Check out the entire Med Tent video series.

The result of his investigation was an article featured in the March/April issue of Inside Triathlon magazine. Click here to read the complete article and enjoy photos of Potts riding indoors from Nick Salazar below.

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From the beginning, Springfield’s Dan and Alix Payton raced together. The first time they ran a marathon, in Columbus in 2001, they did it together. In April 2010, they competed in their first triathlon — together. In November, they will tackle their first Ironman — together.

In two weeks, they take their swimming, biking and running talents to the USA Triathlon Age Group Championships in Burlington, Vt. Racing together — be it in triathlons, running races or biking events — and training together is one of the big reasons they like the multisport competitions.

“That’s been huge,” said Dan Payton, 40, a 1989 Kenton Ridge High School graduate. “We had our kids pretty young. She was 19. I was 20. We didn’t have that time together as a couple. What fitness has done, through either cycling or running or triathlons, has been great for our marriage.”

The Paytons are one of the top married triathlon duos in Springfield. They won’t be competing at the Great Buckeye Challenge triathlon because they will be racing in Vermont, but they have been all over Ohio this summer competing.

Dan finished first in his age group (40-44) at the Giant Eagle Triathlon in downtown Columbus on July 31. His time of 2 hours, 8 minutes in the 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike and 10K run event was just six minutes behind the slowest professional racer. There were 18 male pros in the race.

Both the Paytons qualified for nationals with their performances at the Ohio University Triathlon on May 7. Alix, 39, finished first in her age group (35-39), and so did Dan — not bad for two triathletes who are still newcomers to the sport. Both still struggle with the swim.

Read more: Springfield News-Sun

For those who worry that fitness requires nutritional denial, there is good news, with caveats. Auspicious new science suggests that chocolate can have a surprisingly large effect on the body’s response to exercise, although not in the ways that many of us might expect, and certainly not at the dosages most might hope for.

Researchers have known for some time that chocolate has healthful effects, and recent epidemiological studies have shown that people who regularly indulge in moderate amounts of dark chocolate are less likely to develop high blood pressure or heart disease or suffer strokes. But chocolate’s potential role in exercise performance had not been studied, or probably even much considered, until scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions gave middle-aged, sedentary male mice a purified form of cacao’s primary nutritional ingredient, known as epicatechin, and had the mice work out. Epicatechin is a flavonol, a class of molecules that are thought to have widespread effects on the body.

Exactly how epicatechin intensified the mouse muscles’ response to exercise is not yet known, but “it seems likely that muscle cells contain specific receptors for epicatechin,” said Dr. Francisco Villarreal, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the authors of the study, which was published last week in The Journal of Physiology. Epicatechin binds to the receptors and “induces an integrated response that includes structural and metabolic changes in skeletal and cardiac muscles resulting in greater endurance capacity,” the study concluded.

Read more: The New York Times

The faster Sarah Haskins-Kortuem runs, the better the chances of the Americans breaking back onto the Olympic podium in triathlon. And her secret weapon is an oxygen mask.

Treadmill workouts utilizing supplemental oxygen have opened the door for the Olympic Training Center resident to improve her speed, and she’s optimistic her diligence will pay dividends next month when she attempts to punch a ticket to the 2012 London Games.

Shooting for her second Olympic berth, Haskins-Kortuem, 30, can become the first U.S. qualifier if she’s the highest-placing American woman and if she finishes in the top nine at a world championship series event Aug. 6 in London. She’ll be joined by OTC resident Jillian Petersen, Laura Bennett of Boulder, Sarah Groff and Gwen Jorgensen, and on the men’s side, OTC residents Matt Chrabot and Hunter Kemper, Manuel Huerta and Jarrod Shoemaker also will compete on the Olympic course, with Aug. 7 their date to qualify.

Haskins-Kortuem has been taking hour-long supplemental oxygen jogs the past month at the OTC, at the advice of her husband, Nate, who doubles as her coach, and OTC sports nutritionist Bob Seebohar. They think supplemental oxygen will allow Haskins-Kortuem, who ended last year ranked No. 14 in the world and was No. 6 in 2009, to carry over her endurance level from Colorado Springs, at 6,035 feet, to London, essentially at sea level.

If their plan comes to fruition, Haskins-Kortuem could be as much as 45 seconds quicker during a 10-kilometer run that follows a 1,500-meter swim and a 40-kilometer bike at the Olympic qualifier. That’s a “significant chunk,” said Haskins-Kortuem, who is strongest in the swim. “That’s kind of the goal I’m aiming for – to take my run to that next level.”

Read more: Colorado Springs Gazette

Rob Thomas, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s conservation and research manager, has been donning a wetsuit to swim with the penguins.

He has been practicing for the 1,500 meter swim part of the Olympic distance triathlon ahead of Saturday’s event.

Mr Thomas said the penguins had been “curious” about their guest.

He has also been training for the running and cycling part of the race on Corstorphine Hill where the zoo is based.

Read more: BBC

Written by: Torbjorn Sindballe

There’s a subtle reason why the best pros and age groupers manage to stay on top: the mind. Illustration by N.C. Winters.

This story originally appeared in the March/April issue of Inside Triathlon.

The controversial coach Brett Sutton has churned out many world and Ironman champions. Many of his athletes—past and present—are perennial podium finishers and the best of the best.

While Sutton is well known for his outstanding results, what he is perhaps less famous for is his ability to instill mental toughness into his athletes—for his psychology.

“When you go for eight or nine hours [in an Ironman], there are a lot of places with dark and unlit streets,” he said. “People don’t train athletes to go to those places.”

