Tour de France Team Overview

So, I was mulling over the upcoming TDF, and wondered which teams have been invited to ride...when it occurred to me, as I am sure it has many. many people, just who are the sponsors of these teams and how do they come up with the Team names? One of my favourite blogs, The Inner Ring, has the answers:

There are 18 World Tour teams and 21 Pro Continental teams. One difference from other sports is that cycling teams come with naming rights and usually they are named after the sponsor. But who are these sponsors and what do they do?

You might know about Garmin or Cannondale but do you know what Qhubeka, Orica or Vacansoleil are about? What’s the link between Frano Pellizotti and Hello Kitty? Why do Ag2r ride in brown shorts? All this and more…

Ag2r La Mondiale: an insurance and savings company. Note the team name is not two sponsors but Ag2r La Mondiale is the name of one company. The firm offers retirement savings, healthcare insurance and other forms of social insurance. And why are the shorts brown? Well the corporate logo is blue and brown but note the company’s Parisian headquarters are located at 35 boulevard Brune. Brown Boulevard.

Astana: not a company but a city, a nation. Astana is the capital city of Kazakhstan and the team is funded by the state to promote the country, a bid to counter the “Borat” image if you like. The jersey features the names of various state-owned companies. Note team manager Vinokourov was on a winning list in the last parliamentary elections, showing the close links between the team and the state.

FDJ: is short for La Française des Jeux or “French Games” and is the French state lottery with regular draws, scratchcards and more. The sponsor has backed a team since 1997 but almost quit in the wake of doping scandals but courageously decided to stay in the sport on the condition the team rode clean. This meant lean years in terms of results although we now know why. The Fondation FDJ also supports other supports like other nations the lottery funding helps cover Olympic sports

BMC Racing: a brand of Swiss bicycles. The team is registered in the US but funded by the Swiss francs of Andy Rihs, a billionaire cycling enthusiast who owns BMC and other bike brands. Registering the team in the US helps the team to tap this giant, lucrative market whilst trading on the image of Swiss quality.

Euskaltel – Euskadi : Euskaltel is a regional telephone operator in the Basque region, known as Euskadi in the Basque language. Euskaltel has had a tough time of late with the Spanish courts imposing a €222 million fine last year but this is being appealed. The region is semi-autonomous and retains a strong separatist movement. The team is one way to affirm the region’s identity.

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the new Garmin team bike computer - haha

Garmin – Sharp: Garmin is the US satellite navigation company, well it is from Kansas but registered in Switzerland. It was founded by Gary Burrell and Min Kao which explains the Gar-Min name. Some have questioned the company’s future in a world where smartphones replace many GPS devices but the cycling and sports equipment is proving to be a big new area. Sharp are a Japanese electronics company but the sponsorship is with the European subsidiary as the firm wants to promote its brand in Europe. The team cleverly has a large screen TV incorporated in the side of the team bus.

Orica – Greenedge: Orica is an Australian company that makes explosives and other speciality chemicals for the mining industry. It bought Nobel, the Norweigan dynamite firm several years ago. Australia has been a big part of the global mining boom and the company does not have a great reputation with explosive disasters as well as several fines for environmental damage but sponsoring a cycling team is seen as a way to put something back. Greenedge meanwhile is a holding name as the team searches for a co-sponsor, green as in the Australia but also the environment and edge as cutting edge.

Lampre – Merida: Lampre make rolled, laminated steel. If this sounds unfamiliar take a look at your washing machine or fridge and the white steel around it. The Italian firm supplies the “white good” industry with the white steel and has operations around the world. It’s been in the sport since 1991 with Colnago Lampre and then in 1992 the Lampre team was born with the blue and fuchsia jersey that we still see today. Merida is a Taiwanese bike manufacturer linked to Specialized that’s keen to make a name for itself in the pro peloton.

Cannondale: the bike brand has had its ups and downs. In the 1990s it supplied bikes to the Saeco team in Italy and was famous for its oversized alu tubing. The company moved into motorcycles, offering innovative lightweight offroad bikes but this was a commercial disaster and the brand was bought by Dorel, a Canadian conglomerate that also owns Sugoi, Schwinn and GT as well as a range of brands supplying infant products like Bébéconfort.

