|
1. Asics Novablast 3: First Thoughts (They’re Good):
What You Need To Know
Weighs 8.89 oz. (252 g) for a US M9
All-new Flytefoam Blast+ midsole
Stack height of 31mm/23mm (midsole only, not including outsole and insole)
>BR> Lighter and more breathable mesh upper
Releases September 1 for $140
Pandemic time is a whole weird thing, ‘cause I could’ve sworn the last version of this shoe came out two years ago. But nope, according to our review from last year, it’s been a mere twelve months since the Novablast 2 bounced into our lives.
A year and a half before that, we saw the first version of this shoe at The Running Event, and it caught our eye with its wild midsole design. At the time, Asics said it wasn’t a running shoe. We said they were wrong, and the rest is history. The Novablast has proven to be one of Asics’ best offerings and one of the best daily trainers in general. A bouncy midsole combined with a smooth ride has made it a shoe that can go the distance, the perfect complement to whatever training cycle you’re in at the moment.
More...from Believe in the Run.
2. Jessica Ennis-Hill: Why I now train around my period:
Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill says she could have been an even better athlete if she had trained around her periods.
Nearly 10 years after winning gold in the heptathlon, at the London Olympics, the mother-of-two is launching Jennis, a menstrual-cycle mapping app.
It aims to tell users how to use their hormones to their advantage by exercising in different ways at different times of the month.
But experts say everyone experiences their menstrual cycle differently.
'Gold-medal moment'
Dame Jessica remembers starting her period in the middle of the heptathlon at the Junior European Championships in Lithuania, in 2005.
"I was so preoccupied and worried that anyone was going to see that I started my period and that I didn't have the right protection to sort myself out," she said.
More...from the BBC.
3. Spice Up Your Training With Rowing:
eed a break from your weekly training routine? Here are four reasons why rowing may be exactly what you need.
Hopefully your training is going well and you’re feeling enthusiastic about your times, power output, and other progress markers. But no matter how motivated you might be now, there may come a point when the daily grind of miles on top of miles starts to mount up. Maybe you’ll hit a plateau that you can’t seem to overcome. Or perhaps your body or mind will tell you — in the form of excess soreness, joint pain, or just sheer boredom — that you need to shake it up for a while. In which case, what are you supposed to do that’s different from your usual training but will allow you to maintain or maybe even improve your cardiovascular fitness? Rowing is a possible solution to spice up your training. Here are four compelling reasons why.
1. Reduce Joint Impact
If your typical routine includes at least a couple of days a week of traversing trails or pounding the pavement, it’s likely that your hips, knees, and ankles are taking a beating. Sure, it might not feel like it right now if you’re using max cushioned shoes or are still fairly young, but you might not be able to outrun joint issues forever. While taking collagen and other supplements can help address joint pain and cartilage degeneration, it will also pay for you to take a break from high-impact training periodically. Rowing offers a way to train your cardiovascular system with low to no impact on your joints.
More...from Training Peaks.
4. The Hidden Factor That Explains Easy Run Pace:
Most people run the same pace regardless of how far they’re running, according to new research.
A friend of mine who ran for the great University of Arkansas track and cross-country dynasty of the 1990s once told me a story about training paces. When eager freshmen showed up each fall for their first workout with the team—five by a mile, say—they’d sidle over to the upperclassmen and ask nervously, “So, um, how fast are we supposed to run these miles?” And the seniors would cock an eyebrow and reply, “I don’t know, how fast can you run them?”
That approach works pretty well (within limits) for hard workouts. But it fails for easy runs, which might make up 80 percent of your training and by definition are done more slowly than you’re capable of. As a result, there are some radically different schools of thought about exactly how easy “easy” should be, from super relaxed to the semi-brisk Zone 2 training that’s currently popular. And there’s a more nihilistic school of thought—one that, on reflection, I’ve subscribed to for most of my running career—which assumes that easy running pace doesn’t really matter as long as you’re not pushing the extremes in either direction.
More...from Outside Online.
5. Gregory Brown: We can’t have fair competition between trans and cis-gendered women:
There are all sorts of physiological factors that give men an inherent athletic advantage
My opinion on this is that we cannot have fair competition between trans women and cis-gendered women due to a number of factors.