With Sutton, every athlete is unique, and he treats everyone differently, being a teddy bear to some and authoritarian to others, he said. When Chrissie Wellington showed up at his Team TBB training camp in the Philippines in early 2007, Sutton “challenged her at every inch,” he said. So much so, that the “first three months were horrendous.” Because Wellington had only given herself a 12-month window to succeed in triathlon, Sutton “hit her with everything that takes 12 months, psychologically, in a month and a half.”

He says he helped her narrow her focus and develop an approach to training that was like “a laser beam, every day.” He says he helped her become OK with not having a steady paycheck. And he says he helped her tap into her love of adventure, making triathlon a journey for her. After three months of constant combat, something clicked, and Sutton’s task became a breeze.

While Sutton has many detractors—those who say he breaks more athletes than he creates—no one can take away what came from his time with Wellington. During that time, he unlocked the talent of one of the greatest athletes in Ironman history.

Sutton’s relationship with Wellington is a perfect example of what the right psychology can do for an athlete. And while few of us have access to the world’s best psychologists, there are mental tools out there for all of us to use.

Written by: Alun Woodward

The standard taper varied. In general, though, sprinters tended to take as long three weeks, while endurance swimmers, for example, were inclined to take as little as one week.

Despite clear evidence that a shorter taper is most beneficial for endurance athletes, many Ironman training plans today include a full three-week taper. Ironman triathletes can blame marathon runners for this perverse development. In the 1970s, intensifying competition at the elite level of marathon racing led to a sort of arms race in training loads. Athletes kept training more and more until overtraining was the norm. It takes about three weeks for the body to recover from overtraining. Thus, the marathon runners of the 1970s had to taper for three weeks before racing just to recover from their excessive training.

How you execute your taper leading into an Ironman can affect when and how you cross the finish line. Photo: Larry Rosa

For some reason, a marathon and an Ironman were deemed very similar, so the three-week taper was also adopted for Ironman racing. There are two problems with this practice. First, the three-week marathon taper is essentially just recovery time from overtraining, and by following this taper, we are assuming overtraining is the norm in Ironman preparation. More importantly, though, an average marathoner will take four hours to reach the finish line whereas an average Ironman triathlete takes 12 hours—eight hours is a big difference.

Ironman athletes would have been better off looking to ultramarathon runners for an example. Ultrarunners typically perform either a very short taper or none at all, thus falling much more in line with conventional wisdom.

To fully understand the taper and the best way to approach an Ironman, we need to look at how the body adapts to training stimuli and what we need the body to do on race day.

Let’s look at the three main components of fitness—speed, strength and endurance—and how each of these is affected by training.

Speed and Strength

Speed and strength gains are long-term projects. Gains come slowly, but with the right training program, you can develop these attributes “brick by brick” for a very long time. Developments in both of these areas require patience. One of the main causes of injury is pushing the boundaries of speed and strength before their bodies are ready.

An optimal training plan should take this into account and encourage the athlete to train in line with the body’s adaptations rather than on a time scale, as is the norm in a periodization approach.

The two big advantages of a fitness component that takes a long time to build are that it takes a long time to lose, and that it is easy to maintain with a reduced workload. It is for these reasons that sprinters can reduce their training a long way out from a race without seeing a decline in performance. In fact they experienced increased performance as their muscles achieve a highly anabolic and recovered state during the taper.

Endurance

Endurance, on the other hand, is gained much more rapidly. A big factor in endurance—especially Ironman endurance—is the body learning how to burn energy more economically so that race intensity can be sustained longer. This is a primal survival trait that is deeply rooted in our genes. Because of it, if we were put in a situation where our survival was threatened due to a lack of endurance (i.e. food was scarce and we had to travel a long way to hunt), our body would adjust quickly.

Your level of endurance can make a big difference in the final miles of the Ironman marathon. Photo: Delly Carr

This ability to gain endurance rapidly, though, comes with the caveat that we also lose it just as swiftly. This is a major reason why the three-week taper fails for Ironman. We know from experience that we start to see a decline in endurance ability within seven to 10 days.

That’s why the endurance part of training must be maintained until seven to 10 days out from race day.

In the last few weeks before a race you need to structure your training to maximize endurance and maintain strength and speed gains. You don’t need to hammer out long sessions every day to do develop peak endurance; a weekly long ride and long run are enough Nor do you need to perform a large amount of speed and strength training to maintain the speed and strength you developed earlier in the training cycle.

Timeline

More specifically, this is how your training should look in the crucial last weeks before an Ironman:

Six to eight weeks out: Decrease the quantity of speed and strength work.

Six weeks out: Increase race speed-specific workouts

Four to six weeks out: Shift your focus to endurance.

Ten to 14 days out: Last endurance race-specific effort (3-hour bike/ 40-minute run).

Seven to 10 days out: Last long endurance sessions—ride and run. This is about volume, not intensity, so keep it all easy.

As you head into the final week before race day, I recommend frequent 20- to 40-minute sessions in all three disciplines. The aim here is to maintain neuromuscular pathways, which is basically the brain’s memory system of which muscle fibers it needs to activate in order to perform certain activities, and to perform those activities at certain speeds.

This memory in the brain tends to drift after 48-72 hours without stimulation, so you never want to go longer than 48 hours without repeating a single-sport training session.

These sessions are all about maintaining feel. Mix in a little speed and a little strength work To keep your nervous system primed for maximal efforts.

