playthink

In Chip Brown’s wonderful portrait about Tiger Woods, It’s Good to Be Immortal, the New York Times journalist makes reference to a story in which Michael Jordan, a good friend of Woods, said he (Jordan) was “driven to win because somebody might be watching for the first time.” 

What motivates Tiger?, Brown wanted to know. Woods said, “I don’t see how you can live with yourself not trying and not giving your best. I don’t see how you can go home and say, ‘I didn’t give it my best.’ People do that. I don’t know how they do that. That to me is unacceptable.”

If pride in a job well-done is not enough to help you achieve peak physical performance, Men’s Health magazine, home to “tons of useful stuff,” offers 20 Ways to Stick to Your Workout. Some of the tips are Duh!, such as “Don’t do what you hate.”

Some, no matter how “motivating,” feed off of fear and insecurity, including “Ask your wife/partner make a list of your most displeasing physical characteristic… Make the most-hated body part your workout focus for 4 weeks, then repeat the quiz for more motivation.”

A couple are really useful, even if an echo of what you’ve read on various message boards, including competing/racing (not just training) and registering for an event that is a few states away. Paying — now! — for the registration fees, hotel rooms, airplane tickets, and car rental will certainly be an incentive to train. (Sometimes the best motivation affects the pocketbook.)

But my favorite tip, included maybe half in jest but certainly a unique and effective technique, is number 20 on the list: Blackmail yourself.

Take a picture of yourself shirtless, holding a sign that shows your e-mail address. Then e-mail it to a trusted but sadistic friend, with the following instructions: “If I don’t send you a new picture that shows serious improvement in 12 weeks, post this photo at hotornot.com and send the link to the addresses listed below….” (Include as many e-mail addresses — especially of female acquaintances — as possible.) “It’s nasty, but extremely effective,” says [fitness trainer] Alwyn Cosgrove.

Hey, whatever works.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood 

Friday is turning into excerpt-from-Gina-Kolata day. Her Personal Best column in the New York Times consistently produces some of the most thoughtful, interesting, and well-written articles on exercise, health, and fitness. This week’s piece explores the sport of triathlon, generally, and the difficulty of excelling at multiple disciplines — swimming, cycling, running — specifically.

Excerpts and notes from “For Peak Performance, 3 Is Not Better Than 1“, which looks to answer the question, “Is it possible to peak in more than one sport at once?”:

In the article we meet Joel Friel, a triathlon coach and author of 10 books, including the bible of the multi-sport world — literally. I did not feel comfortable calling myself a triathlete, even as an accomplished athlete in the sport, until reading and underlining what turned out to be nearly ever-other-sentence in Friel’s best-selling training guide, The Triathlete’s Training Bible.

Friel says many of his athletes sometimes feel frustrated that they aren’t running as fast as they think they can and should. His advice? “[I talk with them and ask] do you really want to be a triathlete? If you want to run faster you have to give up swimming and cycling.”

There’s a reason it’s hard to excel in three sports at once, physiologists say. The training necessary to do your best in one sport is likely to counteract what is needed to be good at another.

When you are training, said Gary Krahenbuhl, an exercise physiologist and emeritus professor at Arizona State University, improvement depends on physical and biochemical changes in muscle cells and in nerve-firing patterns. And those changes are very sport-specific, he added. The result, Dr. Krahenbuhl said, is that “changes that facilitate performance for one event may actually undermine performance in another event.

“To think that you could train in such a way as to have your greatest performance in all the sports is impossible,” he added.

Even body musculature can trip up triathletes. Swimmers need large muscles in their backs and shoulders. Runners and cyclists want small, light upper bodies. Cyclists need large quadriceps muscles. Runners don’t, and in fact they don’t want any extra muscle weight on their legs.

A woman named Anne Gordon is profiled in the article. She’s a “51-year-old triathlete [who] has never gotten a personal record in each leg of a triathlon on the same day.”

But, she said, that is part of what draws her to triathlons.

“What I love best about this sport is the training, the sense that the goal of hitting a perfect 10 for all three sports will take a lifetime.” And that, she added, “is O.K. by me.”

As noted, I participated in the sport of triathlon for a few years before leaving for a host of issues that I’ll explain in another post. But the elusiveness of perfection that Ms. Gordon refers… This is what intrigued me about triathlon. There are so many variables in a race — the swim, bike, and run, of course, but also the transitions, hydration and nutrition management, and gear and technical issues — that I never executed anything close to a perfect performance.

But it is that frustration — I had a great swim and run, but I got two flats on the bike section, or I didn’t grab my special-needs bag out of T2 and utterly bonked on the run — and that hope — Next time, baby. Next time – that kept me racing. I couldn’t quit until I mastered the sport and conquered at least one race.

It’s an ultimately futile chase for perfection, I realized. But an exciting and inspiring one. Says Ms. Gordon:

“The simple act of working hard at three things requires a diversity and balance in my life that is rewarding in and of itself. It is good for my spirit to know that I have to work hard and be patient to achieve mastery.”

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

Gretchen Reynolds profiles once national 5K road champion, now champion miler, and maybe-one-day champion marathoner Sara Hall in “Changing Speeds to Go the Distance.”

The takeaways: (1) variety is both the spice of life and of running; and (2) even professional athletes practice, practice, practice basic fundamentals of sport.

My favorite quote from the article, in talking about Sara’s weekly training schedule and her twice weekly fast, hard interval sessions on the track: “These hurt because they are supposed to.”

Get outside, run hard, then long, then hard again. Get hurtin’.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood

Moderate exercise can help us to sleep better at night.

So a harder workout would help us sleep even more soundly, right?

Uh, not exactly.

If you find yourself tossing and turning after vigorous training sessions, you may want to check out Gina Kolata’s NYT article “Sleep After Hard Workouts? You Must be Dreaming.” An excerpt:

It’s one of the mysteries of sleep: Why is it that mild exercise can be invigorating, but strenuous endurance exercise — whether it’s crew practice, long runs as training for a marathon or juggling back-to-back workouts to prepare for a triathlon — makes people groggy?

Sleep specialists often tell people with insomnia to exercise five to six hours before bedtime. The mild exercise raises the body’s core temperature. When the temperature falls again a few hours later, that signals the body to sleep.

But that is a different sort of exercise from what endurance athletes do, and so what happens to marathoners-in-training must have another explanation. One possibility is that cytokines — hormones that signal the immune system — are making these athletes sleep so much.

Exercise, Dr. Chediak said, prompts muscles to release two cytokines, interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha, that make people drowsy and prolong the time they remain sleeping. 

It turns out that the single most important factor for increasing the release of those two cytokines is increasing the duration and intensity of exercise, [which is] what happens when endurance athletes train.

The article goes on to explore “whether a sleepless night before the race affects athletic performance.” Give it a read, go fun a run, then take a nap.

Play, think…
J.R. Atwood