One, we have eons of human experience and thousands of research papers showing that there are important biological differences between men and women, between male and female humans. If we look at those differences, they confer upon males inherent athletic advantages that are advantages that no woman cis-gendered woman can hope to attain.
Those advantages include all sorts of physiological factors that give men an inherent athletic advantage. And at present we do not have any research that substantially demonstrates that transgender identification or the use of gender-affirming hormone therapy erases the differences between males and females.
More...from The Hub.
6. Five things to know about hot-weather workouts:
I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think it’s finally safe to put away the balaclava. For the next few months, the big challenge during outdoor exercise will be staying cool.
Hot-weather workouts can be challenging, but they also have some surprising advantages. Here are five things to know about the science of summer exercise:
You get used to it
It’s not an illusion: The same 20-degree heat that felt like a godsend in May will seem downright brisk in August. Regular exercise in warm conditions triggers a series of physiological changes that keep you cooler: your sweat glands kick in sooner, your blood volume increases, and your heart rate stays lower.
This process of heat acclimatization starts after as few as two hot-weather workouts, and maxes out after about two weeks. But you can’t just lie around on your deck chair waiting to acclimatize: The adaptations happen when you elevate your core temperature, so you have to exercise in the heat to get the benefits.
More...from the Globe and Mail.
7. What is the optimal temperature for peak athletic performance?
The 2017 World Cross Country Championships held in Uganda were about as far from optimal race conditions as you can get. Female athletes in the under 20’s race were hauled away on stretchers and in the men’s event, Joshua Cheptegei went from enjoying a 12-second lead to staggering around the course as the extreme heat took its toll.
As the saying goes, ‘Mother Nature can be a cruel mistress’. But she can also provide conditions that help you produce your very best.
So, what do those conditions look like exactly?
How to find the optimal conditions for cycling
Cycling is a perfect example of the tug of war that can occur between environmental conditions and physiological circumstances. There’s a long and interesting formula which dictates the physics that control a cyclist’s performance. One of the factors within this formula is that of air density. If the air is less dense, then the level of resistance the cyclist is faced with reduces, and they would then go faster for the same effort as a result.
More...from Precision Hydration.
8. There’s a New Way to Choose the Right Running Shoe:
Pronation is out of favor, comfort is too vague, but maybe measuring your "habitual motion path" will guide you to a shoe that minimizes your injury risk
A decade ago, runners had a method for picking shoes that was simple, scientific, and wrong. It was all about pronation, ensuring that your shoe enabled your foot to roll inward by just the right amount with each stride. But amid the upheaval of the barefoot revolution, one of the first casualties was the pronation paradigm: despite two decades of increasingly clunky pronation-controlling shoes, runners kept getting injured.
The challenge, ever since then, has been figuring out what to replace it with. The temporary solution that many people (including me) settled on was a proposal from University of Calgary biomechanist Benno Nigg—one of the original proponents of the pronation paradigm, back in the 1980s—that runners should rely on what he dubbed the “comfort filter.” The idea is that if a shoe feels comfortable, your bones and joints are probably moving the way they’re supposed to, lowering your risk of injury. It’s convenient and simple but it’s also untested scientifically, and sounds suspiciously like a cop-out: we’re out of ideas, so just run in whatever feels good.
More...from Sweat Science on Outside Online.
9. How Running Like an Animal Makes Us Human:
Somewhere between chasing other animals for food and clicking a mouse to purchase a toaster oven on Amazon.com, we stopped living a physical life. But the human existence and experience are physical. How Running Like an Animal Makes Us Human breaks apart the mind-body dualism that places the mind ahead of the body, and treats it as the body-mind dependence that places the body ahead of the mind, explaining that when you train your Body from the outside in, rather than from the ins...
Watch the talk at: TED.
10. Lia Thomas shows it was always about transgender priority, not equality:
Apparently, "trust the science" is nothing more than a political catchphrase and not sound, logical advice people are supposed to follow. Because if it were, Lia Thomas, and all those who support him, would acknowledge the biological advantage Thomas has when competing against women. After all, several doctors did just that in a recent article in the New York Times. All of which shows that this LGBT-mania and activism bemoaning transgender rights has always been about priority, not equality. They didn't care if college female athletes were victimized by unfair and unequal competition.
