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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. John Beattie’s five steps to success
2. It's Gotta Be Da Shoes
3. Training for a Marathon? These Pro Tools Will Help You Go the Distance
4. Channel All That Rage Into Your Workout
5. One Major Side Effect of Lifting Heavier Weights, Says Science
6. The Skeptic’s Take on Altitude Training
7. Habit Stacking: The Easiest Way to Get Your Strength Training Done
8. Why your performance will decline with age (and how you can slow that decline!)
9. An Olympic runner was open about her period. More athletes should speak out, women say
10. The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?
11. Skin-contact doping: An athlete's nightmare
12. New Research Highlights Yet Another Benefit of Exercise for Your Brain
13. Mizuno Wave Rebellion Performance Review
14. The New Kipchoge Documentary Is a Superfluous Delight
15. Sports scientist questions the fairness of Laurel Hubbard at Olympic Games
THIS WEEK'S POLL:
What is/are the toughest feat(s) to accomplish in track and field?
* Sub-10 seconds for 100m
* Sub-4 minutes for the mile
* Sub-13 minutes for 5km
* Sub-2 hours, 10 minutes in the marathon
* Pole vault 6m+
* Shot put 20m+
* Score 8500+ points in the decathlon
* Run the steeplechase sub 8:30
* Throw the javelin 80m+
* Triple jump 17m+
Vote here
PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS:
Which of these athletic events did you enjoy the most at the Tokyo Olympic Games?
1 Sprints/hurdles 246 (13%)
2 Middle distance 325 (17%)
3 Long distance 398 (20%)
4 Steeplechase 213 (11%)
5 Jumps (high, long, triple jump) 189 (10%)
6 Throws (shot, discus, javelin) 178 (9%)
7 Pole vault 185 (9%)
8 Decathlon/Heptathlon 230 (12%)
Total Votes: 1964
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FIVE STAR SITE OF THE MONTH AUGUST: RUNNING SCIENCE:
Running Science was started in 2016 by Dylan and Jonathan, who wanted to collaborate on their joint passion for working with runners and discussing training philosophies. They wanted to create a site and a brand that could be used as a platform for not only teaching runners about the how’s and why’s of training, but also as a way of initiating discussions and debates around thought-provoking running-related topics. The name Running Science combined the focus on running while also looking at things from a more general sports science perspective.
JONO is primarily a trail runner, who has been competing and coaching full-time for the past few years. However, he enjoys all varieties of running and has competed in everything from 800m to road marathons to ultra-trail races; with countless podium placings along the way over all distances and terrains.
His coaching philosophy is based on creating a well-rounded athlete and building consistent, continuous improvement over a long period of time. Part of this is ensuring that despite being challenging, training must always remain enjoyable and mentally stimulating. Another key aspect of his training is communication, to ensure that an athlete can approach training with the right mentality and a good understanding of the purpose behind every run.
DYLAN has a 5 year background in sport science and has worked with athletes, coaches and sports scientists across the board. He has dedicated an immense portion of his time studying the sport to understand that training is neither a science or an art, but both. He emphasises approaching training holistically, instilling confidence in an athlete as well as ensuring that there is maintainable long term growth.
In his own capacity Dylan has run at a national championship level and has medalled at a senior provincial level.
Visit the website at: RunningSciwence
BOOK/VIDEO/MOVIE OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST .THE JOY OF SWEAT: THE STRANGE SCIENCE OF PERSPIRATION:
By Sarah Everts (Author)
A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer
A taboo-busting romp through the shame, stink, and strange science of sweating.
Sweating may be one of our weirdest biological functions, but it’s also one of our most vital and least understood. In The Joy of Sweat, Sarah Everts delves into its role in the body—and in human history.
Why is sweat salty? Why do we sweat when stressed? Why do some people produce colorful sweat? And should you worry about Big Brother tracking the hundreds of molecules that leak out in your sweat—not just the stinky ones or alleged pheromones—but the ones that reveal secrets about your health and vices?
Everts’s entertaining investigation takes readers around the world—from Moscow, where she participates in a dating event in which people sniff sweat in search of love, to New Jersey, where companies hire trained armpit sniffers to assess the efficacy of their anti-sweat products. In Finland, Everts explores the delights of the legendary smoke sauna and the purported health benefits of good sweat, while in the Netherlands she slips into the sauna theater scene, replete with costumes, special effects, and towel dancing.
Along the way, Everts traces humanity’s long quest to control sweat, culminating in the multibillion-dollar industry for deodorants and antiperspirants. And she shows that while sweating can be annoying, our sophisticated temperature control strategy is one of humanity’s most powerful biological traits.
