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The Runner's Web Digest is a FREE weekly digest of information on running, triathlons and multisport activities.
[The links for all Digests posted are available: here]
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Runner's Web Digest INDEX
1. Signs and Symptoms of Overtraining -and How to Avoid It
2. You Can Teach Yourself to Suffer Better
3. On Transgender athletes and performance advantages
4. To Analyze Running Form, Look at the Big Picture
5. Track Your Fitness With These Key Workouts
6. Fitness: What type of exercise is best to lose weight?
7. Ageing process is unstoppable, finds unprecedented study
8. How to Exercise in the Summer Heat
9. New study finds anabolic steroids may be addictive
10. How to maintain your performance in extreme heat
THIS WEEKS POLL
Which is/are your favourite event group(s) within athletics at the Olympic Games?
* Sprints/hurdles
* Middle distance
* Long distance
* Steeplechase
* Jumps (high, long, triple jump)
* Throws (shot, discus, javelin)
* Pole vault
* Decathlon/Heptathlon
Vote here
PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS:
What percentage of track and field athletes do you think are doping?
1 0-10% 71 (8%)
2 11-20% 140 (15%)
3 21-30% 238 (26%)
4 31-40% 111 (12%)
5 41-50% 92 (10%)
6 51-70% 151 (17%)
7 71-90% 83 (9%)
8 91-100%! 26 (3%)
Total Votes: 912
FIVE STAR SITE OF THE MONTH JUNE: JORDAN HASAY
Jordan Melissa Hasay is an American distance runner. She grew up in Arroyo Grande, California, and attended Mission College Preparatory High School in San Luis Obispo. She was unanimously selected 2008 Girls High School Athlete of the Year by the voting panel at Track and Field News.
Visit her updated website at: JordanHasay.com.
BOOK/VIDEO/MOVIE OF THE MONTH FOR JUNE: .GENIOUS OF ATHLETES
The Genius of Athletes: What World-Class Competitors Know That Can Change Your Life Hardcover
By Noel Brick (Author), Scott Douglas (Author)
Whatever your biggest goals are in life, learning to think like an athlete is a game changer.
If you ask research psychologist Noel Brick and bestselling fitness author and journalist Scott Douglas, the "dumb jock" stereotype is way out of bounds. Modern advances in sports psychology confirm what fans have known all along: No world-class athlete--whether an Olympic runner, swimmer, or cyclist, or a pro basketball, baseball, or football player--gets to the top without a strong mental game. Champion competitors have unique ways of taking stock of a situation, self-motivating, and even thinking about time. Cutting-edge discoveries (including those by Dr. Brick) reveal exactly how they do it--and how we can, too.
You don’t need to be facing a literal hurdle to use elite athletes’ tool kits of strategies: They can help you stick the landing at a job interview or get your thesis to the finish line. Brick and Douglas pair groundbreaking science with a highlight reel of instructive moments from across the sports realm to show how legendary marathoner Meb Keflezighi runs on self-talk and how making if-then plans at practice buoyed Michael Phelps to a gold medal at the Olympics. Wherever you are in your own ambitions--from the "middle muddle" to the final stretch--The Genius of Athletes will put you right in the zone.
Buy the book from Amazon.
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For more books on running and Triathlon visit:
HumanKinectics.com,
Amazon.com,
VeloPress.com, and
SkyHorse.com
THIS WEEK'S FEATURES:
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1. Signs and Symptoms of Overtraining -and How to Avoid It:
With the hope of in-person races possibly being held this summer and fall, you’ve probably begun to ramp up your training. A good training plan should set you up for success in reaching the finish line of your goal race. It should have a mix of easy and hard days. It should be a gradual progression of mileage and intensity. Even so, you still may find yourself feeling burnt out and overly fatigued at some point along the way.
Running is definitely hard work. You are constantly breaking down and building up new muscle fibers with every run. You are putting stress on your body. Of course, you are going to feel tired and sore, but there’s a fine line between recognizing the difference between general soreness and fatigue and overtraining.
If you find yourself feeling like you are working at a consistently hard effort, even on easy runs, you may be overtraining.
