… ‘You’re fine. I didn’t raise no soft boy.’ (That’s in nice terms!)
She told me to get back out there and I played the rest of the game, which we won. Straight afterwards, I went to play a mixed netball final. I fell down a couple of times, which really hurt, but we won again.
Eventually, we went to get the wrist checked out and discovered that it was broken. Mum felt bad afterwards. She was very apologetic.
The next week, I was sitting there on the bench for the grand final with a cast on my wrist. I wasn’t too happy. We lost.
… As his energy declined, so did his accuracy. The stat sheet reads like a noir script. Federer put fewer than half his first serves in play and was beaten off the ground, committing a ghastly 77 unforced errors in the three and a half hours he was on court.
Pause here to acknowledge Millman, a genial 29-year-old Aussie whose career has been riddled with injuries. He entered the tournament with a match record of 14-15 for the year, with a season goal of cracking the top 50. Last night, he nailed his audition. Athletic and fit, he stayed in rallies and defended as well as he offended. He—not the guy who has won 20 Slams—played best when it mattered most. His unforced error count? A parsimonious 28. It’s thus no coincidence that he walked off with the biggest win of his career.
Millman’s game was no revelation to Federer. In fact, Federer has often summoned Millman as a sparring partner. It’s fair to wonder whether this relationship had an impact on the match. Spend days practicing with another player and you learn their patterns and preferences. Beyond that, hang with a guy for a few days and, inevitably, his mystique starts to erode. As Millman said afterward, “I’ve never played anyone’s reputation…if you do that you start behind the eight ball right away.”
Sebastian Lletget’s introduction to the U.S. national team last year was even better than he had dreamed it would be.
Playing his first competitive game less than a mile from the San Jose fields where he learned soccer as a boy, the Galaxy midfielder scored five minutes into a crucial World Cup qualifier with Honduras, giving the U.S. a lead it would never lose.
The dream became a nightmare 10 minutes later when Honduran defender Ever Alvarado stomped on Lletget’s left foot, dislodging a bone and ending his season. It took surgery and months of painful rehab to get Lletget healthy enough to return to the national team, yet when he showed up at training camp this week he was hobbled by an abductor problem he says is related to the foot injury.
“It’s been so long,” he said Tuesday. “I did my very best to be called into this camp. It’s a shame.”
Elena Delle Donne, franchise star of the Washington Mystics, only remembers victories.
“I mean, winning is truly all that matters, and all that you remember,” Delle Donne said Friday, about an hour before her Mystics lost to the Atlanta Dream, 81-76, to fall behind in their best-of-five W.N.B.A. semifinal playoff series, two games to one. “I look back at Delaware, A.A.U., all my years of playing, and the only thing I can remember are championships.”
Garmin recently announced Advanced Sleep Monitoring in Garmin Connect, an enhanced capability to more accurately identify sleep stages based on analysis of photoplethysmography (PPG) and actigraphy (ACT) data collected by Garmin wearables featuring optical heart rate. The sleep stage identification algorithm was developed against truth data generated by a clinical device and is the result of a sleep study conducted under the supervision of Dr. Suzanne Stevens, Director of the University of Kansas Medical Center Sleep Medicine Clinic with certifications by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the American Board of Sleep Medicine.
The sleep study cohort consisted of 67 participants (47 = M, age 35.6 ± 8.3; 20 = F, age 35.9 ± 10.5). Only sleepers using CPAP were excluded from the study; otherwise, all participants identified as having no known sleep-related conditions. Purposefully designed for at-home use, participants used a clinical device capable of assessing sleep architecture in a relaxed environment outside of a traditional sleep lab. The device generated EEG, heart rate, EOG and EMG channels, as well as provided the sleep stage classifications. Respiratory effort and airflow were not measured because these measurements are not required for sleep stage identification.
In the last year-and-half, U.S. Soccer has invested in the organization and expansion of a high performance department which now includes 13 staff members for the WNT. The department is divided into three segments: medical, sports science and analysis. In this episode of Behind the Crest, Presented by Volpi, we hear from various members of the department, as well as U.S. WNT head coach Jill Ellis and midfielder Samantha Mewis, as they share how valuable these talented staff members are in the process of maximizing the performance of the U.S. WNT on and off the field.
This blog is mostly about learning computer programming / systems. Probably 70% of these posts are in one way or another about things I’ve learned and why they’re exciting.
But how do you teach yourself hard things? I’ve talked before about having a growth mindset, which is about replacing the belief “I’m bad at X” with “I haven’t learned about X yet”.
