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Runner's Web Digest - April 30, 2021 - Posted: April 30, 2021

The Runner's Web Digest is a FREE weekly digest of information on running, triathlons and multisport activities.
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Runner's Web Digest INDEX

1. ASICS Magic Speed Performance Review
2. The New Science of “Fatigue Resistance”
3. Are Your Body Mechanics Hindering Your Performance?
4. How to rehydrate quickly and improve your recovery
5. Episode 132: The Coaches Guide to Sports Psychology 
6. Do you have the urge to raid the fridge after a tough workout? 
7. How Perfectionism Leads to Athlete Burnout
8. Illusion injuries?
9. Parents’ Diet and Exercise Habits, Even Before Birth, May Contribute to Child’s Well-Being
10. How to train like a woman
11. H is for Hyponatremia
12. What Determines Which Marathoners Get Heatstroke?
THIS WEEKS POLL
Which of the following marathons would you run if you had an unlimited amount of time to train and cost was not an issue?
*	Berlin
*	Boston
*	Chicago
*	Honolulu
*	London
*	Los Angeles
*	Marine Corps
*	New York
*	Ottawa
*	Rotterdam 
Vote here

PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS:
In regards to the IAAF ruling on limiting testosterone levels for female athletes:
1 I gree with the IAAF ruling regarding events from 800M to the Mile 	147  (6%)
2 The ruling should apply to all events 	1694  (73%)
3 The ruling is wrong and there should be no limits 	351  (15%)
4 No Opinion 	141  (6%)
Total Votes: 2333

FIVE STAR SITE OF THE MONTH APRIL: STREAMLINE ATHLETES.
Make sense of university track and field
Choosing where to go to university can be one of the most challenging decisions that aspiring collegiate athletes have to make. With hundreds of college and university programs out there, each with their own pros and cons, how can student-athletes be sure they have the best information?
Streamline Athletes is here to help the next generation of runners, jumpers, and throwers - and their families - discover their top options for both academic and athletic success in the collegiate track and field/cross-country landscape.
Visit the website at: Stream Athletes.

BOOK/VIDEO/MOVIE OF THE MONTH FOR APRIL 2021: .THE UNFORGIVING LINE.
By Paul C. Maurer
'For some, running is a cornerstone in their lives. To those individuals, there is an unquenchable need to run on roads, trails and track. They cannot explain it, but that does not matter. Running is who they are. It is for them The Unforgiving Line is written. Blending past and present, the glorious history of distance running is woven into the tale. Mac, a running warrior from a past era, cannot erase his failure at the worst of times: the 1968 Olympic trials fifteen-hundred meters. D.J., a talented but emotionally fractured sixteen-year old, carries scars garnered from a troubled home life. Mac and D.J. form an unlikely pairing, but each carries the other on a path that encounters rejection, failure, and broken dreams in the quest of finding love and redemption. The Unforgiving Line delivers through the final stride.
Buy the book from Amazon.

For more books on running and Triathlon visit:
HumanKinectics.com,
Amazon.com,
VeloPress.com, and
SkyHorse.com

THIS WEEK'S FEATURES:

1. ASICS Magic Speed Performance Review:
Weighs 7.9 oz. (224 g) for a US M9.0 / 6.6 oz. (187 g) for a US W8.0
FlyteFoam Blast midsole with half-length carbon-fiber plate
Guidesole rocker geometry and full ASICSGRIP rubber outsole
Really great tempo/race shoe at a lesser price point than the competition ($150)
ROBBE: If you’re gonna throw ‘magic’ into a shoe name, I need to know a couple of things first. One, are muggles allowed to wear this, and if so, how can I unlock the magic inside of it without breaking Ministry of Magic rules? Unfortunately, none of those details were on the spec sheet we received, so I had to do a little hillbilly wizardry to figure out how this shoe works.
Turns out, you just have to put it on.
MEAGHAN: At this point, you’ve probably jumped on the ASICS plated shoe hype train. If not, here’s another option for you – the Magic Speed – a ‘budget friendly’ option from ASICS. It’s got similar qualities to the MetaSpeed Sky but costs $100 less. Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk about the details.
More...from Belive in the Run.

2. The New Science of "Fatigue Resistance":
What separates the best endurance athletes from everyone else isn’t their amazing lab test data or power values—it’s how well they maintain those values after a few hours of exhausting exercise
When the lab data from Nike’s Breaking2 marathon project was finally published last fall, the most interesting insights were of the “dog that didn’t bark in the night” variety. Among a group of some of the greatest distance runners in history, none of the standard physiological measurements—VO2 max, lactate threshold, running economy—produced any seriously eye-popping values. To understand why these runners were so good, the researchers suggested, we might need another variable: fatigue resistance, which they defined as “the extent of the deterioration of the three [other variables] over time.”
Interestingly, that same new variable pops up in a new analysis of power data from pro cyclists. An international research team led by Peter Leo, a doctoral student at the University of Innsbruck, and James Spragg, a British cycling coach, crunched the numbers from a group of elite and near-elite professional cyclists in a five-day race called the Tour of the Alps. The best predictor of race performance, competitive level, and event specialty wasn’t the raw power or heart-rate data—it was, once again, fatigue resistance.
More...from Sweat Science on Outside Online.