Rest Days

I don’t recommend a complete day off during the final week before an Ironman. But if you must have one, then take it two days out from the race. Most endurance athletes will feel terrible the day after a rest day, as if something is not quite right. It takes the athlete’s body a day or so to get back into the groove.

In fact, the habit of taking a rest day the day before a race is the major reason triathletes so often feel a little bit off on race day. That said, taking a rest day before an Ironman really is a personal thing, and you can only know from experience whether you gain or lose from it. You are better off scheduling a rest earlier in the week if it usually takes you a few days to feel normal again.

On the final day before the race, do a 10-minute routine in each discipline to make sure that everything is set for race day. This is a little test drive for your body but also for your race equipment—check your gears, goggles, wetsuit, etc. Once that is completed, you’re ready to go!

Alun “Woody” Woodward is the certified Ironguides coach in the U.K. and Hungary. Visit Ironguides.net.

Group rides

Drafting off a large pack of riders may seem irrelevant to tri performance, but group riding is one of the most effective and fun ways to improve your strength and bike-handling skills.

Fitness: Cycling in a pack turns every ride into an interval session. Instead of agonizing over the details of a solo interval ride—time, distance, speed, heart rate, power—simply move to the front of the group, where the wind will boost your intensity level. Slide back into the pack for protection from the wind and the pace becomes a recovery effort. Short climbs and tight corners can quickly turn into an all-out sprint and will give your legs an additional kick that solo riding simply cannot produce.

Skills: For years Andy Potts only rode outside on race day, but even he has started to train outdoors occasionally to improve his bike-handling skills. Riding in a group forces you to maintain a consistent path through corners, take bends at high speeds and ride steadily at all times so you don’t collide with another rider.

Comfortable Gear

Swap out a few of your tri accessories in favor of comfort-oriented pieces.

Road shoes: The biggest difference between a triathlon shoe and a road shoe is the upper. Tri shoes are often lighter because of their minimalistic closure systems, but road shoes use ratcheting buckles, extra Velcro straps, additional materials or other add-ons to fine-tune the shoe’s fit, breathability and comfort.

There are shoes that weigh less or have a similarly stiff sole at the same price point, but if you’re looking for a shoe that is both high-fashion and form-fitting, the Fizik R3 ($300, Fizik.it) fits the bill.

Bib shorts: Shorts slide and bunch, which create hot spots exactly where you don’t want them. Bibs act like suspenders for your cycling shorts and keep them in their proper place to maximize comfort. Once you get past the goofy look, there’s no going back to shorts.

Most women forgo the benefits of bibs because, to put it frankly, over-the-shoulder straps and breasts aren’t a good combination. Pearl Izumi eliminated that problem by tucking the straps down the center of the chest to create the women’s P.R.O. Bib Shorts ($155.00, Pearlizumi.com).

Written by: Krista A. Schultz

Do you find yourself unable to eat just one cookie, one piece of chocolate or one potato chip? You’re not alone. If it’s more than just being hungry after an intense workout, you may be a food addict. Like other addictions, overeating isn’t just not having the will or discipline to stop at just one.

Chemically treated and refined sugary foods, which are readily available as fast food or prepackaged foods, can trigger a response in the brain similar to that from drugs such as cocaine and heroin. These foods cause a chain of events in the central nervous system that give us a feeling of pleasure, which then reinforces the eating behavior. Certain individuals are more sensitive to the brain’s reactions of “addictive foods” and can more easily develop a cycle of bad eating habits. In a food addict, the pattern is a compulsive need for another high after a period of withdrawal, which is very similar to the pattern of alcoholics with drinking and drug addicts with drugs.

The End of Overeating author David Kessler, M.D., says rich, sweet or fatty foods stimulate the brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the pleasure center of the brain. Kessler believes food addicts have certain characteristics such as lack of impulse control and inability to stop once they get started. Dopamine affects brain processes that control movement, emotional response and ability to experience pleasure and pain. In other words, we can become conditioned to overeat simply by the foods we choose to eat. Other foods that trigger a food addiction include the proteins found in wheat (gluten) and milk.

A recent study in The Journal of Nature and Neuroscience tested rats consuming large amounts of high fat and calorie-dense foods. “Drugs such as cocaine, and eating too much junk food, both gradually overload the so-called pleasure centers in the brain,” says co-author Paul J. Kenny, Ph.D. “Eventually the pleasure centers ‘crash,’ and achieving the same pleasure—or even just feeling normal—requires increasing amounts of the drug or food.” This effect is seen not just in rats but humans as well.

Triathletes may be especially susceptible to eating addictive foods since they are regularly depleting their glycogen stores during workouts. Eating processed and sugary foods such as candy bars, gummy bears or cookies or drinking a Coke does provide fast replenishment during or after workouts while improving blood glucose or blood sugar. However, if you become programmed to always eat these foods after a workout versus more nutritious carbohydrates, you may become susceptible to eating more addictive foods on a regular basis.

If the cycle of choosing bad foods and overeating is impacting your ability to reach your health and fitness goals, you may be on the edge of a downward spiral. Because food is socially acceptable and a necessary part of everyday life, this addiction can be hard to acknowledge and break. Food addiction and overeating certain foods do not always mean that the individual is overweight or visibly unwell. Don’t forget that you can be thin or fit-looking and yet still be lacking nutrient-wise—a good diet is the basis of health as well as performance.

Krista A. Schultz (Kristaschultz.com) is a triathlete, coach and exercise physiologist with her own metabolic testing business (Enduranceworks.net).

Written by: Ben Delaney

Click here to view a photo gallery of the the latest offerings.

