sport. politics. philosophy.
The Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club along the Embarcadero of San Francisco organizes a fantastic group swim on Saturday mornings through Trifiniti Coaching Services. Click here to read the flyer about this grueling 90-minute, 3000-4500 meter swim workout tailored to your specific triathlon goals. This tip comes courtesy of a co-worker of mine who holds the Ironman world record for her age group. She knows what she’s talking about. See you on deck!
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
It’s 25 days till my 25th birthday. Mark, a slightly-older friend and former coworker of mine whom I look to as a professional mentor, told me that the halfway-to-50 mark is one of a few monumental “toll booths” on the road of life. It’s an age in which we are forced to slow on a now heavily-trafficked road. The days of easy driving–cruisin’ for the sake of cruisin’–are no longer a taken-for-granted luxury.
This is not a bad thing. While sitting in the stop-and-sputter traffic merging through the forced-bottleneck of the tollbooths, it’s a time to look in the rearview mirror–not just to see whom we have passed, but to also look at one’s self. And it is a time to think–to give considerable thought and attention to–the idea of where to go next. Instinct and intuition and luck and momentum and asking passer-byers got us to this check-point. Is it time for a map?
I intend to use these next few weeks as an opportunity to do three things: to look back and reflect on my first 25 years of life; to look ahead and plan for where to head next; and to look at myself.
Where have I been? Where do I want to go? Do I have the proper change for the paystation? It’s tollbooth time.
Wondering and wandering,
J.R. Atwood
A friend forwarded me an interesting article on sport and science (pasted below)… The takeaway? Relax. Our bodies and brains are incapable of complete consistency. Be content when we stumble into an athletic sweet spot–when we hit that perfect tee-shot off the first hole of a round of golf or run a perfect 100 meter dash at track practice–because performing “in the zone” is a rare and special thing.
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
Stanford Report, January 17, 2007On the golf tee or the pitcher’s mound, brain dooms motion to inconsistency
Study: Movement not primarily a mechanical phenomenonBy David Orenstein
If you’ve ever wondered why your golf swings, fastballs or free throws don’t quite turn out the same way each time, even after years of practice, there is now an answer: It’s mostly in your head. That’s the finding of new research published in the Dec. 21 issue of the journal Neuron by electrical engineers at Stanford University.
“The main reason you can’t move the same way each and every time, such as swinging a golf club, is that your brain can’t plan the swing the same way each time,” says electrical engineering Assistant Professor Krishna Shenoy, whose research includes study of the neural basis of sensorimotor integration and movement control. He, postdoctoral researcher Mark Churchland and electrical engineering doctoral candidate and medical student Afsheen Afshar authored the study.
It’s as if each time the brain tries to solve the problem of planning how to move, it does it anew, Churchland says. Practice and training can help the brain solve the problem more capably, but people and other primates simply aren’t wired for consistency like computers or machines. Instead, people seem to be improvisers by default.
A major conclusion of the study, in fact, is that movement variability is not primarily a mechanical phenomenon, as had widely been thought. After looking at neural activity and muscle activity, the Stanford researchers concluded that less than half the reason for inconsistency in movement lies in the muscles.
“This is the first study to successfully record neural activity during the planning period and link it on a trial-by-trial basis to performance during those trials,” Churchland says.
The Stanford team decided to do just that with the help of rhesus macaque monkeys. The monkeys were trained to perform a simple reaching task. When shown a green spot, they were rewarded with juice if they reached slowly to touch the spot. For a red spot, they were trained to reach fast. During the trials the researchers would monitor the activity of individual neurons in the premotor cortex, a part of the brain responsible for movement planning, while the monkeys were planning their reaches. Then the researchers would record the speed of the resulting motion.
Over a series of thousands of trials, the researchers observed subtle variations in the speeds of the reaches. The monkeys rarely reached with the same exact speed, whether for a green or red spot. More importantly, after some sophisticated statistical processing, the scientists found the small variations in reach speed were predicted by small variations in brain activity during movement planning, before the movement even began.
Flexibility beats consistency
For athletes, the inability to replicate the perfect movement might seem to be a frustrating problem that needs to be solved. But the researchers speculate that the brain has evolved its apparently improvisational style precisely because the vast majority of situations requiring significant movement are novel. Predators never get the chance to catch and kill prey in exactly the same fashion and in exactly the same conditions.
“The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again,” Churchland says. “The nervous system was designed to be flexible. You typically find yourself doing things you’ve never done before.”
The value of practice and training is that they can reduce the variation in the mind’s abilities, but they don’t change the variable way the mind plans motion. An analogy might be to doing math problems. Someone who has studied will find it easier to solve a new problem than someone who has not prepared.