Deeply researched and written with great zest, The Joy of Sweat is a fresh take on a gross but engrossing fact of human life.
Biy 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. John Beattie’s five steps to success:
John Beattie is a man who knows a thing or two about success. The Commonwealth Games, World & European XC competitor and owner of Move Better Run Better offers you his five steps to achieving your running goals.
In May 2021 I did something that I would never have predicted a year before… I dragged myself out from being a happily retired former athlete, to being back breaking 30 minutes for 10k and competing with some of the best runners in the UK.
The race was 200 miles away from where I live, so on the long drive back along the non-descript Midlands motorways, I had plenty of time to reflect on that journey of how I went from feeling horribly unfit not that long before, to being able to run 10km at under 3.00 pace, and just how that was able to happen.
More...from Fast Running.
2. It's Gotta Be Da Shoes:
As technology advances, so too does performance for the world's best track-and-field athletes.
If you have been paying attention to track and field this year, you’ve probably noticed something pretty strange happening in the mid- and long-distance events. Across the whole set of these events, there have been some unbelievable times run this year. These performances have been highlighted by a slew of world records, some even falling within the same week for a single event. But, world records happen; what has really made these events feel special this year is the unbelievable times being run behind the top performances.
This begs the question:
Why are the times are getting faster?
On the one hand, one could argue that the extended time away from racing imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic has been beneficial. Athletes have been able to focus on their training, especially the mid- and long-distance runners who benefit so much from being able to build up their aerobic fitness by running high levels of mileage.1 But, if this is the whole story, we should be seeing the same types of across-the-board gains in the other event groups.
More...from Smater Sports.
3. Training for a Marathon? These Pro Tools Will Help You Go the Distance:
Achy hamstrings? Flagging motivation? We asked running wunderkind Mary Cain and the coach behind Molly Seidel’s Olympic marathon medal for gear-driven solutions to 6 real people’s training woes.
ON AUG. 7, Molly Seidel dramatically overturned the odds to take bronze in the Olympic women’s marathon. But the 27-year-old from rural Wisconsin almost didn’t make the podium.
“As we were leaving the hotel, I said, ‘We should take the medal ceremony kit [the outfit all athletes wear on the podium] just in case,’” said Ms. Seidel’s coach, former professional runner Jon Green. “She said ‘Why?’ but I had a feeling that something special might happen.”
Though the Olympic race was only the third time the runner had attempted a full marathon distance, something special did happen: She became the third U.S. woman to ever claim an Olympic marathon medal.
“Seeing Molly on that podium was amazing, because at the end of the day she’s just a normal person—but she’s doing incredible things,” the coach said.
More...from the Wall Street Journal.
4. Channel All That Rage Into Your Workout:
Stress isn’t usually a good thing for mental health. But during exercise it can be.
When I was in high school, I was not particularly athletic. I sat the bench on the junior varsity baseball team and quit freshman basketball after two weeks.
And yet, I still wanted to find a sport that was right for me, so I got into rock climbing. I wasn’t good at that either, but I loved the feeling it gave me. Climbing seemed to center me. On Friday I’d be a distracted mess of hormones and teen angst. On Sunday, I would dangle 80 feet off the ground, scared out of my gourd, and by Monday schoolwork just seemed easier. How did something so terrifying make the world feel less chaotic and stressful?
There is no doubt that exercise is good for your heart and your mental health. Or that calming activities like yoga or tai chi can help you feel refreshed and recharged. But what about less calm activities? Is parkour jumping from a rooftop or slamming a tennis ball across the court good for the mind?
Traditional exercise psychologists might say no, because anything that spikes your stress hormones, be it through fear or aggression, is not good for mental health. Small studies have bolstered this belief; one suggested that racquetball’s “competitive nature” is less relaxing than weight or circuit training, while another found that adding stress to a biking workout hampers immune function. And certainly this Olympic year was a lesson in the dangers of over-stressing elite athletes on and off the field.
More...from the New York Times.
5. One Major Side Effect of Lifting Heavier Weights, Says Science:
When it comes to gaining strength, a new study shows why all lifting isn't created equal.
Here's a weightlifting fact that surprises a lot of people: Bigger muscles don't necessarily mean enormous strength. In fact, bigger muscles mean bigger muscles. As Superman actor Henry Cavill just revealed to our sister site Celebwell, he doesn't lift huge weights to get his enormous arms—he actually lifts smaller weights to pump as much blood to his muscles as possible to grow their size. "You're doing micro tears and you're creating size in the muscle and not necessarily huge amounts of strength," he explained.
