect Swim Stroke

Should a swimmer's arms serve as paddles or propellers? That question, abstruse as it might seem, underlies a long-running controversy in swimming about the best, most efficient technique for the freestyle and the backstroke. It also prompted a new study from a group of scientists at Johns Hopkins University that, in seemingly answering the question, is likely to provoke even more debate.

The concern about how best to position and move the arm during the freestyle stroke (also known as the front crawl) and its inverse, the backstroke, first gained prominence back in the 1960s, when James E. Counsilman, the famed Indiana University men's swimming coach known as Doc, decided to apply scientific principles of propulsion and fluid dynamics to swim techniques.

The physics of swimming are simple enough. To move through the water, you must generate thrust. To do so, you can use dragging or lifting forces. Drag is created by, unsurprisingly, dragging back against the water and, in the process, pushing an object, like the swimmer's body, forward.

Lift, on the other hand, is created mainly by the flow of fluid around an object moving at an angle through the water. The fluid flows faster around the more curved side of the object, lifting and thrusting it forward. Ship propellers work on this principle.

But until Doc Counsilman weighed in, it was widely believed that swimming, for humans, involved primarily drag forces. You pulled against the water, like someone paddling a canoe, your arm remaining straight, palm perpendicular to the body. This stroke technique is often called a "deep catch" style of swimming, since you pull long and deep against the water.

Coach Counsilman was convinced, however, that lift could and should provide a majority of the propulsion for human swimmers, and that the way to generate lift was to scull, or move the stroking arm through an S-curve underwater.

In his revised version of the freestyle, the arm, bent as it breaks the surface, pulls back against the water at first, as in a paddling stroke. But then the arm starts turning sideways in a gentle curve as it begins to trace an S shape, the thumb heading up as the palm turns parallel to the body. The arm reverses that motion to traverse a full S shape before emerging from the water.

Fluids would flow swiftly around the hand as it sliced through the water and, Coach Counsilman contended, create more lift than the deep-catch stroke.

[In the deep-catch stroke, illustrated at top, the hand pulls long and deep through the water. In the scull, below, the hand traces an S shape]

Coach Counsilman instituted this new stroke technique for his swimmers, first at Indiana University and later as head coach of the United States Olympic team. His swimmers, who included Mark Spitz, won more than 20 Olympic medals and 23 Big Ten Conference titles.

In the years since, sculling during the freestyle stroke and backstroke became commonplace among elite and recreational swimmers.

But many coaches continued to question whether lift, generated by sculling, was really the fastest, most efficient way for swimmers to reach the wall.

So the Johns Hopkins scientists, who before the 2008 Summer Olympics had studied how best to perform the butterfly stroke (their conclusion: have extremely flexible ankles and, if possible, big feet), decided now to put the two strokes to the test in a series of complex computer simulations.

They began by creating a virtual animated arm, using laser scans and motion-capture videos from Olympic-caliber swimmers. "We decided to separate the arm from the rest of the body so the we could study, in isolation, the underwater flow dynamics" around a swimmer's arm during the freestyle stroke or backstroke, says Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins and a devoted recreational swimmer, who oversaw the study.

They then gathered underwater videos of elite swimmers, supplied by USA Swimming, which they categorized as displaying either a sculling or a deep-catch stroke.

The scientists ran their animated arm through multiple simulations of each stroke, requiring thousands of hours of computer time.

The result was "a bit of a surprise," Dr. Mittal says. It turned out that lift was, as Doc Counsilman had maintained, important for efficient, and therefore fast, stroking. In all of the scientists' simulations, lift provided a majority of the propulsive force.

But sculling did not supply much lift. In fact, it impeded both lift and drag. "Our shoulders won't twist all the way around," Dr. Mittal says, meaning our arms won't lever about as ship propellers do, and the amount of lift we can create by sculling is small.

The better choice for human propulsion, he says, was the paddlelike deep-catch stroke, which actually produced more lift than sculling, along with a hefty dose of drag.

"All things being equal, our data show that the deep-catch stroke is far more effective," Dr. Mittal says.

