Chariots of Silicon 110
ToddML writes "I just spotted this article at wired.com which talks about the current deficiencies of the U.S. long-distance running program, and more importantly, what is being done about it. An interesting story from both a gadget perspective, and for the source of the program -- private industry."
Next up? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Next up? (Score:2)
But you're true, I often saw the e being left out, so I guess Ubermenschen is ok too. But the s is necessary
Re:Next up? (Score:1)
Re:Next up? (Score:1)
Well if you can't beat 'em... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you cant beat 'em, spend loadsamoney out-teching them.
Whats the frigging point of having impeccably fair races, drugs testing, etc., when countries can do this sort of thing, giving athletes an unfair advantage over poorer nations' competitors? Granted, the results have yet to be seen but I doubt it will make them any worse athletes. The winning seems to count more than the sportsmanship and fairness.
A bit like U.S. foreign policy, then :-|
Ali
No tech to football... (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise Brazil would not dominate the way it does. Brazil has no tech, just cut throat competition and the football lifestyle. I watched how Brazilian players are trained and it starts when they are seven or eight. It is in their "blood". The truly elite players in football, live, breath and eat football. And more often than not they come from poor areas, eg Zidane...
Re:No tech to football... (Score:1)
A team with more endurance = a better team. period. Though you're right that there are many other [often more important] factors.
In Brazil football is almost a religion and the training often starts with walking; why waste 4 or 5 good years of potential development?
At the end of the day hi-tech training gives an advantage but not instant wins. I'd bet that a 'tech-trained' athlete could be beaten by a normally trained clone who believed he could beat him, assuming the tech guy didn't have a massive advantage. Gattaca [gattaca.com] is an great [and unfairly overlooked] movie and illustrates the way I see this situation.
Take, for example, the Four Minute Mile: People did not believe it could be done until a guy achieved it, and from then on many more people managed it. Mohammed Ali truly and sincereley believed he was the greatest, and that gave him the strength to fight to win. He achieved an [AFAIK] unmatched record, although my great great [...] grandfather [cyberboxingzone.com] did manage something similar, albeit without those wussy pussy padded mittens ;-)
Ali
Re:Well if you can't beat 'em... (Score:1)
Whats the frigging point of having impeccably fair races, drugs testing, etc., when countries can do this sort of thing, giving athletes an unfair advantage over poorer nations' competitors?
What's the point of races in the first place?
In most sports, at the elite level, your genes are your most important ally. You need to train hell hard to win, but if you don't have the right body type, you can train all you like and not succeed...
Already, technology is giving people better shoes, or wetsuits, or gold clubs... This is just the next step.
On the horizon, you can see the distant spectre of genetically engineered athletes --- designed for super endurance, speed, height, whatever is appropriate. Then they'll take them and train them using technology like this... And claim new records as the fastest human in the world.
And you start to wonder why they don't just remove the human altogether --- since it's obviously the weakest link...
Incidentally, is anyone else amused by the way the article described the new tech as a way to try and create a Lance Armstrong --- Armstrong being one of the top competitors in professional cycling, a 'sport' which is reknowned for rampant drug use...
Re:How about (Score:1)
If you look at top-sport, everyone is trying new methods, technology to improve performance. Most of the times it works temporarily: until the next Olympic games. After that, competitors copy the methods and the race starts over again. Look at swimming (new swim-suits), speed-skating (clap-skates or how you call them in English), etc.
I think it will become dope if it's harmful for the sporters themselves: it would mean that other sporters must copy this harmful technique to stay competitive.
Re:How about (Score:1)
Re:How about (Score:1)
Re:Americans always lose (Score:2)
Oh come off your high horse! That's how the human mind works. We try to perceive generalities and rules and we apply those to individuals we meet. We make assumptions about *everybody* we come across. Assumptions are based on probabilities. The thing is to recognize those assumptions for what they are and not hold them as absolute truth. None of us are stereotypes.
The poster was making a point that black athletes are, in general, more accomplished than white athletes. Being white, I could get offended by that, but the thing is that he's probably right. Better genes for that sort of thing, no doubt.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Americans always lose (Score:2)
Re:Americans always lose (Score:2)
It's how we are made.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:1)
As for what's wrong with people today, it's more that stereotyping is a international sport. Blacks are good athleets, muslims are terrorists etc. etc.