Here are 12 warning signs from your body that this may be the case:
Heavy legs before, during and after runs
Emotional highs and lows
Appetite changes
Consistently higher resting heart rates
Lack of motivation for usual workouts
Easy workouts consistently feel harder than usual
Persistent achy-ness, stiffness or pain in the muscles and/or joints (beyond the typical delayed onset muscle soreness felt after a workout)
Frequent headaches
Drop in athletic performance
Not able to complete your normal workout
Lowered immune system
More...from Active.com.
2. You Can Teach Yourself to Suffer Better:
Dealing with discomfort isn’t a magical gift. It’s a skill, and you can improve at it.
Two weeks into his 38-day solo row across the North Atlantic, Bryce Carlson got a disturbing update from his weather team. Hurricane Chris’s 90-mile-per-hour winds were stirring up 45-foot waves, much more than his 20-foot rowboat could handle—and the storm was headed his way. He veered south to avoid its path, but that meant rowing directly into the prevailing winds for three days, virtually nonstop. “I was fighting it straight on,” he says. “It took every ounce of energy I had to not drift north.” Still, he didn’t call off the attempt.
Every sport demands its own superpowers, and extreme athletes are distinguished by their willingness to tolerate, even embrace, suffering. In one study, ultrarunners rated the discomfort of a three-minute ice-water test as a mere six out of ten; the nonathlete controls barely made it halfway through before giving up. What allows athletes like Carlson, an otherwise unassuming high school teacher, to soak up so much pain? And how can the rest of us learn from them?
More...from Sweat Science on Outside Online.
3. On Transgender athletes and performance advantages:
Ok, here goes. I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but time and energy have not allowed it. But I’ve just been involved in some lively Twitter discussions, ultimately productive, so I’m going to try to share some thoughts around this issue of transgender females (male-to-female transitioning people) competing in women’s sport.
It’s a supercharged, emotive issue. No matter what one says, the “other side” will criticize it. That, to me, is why it has to be discussed from as many perspectives as possible, because so many conflicts require that the issue be held up and examined from as many sides as possible.
I’m going to try my best to offer the full 360 degrees on the issue of male to female (MTF) transgender athletes. So bear with me – my intention is to explain, not to convince. I have no specific ideology on this, just an opinion, and it’s an opinion that matters less than the logic of how we discuss this issue.
I want to offer my insights (for what they’re worth) and offer suggested next steps and predictions. This means I have to work around to the ‘dark side of the moon’ to see the issues, to ask questions and to play devil’s advocate. I cannot possibly do them all justice, but I hope it helps a little.
It’s a complex issue with many threads, so forgive me if I don’t link them all as elegantly as I hope to in the future. I’ve gone overboard with sub-headings, which I hope makes reading this easier (or skipping big sections possible), but here’s a first attempt at it.
More...from Science of Sport
4. To Analyze Running Form, Look at the Big Picture:
Instead of focusing on joint angles and limb movements, a new study takes a holistic approach to the biomechanics of elite runners.
Imagine trying to explain how to run to someone who’d never done it before—the incredibly complex sequence of forces and joint angles and muscle contractions that you need to coordinate in exactly the right order. That complexity is why it’s really hard to build a robot that can run on two legs, and it’s also why attempts to improve running form by tweaking a joint here or an angle there have generally backfired.
But that doesn’t mean that some people don’t run objectively “better” than others. A new paper in Scientific Reports takes a more holistic approach to evaluating running form, comparing some of the greatest runners in the world to their merely good counterparts. Instead of worrying about exactly where the legs are or what the arms are doing, the analysis basically models each runner as a pogo stick—what’s known in the biomechanics world as the spring-mass model. Here’s what that simplified pogo-runner looks like, which is basically a ball attached to a spring attached to the ground:
More...from (Sweat Science on Outside Online.
5. Track Your Fitness With These Key Workouts:
Use these key workouts to track the metrics that matter most in achieving your fitness goals.