Given the endemic nature of movement variability, the research doesn’t point to any definitive means for combating it. In their paper, the engineers offer no advice for baseball trainers to help pitchers throw more strikes. A potential application of the research, Shenoy says, could come in future efforts to achieve new kinds of computing by building artificial circuits modeled on the brain. But Shenoy says the research simply set out to explain variability in movement.
“This is basic science,” Shenoy says. “We ask questions because we want to know.”
The study could help resolve a question about human nature, however. Which is more true, “nobody’s perfect” or “practice makes perfect”? If complete consistency is the standard of perfection, then it seems that nobody will ever be perfect.
David Orenstein is the Communications and Public Relations Manager at the Stanford School of Engineering.
Kristin Armstrong, ex-wife of Lance, offers incredible insight into the person and psychology of the seven-time Tour de France winner after he struggled his way through his first marathon. Click here to read the Runner’s World article. It is a story of a legend–yet still a man–learning the humility of mortality through the sport of running.
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
Seven days into the new year…
I made an effort not to over-promise or over-extend myself with respect to training these first few days of 2007. Few things are more disappointing than the failure of meeting early expectations. Interestingly, it took a lot of will power to moderate my training this week. I woke early in the mornings anxious to run, but knew that an injury or burnout, the cause of over-eager zeal, is a set-back not terribly uncommon during the physical acclimation phase of new resolutions.
Still, I was too haphazard about my workouts–three days of running (7.65-mile tempo run, 4+ mile fartlek, 6+ miles of trails), a day with 10 miles of city bike riding, and a 60-minute spin class. I want to start planning in advance a week or two of training so that I do not fall victim to the whims of moments. My running, cycling–swimming and yoga, too?–routines need to become purposeful and focused, not simply convenient.
For this coming week here is what I have sketched for myself…
Monday, Jan 8: 60-minute tempo run
Tuesday, Jan 9: 45-minute spin class (teaching)
Wednesday, Jan 10: light run w/ intense hill or stair climbs
Thursday, Jan 11: rest
Friday, Jan 12: 60-minute spin class (teaching)
Saturday, Jan 13: 90-minute tempo run; yoga class (studio and type: tbd)
Sunday, Jan 14: 90-minute fun run
Next week I will also be exploring some cross-training and strength training exercised to incorporate into my training–everything from jump roping to rowing to weights to plyometrics to swimming. I need to strengthen my body–not just my muscles, but also my joints. I feel week when I run… My shoulders are too weak to keep my chest and lungs open throughout the entirety of a long and hard run; my core is soft; my ankles are not as strong as necessary to help me bound up hills and navigate the loose footing of trails. I have lost a lot of quickness, too. It is a ridiculously laborious effort to sprint the last few hundred yards of my runs and I feel like I am cutting through knee-high water when I do. Yesterday I spent some time climbing a little sand hill… too much time for its size. It has been a while since I have felt springy and fresh.
In high school I played numerous sports… cross-country, track, basketball, soccer, swimming, and some baseball early-on, in addition to the weekend games of tennis or tag throughout the neighborhood. The year-round conditioning gave me chiseled legs and awesome lungs and I could sum up the athletic ability to match my will to chase people down on the track.
Sometimes I feel like I am too specialized–too much of a runner. Sport-specific movements are important for efficient and effective technique, but I feel it was the constant bounding, jumping, sprinting, weight training, distance running, laps of swimming, and hours of drills I consumed in high school that made me potent on the track. I want to get back to that state, to a physical and mental state where I could challenge–not always win, but compete with–my athlete-friends in almost any discipline of sport. Plus, it was a lot more fun.
So for 2007, I’m bringing cross-training back.
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker and veteran of the Navy, performed such a selflessly inspirational act yesterday, that I am left truly awed. The father of two young girls jumped onto the subway tracks as a speeding train was approaching to save a young man who had fallen from the platform during a seizure and was unable to climb back to safety. Please click here to read the amazing story of heroism published in this morning’s edition of the New York Times.
Yesterday evening Lauren and I hosted a small group of friends for a New Year’s Eve celebration. It was an intimate evening of great conversation, good food, and sharing and creation of memories. Around 11:45 we made our way to the beach of Crissy Fields where we took in the awesome sight of fireworks over San Francisco. Launched from the Embarcadero, the display was just above the skyline and we had the entire beach to ourselves. In the crisp midnight blue sky, with the evening-lit Golden Gate Bridge behind us, the shadowed Alcatraz and Angel Island floating on a calm bay of Pacific water, the dulled explosions of fireworks illuminating the few low-lying clouds over the distant downtown, surrounded by some of my best friends whose relationships were first formed back in middle school, life seemed pretty perfect.