3. Are Your Body Mechanics Hindering Your Performance?
Here are four movement errors you might be making — and how to overcome them.
Regardless of what your sporting goals are and where you are on the continuum from professional to weekend warrior, you’re going to need to develop your power, speed, strength, and endurance. But just as important is your ability to move well. Movement competence is the foundation on which all those other physical qualities are built, and just like the biblical parable, if you’re building your metaphorical house on sand, it’s going to crumble when a storm strikes. In this piece, let’s look at four movement errors you might be making, and then highlight the best ways to fix those.
1. Breathing Dysfunction
Wait a second, isn’t breathing a function, not a movement? It’s actually both. Yes, the action of taking a breath is an autonomous function that your body performs to survive, but it’s also intrinsically tied to movement because of all the muscles and supporting structures involved in respiration. If you get stuck in a dysfunctional breathing pattern, you start overemphasizing the muscles of the chest, shoulders, and upper back/neck. No wonder so many people hold tension in these areas. If you’re taking thousands of breaths per day from this area, the muscles and supporting tissues are doing double duty.
Mouth breathing, along with upper chest breathing, traps your body in a sympathetic stress state, which reinforces that negative feedback loop. My swim coach recently noted that I don’t breathe well when I’m in the pool and it throws my whole body off. In sports, we see this in the ribs flaring, which limits hip extension and emphasizes lumbar (low back) extension instead.
More...from Precision Hydration.

5. Episode 132: The Coaches Guide to Sports Psychology:
As coaches, we obsess over the X’s and O’s. Did we get the training just right? But often it’s the mental side of the sport that makes much of the difference. In this episode we dive into what coaches need to know about sports psychology. We cover everything from anxiety, choking, motivation, and understanding our stress response and arousal.
Listen to the podcast on (Science of Running.

6. Do you have the urge to raid the fridge after a tough workout?
A study shows most people get more hungry after exercise, but there's a way to avoid eating up all the calories you just burned.
Exercise has an uneasy relationship with food. Despite its much-heralded role in burning unwanted calories and maintaining a healthy weight, about 75 per cent of exercisers can’t wait to raid the fridge post-workout. Others report the opposite effect, stating that exercise depresses their sense of hunger. And while committed exercisers generally have a healthier overall diet than those who are sedentary, individuals with very high levels of physical activity are also known for consuming large amounts of high-calorie sugary foods, a trend dietary experts call compensatory eating.
Nutrition and exercise professionals aren’t sure why working up a sweat makes some people ravenous and others totally disinterested in food, the uncertainty of which piqued the interest of a group of researchers from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In search of answers, they decided to investigate the impact of exercise on appetite and food choices including how long its effects last.
More...from the Montreal Gazette.

7. How Perfectionism Leads to Athlete Burnout:
Setting high goals is great, but how you deal with falling short determines how long you’re willing to keep chasing them
Overtraining syndrome is one of the great mysteries of modern sports science. No one is exactly sure what goes wrong or how to fix it. But there’s a general consensus about what causes it: too much training, not enough recovery. It’s basically a math problem, and if the dawning age of sports technology ever delivers a perfect way of measuring training load and recovery status, we’ll one day be able to balance the books and eliminate overtraining for good.
At least, that’s the theory. But sports psychologists have been studying a parallel condition they call athlete burnout since at least the 1980s, which carries some different assumptions. In this view, burnout is influenced not just by the physical stress of training and competition, but by the athlete’s perception of their ability to meet the demands placed on them. Burnout isn’t exactly the same as overtraining, but there’s plenty of overlap: chronic exhaustion, a drop in performance, and in many cases a decision to eventually walk away from the sport. This perspective doesn’t get as much attention among athletes—which makes a new paper in the European Journal of Sport Science worth exploring.
More...from
Sweat Science on Outside Online.

8. Illusion injuries?:
From beginners to pro athletes, mental imagery can be useful — or dangerous if you’re unrealistic
The beautiful stride of a world class marathoner is something to behold. A perfect 10, some might say. We see this elegant imagery at the pinnacle of every sport. Our eyes transmit these images to the brain, where something amazing happens: We actually begin to mimic those same actions.
This happens not just through the imagination or dreams of being world class. Rather, the brain’s motor cortex initiates the connections with those very same muscles used in the actions we see — all while we sit on the couch just watching and wishing.
This mechanism is hard-wired in the human nervous system. We do it from the earliest age — the brain mimics others. It helps us learn to walk, and is a reason why we often stand, walk or move very similarly to the way our parents do. As babies, we imagine moving like mom, and, eventually, the mind mirrors it.
More...from Dr. Phil Maffetone.