Having a positive attitude is really important, but IMO by itself it’s not enough to learn hard things. Learning is a skill which takes a lot of work to get better at. So this blog post is about specific learning skills that I’ve worked on over time. They are:
Identify what you don’t understand (maybe the most important one)
Swelling, blisters and wounds on the feet make things difficult for ultra runners and endurance athletes. The Irish startup Qilta promises the perfect recovery for the feet with its innovative recovery socks and calf sleeves. The ISPO Open Innovation community can exclusively convince itself of this in a free test long before the market launch.
Gatorade Sports Science Institute, Jill J. Leckey & John A. Hawley from
Carbohydrate (CHO) availability is fundamental for high-intensity endurance performance, contributing over 80% of the total energy expenditure via both muscle glycogen (~60%) and blood glucose (~20%) oxidation when working at intensities of 80% V̇O2max and above.
The body’s finite CHO stores (~500 g) can sustain high-intensity endurance exercise for ~90 min. Therefore, the body aims to spare this limited CHO supply where possible and utilize fat substrates during submaximal exercise.
High-fat or ketogenic diets increase the utilization of fat substrates during prolonged, submaximal exercise but impair carbohydrate metabolism. Current evidence demonstrates that high-fat diets impair exercise economy and do not improve high-intensity performance.
In England, 16-year-olds can down a pint in a pub, if having a meal in adult company. But under a new government proposal, it would be illegal for them to buy an energy drink like Red Bull at the corner store.
A government statement on the proposal said that two-thirds of children ages 10 to 17, and a quarter of those from 6 to 9, consumed energy drinks. And it cited concerns including childhood obesity and the effects of caffeine and sugar on behavior in school.
“Childhood obesity is one of the greatest health challenges this country faces, and that’s why we are taking significant action to reduce the amounts of sugar consumed by young people and to help families make healthier choices,” Prime Minister Theresa May said in the statement.
The San Diego Padres just wrapped up one of the odder promotions in baseball history. For $99, a fan could purchase a “Five-Win Pass,” which provided a ticket to every home game until either the team won five or the season ended, on September 30. The deal rested on a simple fact: The Padres are bad. After the offer went into effect on July 27, it took 17 games in their native Petco Park for them to win five. In other words, a fan who bought in early could have gotten 12 extra tickets for their investment—a great deal, as long as they didn’t mind watching awful baseball.
Tuning in to this week’s U.S. Open tennis tournament might have you wondering: How far does a professional tennis player run during a tennis match? It sure looks like a lot of work running back and forth to chase balls.
Well, according to data that IBM and SI.com teamed up to track and publish data from the 2015 Australian Open, it varies depending on playing style.
The research reveals that, among the top men, David Ferrer, who is known for his speed and agility, covers the most distance. Through three rounds of the tournament, Ferrer had run approximately 10,000 meters or 6.2 miles.
On the other end of the spectrum, top-ranked Novak Djokovic had covered less than half that distance, somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 meters or about 2.5 to 3.1 miles through three rounds of play.
When Laura Siegemund, who once reached 26th in the women’s tennis rankings, had to drop down to the I.T.F. Pro Circuit as she came back from an injury, she noticed a significant difference in the players there that went beyond skills and polish.
“There were far more small players down there, and the higher you go on the tour, the players get taller,” said Siegemund, who is 5 feet 6 inches tall. “So taller players have an advantage.”
The former United States Open champion Tracy Austin, who at 5-5 was fairly average in her day, would be undersized today.
“Martina Navratilova was thought of as tall back then, and she was 5-8,” Austin said.
As the NFL draft approached this past offseason, Chicago Bears General Manager Ryan Pace sneaked downstairs to Coach Matt Nagy’s office late one night. Eyes glued to a screen, Nagy examined the route-running and athletic traits of a wide receiver prospect, scribbling his evaluation in a notepad. That was standard. Pace also noticed a second notepad, which was not. Each time Nagy saw a play he liked, he jotted down a reminder in the second notebook to go back for further study, with the aim of incorporating it into the Bears’ playbook.
“I love that,” Pace said. “I just think that that progressive style of thinking is what you need to stay ahead in the league.”
If the summer is any indication, uproar over issues pertaining to the national anthem and new helmet-contact rules will dominate conversation this NFL season. For an idea of what will define the season on the field, start with Nagy’s second notebook.
The Bears’ hiring of the 40-year-old Nagy, along with his creative outlook, provides a window into the direction the NFL is headed.