As an endurance athlete, you likely have your go-to workouts that help you define what your current fitness is and how you’ve improved over time — whether that’s over the span of a month, a year, or a decade. When evaluating your fitness gains, it’s imperative that these workouts give you the information you need to make necessary adjustments. This article will highlight a couple of key workouts you can use to track your fitness and will also touch upon some metrics to look out for. I’ll use running workouts to keep things simple, but these can easily be adapted for cyclists, too.
I recruited input from some of my D3 Multisport coaches about the run workouts they regularly use to track where an athlete is at any given time in their training cycle. Some of these are easy baseline workouts that are repeatable, and some are closer to threshold and will take some effort. As you incorporate these workouts into your routine, you’ll have a greater picture of how successful your training is over time.
More...from Guardian.
8. How to Exercise in the Summer Heat:
As record high temperatures batter much of the country, expert advice on staying active this summer.
The summer of 2021 came in sizzling, with June temperatures in many parts of the United States shattering records, baking landscapes and prompting those of us who usually exercise outside to question when, how — and if — we should continue to work out in nature’s furnace.
Helpfully, a group of exercise scientists wrote a comprehensive scientific review about training and competing in scorching heat, in preparation for the upcoming Summer Olympics in torrid Tokyo. Published in the aptly titled journal Temperature, the review focuses on elite athletes — but, the authors agree, the advice can be adapted for those of us training for a summer fun run or charity bike ride or aiming simply to stay active and safe outside until fall. What follows is a compilation of their expert recommendations, including when to down a slushie, why you might want to take a hot shower and whether to freeze your underwear.
More...from the New York Times.
9. New study finds anabolic steroids may be addictive :
Research using animal model released at ACNP Conference.
A new study designed to test whether androgenic-anabolic steroids may be addictive found that hamsters exposed to the compounds demonstrated addictive behavior over time. The research, conducted by the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine was released at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology's (ACNP) annual conference.
"Most people use anabolic steroids to enhance their physical performance, but they deny that steroids may be addictive," noted lead researcher Ruth Wood, PhD, Professor of Cell and Neurobiology at USC. "Unlike other commonly abused drugs, the primary motivation for steroid users is not to get high, but rather to achieve enhanced athletic performance and increased muscle mass. The complex motivation for steroid use makes it difficult to determine the addictive properties of anabolic steroids in humans. Our goal was to create an experimental model of addiction where athletic performance and other reinforcing effects are irrelevant."
More...from Eureka Alert.
10. How to maintain your performance in extreme heat:
During exercise, offloading metabolic heat to the environment is one of the biggest challenges the body has to overcome. Despite being well adapted, cooling in extreme environmental conditions can put an unbelievable and dangerous strain on thermoregulation.
So, understanding and defining your own limits is incredibly important for any athlete wanting to perform well, and safely, in the heat.
What is extreme heat?
There are two definitions of extreme heat: :
A number of unusually hot days occurring in succession
Weather that’s much hotter (or humid) than the average for a particular time and place
When it comes to determining whether heat is 'extreme', much will also depend on the individual. Some people have a lower ‘threshold’ than others and may interpret conditions as extreme on occasions when others deem it OK. A person's degree of acclimation and their training level play a big role in this thermal perception.
You might have heard the old saying, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”, and this does hold some truth. Humidity is the percentage of moisture saturation in the air and it can greatly influence our perception of the ‘feels-like’ temperature by hindering our body's ability to cool.
More...from Precision Hydration.
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FEATURED EVENTS:
*Please verify event dates with the event websites available from our FrontPage.
Upcoming Races, Marathons, Races, and Triathlons
Featured Ongoing Events
June 18 - 27, 2021:
U.S. Olympic Team Trials - Eugene, OR
June 24-27, 2021:
2021 Olympic and Paralympic Track and Field Trials - Montreal, QC
June 25-27, 2021:
Müller British Athletics Championships - Manchester, UK
Webcast Featured Upcoming Events
June 26 - July 18, 2021:
Tour de France - France
July 1, 2021:
Diamond League Oslo - Norway
July 9, 2021:
Diamond League Monaco - Monaco
July 13, 2021:
Diamond League London/Gateshead - UK
July 30 - August 8, 2021:
Tokyo Olympics - Tokyo Japan
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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