Of course, races are not won or lost by disembodied arms, and as Dr. Mittal points out, "all things are not equal, most of the time." An effective deep-catch stroke requires considerable shoulder strength, which many swimmers lack, making a sculling-based stroke easier for them, at least until they develop robustly muscled shoulders.
"How you roll your body in the water with each stroke will also matter," he says, as will overall fitness. "Sculling is less fatiguing," so less-fit swimmers may opt to scull, he says.

But for fit, powerful swimmers, or those who aspire to become such, "my advice would be to use the deep-catch stroke," he says.

"Anecdotally, we've been told that more and more coaches are moving to the deep-catch," he continues, and his group's findings suggest that for most swimmers, whether elite or recreational, "that is the way to go.

Paddle vs. Propeller: Which Olympic Swimming Stroke is Superior?

stroke on my friends
Johnny Boy

Be A Cheetah (not a "cheater"!)

Back in the 1960s, researchers in Africa clocked the wild cheetah as it ran and determined that at full gallop, a cheetah reached a top speed of about 65 miles per hour, making it easily the world's fastest land mammal. No other quadruped or biped comes close. Galloping quarter horses top out around 47 miles per hour, while sluggish humans, in the person of the world record 100-meter sprinter Usain Bolt, have attained a top speed of less than 28 miles per hour. Even the bullet-train like greyhound, similar in build and running style to the cheetah, doesn't surpass 40 miles per hour.

So what is it about the cheetah and its particular physiology or running form that allows it to set such a blazing pace? And can a better understanding of cheetah biomechanics help humans to move faster?

Those were the questions that motivated a group of scientists at the Structure and Motion Laboratory at the University of London, who decided to compare the cheetah with one of its near rivals in speed, the greyhound.

"The two animals are quite alike in terms of body mass and running form," says Alan H. Wilson, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, who led the study, which was published in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Both animals employ a running form known as the rotary gallop. Their legs churn in a circular motion, the animal's back bowing and its hind legs reaching almost past its ears at full stride. (Tongues tend to loll, too, but there's no indication that this attribute affects speed.)

"Up to a speed of about 40 miles per hour, there's very little difference," Dr. Wilson says. "But what happens after that," when the cheetah finds another gear and accelerates to 65 miles per hour, "is something we'd like to understand. We believe it can help us to better understand the determinants and limits of speed itself."

But closely studying cheetahs in the wild is logistically challenging, especially if you want exact measurements of running force and stride. So the researchers turned to captive cheetah populations at a zoo in Dunstable, England, and a sanctuary in Pretoria, South Africa. The animals were extensively measured and filmed.

Then some of the English cheetahs were taken to the performance lab and encouraged to chase a chicken-meat lure along a 90-meter track dotted with force plates to chart their strides. Meanwhile, high-speed cameras recorded their every movement from multiple angles.

The researchers repeated the experiment with trained racing greyhounds, then compared the two animals' pace and form.

The first thing they noted was that captive cheetahs are relatively slow, compared with their wild brethren. The galloping zoo-bred cheetahs topped out at a little less than 40 miles per hour, slightly lower than the top speed for the greyhounds.

"That finding was not really unexpected," Dr. Wilson says. Cheetahs that live in zoos do not have to feed themselves. They have less motivation to run hard, even when a chicken lure is waggled enticingly in front of them.

"They also don't necessarily learn to gallop as fast," Dr. Wilson says. "There is almost certainly some amount of speed that depends on learning" to be swift enough to bring down prey.

Dr. Wilson is now collecting data on wild cheetahs, but even in the zoo-bred animals, there were hints of their capabilities. When the cheetahs "felt like it," Dr. Wilson says, their leg turnover rate spurted and their pace dramatically increased. They began bringing their legs around faster and faster, their strides lengthening, even as the frequency of their strides increased.

The greyhounds, on the other hand, maintained a fairly even stride frequency throughout their entire run.

The cheetahs also hit the force plates differently from the greyhounds, their paws remaining on the ground slightly longer -- an action that presumably allows the legs to absorb more of the forces generated by the pounding stride.

"One of the limits to speed is that, at some point, you can generate more force than the muscles can withstand," Dr. Wilson says. Striking the ground with such shattering oomph can cause muscles to shred. The cheetahs reduced this risk by letting their paws linger a fraction of a second longer on the ground than the greyhounds did.