Luckily the world isn't that black and white..
One of the most narrow minded comments (Score:1)
Physicly (that is in fact) black african races have longer ham strings and are better runners, white nordic people tend to have better strength, got a problem with that, wake up to the real world, were all different just because you don't like someone saying so, it doesn't change the fact.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:3, Insightful)
Many genetic disorders are far more common in a particular ethnic group, sickle cell anemia is just the most striking example. There's a genetic disorder that almost exclusively affects people who are ethnically Jewish and are born to two ethnically Jewish parents. The name escapes me.
On the whole, Kenyans appear to blessed with an extraordinarily high slow fast twitch/fast twitch muscle ratio. You cannot take someone with a lot of fast twitch muscle and turn them into a good marathoner; it just can't be done. Try this at home: jump as high as you can without bending your knees substantially. If you can't get more than six inches off the ground, your genes will never let you be a great sprinter, even if you started training at six and had all the training in the world. The colder you ancestors' climate, the more likely you are flunk, which makes the Kenya thing kind of weird.
But except in these corner cases, this stuff doesn't matter. A white person can be a great athlete, and a black person can be a brilliant scholar. Sadly, some people seize on these relatively trivial differences to make a case that are ancestry is far more important than it really is. Just because a particular group of people can or can't jump very high (on average) doesn't mean they should be treated any differently.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:1)
-Of course you speak of averages. I know you probably meant to include that, but your reasoning implies that a white person would NEVER beat an african american in any instance, which is simply not true.
The limited pool of black athletes can only be divided so much.... short distance sprinter may be able to become a world-class distance runner...America designates black runners as short distance competitors
-that's just complete and utter bullshit. It's not like the US decides ahead of time which events we want to win, and thus designate athletes accordingly. I run track and I won the pentathlon in my state my senior year, but that does not mean I could have even made it there in the 5K or even the 100 meter dash. It would be pointless to take sprinters like Michael Johnson or Maurice Green and train them for the mile, cause their bodies aren't built for it. Their bodies are meant for explosive , fast twitch motions, Not endurance based distance running which depends much more on the bodies ability to combat lactic acid build up and fatigue.
Look, I agree with you that black athletes are on average (at least the ones that compete) more skillful and talented in their respective sports with similar training regiments. However, this has nothing to do with the prevalence of black sprinters vs black distance runners.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:1)
that's just complete and utter bullshit. It's not like the US decides ahead of time which events we want to win, and thus designate athletes accordingly.
I have to respectfully disagree with this. Though it may not happen at the Olympic level, it sure as hell happens at the collegiate and high school levels. Coaches steer athletes toward events that the athlete would excel at, and away from things that wouldn't help the team in competition. This means that black athletes get steered toward sprinting, and white athletes get steered towards long distance events. From this pool come the world class athletes that we see in the Olympics, and by the time they are chosen to represent the country the statistics bear out the choices the coaches made early on.
I also agree with you on the topic of Johnson and Green being wasted talent in longer distance events. However, just to say that they would waste their talents by running longer distances doesn't mean that they couldn't become excellent distance runners at all. My point was that on the other hand, you couldn't take a marathon runner and turn them into a Michael Johnson.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:1)
Interestingly, I know a white guy who runs the 800m for his high school's track team. From time to time he'll run the 400m, which is normally dominated by the black guys (African-American is not the PC term anymore, btw).
He won't win the 400, because it's an all out sprint, essentially, and the black guys beat him (although he's close). But put him in the 800 against the same guys, and he'll blow them away in the stretch. Why? Who knows. I'll just keep my simpleton view and say that different people excel in different events and that's it. I'm not going to get into this race discussion.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:2)
It's okay to call a white guy for both white and caucasian, but not okay to call a person of african decent anything that can come close to describing their basic features, other than calling them african-american, or "of african decent". I know plenty of black people (here in Europe) who are pissed off every time they're described af "of african decent" because they're not - they're from Sri Lanka, but to you or me they don't look much different than someone from Nigiria. They prefer the term black (or as one of them said "pigmentedly challanged"). Using such terms doesn't mean I'm a racist, and I wish people would pull their head out of their asses and realise that.
