As Serena Burla pushed hard toward the finish at last summer’s World Marathon Championships in London, she tried to stay in the moment. She took in the sights and sounds along the route to the finish at Tower Bridge. She embraced the cheers of fans lining the street. She paid attention to how good it felt to be strong and fast.
“I remember the last probably 1,000 meters being, ‘You’ve just got to soak this up because you don’t know what the future holds, so just appreciate every step,'” she said.
She ran as though it were her last race because she was terrified it might be.
Weeks earlier, Burla had discovered a marble-size lump on the back of her right thigh. It was in the area where a malignant tumor — synovial sarcoma, a rare form of cancer — and much of the surrounding muscle had been removed in 2010. “I’m definitely an optimist,” she said, “but something like that, I was like, ‘It’s back. It’s back.’ I just had a feeling.”
Abby Wambach explained why she plans to donate her brain to science during a segment on NBC’s Megyn Kelly TODAY show Thursday morning.
The retired soccer star appeared with Hall of Fame quarterbacks Bret Favre and Kurt Warner and former Chicago Cubs catcher David Ross. Each said they hoped that researchers could examine their brains after they died and advance the understanding of head trauma.
“The only thing I can do at this point to give back to the world and help give more information, so our young kids and their parents can make better decisions about their brain health,” Wambach said.
Swimmer Leah Smith grew up knowing she had impressive athletic achievements in her family tree.
Great uncle Billy Conn was the world light heavyweight boxing champion and her great grandfather, Jimmy Smith, won the World Series with the 1919 Cincinnati Reds.
So where do Olympic gold and bronze medals stack up?
“I’m not sure, honestly – I haven’t asked around,” Smith said. “What I mainly hoped to do when I was little and I was making different goals was I just wanted to contribute to my family’s legacy. I have lots of little cousins that are doing different sports and I would be so happy if they were inspired by what I’ve done in the pool.”
Weak hip muscle strength and excessive hip motion during running have been suggested as potential risk factors for developing patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) in females, but not males. There is conflicting evidence on the relationship between hip strength and hip kinematics, which may be partly due to sex differences in the relationship between these parameters. Hip, pelvis, and trunk kinematics were collected while 60 healthy, habitual runners (23 females, 37 males) ran overground, and isometric hip abduction and external rotation strengths were measured bilaterally. Pearson correlation coefficients quantified sex-specific correlations between hip strength and kinematics, and unpaired t tests assessed sex differences in hip strength and kinematics. Hip abduction strength was moderately and inversely correlated to hip adduction excursion in females, and pelvic internal rotation excursion in males. Hip external rotation strength was moderately and inversely correlated to trunk flexion excursion in females. Finally, females displayed less hip external rotation strength and greater excursion at the hip and trunk during running compared to males. Despite the significant correlations, the relatively low r2 values suggest that additional factors outside of strength contribute to a substantial portion of the variance in trunk, pelvis, and hip kinematics.
Staying fit during a schedule packed with games means planning training in a way that is progressive and takes advantage of windows of opportunity. With the NC Courage, we ensure the ladies maintain their fitness through GPS tracking and biologically dictated periodization. When there is an opportunity to train, the ladies take full advantage of their time and are able to improve their strength, power, explosiveness, and speed in season.
tucson.com, Arizona Daily Star, Ron Medvescek from
March was spring training in Arizona, and not just for professional baseball players.
The UA women’s basketball team started its spring workouts two weeks after its season ended with a loss in the Pac-12 Tournament. The Wildcats’ training time was limited — NCAA rules say players can spend no more than eight hours per week on strength and conditioning and two hours on the court per week — but they still managed to squeeze a lot in.
There, of course, is a balance to strike. Arizona players want to get stronger and faster without putting more wear and tear on their bodies following a long season.
I was rushing to a 10 a.m. meeting with the director of the organization where I had just started working. In an attempt to look less disheveled than usual, I was wearing a long, red skirt. And I was cycling rapidly to get there in time.
Object Lessons
Cycling became gradually harder the closer I got to work. Eventually, I couldn’t ignore the resistance to my pedaling, and I saw the culprit: The bottom of my skirt had gotten entangled in the bike spokes. I tried to extricate it gently. When this didn’t work, I started yanking. The skirt tore off unevenly, the ends marked by unsightly patches of bike grease. I looked like I’d gotten into a fight with an urban fox, and lost.
Dressing for a commute should be straightforward. Yet this becomes more complicated when the commute involves a bicycle, and when the clothing is intended for a woman.
Objective To estimate the incidence proportion (IP) and incidence rate (IR) of ACL injury in football players.
Design Systematic review with meta-analysis.
Data sources PubMed, CINAHL and SPORTDiscus electronic databases were searched from inception to 20 January 2017.
Eligibility criteria for selecting study Studies that reported the total number of participants/population by sex, total number of ACL injuries by sex and total person-time by sex were included.