The lessons for human runners are somewhat abstract, since we have only two legs and, with rare exceptions, cannot curl them up past our ears, as cheetahs and greyhounds do. "The cheetah's back functions as an extension of its hind legs," Dr. Wilson points out, its spine coiling and extending with each stride, as ours cannot.

But there are tips we can glean from the cheetah. The speed with which a creature brings its leg back around into position appears to be one of the main determinants of speed, Dr. Wilson says. The faster you reposition the leg, the faster you'll move.

But swift leg turnover requires power. "Compared to the greyhound, the cheetah has bulky upper legs," Dr. Wilson says. Its powerful thigh muscles allow its legs to pump more rapidly than the spindly greyhound's can.

So strengthen your thighs.

And perhaps invest in lightweight racing shoes. "Having less weight in the lower portion of the leg aids in swift repositioning" of the limb, Dr. Wilson says.

Finally, while a dangling lure is optional, being hungry, Dr. Wilson says, at least metaphorically, "probably helps quite a bit."

So, the message? Run fast, but beware the "cheetah"...

Johnny Boy

Too Hip for You

(Johnny being made to confess where the diamonds are)
So, last Thursday headed off to St Mike's Hospital to take a "stab" (pun intended) at the option my surgeon had suggested of "delaying" the hip surgery for all the messed up damage that has been hobbling me for the last 2 years.
Que'est que c'est "option"? (the French is a reflection of the global inclusiveness of my Blog - I am, after all, very continental with my writing).
Dr. Dan (not to be confused with "Ltnt Dan" from Forrest Gump, who I might add, with his injuries and all, I could sooo take in a race - sorry...) had indicated after the MRI, CT scan, series of xrays, etc, that given the (likely negative) impact surgery will have on my ability to keep cranking out the miles on my tired old body, that we should try an injection of this "stuff" that may help to at least off set some of the pain.
He noted that the drug, called "Durolane", is a synovial fluid that in essence acts like a "super-lubricant"...hey, get your mind out the gutter!) that could ease some of the grinding but in no way would work magic, not would it do anything to repair the labrum tear.
With really no downside to trying this, I figured "what the hell".
Then I had to buy the drug - not OHIP covered - and after forking out close to $500 smackers, for the second time that day thought, "what the hell?".
My use of the word "hell" is, it seems, intrinsically linked to my hip.
So - willing to try anything, short of modelling myself after Gary Sinese that is, I was booked in for the injection.

To make a long story short, here is how I remember the procedure/surgery - St. Mikes, hospital gown (man, I have a white ass), under the xray machine, surgeon pops in, anesthetic into hip joint closer to groin/adductor (and the "boys" - "hey, careful Doc, I may need them!"), gadolinium contrast dye injected into hip socket, 4" needle stuck into hip, watching this as best I could on the xray monitor, surgeon muttering "god damn..."
WTF!!!???
Seems the needle tip was hitting the head of my hip bone and could not release the drug, which is apparently really viscous and needs some space to be injected.
So, what to do, what to do? Well, I will tell what the (f*ck) to do: pull out needle, pull out dye syringe thingie and start all over.
45 min I will never get back in my life - and done.
Ya, I realllllyyyy enjoyed that.

Anyway - hip full of junk, I was done and thought I could leave.
Nurse says "sit" for 1-2 hours to make sure I am ok, no negative reaction to anesthetic, blah blah blah; however, I had places to go, people to see, so I split (kinda caught shit for that when I got home though!).
Nice bruise on inner groin and pretty sore for a while - but it seems to have helped a bit, as I just got back from a sweet 18km run on the Spit.

Still sore but pushing on.
Here's hoping this sh*t works its mojo at least for a few months so I can get a summer of racing in before I absolutely, positively HAVE to go under the knife.

See ya on the road
Johnny Boy

REALLY? Triathlon the HARD way...

So, short post tonite; just back from having a 4" needle jammed into my hip - twice.
But more on that later...

I did my first triathlon in 2 years last weekend - race review will be forthcoming [hell, why do today what you can put off and procrastinate for a while? haha].
But I came across these 3 photos on the weekend, and realized that I have been riding my bike all wrong!!
#1 - see above - WTF? Where do you pin your race #?? Worse, where do you stick your gel??