Coming in August, the PowerTap G3 is a 325-gram power-meter hub that has wider flanges but a smaller overall profile than previous PowerTap models. Selling for $1,299, the G3 houses the majority of its electronics, plus the battery and the antenna, in the replaceable end cap. The strain measurement components are still in the hub. When PowerTaps fail, typically it’s the electronics that go. This new design allows a quick fix, as the company can mail out a new cap to customers.

Perhaps more impressive than the new hub are the new wheelset options into which the G3 hub can be built. Using ENVE 45mm and 65mm carbon tubular and clincher rims, CycleOps will be selling G3 carbon-rim wheelsets for $2,999 and alloy-rim wheelsets for $1,399.

Click here to read the complete article at Velonews.com.

Courtesy of Jeremy Jenum on Flickr.

“The more scientists study warm-ups, the less they seem to understand about the practice,” said the New York Times in a health article posted today.

The article cited a new study published in May in The Journal of Applied Physiology that found some athletes warm up so much that they are too tired to perform at their best come time for their competition.

Researchers at Canada’s University of Calgary studied highly trained male track cyclists, asking them to compete after their usual warm-up (20 minutes of riding, increasing to 95% max heart rate, then 4×8 minute all out sprints) and after a 15-minute, lower-intensity warm-up. The researchers found that the cyclists’ muscles had more power before the cyclists’ usual warm-up than after it, leading researchers to believe that as far as warming up goes, less is more.

The researchers, however, were unable to answer whether or not warming up at all is beneficial to athletic performance.

“A warm-up is thought to allow tissues literally to become heated, to reach a temperature at which they are, presumably, more flexible and malleable and ready for the demands of further exercise,” Dr. MacIntosh, a researcher who studied sprint skaters’ warmups before the 2010 Winter Olympics, told the New York Times. “But it hasn’t been proved that warm muscles perform better than colder ones or that they are less prone to injury.”

The following is a personal account of the hardest race of Sindballe’s career, as well as the result of his interviews with Alexander and Granger, printed in full. It was originally seen in the July/August 2010 issue of Inside Triathlon magazine.

For more insight into the sport’s top pros, subscribe to Inside Triathlon magazine by clicking here. Follow Inside Triathlon on Facebook and Twitter.

By Torbjørn Sindballe

Photos by John Segesta

As I finished the bike I knew I was in for a brutal day. Stars spun wildly around my head the final 20 miles of riding as I crashed through dizzy spells and fought to remain upright. My legs were powerless and my muscles were buzzing with soreness. Every hill devoured me.

Like hitting a thumb with a hammer, my body had become numb to the constant muscle firing forced by my will power and desperate need to compete. While clawing through the pain, I had lost three minutes in the last lap. Although I was leading, my internal situation was as grim as hanging from a cliff.

I was still in the black zone when my feet started pounding the pavement. I doubted I would be able to finish. In the punishing sun and 90-degree heat, the 30 kilometers of running stretched out in front of me as might an implausible nightmare. As I passed T2 after the first 3K of running, my coach, Michael, yelled, “Twelve minutes!” The voice in my head responded, “Twelve minutes? What’s he talking about?” I was convinced my lead had shrunk considerably after my miserable last lap on the bike.

A few seconds later I saw Craig Alexander coming out of T2, starting to chase me from 3K behind. My lead was in fact 12 minutes. Wow, even though I got the hammer, everyone else was struck harder and let up five to six minutes in the last lap. Despite the miserable state of my body, the gigantic lead knocked me into race mode again. I willed my legs to move faster. There was no jump, no spring-like feeling in my legs; I just tried to motor all I could. I had no idea why nothing clicked into gear despite taking down fluids, salts and energy to rebound.

A few kilometers into the second lap, I passed Michael again. He yelled, “Crowie is closing fast—seven minutes down.” Crowie would catch me if things stayed like this. I surged. I found a threadbare rhythm for a few kilometers and motivation from my experience that chasers usually slow down on the second lap, so if I kept pushing I had a chance. My legs were starting to cave, my quads where gone and I began sliding into the place where I feel like I’m running on big stiff painful logs of heavy wood that are driven forward from my hip without any hint of technique whatsoever. A few kilometers later my calves started to buckle and my core with it. I was running on will alone. I approached the final 10K lap and Michael’s voice rang out: “Three minutes, 10 seconds. Come on, you can do it. This is it. Come on.” Had I been functioning closer to normal, the race would have been a done deal. Not this time, however.

With 9K to go I went into what I call “the black hole.” For energy I relied on mental images of my family and all the work and sacrifice I had given in training. I focused on every tree and every turn like rungs of a ladder, prying myself along and inching through the course. I would think, “Come on. Run as hard as you can to that corner.” At first, I could keep it going for a quarter of a mile but the pain would break my concentration. Thoughts of quitting seeped in: “Stop. Sit down and have a Coke. Call it quits. Slow down.” Negative thoughts poisoned my mind. Within the final 5K I bounced between doubt that I would make it and belief that I could. A bit of breeze or a patch of shade from a tree would lift my mood for an instant, but it would always collapse a moment later. It was push, collapse, push, collapse, push. I had no idea whether Crowie was closing. Finally within 2K of the finish, I started looking back. I could not see him, but I might have missed him. The finish line approached. I looked back over and over again. No one in sight. “Keep pushing,” I told myself. I tried lifting my arms over my head as I ran up the last 100 meters to the tape, but I just couldn’t. I crossed the line: ITU long distance world champion for the second time. I sat down in the nearest chair. I rested my head in my palms and started crying. I couldn’t celebrate; I could scarcely speak. I had given everything.