A new study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise actually backs up his beliefs about lifting. According to the study, conducted by researchers in Australia, there's a wide array of load amounts (or "weights") you can be lifting, but only one type of load-lifting is actually associated with not only growing the size of your muscles but also significantly improving your strength. Read on to learn more about what it means for you. And for more on the incredible benefits of strength training, don't miss the Secret Side Effects of Lifting Weights You Never Knew, Say Experts.
More...from Eat This, Not That.
6. The Skeptic’s Take on Altitude Training:
Pretty much every elite endurance athlete trains in mountain air or the altitude-tent equivalent. But a few scientists think they're wasting their time and money.
This month’s issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise features a debate on the merits of “hypoxic training”—that is, training in the thin air of real or simulated altitude for the purposes of enhancing endurance. On the surface, it’s a heavily mismatched debate: in the decades since the idea was popularized in the lead-up to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, altitude training has become almost compulsory for elite endurance athletes, and it has been heavily studied by scientists around the world. There aren’t many doubters left.
Still, there are a few. At a conference in Amsterdam last month, I met Christoph Siebenmann, the Swiss researcher (currently at the Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine in Bolzano, Italy) who co-wrote the skeptic’s take in MSSE. Hearing Siebenmann present his case in person and chatting with him over dinner helped me to understand where he and his co-author, University of Wisconsin researcher Jerome Dempsey, are coming from. Here are some of the points that stuck with me.
More...from Sweat Science on Outside Online.
7. Habit Stacking: The Easiest Way to Get Your Strength Training Done:
Building upon your existing habits might be the key to creating positive new ones — especially when it comes to strength training.
Most athletes know that strength training is extremely important in helping to prevent injuries, maintain muscle tissue, improve bone health, and increase strength for better athletic performance. The problem for many of us is finding the time to do it. How do we fit in strength training sessions on top of our jam-packed schedule? The answer could lie in habit stacking.
Coined by S.J. Scott, the bestselling author of Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less, habit stacking is the simple concept of adding new habits on top of existing ones. I’ve found this to be amazingly simple and effective, especially when it comes to strength training.
More...from From the film ‘Moneyball’.
For me, this quote from one of my favourite films pretty much encapsulates my own personal panic on the subject of aging and competitive sport. You probably don’t need me to tell you that at some point, it’s going to become painfully obvious that you’re slowing down. A workout may take longer to recover from or the stopwatch seems increasingly further away from your best.
And let’s be clear here, whilst magazines sometime give the impression you can defy time, it’s a battle you’re ultimately going to lose. Let’s take a look at some of the sobering evidence on this and the changes you can expect to see.
More...from Precision Hydration.
9. An Olympic runner was open about her period. More athletes should speak out, women say:
Israel’s Lonah Chemtai Salpeter said her cramps got so bad during the marathon in Tokyo that she stopped to take a break.
When Lonah Chemtai Salpeter of Israel touched down in Tokyo to run the Olympic marathon last week, she was prepared to run the race of her life. Months of training had put her in “my best shape ever,” she said.
“When you believe in your training and you see your training going well … you are all set,” the 33-year-old elite runner told The Lily. “I was not doubting myself.”
Salpeter, who originally hails from Kenya, had little reason to doubt herself: She holds Israeli national records in the marathon, the half-marathon and the 10,000-meter run, according to the international governing body World Athletics. And when she ran the Tokyo Marathon last March, Salpeter won the event in a race record of two hours, 17 minutes and 45 seconds.
More...from The Lily.
10. The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?
Caffeine makes us more energetic, efficient and faster. But we have become so dependent that we need it just to get to our baseline.
After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story I was writing demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life – its invisible yet pervasive power – without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “caffeine withdrawal” included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn’t begun to understand his own relationship with caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same.
More...from .
11. Skin-contact doping: An athlete's nightmare:
From handshakes to contact sports ? athletes touch all the time. But even such brief physical contact may be enough to get you a positive doping test.
You may not have believed it would happen, but against all COVID (and other) odds, the Olympic Games in Tokyo are in full swing.
Sure, the stadiums are mostly empty, and living in the Olympic Village will feel different with all those corona restrictions.
But the central Olympic tenet remains the same: It's a competition between the world's best athletes.
And with that come those age-old doping concerns.
To try to make sure the Games are fair, the International Testing Agency (ITA), overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), says it is "leading the most extensive anti-doping program for Tokyo 2020 that has ever been implemented for an edition of the Olympic Games."