And the two below: these 2 guys decided that riding 90km in a Half Ironman is not quite hard enough on its own.
Rather, they decided to ride...IIN THEIR FRIGGGIN' WETSUITS.

I mean, c'mon - that has GOT to cause some friction, not too mention at a minimum some serious dehydration.

I have been swimming in the lake for a week now; ya, it is brisk (10 degrees) but at least I peel off my wetsuit to walk home!
Having said that, I do have a friend who drove over to the lake while wearing her wetsuit...I would have paid good money to see her get pulled over that morning by the "5-0" for some random traffic violation ("DWW": driving wearing wetsuit" - "Ma-am, license, registration, 1500 time". hahaha).

But these people in the photos? Stupid is as stupid does.

peace out
Johnny Boy

The Running Life: Book Reviews!

The first marathon that I remember being really jazzed about was the 1982 Boston Marathon. There’s little competition that’s purer than two men—Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley, in this case—racing side by side for 26.2 miles. Beardsley wore a white cap; Salazar wore red shorts; they ran so close together that they seemed like one.

Salazar was twenty-three years old, and full of swagger. “I’m the fastest runner in the race,” he told reporters beforehand. He was the world-record holder in the event, and he seemed both indestructible and indomitable. He drank almost no water during the race, and he stayed right on Beardsley’s shoulder as the two surged through the Newton Hills. In the last half mile, Salazar sprinted out in front. Beardsley tried to counter, but a motorcycle cut him off. Beardsley swerved, accelerated, and almost caught back up. But Salazar won by two seconds. I vividly recall my outrage: couldn’t they just do it again, fair and square, without the motorcycle? Salazar, who was nearly six feet tall, had begun the race at one hundred and forty pounds and ended it at one hundred and thirty. He collapsed at the finish line; to revive him, paramedics administered six quarts of intravenous saline.

Competitive running is a relentless sport. The training usually happens alone, and failure is personal. When you lose, there’s usually no teammate or referee to blame. When your skills start to decline, your watch lets you know by exactly how much. Perhaps not surprisingly, for both Salazar and Beardsley, the race was more of an ending than a beginning. Beardsley never ran so fast again, and he lost much of his life to an addiction to painkillers. Salazar won one more marathon, six months later. But soon his body fell apart. His stride had always been chaotic, and he was never a graceful runner. Eventually, everything began to break; he won his last marathon at the age of twenty-four. (This is the same age at which Sammy Wanjiru, perhaps the greatest marathoner ever, died in a drunken fall.) For years—through endless surgeries and thousands of vitamin pills—Salazar tried futilely to reverse his decline. As he writes in his new autobiography, “14 Minutes,” “My workouts turned slower and slower, more and more of a chore, while my emotional distance from my family widened and my black reverie—my daydreams of definitive catastrophe—grew longer.” Running had made the young Alberto Salazar cool. (This is often the case: track is the rare sport where success comes to the scrawniest, and it has helped thousands of dorks at thousands of high schools.) In rather short time, it made him a world champion. And then, after the injuries, it made him a little crazy.

Salazar followed his burnout with wandering. He sought spiritual guidance in Yugoslavia, briefly returned to health and won an ultramarathon in South Africa, hurt himself again, half-heartedly went into the restaurant business, and eventually found himself back where he had gone to college: in Eugene, Oregon. There he became a track coach—a terrible one at first, who was too focussed on getting his runners to use obscure gadgets and sleep in altitude tents. But then, somehow, he became a great one. He is now perhaps the most successful distance-running coach in America. One athlete he has coached for a decade, Galen Rupp, is the fastest ten-thousand-metre runner in American history. A more recent recruit, Mo Farah, will be a favorite for a gold medal in this summer’s London Olympics.

