… That there was little fanfare in San Antonio when Murray took over for good on Jan. 21, was … because San Antonio. The Spurs wouldn’t make any public noise if the duplex in which they were all living burst into flames at 3 a.m. Hello, 911. There is a combustion event occurring at our domicile. Please do not send any assistance. We just thought it prudent and appropriate to inform you that we will be attaching a hose to the nearest available hydrant. No, we’ll do it ourselves. Thank you for your time.
But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big, big deal. And even a young guy like Murray understood the significance of it, and was willing to fall in line to do it “The Spurs Way.” He knows that, one day, he’ll be at the other end of this.
“As you see, they do the right things,” Murray said at the Spurs’ practice facility last week. “They’ve got the right people, the character, people that’s willing to help you get better, from watching film, to strength, to shooting, to ballhandling. They have everything. Everybody’s comfortable with each other; everyone respects one another. It’s just a blessing to be around so (many) great people. There’s not one person that I can tell you steered me the wrong way. Everybody is supportive of one another, we respect one another. The love is all one. It’s a family here.”
… “It’s really unnatural and uncomfortable — the whole sport, generally,” says Alan Alborn, a former Olympian and the current U.S. women’s ski-jumping head coach. For young jumpers especially, training on smaller hills, the experience is almost violent. An athlete’s body is overloaded with sensation: a barrage of air pressure; the whistling static and rush of the wind. But slowly, his or her mechanics improve. The takeoffs get cleaner: The legs push down harder, lifting the jumper off the end of the in-run more explosively and with better timing. Then the skis find just the right angle at which to splay. The hill at the Olympics is steep enough and long enough to enable jumps of 100 meters. But by the time a kid moves up to jumping from the so-called 60-meter hill, usually when she’s around 13, she is picking up sufficient speed on the runway to feel it happen in the air — that thing she has been hearing about for years.
Best Setter at the 2015 FIVB World Cup and 2016 Olympic Bronze Medalist, Micah Christenson, began his ‘Path to the Podium’ with a High Performance tryout and still thinks of that as his best experience with USA Volleyball!
Philadelphia Eagles guard Brandon Brooks threw up everything he had in his stomach right before the NFC Championship Game against the Minnesota Vikings, a welcome indicator that, in his mind, everything was OK.
“As weird and as bad as that sounds, I felt cool, I felt good,” he said. “It’s what I needed, to be honest, because when I threw up it was like, ‘OK, it’s game day. It’s just like every other game. Nothing different.’ ”
For most of his pro career, Brooks has started his Sunday mornings by vomiting. But on the day of the Vikings game, that familiar feeling didn’t come immediately. He has a pretty firm grasp on things now, but a deviation from the norm before the biggest game of his life was a touch unsettling for Brooks, who missed two games last season and four games in his career as the result of the debilitating effects of an anxiety condition that went long undiagnosed. On those days, he would wake up around 4 or 5 in the morning violently ill and remain in that state for a full 24 hours. Then, as suddenly as it came on, the illness would stop, and he’d be back to his old self.
… Like many milers before me and since, I was a Bannister disciple, with a creased and nearly memorized copy of his autobiography in permanent residence on my bedside table, but in that winter of 1996, I was seeing more and more Landy when I looked in the mirror. Since the age of 15, I’d been pursuing my own, lesser four-minute barrier—for 1,500 meters, a race that’s about 17 seconds shorter than a mile. I ran 4:02 in high school, and then, like Landy, hit a wall, running similar times again and again over the next four years. Now, as a 20-year-old junior at McGill University, I was starting to face the possibility that I’d squeezed out every second my body had to offer. During the long bus ride from Montreal to Sherbrooke, where my teammates and I were headed for a meaningless early season race on one of the slowest tracks in Canada, I remember staring out the window into the swirling snow and wondering if my long-sought moment of Landyesque transformation would ever arrive.