Thomas showed no regret during an interview with Good Morning America. He also did not show any intention of listening to the science. Instead, he announced intentions to continue swimming with a biological advantage over female competitors. Thomas also announced he is eyeing the Olympics.
"I don't need anybody's permission to be myself and to do the sport that I love," Thomas said. "I intend to keep swimming."
More...from the Washington Times.
11. Why We Should Embrace Post-Race Emptiness :
Jakob Ingebrigtsen may be a 21-year-old wunderkind, but he’s already learned an important truth about the fleeting satisfaction of success.
Earlier this month, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the reigning men’s Olympic 1,500-meter champion, gave a post-race interview at the Sound Running Track Meet in California. The 21-year-old Norwegian had just vanquished a quality field in the 5,000-meters despite still being, as he put it, in the “basic training” phase of his season. After answering a few questions about his upcoming schedule, Ingebrigtsen was asked about winning Olympic gold last year. Had the emotional payoff been what he expected? “It’s really strange because I trained for that specific race for basically my whole life,” he replied. “The peak is really high, but also right after the peak there’s a big low. Because I’ve done it. So what’s the meaning of going back and doing all the shit work that’s needed to get back into the same shape?”
Heavy. One minute you think you’re in for another banal exchange about stacked fields and race prep and then you have the young idol of the international athletics world confessing his existential ennui. (Who would have thought that being the best in the world at running laps around an oval would cause you to wonder about the point of it all?) Fortunately, young Ingebrigtsen was able to get out of his post-Olympics funk. “I’m still competitive,” he said in the interview. “I just can’t throw in the towel and say I’m finished. I want to win the World Championship as well. And when I’m this fast, it would have been stupid not to go after some records.”
More...from Outside Online.
12. Your genetic sex determines the way your muscle 'talks' to other tissues in your body: Study:
A new study identifies sex-specific circuits of muscle signaling to other tissues and that the organs and processes muscle impacts are markedly different between males and females. This new discovery provides insight into how muscle functions, such as exercise, promote healthy longevity, metabolism and improve cognition
A new University of California, Irvine-led study identifies sex-specific circuits of muscle signaling to other tissues and that the organs and processes muscle impacts are markedly different between males and females. This new discovery provides insight into how muscle functions, such as exercise, promote healthy longevity, metabolism and improve cognition.
More...from Science Daily.
13. How I Learned To Love Finishing Last:
In a sport that rewards speed, sometimes it’s healthier to be the tortoise than to be the hare.
Many runners are driven by a desire to cross the finish line as fast as possible. I am driven by a desire to cross it before race organizers leave for the day.
I’ve cut it close. During the last few miles of the 2016 New York City Marathon, I was given what appeared to be my own police escort, as city workers disassembled the course behind me. Friends who had vowed to cheer me on abandoned their posts for dinner plans. The race was a highlight of my life, but I would be lying if I said I was thrilled to cross the finish line nearly last.
More...from the New York Times.
14. Coffee Drinking Linked to Lower Mortality Risk, New Study Finds:
The research found that those who drank moderate amounts of coffee, even with a little sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee.
That morning cup of coffee may be linked to a lower risk of dying, researchers from a study published Monday in The Annals of Internal Medicine concluded. Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period, with those drinking about three cups per day having the lowest risk of death when compared with noncoffee drinkers.
More...from the New York Times.
15. The psychology of pacing:
Pacing is critical in triathlon, but it's not an easy skill to master. The science behind pacing strategies.
Pacing is a skill that’s tough to master. However, it’s an essential part of a triathlon. While your pacing strategy may depend on your strengths and weaknesses, how you pace your effort will make or break your goals of setting a new PR or making the age-group podium.
The Oxford dictionary defines pacing as doing something at a steady rate to avoid overexertion. In a triathlon, decisions are being made continuously to regulate effort versus the time or distance of a race.
The factors that influence pacing decisions are constantly debated. The change in the metabolic demand of working muscles is a common theory used to explain an individual’s effort. However, it only explains half the story. Over the last 20 to 30 years, research has looked into the effect the brain has on pacing. In 1996, Ulmer proposed a more extensive theory that the brain (central programmer) coordinates and adapts the outgoing messages of effort with the expected metabolic or biomechanical costs (fatigue, pain, breathing, lactic acid, recovery, etc.).
More...from Triathlon Magazine Canada.
|
Know someone else who's interested in running and triathlon?
