This month, I’ll leave the stories to recapping the Olympics. Specifically, the marathons. What stories, one of an athlete everyone expected to dominate doing just what was expected. The other of an athlete nobody expected to be in the mix doing just what nobody expected. Both incredible stories. Both worth reflecting on and learning from.
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This year’s Olympics really seemed to put a real focus on mental health issues in sports. From mind-body disconnects that could be incredibly dangerous if not life threatening to mental health issues related to high level competition or placing one’s health above performance, the topic seemed to come up in several discussions.
While this is a discussion I would never pretend to be an expert in, I think it is a very important one so I’ll offer a few thoughts and encourage anyone who is facing challenges to seek help and anyone who knows someone facing challenges to be supportive.
…Welcome to the Olympics! By the time this post appears, we’ll be mere hours away from the beginning of track and field events starting in Tokyo (this evening American time is the start). In honor of the Olympics, I have a couple topical articles to share, along with a couple others.
First up, Abdi Abdirahman will be running the marathon at his 5th Olympics at the age of 44. How did he prepare? There might be some good lessons in here for the rest of us.
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Last week, I did a workout in some extreme heat and humidity on Tuesday, then bounced back with an up tempo run on Thursday in relatively cool weather.
I thought a comparison of paces between these runs was an interesting study in what the heat can do to a runner so I figured I’d share the comparison between these runs with you. It’s not meant to be a study of exactly how one can compare splits in the heat but more an illustration that, yes, it can significantly affect your running and the best thing you can do in the heat is accept slower paces.
…How do we determine what is good form? Knee angles? Foot angle at initial contact with the ground? Various other specific details?
What if we zoomed out? A new paper suggests that may be the way to go. Instead of focusing on all those minute details, this looked at just a few variables and found meaningful differences between elite runners and very good ones. These things basically fall into line with what we would expect but the power is in that we don’t need to get down to minute details that would be hard to analyze. These are things that can be looked at without too much in the line of specialized equipment or technical knowledge.
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