Results Twenty-eight studies were included. The IP and IR of ACL injury in female football players were 2.0% (95% CI 1.2% to 3.1%) and 2.0/10 000 athlete exposures (AEs) (95% CI 1.6 to 2.6; I2=91%) over a period of one season to 4 years. The IP and IR of ACL injury in male players were 3.5% (95% CI 0.7% to 8.2%) and 0.9/10 000 AEs (95% CI 0.7 to 1.1; I2=94%). Studies that evaluated matched cohorts of female and male players showed no difference in IP (relative risk=1.2; 95% CI 0.9 to 1.6; P=0.47) over a period of one season to 4 years. Women were at greater risk than men (incidence rate ratio (IRR)=2.2; 95% CI 1.6 to 3.1; I2=83%; P<0.001). When accounting for participation level, the difference in IR between women and men was greatest for intermediate players (IRR=2.9; 95% CI 2.4 to 3.6) compared with amateur (IRR=2.6; 95% CI 1.4 to 4.8) and elite (IRR=2.0; 95% CI 1.1 to 3.4) players.
Summary/conclusion Overall, more men sustained ACL injury in football. There was no difference in the relative risk of ACL injury between female and male football players in a window that spanned one season to 4 years. The IR of ACL injury among women was 2.2 times higher than the IR of ACL injury among men. The reported sex disparity in ACL injury was independent of participation level.
Ice hockey was her hobby. Lacrosse was her passion.
Yet neither sport will be at the front of Kat Kern’s mind when she begins her collegiate career this fall at Duke.
Kern expects most of her time outside the classroom will be spent on the water with the university’s rowing team, a sport the Greenwich native tried for the first time just three years ago.
“My big thing was lacrosse,” Kern said recently. “I really wanted to be recruited for lacrosse.”
Kern would learn, though, that few sports offer as many opportunities in college as rowing. In the age of Title IX, rowing is especially advantageous for female high school athletes looking to compete at the next level.
The 7-year-old’s epiphany came in the middle of a professional wrestling match.
Carol Hutchins had watched bouts like this before on television: Two well-muscled bodies slamming against one another, contorting into unnatural positions and ricocheting off ropes tethered around the ring. It was the mid-1960s, and the wrestling program was common entertainment in the Hutchins household. But on this day, the young girl noticed something strikingly different about the two wrestlers. Their faces weren’t hairy, and their bodies weren’t half-naked. Their hair wasn’t cut short like her brothers’, but dangled long like hers.
These wrestlers were … women.
Hutchins stared in amazement. Then she knew. “I want to be a lady wrestler,” she told her mother.
In their 37-year study, researchers R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Carpenter tracked the decline in the percentage of female head coaches in 24 women’s varsity sports. Before 1981, when the NCAA began sponsoring women’s sports, numbers were collected from the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.
Decades later, the declaration still draws laughs. But in that moment, to a 7-year-old Hutchins, it made perfect sense. She had never seen an athlete on television who looked like her. She had never encountered other girls who liked to do “boys stuff” like she did. Maybe her preference for basketballs over baby dolls wasn’t so odd, after all. Her imagination churned.
Menstruation is often called the “last great taboo” in women’s sport. But periods are the media’s taboo, not sportswomen’s. Our new research showed that elite athletes are not afraid to talk about their menstrual cycle and how it affects them. We also found that half of the 430 athletes we interviewed are using some kind of hormonal contraceptive, which affected their menstrual cycle.
The menstrual cycle is a repeating pattern of hormones, designed to allow pregnancy to occur. Each phase produces different concentrations of the hormones oestrogen and progesterone. On the other hand, hormonal contraceptives aim to prevent pregnancy by removing the menstrual cycle and creating a new hormonal environment, with low levels of oestrogen and progesterone almost all of the time.
These hormonal differences, between women with and without a menstrual cycle, mean that not all female athletes are the same. As oestrogen and progesterone have the potential to affect many aspects of health and sports performance, it’s important to know the hormonal profile of each athlete, so that training and performance can be optimised.
Up until now, it was unknown how many elite sportswomen in the UK used hormonal contraceptives, such as the oral contraceptive pill, the contraceptive injection, a patch or implant. My colleagues and I surveyed 430 elite athletes, from 24 different sports including hockey, football and rowing, to determine how many used a hormonal contraceptive or not.
South African superstar Caster Semenya is poised this week to become the third woman in the history of the Commonwealth Games to win double gold in the 800-metre and 1500-metre races. But a new policy on hyperandrogenism (characterised by high testosterone) may spell the end of her illustrious career.
The policy from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which council members approved last month and takes effect in November, is suspiciously selective. It applies only to women who compete in track events between 400 and 1500 metres. These are the distances at which Semenya excels.
Weighed against other testosterone-related regulations, the new policy is not only confusing but also contradictory. Even more, the regulations suggest that testosterone is a luxury only men can afford.