To break four minutes, I would need to execute a perfectly calibrated run, pacing each lap just two-tenths of a second faster than my best time of 4:01.7. Sherbrooke, with its amusement-park track and an absence of good competition, was not the place for this supreme effort, I decided. Instead, I would run as easily as possible and save my energy for the following week. Then, in the race before mine, I watched my teammate Tambra Dunn sprint fearlessly to an enormous early lead in the women’s 1,500, click off lap after metronomic lap all alone, and finish with a scorching personal best time that qualified her for the national collegiate championships. Suddenly my obsessive calculating and endless strategizing seemed ridiculous and overwrought. I was here to run a race; why not just run as hard as I could?
… One area where I see recreational athletes struggle particularly to make good decisions is performance weight management, or the pursuit of racing weight. I see people making bad decisions in goal-setting (fixating on a certain weight or body fat percentage they want to reach instead of letting form follow function), method selection (trying extreme diets instead of emulating the proven eating habits of the most successful athletes), and execution (breaking their own rules and giving in to temptations more often than they can get away with without sabotaging their progress). When I left California for Flagstaff last summer I weighed 150 pounds, which has been my racing weight forever. But I was open to the possibility of getting a little leaner before the Chicago Marathon, and as it turned out I raced Chicago at 141 pounds—the lightest I’d been since high school, lighter than I thought I would ever be again, and a weight that certainly made a positive contribution to my performance. I was very intentional about the decisions I made in pursuit of getting leaner. Here are the key decisions that went into the positive outcome.
I didn’t set a weight-loss goal. My focus was entirely on the process. The approach I took was to train and eat smart and see where it got me weight-wise.
Schools across the country should dust off their “If you believe it, you can achieve it” posters, because scientists from Stanford University have discovered the brain pathway that directly links a positive attitude with achievement.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine studied 240 children ages seven to 10 and found that being positive improved their ability to answer math problems, increased their memories and enhanced their problem-solving abilities. They also used MRI brain scans to map the neurological effects of positivity.
… The concept behind the program that connected him with St. Cuthbert’s, An Hour for Others, is simple, self-explanatory. One of the group’s founders, Kevin Morland, a painter and decorator, decided that his time and skills could help those in need more than his money. He started off redecorating children’s bedrooms in some of Liverpool’s most deprived areas at no cost to residents, and slowly the concept spread.
Now, An Hour for Others offers everything from cooking classes taught by professional chefs to dance, yoga and science sessions. Some people volunteer their time, others their equipment or access to their property.
Alexander-Arnold was still just a hopeful at Liverpool’s academy when he became involved. His mother, Diane, recommended one of the charity’s first beneficiaries to Morland and his partner, Gill Watkins. Alexander-Arnold, in his midteens at the time, was summoned early one morning to help load boxes of donated toys into Morland’s van.
… The costs of this distraction are starting to become apparent. I wrote recently about the research of Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine. Prof Mark argues that reorientating yourself after an interruption tends to take between 20 and 25 minutes. We all know how a moment’s inattention can turn into a clickhole of distractions. She also points out that once we get used to being interrupted by others, we start interrupting ourselves, twitchily checking email or social media in the hope something interesting might turn up.
Yet digital devices slow us down in subtler ways, too. Microsoft Office may be as much a drag on productivity as Candy Crush Saga. To see why, consider Adam Smith’s argument that economic progress was built on a foundation of the division of labour. His most celebrated example was a simple pin factory: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points” and 10 men together made nearly 50,000 pins a day.
There’s no denying that running watches are as feature rich as they have ever been. Garmin, Suunto, Polar et al. have all raised their game by packing in more modes and extras than we could ever possibly use. But it’s always nice to have more features, right?
Running watches will undoubtedly get better and smarter but is it about offering more or offering the right features? The ones that runners would happily pay extra for.
Studies comparing the effects of fatigue between men and women after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction are lacking. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of muscle fatigue on trunk, pelvis and lower limb kinematics and on lower limb muscle activation between male and female athletes who underwent ACL reconstruction. Design
Cross-sectional study. Setting
Laboratory setting. Participants
Fourteen recreational athletes (7 males and 7 females) with unilateral ACL reconstruction participated of this study. Main outcome measures
Trunk, pelvis and lower limb kinematics and muscle activation of the vastus lateralis, gluteus medius and gluteus maximus were evaluated during a single-leg drop vertical jump landing before and after a fatigue protocol. Results
Females had greater peak knee abduction after fatigue in relation to before fatigue (P = 0.008), and in relation to men after fatigue (P = 0.011). Also, in females, peak knee abduction was greater in the reconstructed limb in relation to the non-reconstructed limb after fatigue (P = 0.029). Male showed a greater mean amplitude of activation of the vastus lateralis muscle after fatigue in relation to before fatigue (P < 0.001).
