All eyes are on Galen Rupp in the lead up to Sunday’s Chicago Marathon. The American wunderkind has had a remarkable successful early marathon career – a win at the 2016 Olympic Trials, a bronze at the Rio Olympics, and a runner-up finish earlier this year in Boston.
With that track record, there are a lot of reasons to think Rupp could pull of his first major marathon victory in Chicago.
A day after Vikings quarterback Sam Bradford didn’t even last a half in his return from a left knee injury, an MRI on Tuesday showed no additional damage.
Athletic trainer Eric Sugarman revealed that to reporters at Winter Park and said Bradford has “wear and tear in his knee joint.’’ It’s the first time the Vikings have provided specifics on Bradford’s injury since he was hurt Sept. 11 against New Orleans and missed three games.
Jesse Thomas just wants to be happy. He thinks you should be happy, too.
He’ll be lining up in Kona, Hawaii, to race in his second Ironman World Championship on Oct. 14. Last year he showed up at the start line burned out, with a fatigue that had crept up on him in the last few weeks of training. He finished No. 16, 23 minutes behind winner Jan Frodeno. This year, he took almost two weeks off training in June. He kicked back a little, drank the occasional beer. A foot injury even helped by slowing down his ramp back up to full workouts.
Thomas juggles being a pro athlete with running the energy bar company he co-founded called Picky Bars, and raising his family—he and his wife, Lauren Fleshman, have a four-year-old son, Jude, and Fleshman gave birth to their daughter, Zadie, on Monday. In August, he hosted two aspiring amateur triathletes over separate weekends in his hometown of Bend, Ore., giving them a window into both his workouts and his life.
Laboratory and match physiological data from an elite male collegiate soccer athlete. J Strength Cond Res 31(10): 2645–2651, 2017—This study compared physiological data from an elite collegiate soccer player to those of his teammates over 2 seasons. The player of special interest (player A) was the winner of the MAC Hermann Trophy and was therefore considered the top player in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) division I soccer for each of the 2 seasons in which data were collected. Maximal oxygen consumption (V[Combining Dot Above]O2max) was measured during preseasons and heart rate (HR) was recorded during competitive matches. Polar Training Loads (PTL) were calculated using the Polar Team2 Pro (Polar USA) system based on time spent in HR zones. Player A had a lower V[Combining Dot Above]O2max than the team average in 2012 (56 vs. 61.5 ± 4.3 ml·kg−1·min−1) and a similar value in 2013 (54 vs. 56.9 ± 5.1 ml·kg−1·min−1). During matches, player A showed consistent significant differences from the team in percentage of time spent at 70–79% maximal heart rate (HRmax) (12.8 ± 5.5% vs. 10.1 ± 4.0%), 80–89% HRmax (54.3 ± 11.5% vs. 29.3 ± 6.8%), and 90–100% HRmax (23.1 ± 10.6% vs. 45.4 ± 8.5%). This led to a consistently lower PTL per minute accumulated by player A compared with his teammates (3.6 ± 0.4 vs. 4.4 ± 0.3), which may be beneficial over a season and may be related to his success. Thus, the ability to regulate moments of maximal exertion is useful in reducing training load and may be a characteristic of elite players, although whether our findings relate to differences in the playing style, position, or aerobic capacity of player A are unknown.
… the most unsettling part of cross-training is the deferred sense of purpose. Cross-training, especially when we’re injured, forces us to dramatically shift our reason for training. We must adopt a maintenance mindset. Injury usually necessitates that runners stop thinking about improvement or forward progress. Forced by circumstance into a position of preservation, the cross-training runner no longer works toward new goals or a better self. Training becomes mere exercise, a fight against our deteriorating fitness—a desperate struggle against entropy. Cross-training is about becoming less lesser; it’s about treading water, or breaking even.
The mystery of sleep keeps getting deeper. A recent serendipitous discovery by a group of graduate students led them to prove that jellyfish seem to sleep. It’s a pretty remarkable discovery, not least because jellyfish don’t really have brains. It calls into question very purpose of sleep, which, despite years of study, is still not understood.
Sleep is dangerous for an organism; it’s a very vulnerable time. If sleep has persisted throughout evolution, there must be a good reason for it. Many have noted that intense physical activity does not automatically lead to sleep, however, so many modern hypotheses regarding sleep are focused on the brain.
Unfortunately, when it comes to studying the brain, technological prowess has outpaced understanding. We can image, read activity, and examine gene expression in the brain, learning neurologically and genetically what happens during sleep. But what is not the same as why. There are several basic theories, any or all of which might apply: Sleep may help regulate brain temperature, clear out toxins generated over the course of wakefulness, restore brain energy, physically restore brain tissue, aid learning and memory, or restore needed molecules to the brain and body that are used up in sleep.
