STOP RUNNING STUIPID If you don’t know Adam Robinson, you should. By all accounts, Robinson is a modern-day polymath: robustly opinionated and ubiquitously coveted for his expertise. His palmares include being an American Chess Master, obtaining a law degree from Oxford University, co-authoring the New York Times best-seller Cracking the SAT, co-founding The Princeton Review,…
TILTING AT MORE THAN WINDMILLS Albert Einstein once remarked, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” The philosopher and essayist Henry David Thoreau emphasized “Our life is frittered away by detail …simplify, simplify, simplify.” Columnist and author Amish Tripathi forewarned “[if] you want to convey a…
THORWING THE CAT AMONGST THE PIGEONS What were you doing at 18? Me? I was trying to get my footing as a student-athlete at Penn Sate. The lure of fraternity and dorm parties was definitely at odds with any academic rigor I could muster. Coupled with a less-than-productive end to my first varsity basketball…
NOW YOU SEE HIM, NOW YOU’RE NOT SURE WHAT YOU’RE SEEING In Luke Dittrich’s July 22, 2012 Esquire article “A Lament for Tyson Gay,” he explains it this way: By almost every criterion, Gay is the better runner. He trains harder, gets off the blocks faster, has superior form. Even in purely physical terms, Gay has the…
LOST IN TRANSLATION: The Beauty of Efficient Movement About four months ago I started cooking. Life circumstances nudged me away from the kitchen for over 20 years, and current life circumstances have pulled me into this previously unfamiliar space in my home. I didn’t know what to expect when I first delved into the…
THE QUESTION OF VARIABILITY: Runblogger and Burfoot and Biology, Oh My! I recently read, and was dumbfounded by, two of Pete Larson’s (anatomy and exercise physiology professor at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH) companion internet posts – last year’s “On Running Form, Variability in Elites and What This Means to You (And Me)”…
LONG, SLOW DISTANCE (LSD) OR SPEED? Last weekend I had the opportunity to be a part of the 2011 edition of the Wineglass Marathon. Thanks to Sheila Sutton (assistant race director), I was invited to present a couple of lectures during my stay in Corning, NY, and otherwise mingle with the few thousand runners…
Hard or Soft Ground? What struck me so paradoxically, in Gina Kolata’s column ”For Runners, The Soft Ground Can Be Hard On The Body” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/health/nutrition/19best.html?_r=1&ref=personalbest), was not the inconclusive responses to the question at hand – Is it better to run on hard or soft ground? – but rather Ms. Kolata’s comment about her own…
Running Economy In his recent post “Running Economy: Overrated and Misunderstood”, Steve Magness, exercise scientist and newest addition to the Nike Oregon Project team, bemoans the “sad state of a lot of physiology research out there” which has streamlined exceptional running performance into a neatly tied package of running economy (RE), maximal ventilatory intake (VO2max) and…
Ask The Trainer For the past year or so, I’ve been working closely with my friend and colleague Dr. Lee Cohen (www.drleecohen.com). Dr. Cohen is the podiatric consultant for the Philadelphia Eagles, 76ers, Wings and a host of collegiate and high school teams. I met him through the usual “know somebody” network, and he was…