In their humble words, they want to make sure athletes using performance-enhancing substances do not stand a chance.
More...from DW.
12. New Research Highlights Yet Another Benefit of Exercise for Your Brain:
Physical activity can help your brain adapt and change, reducing the risk of depressive symptoms.
Physical activity can help your brain adapt and change, reducing the risk of depressive symptoms, according to a new study.
It doesn’t take much exercise either—activities such as walking home from work or taking the stairs instead of the elevator are beneficial.
Of course, exercise, such as running, alone isn’t a cure for depression or even sufficient for treatment, since it often takes a multi-layered approach, often including therapy and/or medication, to reduce symptoms.
Plenty of research has linked exercise with better brain health, and now there’s more evidence that what’s good for your body is great for your mind. Physical activity can help your brain adapt and change, reducing the risk of depressive symptoms, according to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.
More...from Runner's World.
13. Mizuno Wave Rebellion Performance Review:
What You Need To Know
Weighs 9.4 oz. (268 g) for US M10.5 / 7.7 oz. (218 g) for US W7.5
Features glass-fiber (fiberglass?) plate, with a fork design, levered in the forefoot
8 mm ramp (Mizuno’s term), though the drop seems much higher
It’s a move in the right direction, but the road in that direction is long and full of intense competition
THOMAS: Mizuno has been pretty quiet the last couple of years. Like, quiet as a mouse in a mausoleum. Of course we’ve seen releases of their standards, but nothing too edgy or innovative. But hey – credit with them for being one of the first to bring a plate to the market with the Wave Plate way back then. But that was then and this is now and the game has changed.
We thought we might be getting something cool when we finally started seeing some leaks from Japan, but none of those racers have landed here in the USA, or even made it to production as far as we know. We tried a few of their models with their new ENERZY foam, which actually does feel very nice underfoot, but the foam is heavy and must be used as the core in “rim and core” construction. Meaning – Enerzy needs structure to contain it, so structure equals weight equals not what we like in a running shoe.
When we spoke with Mizuno in the spring, they showed us their lineup, and hands down the most intriguing shoe out of the bunch was the Wave Rebellion. At the time, we weren’t sure what category the Wave Rebellion would fall into – daily trainer, tempo shoe, or race day weapon? Now that we have run in it, we have a better idea of where the shoe lands.
More...from Belive in the Run.
14. The New Kipchoge Documentary Is a Superfluous Delight :
Running nerds won’t learn anything new from ‘Kipchoge: The Last Milestone,’ but it’s still a feast for the eyes.
Earlier this month, after Eliud Kipchoge defended his Olympic title, it felt like we’d finally run out of superlatives for the most accomplished marathoner in history. Even before his victory in Sapporo, the 36-year-old Kenyan had a marathon resume that defied comprehension: 12 victories in 14 starts. An absurd new world record—2:01:39—set in 2018 in Berlin. A sub two-hour marathon one year later that wasn’t a race so much as a display of Platonic perfection. By the time he trounced his competition at this summer’s Games, Kipchoge’s GOAT status was already long affirmed, prompting LetsRun to keep things economical with their headline: “The Greatest Ever x2.” When it comes to burnishing the Kipchoge legend, is there anything left to say?
More...from Outside Online.
15. Sports scientist questions the fairness of Laurel Hubbard at Olympic Games:
A world-renowned sports scientist has entered the debate about Laurel Hubbard's participation in the Olympics, saying you can have inclusivity and fairness in women's sport, but you can't have both.
Hubbard will make history when she competes tomorrow in the women's +87kg weightlifting class, becoming the first openly transgender athlete to compete in an Olympic Games.
Sports scientist Dr Ross Tucker, of South Africa, told Newstalk ZB's Elliot Smith on the DRS that society is moving towards people's choices more than in the past, but when it is applied to sport it creates a collision of rights.
"This is sport's unsolvable issue. There is no solution that satisfies both sides of the polarised debate. The moment you have that there is no compromise to be found," said Tucker, host of the award-winning Science of Sport Podcast.
More...from NZHerald.
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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
August 18-22, 2021:
World Athletics U20 Championships - Nairobi. Kenya
August 20-22, 2021:
WTS Edmonton - AB Featured Upcoming Events
August 21, 2021:
Diamond League Eugene/Prefontaine Classic - Eugene, ORE
CBC Webcast - 4 PM EDT
August 22, 2021:
Generali Berlin Half Marathon - Berlin, Germany
Vitality Big Half - London, UK
August 26, 2021:
Diamond League Lausanne - Lausanne, Switzerland
CBC WEbcast - 2 PM EDT
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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