Part of Salazar’s success is that he learned to teach his runners to avoid the mistakes he made. When you watch Farah or Rupp run, they look like they’re gliding. There’s no wasted motion, and nothing seems forced. They would fit in on the Kalahari. In 2010, Jennifer Kahn wrote a piece for The New Yorker about Salazar, explaining his obsession over how his runners kick their legs, swing their arms, and angle their thumbs. At the time, Salazar was training a running prodigy named Dathan Ritzenhein for the New York marathon. One of Salazar’s principal goals was to make Ritzenhein land more on the front of his foot than on his heel. The idea is somewhat counterintuitive. Why land on the thin, bony part of your foot instead of the large, fleshy part? Is it really good to put so much stress on your metatarsals, the little bones in the front of your feet? But Salazar was convinced. In an interview with Runner’s World, he said, “There has to be one best way of running. It’s got to be like a law of physics. And if you deviate too much from that—the way I did in my career—it can be a big handicap. Dathan can’t be a heel striker and expect to run as good as the best forefoot runners… You show me someone with bad form, and I’ll show you someone who’s going to have a lot of injuries and a short career.”

The search for the one best way of running is what drives Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run,” which came out in 2009 and has sold at least half a million copies since. The book tells the story of a group of larger-than-life ultramarathoners, with names like Caballo Blanco and Barefoot Ted, and the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, a tribe of men and women who spend their lives racing, in sandals, through canyons—except for when they come to the United States to win hundred-mile races. It’s a rollicking narrative, a romanticization of a distant group of people, and a broadside against American shoe companies. “Born to Run” is not the best book on the intricacies of the sport—my pick would be Timothy Noakes’s “Lore of Running”; for a training guide, I’d select Scott Douglas and Pete Pfitzinger’s “Advanced Marathoning”—but it’s certainly the most accessible and the best selling.

In McDougall’s view, runners have been duped by running-shoe companies, eager to sell us shoes with ever more cushioning in the heel at ever higher prices. Modern running shoes, McDougall writes, are sort of like plaster casts, inhibiting free movement, and pushing us into all sorts of bad habits, like landing entirely on those well-cushioned heels. He started researching the book because he wanted to know why so many runners—himself included—get hurt. The answer is that our shoes did it. McDougal’s book has changed the way that a lot of people run, and it has led to a surge in sales for thin running shoes, or even “five-fingered” shoes that make someone look something like a lizard. If you haven’t seen these shoes before, head to a track on a sunny afternoon. Or look for the people stepping on buses to remote corners of Mexico to search out the Tarahumara.

Running is indeed a sport defined by injuries. Each stride puts stress across the body in the same way every time. Our shins splint, our tibias fracture, our patella tendons become inflamed - even our hips get messed up! Part of the problem is that the thing that injures a runner—running—is the very thing that makes him better. Basketball players may get injured by crashing into people as they rebound, but they can improve by shooting jump shots alone in a gym. You improve at running by running. Many of the sport’s injuries are chronic. And in those cases, there’s no question that a minimalist shoe, or running barefoot, can help. Chronic problems typically derive from some ingrained habit. Maybe you twist your hips in a way that puts pressure on the outside of the leg. A radical change in shoe, and a radical change in stride, changes the habit. The new techniques are better just for being different. Just as the Atkins diet makes you lose weight quickly, barefoot running can quickly make your knee pain go away.

But there’s a danger. Our ancestors may have run barefoot, but they didn’t do it on asphalt and concrete. They didn’t do it on roads caked with broken glass. They also didn’t have potato chips and soda, or bodies shaped by days spent in offices. Running is an extremely complex physical motion. Changing your shoes might help, but the way stress is distributed across your body depends a great deal, too, on how your hold your head, and even how you swing your arms. Ultimately, we don’t really know whether the movement spurred by “Born to Run” will make us more or less hurt. My guess is that, ten years from now, we’ll see it as a useful corrective. Runners will spend much more time thinking about their form, and there will be lines of well-tested and well-designed thin shoes. But most of us, particularly those of who live in cities, will be training in relatively thick shoes. When Salazar started adjusting Ritzenhein’s form, he came down with stress fractures in his metatarsals. He’s been battling injuries since.

Lizard shoes or not, the real virtue of McDougal’s book is that it reminded readers about our primal connection to running, the purest of sports. It reminded us that there are different ways to run—some of which hurt our bodies more than others. And it gave us new ways of appreciating distance running. It has, in other words, made hundreds of thousands of people look at the sport again, with the same excitement that I had for the great duel between Dick Beardsley and Alberto Salazar 30 years ago.

peace out

Johnny Boy