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pee break

Argos – Shimano: Argos is a Dutch oil company but don’t think of oil rigs, think gas stations and tanker trucks as the firm sells and distributes diesel, heating oil, petrol and lubricants in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany. It was recently bought by a Russian firm but I’m told the takeover changes nothing and the sponsorship continues. Shimano is obvious but note their European base in the Netherlands which explains this Dutch connection.

Lotto Belisol Team : Lotto is the Belgian state lottery and like FDJ in France, has the monopoly in Belgium. Founded in 1934 to raise funds for the sick in the Belgian Congo, the company has continously sponsored a pro team since 1985 although at times it has been the number two name, for example Omega Pharm – Lotto a couple of years ago. It also sponsors the Stanard Liège football team. Belisol make alu and wooden windows and doors and has branched out into domestic renewable energy products like solar energy panels.

Movistar Team: Movistar is a mobile telecoms operator owned by Spanish national telecoms firm Telefonica with operations in Spain and Latin America and also in several European countries under the 02 brand. It’s a giant company but the pro team is one of the smallest budget teams in the World Tour. Be sure to pronounce the team name right, it is not “movie star”

Omega Pharma – Quickstep: contrary to the name Omega Pharma is not a pharmaceuticals company. Instead it sells para-pharmaceutical products like wound dressings, vitamin supplements and other products find in pharmacies. Quickstep is a brand of laminated flooring that might seem indissociable from Belgian cycling but in fact it’s owned by US company Mohawk Industries.

Blanco Pro Cycling: “your name here” as the team formerly known as Rabobank is hunting for a sponsor. Rabobank quit the mens’ pro cycling at the end of 2012 but fulfilled its contract by leaving enough money to fund the team. It says something that the sponsor prefers to pay for the team but not have its name linked.

Radioshack – Leopard: Radioshack is a US electronics retailer that came into the sport to support Lance Armstrong’s comeback. Surprisingly they’ve lasted longer than the Texan although the company frequently attracts headlines about being bought out. Leopard is another holding name, supplied by Luxembourg real estate millionaire Flavio Becca. I gather a new sponsor will be announced later this spring.

Team Sky: Sky is a satellite television channel with operations in Britain, Germany and Italy. The brand is ultimately controlled by Newscorp and the cosmopolitan Murdoch family. The team is partly owned by British and Italian Sky which helps to explain the presence of several Italian riders and is surely an additional incentive as Wiggins targets the Giro.

Team Saxo – Tinkoff: Saxo is a currency brokerage from Denmark that offers software platforms to the banking industry. Tinkoff is a Russian bank and credit card issuer that operates online only, copying the model of Capital One in the US.

Vacansoleil – DCM: Vacansoleil is a Dutch operator of holiday camps across Europe and the name is play onvacances and soleil, French for holidays and sunshine. They have camping sites in France and beyond. DCM is a company selling garden products, notably soil and plant food. Note this is big business in the Netherlands where the flower industry is huge and supplies much of Europe.

Pro Continental teams
Accent Jobs – Wanty: Accent is an employment agency in Belgium whilst Wanty is a construction company.

Doug's new bike

Androni Giocattoli – Venezuela: giocattoli is Italian for toys and Androni makes a range of plastic toys under licence including a Hello Kitty lawnmower. Venezuela is of course the South American nation and the team has recruited several riders from here.

Bardiani Valvolve – CSF Inox: two names but the same company, Bardiani makes steel valves for the food industry. The next time you see TV footage of a food factory with liquids being pumped and poured as products move along conveyor belts it might feature Bardiani’s valves or CSF’s steel piping.

Bretagne – Séché Environnement: Bretagne is the cycling-mad region of north-west France that juts out into the Atlantic whilst Séché is a recycling company that manages waste and other products.

Caja Rural: a Spanish banking brand, it covers over 70 different small banks run on a cooperative basis.