After the night-of-lights show and the exchange of well wishes for the new year, we stood on the beach talking about life and love. Someone said we should come up with a communal resolution, to which someone else said that we should return to this very spot in 20 years for NYE 2027. We all shook hands and said we’d return. But we should come back to something that captures the moment from this night! So we dug a hole in the sand, about two feet deep, with our hands and a few sticks. Under the moonlit sky we searched our persons for what we could contribute to the time capsule. Lauren had a pencil from IKEA. I had a BART ticket. Gaurab threw in a movie ticket stub. Dave put in his undershirt. And Zach, true to Zach form, took off his underwear and added it to the pile of treasure. (Next year I will carry something special or meaningful in case another situation arises where we decide to make a time capsule.)
Dave had portable GPS device and held it over the spot we dug and covered. Twenty minutes after counting from “10″ to “Happy New Year!” we were calculating and recording GPS coordinates.
Someone joked that with global warming, this beach may not be here in 20 years, so we amended our “return to this spot” day from December 31, 2026 to mid-summer 2007.
***
Having retired only a few hours before the sun rose, I slept in this morning. Around 10:00am, excited about the newness and hope of promise that a new year brings, I slipped out the door for a morning run.
In addition to my Garmin Forerunner 205, which I was anxious to test on the tree-lined trails and streets of the Presidio (it worked flawlessly–no problem attaining a satellite signal and no dropped signal), I also was wearing my new favorite accessory, the Apple iPod shuffle. It is a ridiculously small and beautiful thing, especially when compared to my 30 gig video iPod I used to strap to my arm and scroll through while running.
To Stereophonics’ “Have a Nice Day,” I made out for a run along Crissy Fields, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and along the coastal roads of outer Marin County. There were a lot of people following through with their New Year’s resolution to run, walk, or bike and everyone was in a smiling and polite mood.
It was a truly beautiful morning. I raced the waves crashing high against the rocks near the base of the bridge and cut through the dense morning fog along its pedestrian walkway. When i reached vista point on the Marin side of the bridge, the sun broke through and revealed patches of radiant blue sky. I ran under the 101 highway and charged up a hill into the Marin Headland trails, racing–and beating!–a mountain biker ascending on a new year’s day climb. From there I was greeted with a magical scene: the Golden Gate Bridge, still surrounded in thick white fog, looked suspended in the heavens. I introduced myself to an older gentleman who was taking pictures with his new digital camera–a gift from his wife for Christmas–and asked if he wouldn’t mind sending me a few shots via email.
The return home was quickened by the hunger in my stomach. Lauren and I were going to brunch with Dave and Jess and I began craving an omelet, french toast, an overflowing fruit plate, a giant smoothie, waffles with ice cream, bacon and ham… anything and everything!
I quickly showered and the four of us strolled up and down the Chestnut street in search of food. We found a favorite spot–Pacific Catch–and refuelled with a salmon teriyaki bowl, a crab and avocado salad, and a side of sweet potato fries. Mmm!
It was not until we returned home that I looked at the stats on my watch for info about my run today: 7.65 miles in 54:05 minutes with another ten minutes sprinkled over two stops, the first to stretch, the second to take in the awesome new day view of San Francisco above the Golden Gate Bridge; average pace of 7:04/mile. (I am toying with the best way to track, manage, and share my training information.)
While only one day into the new year, 2007 is off to an amazing start.
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
Runners World magazine published an awesome collection of “gotta’ do!” events and experiences for runners of all ages and abilities in their January 2007 edition. “The Life List,” authored by John Galvin, is filled with historical (re-create the Roger Bannister’s sub-4:00-minute mile), challenging (run an ultramarathon or race at the north or south pole), just-for-fun (enter a New Year’s Eve race), ridiculous (run in costume), inspiring (run like Pre on the University of Oregon’s Hayway Field), and interesting (complete the 86-floor race through the stairwell of the Empire State Building) ideas for runners. Click here to read the article.
Looking forward to seeing you on the 600-meter track in Rome’s Circus Maximus gigantic stadium (with room for 250,000 spectators).
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
Scott Jurek is perhaps the real ultramarathon man: course record holder and consecutive seven-time champion of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run, course record holder and defending two-time champion of the Badwater Ultramarathon, and defending Spartathlon champion.
I read an interview with him in Runners World magazine and simply want to highlight his name and accomplishments as a source of inspiration. Click here to browse Scott’s website. Click here to read the runnersworld.com interview. When done reading, slip into your shorts and shoes and…
Run With It!
J.R. Atwood