The 2006 ITU World Championship in Canberra, Australia, was the hardest race of my career, and the words above are my account of the battle that raged inside me on the final run leg. I have always wondered how other athletes have felt in those times when they are pushed further than they thought possible—when they break into new territory and force themselves to go on. How does it feel?

I asked two of my former colleagues, two-time Ironman world champion Craig Alexander and multiple Ironman winner Belinda Granger, who, as veterans of the sport, now have their share of suffering under their belts.

What was your hardest race?

Craig Alexander: I think mentally the toughest races are also the toughest physical races. It is no coincidence. When things are going well physically, you have a lot of confidence, and those days probably don’t require the same amount of mental strength. One that comes to mind was the ITU Long Course World Champs in Canberra in 2006. I had never raced longer than a half-Ironman distance race at the time, and I had just won the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Clearwater the weekend before and then traveled home to Australia. I’d say physically I was in some of the best shape of my career, but I wasn’t really up to speed with nutrition for long-course racing. It was a very hot day and a fairly tough course, and I cramped a lot and ran out of fuel. The final 10K of that race was more mentally challenging than any other race of my career. I learned a lot that day.

Belinda Granger: This is a tough question. When I think back to all of the Ironman-distance races I have done, Ironman Canada 2006 stands out as it was a turning point in my career. I actually didn’t even know I was doing the race until about four weeks beforehand, when my coach at the time, Brett Sutton, told me I was going. At first I was totally against the idea as I knew Lisa Bentley [an 11-time Ironman champion] was racing and I honestly thought it was impossible for me to beat her—especially in her own country. But Brett insisted I go. I remember being given a time split when I dismounted the bike and it was around 20 minutes. I started to believe that I might just be able to pull off the upset of the year. I ran the first lap of the run feeling like I was invincible. The second lap, however, was a whole other ball game. I started to feel heavy and of course I knew that Lisa was eating away at my gap in leaps and bounds. All that kept going through my head was, “Can you do it? Can you hold her off?”

I started getting desperate and was trying to get splits back to her every opportunity I had. I stopped focusing on my run and my form and getting to the finish line and started obsessing about where Lisa was and trying to do the math in my head. It was driving me insane. I was then given a split with about 8 kilometers to go. Basically I was told that if I kept running at the pace I was running, and if Lisa kept running at the same pace that she was running, then it would be a sprint to the finish line. The thought of a sprint finish nearly killed me. I just did not want to be part of that scenario, so I picked it up and started to hurt myself like I have never hurt myself before. There was one stage with about 3K to go that I actually started to cry. It was a combination of pain, exhaustion and sheer determination to make it to that finish line in first place. When I finally turned for the finish straight and I knew that I had won the race, the feeling is one of utter exhilaration. You are running on air. For such a long time you are fighting with the demons in your head telling you that you cannot do it, that you cannot pull it off. You try to stay focused and positive but the mind is such a strong tool, and when negative thoughts start to creep in they can be incredibly difficult to get rid of. You can be in the greatest shape of your life but if you do not believe in yourself—in your ability as an athlete—then all the training in the world won’t help you. I think the main reason I won that race in the end was because I wanted the win so badly. I was willing to put it all on the line to make it possible. But the mental demons I had to overcome throughout the entire second half of the marathon were utterly exhausting, and it took me a month before I felt like I had recovered both physically and mentally from that race.

Describe the thoughts and emotions that go through your head in that situation, being at the absolute limit of what you can handle.

Craig: I think about the commitment I made to myself to be the best athlete I could, and all the time and energy that has been invested in my career by myself and others. I also think often of my family and draw inspiration from them. I try to stay positive and block out the negative thoughts. I concentrate on the things that are going to positively affect my mood and performance, rather than the thoughts and feelings that are going to undermine me.

Belinda: It is almost unbearable—you try so hard to keep your thoughts and emotions under control, but it is almost like the harder you try to control them, the more out of control they become. It is such a weird sensation to be so totally exhausted physically but your mind and your emotions are working overtime, like they have had a triple shot of espresso. I think it is also the fact that you have no idea how it will all end. What if you put in all of this effort and then you do not pull it off? Could you live with that? To give it everything and then to pull up short by mere seconds? It is a horrible thought, but it’s reality. This is when you know you have to fight. I have often screamed out during this time, convincing myself that I can pull it off, willing myself to believe it. It is a crazy feeling.

Do you use any strategies that you draw on in situations like this, or do you recognize a pattern if you track through some of the hardest races?

Craig: I guess the only strategy I use is the thoughts, feelings and actions triangle, and how these things are linked. I also draw on past successes.

Belinda: As I mentioned before, one of the strategies I use is to scream out loud, telling myself that I can do it. Usually it is something like, “Come on. Push, Belinda.” Other times when it really is too much, I find I remove myself completely from the race and I focus on something outside of it. Sounds crazy, I know, but often if I can give myself a short break from the intensity of the race, I can come back even stronger and more willing to hurt myself. This break may just be a short thought about something I will do after the race or a holiday I am taking, but it gives me a break from the race and also motivation to keep on pushing through until the end.

How do you feel about the competitive aspect of another person trying to run you down in that situation? Does it cause doubt and negative thoughts at times, or are there times when you feed from it?