CCC Polsat: CCC is a chain of shoe shops in Poland whilst Polsat is satellite TV channel.

Champion System Pro Cycling: makes custom cycle clothing for clubs and teams.

Cofidis: is a French consumer credit company offering loans in France, Belgium and Spain. It concentrates on the sub-prime segment and has drawn criticism for aggressive tactics.

Colombia: is a quasi-national Colombian team but the funding is diverse with the national government making a contribution via the Coldesportes (Colombia Sports) agency and then a range of co-sponsors chipping in funding and equipment.

Europcar: is a privately-owned vehicle rental company with operations around the world. The green brand is a common sight at airports and beyond and in France you can spot the likes of Thomas Voeckler painted on the side of rental vans.

IAM Cycling: Independent Asset Management is a Swiss fund management company that has focussed on private funds but is moving to sell its funds to the general public.

Crelan – Euphony: Crelan is the new name for Landbouwcrediet (“land-build-credit”) a bank offering savings and mortgages. Euphony is a telecoms reseller offering mobile phones and broadband in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Meets the UCI’s 6.8kg minimum weight rule

NetApp – Endura: NetApp is a Californian company offering data storage and other IT services. Endura is a Scottish cycle clothing manufacturer.

Team MTN Qhubeka: MTN is a mobile phone operator from South Africa with operations across Africa and beyond. The continent often lacks the infrastructure of traditional telecoms and MTN has grabbed a big share of the mobile market. Qhubeka is a charity project in South Africa to get people cycling. It helps rural communities by giving bicycles to children in return for work done to improve their environment and their community, this way the kids can get to school or provide improved access to healthcare.

Bon appetit!

Sojasun: is a French brand of soya-based food products from drinks to snacks to other healthfoods.

Team Novonordisk – Type 1: Novo Nordisk is a Danish pharmaceutical company with a range of insulin products and it is funding a pro team comprised only of diabetic athletes as a way to show the condition need not prevent an active life.

Topsport Vlaanderen – Baloise: Topsport is a Flemish sports foundation funded by the regional government and is helping younger riders in the pro careers. Baloise is a Swiss insurance and savings company.

United Healthcare: a US healthcare insurance provider.

Vini Fantini: a brand of wines from Italy. The same company as Vini Farnese last year, now the team promotes Fantini wines.

Rusvelo: is essentially the Russian track cycling program with a road team to allow the endurance athletes to race on the road and is funded by the Russian government.

Katusha: is the abbreviated version of Ekaterina, the Russian version of Katherine and the name of a famous Soviet wartime folk song in Russia which still gets patriotic hearts stirring today. In English you’d call them Team Kathy but there’s nothing diminutive about the sponsors: Gazprom and Itera are energy giants and Ростехнологии / Rostechnologii is a Russian state agency designed to fund and control various technology and defence companies making this a team funded from the heart of the Kremlin.

ride on.

Johnny Boy

Catchin' ZZZ's

Message for today: sleep more, get faster...

THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

“More, bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided assumption — that our resources are infinite.

Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work.

Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.

Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.

As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.

“To maximize gains from long-term practice,” Dr. Ericsson concluded, “individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

So, if you want to maximize your performance - at work or on the roads running - get to bed, take some time off, and, most importantly: chillax.

Good way to "RELAX"? **chill out to 80's grooves!

see ya on the roads

johnny boy

Is There One Right Way to Run?

Forefoot vs Heel? As Willy the Shake once said, "that is the question".

In recent years, many barefoot running enthusiasts have been saying that to reduce impact forces and injury risk, runners should land near the balls of their feet, not on their heels, a running style that has been thought to mimic that of our barefoot forebears and therefore represent the most natural way to run. But a new study of barefoot tribespeople in Kenya upends those ideas and, together with several other new running-related experiments, raises tantalizing questions about just how humans really are meant to move.

For the study, published this month in the journal PLoS One, a group of evolutionary anthropologists turned to the Daasanach, a pastoral tribe living in a remote section of northern Kenya. Unlike some Kenyan tribes, the Daasanach have no tradition of competitive distance running, although they are physically active. They also have no tradition of wearing shoes.

