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