Ryan

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

Beet juice for the brain

You’re late in a race. Maybe you’re running a 10 miler, shooting for 80 minutes, and you just went through 9 miles in 1:11:34 after going through mile 8 in 1:03:42. Quick. How much time do you have to cover the last mile and is that faster or slower than you covered the prior mile? Right now, that’s easy to answer. You know as well as me that it would be a far different story if you were trying to do the math during the race.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about the likely endurance benefits of beet juice and its key ingredient, nitrate (also found in dark leafy greens and some other foods). What if there were another benefit?

Well, Alex Hutchinson finds a study that points to another potential benefit.

When you’re exercising hard and hyperventilating, levels of carbon dioxide in your blood drop, which can in turn cause your blood vessels to constrict, reducing the amount of oxygen reaching your brain. The nitrate in beet juice, which is converted to nitric oxide, plays a crucial role in dilating blood vessels, so it may counteract this effect.

That’s just a hypothesis right now. However, with those taking beet juice able to respond to a cognitive test more rapidly, there definitely appears to be some benefit.

Pre-exercise dynamic stretching

What do you do in regards to stretching or mobility exercises before workouts or races? Nothing? Static stretching? Dynamic stretching? There is plenty of debate as to what kind of exercises are good to do pre-exercise or whether it’s best to do none.

In the battle of none vs. dynamic, let this be a vote in favor of dynamic:

The results demonstrated that the DS [dynamic stretching] treatment improved the endurance performance of running at a velocity equivalent to 90% VO2max in well-trained male runners, although it did not change the RE [running economy]. This running velocity is equivalent to that for a 3000 or 5000 meter race. Our finding suggests that performing DS during warm-up before a race is effective for improving performance.

This is when compared to non-stretching. I’d definitely consider this pretty significant. Time to exhaustion at 90% VO2max was significantly longer on average and total running distance was, on average, nearly 700 meters longer (just over 4301 meters vs. just short of 3617 meters). That’s a result to pay attention to.

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

I hope nobody gets the wrong impression. I really don’t think running should be such a painful thing. That said, I have two pain related topics for today. Gender specific injury prevention and our memories of painful events.

Gender specific injury prevention

This seems like an interesting topic to me. Let’s be honest. As much as I love the sport of running because it’s so open to all people, all ages, all genders, men and women are different even when it comes to running. There are some differences in our physiology that simply can not be overlooked.

How might those differences affect our susceptibility to injury? Well, Alex Hutchinson came across an interesting study on that topic.

Comparing within each sex, the injured female runners displayed greater hip rotation than healthy female runners. The same pattern didn’t show up in men, though; instead, injured male runners had greater ankle rotation than healthy males. So while the end result is the same, “females develop this injury from a hip-down perspective while men develop it from a foot-up perspective,” Ferber says.

Now, that’s an interesting result. The suggestion was that women should focus on hip strength to reduce injury risk while men should focus on foot and lower leg strength. I’d suggest that all runners should pay at least some attention to all these areas but it may be worth considering where an additional focus is given if you have a history of problems.

Our memory of pain

Think back to your last marathon. If you haven’t run a marathon, think back to your big race last year. What do you remember? The accomplishment? The sense of achievement you felt when you realized you hit your goal? Oh yeah, it hurt some also, didn’t it?

I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising but you probably have forgotten more about the pain than about the accomplishment.

In short, that’s exactly what happens. You remember the sense of accomplishment. The memory of the pain it took to get there fades.

What can we do with this? The article suggests trying to associate the pain during a race with the sense of accomplishment that is coming at the end because that’s what your future self will do. More practically, I’m not sure but it’s interesting to think about and I thought worth a share.