Craig: The thought of someone trying to run me down doesn’t intimidate me. I love the competitive nature of that situation. I am a competitive person, and I certainly feed off the competition. In the longer races I certainly spend more time concentrating on my own situation than thinking about anybody else. There are a lot of things in a race and in the lead-up to a race that can cause doubt. I really try to use these things as motivation to prepare well, and focus on the things that I can control. I think it is human nature to feel doubt at different times, but it is how you use those feelings, or learn from them, that’s important.

Belinda: Most of the Ironman races I have won have been from the front. I have built up a good-sized lead on the bike and then I just try to hold on during the run. I make the other girls do the chasing. I like this scenario and I feel comfortable with it. But, of course, it all changes when you have some of the best runners in the world chasing you down—that is when your mind starts to play tricks on you and the doubt starts to creep in. I remember racing Ironman Malaysia in 2008. Yvonne Van Vlerken was also racing and I knew it was going to be very tough to beat her. Again, I had a huge lead off the bike, but I also knew Yvonne was capable of running a sub-three-hour marathon. Yvonne cut my lead down to about one minute at one stage, and I had all but given up hope of holding onto the win. But then I was given another time split and it had opened up again to about two minutes. That was all it took. My confidence came back and for a split second I let myself believe I could do it. All of a sudden I started to run well again, my stride quickened and I almost felt like a “runner.” My lead continued to increase and I continued to feed from it. It was almost the perfect race for me. I held on for the win and it took me about 10 minutes post-race to truly comprehend what I had just done.

Learning from the experts

One thing that is similar to all three of our stories is the connection of body and mind. As Craig mentions, there is a connection between our bodies, feelings, thoughts and actions that all influence each other. When our body is on and ready, the mental side usually gets much easier and we can push as hard as we want. When it is off, we need to drag out the mental toolbox. The most important thing for an optimal mental performance is to prepare yourself physically for what you are trying to achieve. Your mentality will never be able to turn an out-of-shape body into a race machine, but an out-of-shape body will turn your mentality into a fraction of your usual self.

During the race, mood swings will most likely follow the state of your body and how you’re doing in relation to your goal. If you are fighting for the win, all the positive feedback you get can be vital, as Belinda experienced in Malaysia where all it took was one split going her way.

The race where everything clicks is rare for anyone, so when it happens it should be cherished as an inner mantelpiece, to be used over and over again to set yourself up for similar performances. But what do you do when there is no flow and everything goes down the drain? One strategy could be to continuously direct your attention toward something ahead of you. Break it down into manageable pieces. At the start of the run, you might be able to comprehend the first half of the course, while in the end you might be able to focus on only 50 meters at a time to the next road sign.

This idea is captured in what sport psychologists call “attentional styles.”

Psychologist Dr. Robert M. Nideffer described four ways you can focus when doing sports. You can focus inside your body or you can focus outside your body, and each of these directions of focus can either be narrow, focused on a specific point, or broad, focused on a larger view. The strategy of breaking the road ahead into small pieces would be an outer narrow focus. When looking for competitors or trying to focus on the views of the course or what you are doing after the race, your focus is outer and broad. If you focus on a specific point inside yourself, like the feeling in your calves, your focus is inner narrow, and if you try to focus on inner rhythm or trying to reach a state of thoughtlessness, your focus is inner broad. Research has shown that experienced athletes are able to change constantly between the different attentional styles, depending on what they need in the situation. In regard to pain management, it becomes a cycle that is repeated over and over again to constantly direct your attention onto what propels you forward and away from the pain.

Another aspect of the battle inside is controlling your inner dialogue, trying to turn every challenge into a positive energizer. This is a powerful tool that can be trained and used. My own experience is, though, that there comes a point in the hardest races where everyone breaks and can no longer control those thoughts. At that point, it is a great help to have been there before and see the negative thoughts as something temporarily flowing by. Focus on your pace, rhythm, nutrition and focus points, and the negatives will turn around.

For years I tried to use specific mental training on tapes to rehearse and control my inner dialogue in the final stages of the race, but while I was able to stay focused and positive until the final part of the run, my inner demons always seemed to take over when my body was broken down into pieces. Anyone will break if they push far enough. Instead of being able to control the inner dialogue, I just started to focus on the positive inner voice that came to me in the race and use it as mantra that enforced the push cycle. One time it was someone shouting, “This is your day,” and I used that to propel myself forward. Another time it was a little verse, “Strong, strong, strong as a bear.” Other times I have recited the names of my wife and kid over and over again, and that has helped me to control the pain and stay focused. I did not try to control my dialogue as such, but I went with what came to me on race day.

In closing, I remember something my former teammate and three-time ITU world champion Peter Sandvang said after winning the ITU World Championship for the second time in Nice, France, in 2000. Entering the final part of the run course, he was running shoulder-to-shoulder with Frenchman Cyrille Neveu with four more Frenchmen trying to chase him down—they were absolutely desperate to win in front of their home crowd. Entering the final 5K he thought, “Peter, this is 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes and you can relax for the rest of your life.” He surged and left Cyrille, holding off the entire French armada until the finish line. Sometimes perspective is a powerful tool.

Location: Tucson, Arizona

Route: From the corner of N Mt. Lemmon Short Rd and Catalina Highway (aka E Mt. Lemmon Highway) to Mt. Lemmon Ski Valley and back

Total distance: 51 miles

Elevation gained: 6,158 feet

Road quality: 9 of 10

Map and elevation profile: Click Here

Written by: Aaron Hersh

Climbing from Tucson’s scorching Saguaro decorated landscape up to the pine forest at the top of the mountain, the ride up and down Mt. Lemmon is only 51 miles, but its views and the challenge of summiting the peak make it an epic ride by almost any definition. The road gently twists and turns up the mountainside, following a steady 4 to 5% grade without any short, steep kicks. There is an ample shoulder the entire way up the mountain and road surface is amazingly smooth and well maintained.