Humans have run barefoot, of course, for millennia, since footwear is quite a recent invention, in evolutionary terms. And modern running shoes, which typically feature well-cushioned heels that are higher than the front of the shoe, are newer still, having been introduced widely in the 1970s.

The thinking behind these shoes' design was, in part, that they should reduce injuries. When someone runs in a shoe with a built-up heel, he or she generally hits the ground first with the heel. With so much padding beneath that portion of the foot, the thinking went, pounding would be reduced and, voila, runners wouldn't get hurt.

But, as many researchers and runners have noted, running-related injuries have remained discouragingly common, with more than half of all runners typically being felled each year.

So, some runners and scientists began to speculate a few years ago that maybe modern running shoes are themselves the problem.

Their theory was buttressed by a influential study published in 2010 in Nature, in which Harvard scientists examined the running style of some lifelong barefoot runners who also happened to be from Kenya. Those runners were part of the Kalenjin tribe, who have a long and storied history of elite distance running. Some of the fastest marathoners in the world have been Kalenjin, and many of them grew up running without shoes.

Interestingly, when the Harvard scientists had the Kalenjin runners stride over a pressure-sensing pad, they found that, as a group, they almost all struck the ground near the front of their foot. Some were so-called midfoot strikers, meaning that their toes and heels struck the ground almost simultaneously, but many were forefoot strikers, meaning that they landed near the ball of their foot.

Almost none landed first on their heels.

What the finding seemed to imply was that runners who hadn't grown up wearing shoes deployed a noticeably different running style than people who had always worn shoes.

And from that idea, it was easy to conjecture that this style must be better for you than heel-striking, since presumably it was more natural, echoing the style that early, shoeless cavemen would have used.

But the new study finds otherwise. When the researchers had the 38 Daasanach tribespeople run unshod along a track fitted, as in the Harvard study, with a pressure plate, they found that these traditionally barefoot adults almost all landed first with their heels, especially when they were asked to run at a comfortable, distance-running pace. For the group, that pace averaged about 8 minutes per mile, and 72 percent of the volunteers struck with their heels while achieving it. Another 24 percent struck with the midfoot. Only 4 percent were forefoot strikers.

When the Daasanach volunteers were asked to sprint along the track at a much faster speed, however, more of them landed near their toes with each stride, a change in form that is very common during sprints, even in people who wear running shoes. But even then, 43 percent still struck with their heels.

This finding adds to a growing lack of certainty about what makes for ideal running form. The forefoot- and midfoot-striking Kalenjin were enviably fast; during the Harvard experiment, their average pace was less than 5 minutes per mile.

But their example hasn't been shown to translate to other runners. In a 2012 study of more than 2,000 racers at the Milwaukee Lakefront Marathon, 94 percent struck the ground with their heels, and that included many of the frontrunners.

Nor is it clear that changing running form reduces injuries. In a study published in October scientists asked heel-striking recreational runners to temporarily switch to forefoot striking, they found that greater forces began moving through the runners' lower backs; the pounding had migrated from the runners' legs to their lumbar spines, and the volunteers reported that this new running form was quite uncomfortable.

But the most provocative and wide-ranging implication of the new Kenyan study is that we don't know what is natural for human runners. If, said Kevin G. Hatala, a graduate student in evolutionary anthropology at George Washington University who led the new study, ancient humans "regularly ran fast for sustained periods of time," like Kalenjin runners do today, then they were likely forefoot or midfoot strikers.

But if their hunts and other activities were conducted at a more sedate pace, closer to that of the Daasanach, then our ancestors were quite likely heel strikers and, if that was the case, wearing shoes and striking with your heel doesn't necessarily represent a warped running form.

At the moment, though, such speculation is just that, Mr. Hatala said. He and his colleagues plan to collaborate with the Harvard scientists in hopes of better understanding why the various Kenyan barefoot runners move so differently and what, if anything, their contrasting styles mean for the rest of us.

"Mostly what we've learned" with the new study, he said, "is how much still needs to be learned."

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 

'

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