Conclusions
Muscle fatigue produced kinematic alterations that have been shown to increase the risk for a second ACL injury in female athletes.
There are limited data evaluating the outcomes of revision anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction surgery in younger patients despite recent reports that the rates of graft rupture are higher in young cohorts. Purpose:
The purpose was to explore the outcomes of revision ACL reconstruction surgery in younger patients with the specific aims of determining the rates of third ACL injury and whether knee pathology at the time of revision surgery and return to sport were associated with further injury. Study Design:
Case-control study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods:
The study cohort consisted of 151 consecutive patients who were aged 25 years or younger at the time of their first revision ACL reconstruction. The number of subsequent ACL injuries (graft rerupture or contralateral injury to the native ACL) was determined at a mean follow-up time of 4.5 years (range, 2-9 years). Surgical details were recorded, along with a range of sport participation outcomes. Contingency tables were used to assess the associations between subsequent ACL injury and return to sport, knee pathology, and the drilling of new femoral or tibial tunnels at revision surgery. Results:
The follow-up rate was 85% (128/151). Graft reruptures occurred in 20 patients (16%) at a mean time of 2 years after revision surgery. Contralateral ACL injuries occurred in 15 patients (12%) at a mean time of 3.9 years. The total number of patients who had a third ACL injury was 35 (27%). There was a significant association between having medial meniscal pathology and sustaining a graft rerupture (P = .03), but there was no association between graft rerupture and using the same tunnels from the primary procedure at revision surgery. After revision reconstruction, 68% of patients (95% CI, 55%-71%) returned to their preinjury level of sport, compared with 83% (95% CI, 69%-84%) after primary reconstruction in the same patients. Those who had a third ACL injury had a significantly higher rate of return to preinjury sport (83%) after the revision procedure than did the group that did not have further ACL injuries (62%, P = .02). Conclusion:
Younger patients are at significant risk of having multiple ACL injuries. The high rate of third ACL injuries presents a significant issue for future knee health in these young athletes. Medial meniscal pathology and returning to high-risk sport are factors that are significantly associated with the high multiple ACL injury rate in the young.
This week has witnessed the best of the Premier League: a competition that retains an intrinsic sense of unpredictability and unchoreographed madness. The spectacle of Swansea toppling Arsenal, the night before Bournemouth thumped Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, reaffirmed much of what makes the Premier League the most lucrative football division in the world.
Yet these intoxicating moments are becoming rarer, as the league’s “Big Six” – the two Manchester clubs, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur – hoard ever-more wealth, and ever-more of the league’s best players.
Globalisation has opened up unprecedented new opportunities for elite clubs – those who are most popular abroad, because they win the most – to generate more wealth. In 2016/17, according to Deloitte, Manchester United earned £581.2m, while the 10th wealthiest Premier League club, Everton, earned £171.2m – a gap of £410m. Twelve years earlier, the gap between United and Everton, then the eighth richest Premier League club, was £137m.
… Eddie Howe seems to have added some street smarts to his passing principles this season. Bournemouth’s averages for possession (48%), pass accuracy (77.1%) and shots per game (11.7) all rank among the top 10 in the league but those numbers are all lower than they were in their first two campaigns in the Premier League. Their improvement this season has come from being better when out of possession. They are more organised and reserved in their defensive play. They are in less of a hurry to win the ball back and are making better decisions as a result. Their average of 13.2 tackles per game is way down on their debut season in the league (18.6) and also the lowest of all 20 teams in the league this season.
Bournemouth conceded 67 goals in each of their first two seasons in the Premier League (1.76 per game), but have cut that down to 37 so far this time around – just 1.42 per match. Bringing in Asmir Begovic and Nathan Ake has helped, but the entire team has a better structure when they don’t have the ball.