The only water on the mountain between the base and the summit is at the Palisade Visitor Center approximately 18 miles up the hill, so make sure to bring plenty of water. The dry desert air sucks it away shockingly fast. Don’t be caught without proper hydration.

After climbing up and up for 20 consecutive miles, the road switches from steady uphill to rolling hills and hovers around 8,000ft of elevation before ending at Mt. Lemmon Ski Valley.

Stop at the Mount Lemmon General Store at the top of the climb in Summerhaven for homemade fudge and typical gas station fare or at the Iron Door in Ski Valley for their famous pies.

We asked Dr. Victor Runco of the San Diego Running Institute to provide tips to triathletes looking to add trail running to their workout repertoire.

Trail Running Shoes—Are they necessary?

It depends on the trail. Trails are specific—trails with lots of sharp rocks may require a trail shoe with a forefoot rockplate like the Saucony Peregrine. Soft dirt fire roads may not require trail shoes at all or a hybrid shoe like the Mizuno Ascend will work well. Trails that are very wet and muddy can be run better with trail shoes that have superior grip and sticky rubber bottoms for better traction and grip. Trail shoes like the innov-8 talon work awesome for that.

Trail Running Complements Road Running

Trail running will make your legs stronger due to the fact that most trails (at least in Calif.) require running hills. Many trails are in the mountains so running at altitude can make you more efficient as well. Trail running also causes a runner to modify their running form thus changing the impact zones. This is different from road running and in a way is “cross-training” from traditional road running.

Interval Training on Trails

You can do interval training on trails with flatter trails being better suited for that purpose. If you are doing Xterra races, you need to train on the type of surface you are going to race on. If you are going to do a hilly course at altitude—interval training and hill work on hilly trails at altitude is a great option, although your speed will suffer. Speed work should be looked at as its own training tool and can be done in addition to hill and trail training.

Nutritional Needs Differ

If you are going to be running over one hour, it is important to bring hydration. Trail running is more strenuous than road running and in the southwestern U.S., trails can offer little cover from the sun. Couple that with any altitude and dehydration can set in quickly. Hand bottle carriers and backpacks are the favorites of most trail and ultra runners. Backpacks by Ultimate Direction and Nathan are the most popular allowing the runner to carry two liters of fluid for longer runs with many storage pockets for gels and food. Hand bottles from Nathan and Amphipod are great for shorter runs and carry up to 16-24 ounces with a storage pocket for keys and a gel packet. The recommendations by the gel companies are actually pretty accurate to replace blood sugar. You can try a gel every 30-45 minutes.

Strength Training for Trail Running

Strength training comes in many varieties and strength has many definitions. Most triathletes want endurance strength not absolute strength like a power lifter. There are many ways to achieve this like traditional weight training, cross-fit, Pilates, yoga, etc. None of these replace running though.

In addition to being a doctor I am a CSCS (Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist). My personal preference for getting my muscles stronger and conditioned is coupling my running with weight lifting focusing on higher repetitions.

Dr. Victor Runco is a chiropractor, certified strength and conditioning specialist and the clinical director for the San Diego Running Institute. He has run marathons in 12 states, and has run six 50-mile ultramarathons and one 100-mile ultramarathon. He recently completed his fifth Pacific Crest trail 50-mile endurance run. He has been treating and fixing endurance athletes in San Diego for 12 years specializing in fixing running injuries quickly without drugs or surgery.

Please visit the San Diego Running Institute at www.sdri.net or the San Diego Dirt Devil Trail Series at www.dirtdevilracing.com. For more info on running injuries, home remedies or treatment go to www.sandiegorunninginjuries.

Click here to see the latest Shoe Talk with The North Face Double Track trail runner.
[sig:JenniferPurdie]

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

Darwin Fogt, PT, owner of Evolution Physical Therapy in Culver City, CA, is alarmed by a stark new trend at his facility: runners with injuries caused by barefoot (or virtually barefoot) running. Fogt says he has four or five current patients with heel injuries clearly resulting from a switch to barefoot running and has recently treated another 12 to 15 others.

“That’s up from zero a year ago,” says Fogt.

Other physical therapists and sports medicine doctors across the country are seeing the same sudden rise in barefoot running injuries.

“We’ve seen a fair amount of injuries from barefoot running already, or from just running in the Vibrams,” says Nathan Koch, PT, Director of Rehabilitation at Endurance Rehab in Phoenix, AZ. Vibrams are the barely-there “foot gloves” that have become popular among barefoot running devotees.

Steve Pribut, a Washington, DC podiatrist and one of America’s most respected running injury specialists, says he has experienced a recent influx of barefoot runners at his office as well. And, asked by email whether he could confirm a barefoot running injury trend in his clinical experience, Lewis Maharam, a.k.a “Running Doc,” replied with two words: “Oh, yeah!”

The Thing To Do

The developing barefoot running injury epidemic is plainly a secondary effect of the rise in popularity of barefoot running. “Everyone is reading Born to Run and wanting to run barefoot,” says Pribut, referring to the bestselling book by Christopher McDougall that is widely credited with starting the barefoot running trend.