Massachusetts General Hospital, Proto magazine from
… Joints mixed with antibiotics already exist, but they are made of less durable materials and can’t support a patient’s full weight. Current versions are used only temporarily to treat infections, then replaced with a polymer implant. Oral’s material incorporated the antibiotics into the sturdiest polymer in use—Muratoglu’s vitamin E–soaked polyethylene, intended to be used for 10 years or more.
Oral had to contend with the drug’s tendency to form itself into tiny spheres—a shape that causes gaps and pores that weaken structural integrity of the polymer. She found a way to tease the antibiotic molecules into thin, elongated clusters, which allow drug and polymer to connect more seamlessly. Antibiotics are also sensitive to heat and can degrade, so she developed a methodology that limits the drug’s exposure to high heat while turning the polymer into a solid.
So far, the material has been tested on rats and rabbits, and Oral and Muratoglu will soon seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration for its use in permanent prosthetics in humans.
Blow into the tube, please. In the future, the procedure will not just be used by police checking for alcohol intoxication, but also for testing the condition of athletes and for people who want to lose that extra bit of weight. A sensor developed by ETH researchers makes it possible to measure when the body starts burning fat with a convenient breathalyser.
… research from BYU mechanical engineering associate professor Scott Thomson and new technology from BYU mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Jake Merrell could be game-changers both on and off the field. Their work is refining how concussions are studied – and in Merrill’s case, how they’re detected.
Cavitation crisis
Thomson, who teaches courses in fluid mechanics, first connected cavitation to the brain while looking at a succession picture of a glass bottle filled with water. The bottle is hit from the top, but it shatters from the bottom due to an effect called cavitation.
“The first thing I think we need to do is be clear what we’re talking about when we’re saying stem cells, because people can get a little crazy when they hear the phrase ‘stem cell.’”
That’s how Dr. Riley Williams, orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York and Medical Director for both the Brooklyn Nets (NBA) and New York Red Bulls (MLS), begins our phone conversation about the treatment that he has provided to professional athletes from a variety of sports over the last several years.
He’s right of course. The conversation surrounding the use of stem cells in medical procedures and research can often become contentious and devolve into a screaming match. However, Dr. Williams wants to be clear of the difference between the stem cells he uses and the ones that we typically associate with the phrase.
The U.S. men’s soccer team’s loss to Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday night—which knocked them out of contention for next year’s World Cup—was, to say the least, a disappointment. It was a disappointment to the players, who will be rehashing the game’s events for years. It was a disappointment to the coaching staff, who failed to deliver what should have been an easy victory. And it was a disappointment to fans, who were looking forward to their sport of choice getting the burst of national attention that has come reliably every four years.
It was also, in a way, a disappointment for capitalism. The U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF), the governing body that oversees the national team, brings in and spends an order of magnitude more money than countries like Trinidad and Tobago, and puts considerable resources toward scouting out, training, and coaching the nation’s soccer talent. The U.S.’s failure to qualify for the World Cup, then, challenges a core American idea: that throwing money at a problem should make it disappear.
Watch “The Diversity Bonus Author” Scott Page and “Our Compelling Interests” series editors Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor explore the diversity bonus using evidence—and animation—to build a strong case for diversity and inclusion in the workforce and other settings.
… Isaac: It almost seems like a Zen mind trick—you have to put the desire to lead and inspire out of your mind to become an effective leader and a source of inspiration.
Adam: There’s a great book on this by Ted Slingerland called Trying Not to Try, where he explores this paradox. The things you do to try to achieve success actually prevent you from achieving success. I made a very similar claim in Give and Take that if you focus on helping others, success often follows as a byproduct. You can think about all sorts of reasons for that.
One is motivation. It’s a lot more meaningful to work on things that help others than things that are just for your own gain. Another is learning—the time you spend solving other people’s problems actually gives you new knowledge and skills to solve your own problems. A third is social capital, that the time you invest in helping other people builds stronger relationships, and enhances your reputation.
If you understand this, you’re like, “Wow, I want to be a giver.” Only, if you do it to succeed, it’s probably not going to work, because then you’re just giving for taking reasons. That’s the paradox.
The Washington Post, Roman Stubbs and Dillon Mullan from
Sasho Cirovski watched every painful minute of the U.S. men’s national soccer team’s 2-1 loss to Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday night, and he stayed up late to watch commentators on television bark over the fallout. By Wednesday morning, the coach of Maryland’s powerhouse college program was still struggling to process the fact that the United States will not be represented in the World Cup for the first time since 1986.
“A major punch to the gut. Just a complete emptiness, filled with disappointment and disgust. The first half was just hard to watch. The casualness, the complacency, the lack of competitiveness was just really surprising and worrisome,” Cirovski said. “And then, obviously, all of the other dominoes that could fall against us started to fall. It was tough to fathom.”
The shock waves of the most embarrassing loss in U.S. soccer history were felt among lower-level programs around the Washington area. The consensus among several coaches, however, was that it won’t have an immediate impact on participation or enthusiasm for the sport in the country, especially at the youth level.