9. Parents’ Diet and Exercise Habits, Even Before Birth, May Contribute to Child’s Well-Being:
Physical activity during pregnancy might have long-lasting benefits for a child’s health, new research suggests.
The lifestyles of soon-to-be mothers and fathers could shape the health of their unborn offspring in lasting ways, according to a surprising new animal study of exercise, diet, genetics and parenthood.
The study found that rodent parents-to-be that fatten on a greasy diet before mating produce offspring with sky-high later risks for metabolic problems. But if the mothers stay active during their pregnancies, those risks disappear.
The study involved mice, not people, but does suggest that when a mother exercises during pregnancy, she may help protect her unborn children against the unhealthy effects of their father’s poor eating habits, as well as her own. The findings add to our growing understanding of the ways in which parents influence children’s long-term health, even before birth, and suggest how physical activity during pregnancy might help to ensure that those impacts are beneficial.
More...from the New York Times.

10. How to train like a woman:
Are female athletes getting the advice which suits them? Dr Emma Ross, Baz Moffat and Dr Bella Smith of The Well HQ believe not – and insist it’s time to think differently
As women pursue peak performance, we have to think differently about what it takes to allow them to fulfil their potential, because what works for women won’t always be the same things which have worked for men.
Currently, female athletes usually train and are coached in a way which doesn’t always consider the ‘female’ part of being a female athlete. The support that is applied to their performance – nutrition, physiology, psychology, etc – tends to be based on research which has been done on men, or what has been seen to be successful with male athletes.
But women are very different from men. Women have periods and menstrual cycles, they may use hormonal contraception, they have breasts, they are far more likely to have pelvic floor dysfunction, they have a much higher risk of injury, they manage emotions and derive confidence differently from men.
More...from Athletics Weekly.

11. H is for Hyponatremia:
Some experts suggest to just drink water during exercise, we say “it depends”.
We have talked about hyponatremia before but to briefly remind you, it’s a condition that most often occurs in those who drink too much during exercise, as they struggle to excrete out the excess (your body slows down urine production when you’re active).
Hyponatremia is dangerous because, as more fluid enters the bloodstream, the body has to move some of it back out again to balance the sodium content. If the excess can’t be urinated out easily, fluid is forced into the intracellular space instead. This causes swelling of the cells. If this occurs in the brain it leads to headaches, confusion and even coma or, in extreme cases, death!
The advice we generally support is to largely drink to thirst during training and racing. Learn the signals that the human body has developed over millennia to tell you when you need to drink. Don’t listen to the latest marketing message that tells you to be drinking a fixed quantity every hour all day. We are all individuals and have individual needs. Learn to accommodate yours.
However, given the very nature of our business, we don’t think water alone will always provide you with everything you need to stay optimally hydrated while you are under stress and/or when you’re sweating a lot, as can happen frequently when you’re training and racing hard.
More...from Precision Hydration.

12. What Determines Which Marathoners Get Heatstroke?:
A new analysis digs into who overheats and which conditions are most risky, with surprising results
When researchers from Nike were plotting the details of their Breaking2 marathon project in 2017, one of the variables they considered was start time. The usual early-morning starts give you cool air that gradually heats up—but an evening start could give you cool air that gradually gets even cooler as the runners heat up. They eventually stuck with the morning start, mostly to avoid practical problems like figuring out what runners should eat all day before an evening marathon. But the discussion made me realize that there’s more to race temperatures than what the thermometer reads when the starting gun fires.
A pair of recent papers in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise explores the topic of heat stress in the Boston Marathon. Boston is a major outlier among marathons, with a traditional start time of noon that was changed in 2007 to 10 A.M. for the first wave of the mass start—still much later than most races. One of the papers, from a team led by sports science consultant Samuel Cheuvront, analyzes weather data from 1995 to 2016 to conclude that runners were 1.4 times more likely to face conditions associated with exertional heat illness—a spectrum that includes cramping, heat exhaustion, and heatstroke—with the old start time compared to the new one.
More...from Sweat Science on Outside ONline.

FEATURED EVENTS:
*Please verify event dates with the event websites available from our FrontPage.

Upcoming Races, Marathons, Races, and Triathlons May 1-10,, 2021: The Srengeti Challenge Virtual Run - Serengeti National Park, Tanzania May 8-9,, 2021: Gasparilla Distance Classic - Tampa Bay, FLA May 14-15, 2021:1 Mt. SAC Relays - Walnut, CA May 29-30, 2021: Ottawa Race Weekend - Ottawa, ON For more complete race listings check out our Upcoming Races, and Calendars. Have a good week of training and/or racing. Ken Email: webmaster@runnersweb.com


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