What is not known is whether barefoot runners are now disproportionately represented in physical therapy and sports medicine facilities—in other words, whether barefoot runners are more likely to develop overuse injuries than shod runners. Koch and Pribut are not ready to say that this is the case. “The more barefoot runners there are, the more injured barefoot runners there will be,” says Pribut, who attributes the spike primarily to the burgeoning number of barefoot runners.

But Maharam and Fogt see evidence that switching to barefoot running is causing injuries that would not otherwise happen. “I see one injury over and over in the barefoot runners who come to me,” says Fogt: “plantar fasciitis.” A painful and difficult-to-overcome heel injury, plantar fasciitis accounts for less than 15 percent of all running injuries. The fact that it accounts for more than 90 percent of injuries in the barefoot runners Fogt sees suggests that it is barefoot running specifically, not overuse generally, that is causing these injuries. Thus, unless barefoot running is concurrently drastically reducing the likelihood of knee pain and other common running overuse injuries, then its overall impact on running injury risk is probably an increasing effect. If this is indeed the case, then the barefoot running injury epidemic is an ironic reality, as barefoot running is overtly promoted as a way to reduce injury risk.

Koch points out that the apparent injury risk associated with barefoot running may actually be artificially low. “There are a fair amount of people who have tried it but have stopped pretty quick, just because they realized that it was not going to work for them,” he says.

I am one such case. I began running in Vibrams in 2006. Despite easing into virtual barefoot running very slowly, I developed calf, ankle extensor and achilles strains immediately and could not quickly overcome them, so I went back to running full-time in running shoes.

Defenders of barefoot running contend that such injuries are easily avoided by a gradual adoption of the practice, but that wasn’t my experience (my first “barefoot” run was one minute). Moreover, I think that this contention that every barefoot running injury is an exception to the rule is a classic fallacy of faith-based versus evidence-based belief. As Koch puts it, “It’s totally misleading to tell people that when they get injured running in shoes, it’s the shoe’s fault, and when they get injured running barefoot, it’s the athlete’s fault. It makes no sense. You’re going to have injuries either way. It’s running.”

One thing all of the medical professionals I interviewed for this article agree on is that many runners have no business even trying to run barefoot. “Runners who have what I call biomechanically disadvantaged feet need shoes, and often orthotics too,” says Maharam.

What’s a biomechanically disadvantaged foot? “People with poor forefoot stability, overpronators, and even supinators are asking for trouble if they ditch their shoes, or even wear the wrong shoes,” says Fogt.

It doesn’t stop at the feet, though. According to the experts, other biostructural factors predispose runners to injury, and going barefoot could exacerbate some of these structurally based predispositions to injury. “When we look at a runner and consider whether running is even appropriate for a person, we’re looking from the spine all the way down to the foot,” says Koch.

Not Born to Run

Wait: Did Koch just say “whether running is even appropriate for a person”? Is he suggesting that not all humans are, in fact, born to run?

Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. Fascinating recent research by Daniel Lieberman and other evolutionary biologists has popularized the notion that our species is specially designed for distance running. While the point that human beings are better suited to distance running than the hominid and ape species preceding us in the descent of man is difficult to contradict, it is quite obviously not the case that every human individual is meant to run.

Consider this: Every cheetah is a world-class sprinter. No exceptions. By contrast, the degree of interindividual variation in distance running ability in the human population is incredibly vast. There are no Jim Hogarty’s in the Cheetah world. Jim Hogarty (real name disguised to protect his dignity) was a kid I went to elementary school with who effectively couldn’t run a step. There was nothing really wrong with him. He was just giant and knock-kneed and flatfooted and running was terribly uncomfortable for him. There are millions of Jim Fogarty’s out there, and millions of others who have the same trouble with running to lesser degrees.

That’s because humans really are not born for distance running in the same way that cheetahs are born for sprinting. Evolutionary biologists other than Daniel Lieberman will tell you that humans are born generalists more than we are born specialists in endurance running or anything else. A natural consequence of this “jack of all trades, master of none” design is that there are different types of individual specialists within the total human population. Some of us are strong, others weak. Some of us have great hand-eye coordination, others don’t. Some of us can be great marathon runners, others can’t run a step.

The romantic vision of an Edenic primitive humanity in which everyone ran like Kenenisa Bekele is complete hokum. Endurance running was very likely only ever a specialization of the few, exactly as it is today.

Hence, “If we can say that everyone is built to run barefoot we can say that everyone is built to fly a fighter jet without glasses,” says Pribut. “We don’t all have 20/20 vision.”

But most of us do have 20/20 vision with glasses. Similarly, says Pribut, “There are more people who can run because of shoes than can’t run because of shoes.”

In other words, the right shoe can help some of those who were not born to run, run anyway, and those who were born to run a little, run a little more.

Reason and Irony

None of the medical professionals interviewed for this article is an anti-barefoot running partisan. All concede that the wrong shoes contribute to injuries and are willing to help patients whom they deem structurally capable of running barefoot do so successfully. “If a patient says they want to run barefoot, if they have a neutral or a high arch, I’ll tell them to go ahead gently,” says Pribut. “If they badly overpronate and I feel that their injuries came about because of that, I’m going to steer them toward shoes that I think are more correct for them.”

When Pribut spoke these words to me I next asked him if those individuals who are best suited to barefoot running are not also those who will tend to have the fewest injuries in shoes. “That is probably true generally,” he said.

So, if you don’t get injured often in shoes, there’s no need to switch to barefoot running, but you probably could get away with it. And if you do get injured in shoes, switching to barefoot running might be tempting, but it will probably only make matters worse.

If nothing else, the barefoot running injury epidemic is a story of many ironies.