But then again, PC-people are probably just intellectually, gravitationally and cosmeticly challanged
Re:Americans always lose (Score:1)
See this article [jonentine.com] for a better explanation of the African connection.
Ignorance (Score:2, Insightful)
On average there are differences in muscle composition between whites and blacks. Blacks tend to have more muscles of the fast twitch variety, which contract very quickly, and are well suited to things like running and jumping. Whites tend to have more slow twitch muscle fibers whisk are well suited to things like weightlifting, cycling and swimming. This only accounts for a small portion of the difference.
The main difference is cultural. In America the high profile sports are basketball, baseball, and American football, the fact that these sports are so popular causes many of the gifted athletes to want to do these sports; we don't have someone allocating America's great athletes to different sports, they allocate themselves. Now in many parts of Africa, there is only one sport (unless you are one of the social elite), that sport is running (think about it, if you were extremely poor, what sport could you afford to do). Running in Africa is a way of life, school children run to and from school further than many of us drive to work. Running is the way out of poverty there, poor children dream of being world class marathoners, the same way many poor Americans dream of NBA careers.
Wish me luck, my first Marathon is on October 13th...
Re:Ignorance (Score:1)
I disagree with you about athletes not being allocated for certain sports. On the contrary, I think athletes are assigned to certain events and positions all the time, the same as speech and debate participants are channeled into particular roles (whether LD debates, extemporaneous, or policy debates). The goal of a coach is to maximize the teams wins and secondarily to provide an enjoyable recreational activity for his charges.
Black students get pigeonholed early: sprinters, wide receivers, outfielders, power forwards, etc. This is as much a cultural thing as it is a tacit acceptance that black athletes are on the whole better athletes than white athletes on the whole. At the Olympic level, black athletes dominate the American track and field team. This cannot simply be a coincidence or the result of some affirmative action program. They are there because they are the best in the country and have eliminated many others who were almost good enough to make it to the games.
Yes, running is a way of life for Africans. After all, they have many track stars to look to as role models. But the point is that if you gave the African athletes a larger set of sports to choose from and world class coaches and facilities they would surpass most 'Western' countries in almost all events.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:2, Informative)
Secondly, athletic prowess is also poorly defined. This article is about one particular event: long distance running. No one seems to comment on the dominance of Slavs in power lifting or Slavs and East Asians in gymnastics and diving. These are also basic sports in that they emphasize excellence in one particular area: power or flexibility, while not requiring the level of training in technique of sporst such as golf or baseball where good hand eye coordination can compensate for a difference in power. At this point I will make the obligatory mention of the lack of success of Kenyans at events shorter than 800m.
Third of all, anyone paying attention to the standings at world class competitions will note the rise of competitiveness of South Koreans and Mexicans at 10000m and longer events, Morroccans at events from 1500m to 10000m, Eastern Europeans in the Decathlon and so on.
Which brings me to my next point, we are discussing world class performances here. By definition this requires a level of training and commitment that most people are not willing to achieve. Excellence at the world class level depends on many factors: equipment, training and and taking advantage of whatever genetic advantages one has. Since Bikila's breakthrough at the Rome Olympics, there has been a concerted effort among East African nations to provide top athletes for the long distance events. This has led to national programs that identify, support and promote the best available talent on a scale that the US Olympic effort has only recently begun to match. Note that the original "African" long distance champions were Ethiopians who are as distinct from the current crop of Kenyans as a Swede is from an Italian when compared visually. No one was complaining when the US had a running obsession in the 70's and regularly produced long distance champions. There is no reason to suspect Kenya's current dominance, which I predict will fall to Mexico within a decade, is any different.
As for taking advantage of genetic heritage; any American whose family has been here for more than 3 generations can likely trace portions of their genetic heritage to ancestors from virtually any part of the globe. This is especially true of "African" Americans as they usually have ancestors originally from Europe at some point in their bloodline. The primary example is Tiger Woods who's ancestry is almost equally divided among Asian, European, African and Native Americans. As it becomes easier for population groups to intermingle Woods is going to be the rule rather than the exception.
Finally, anyone who has actually been to Japan as opposed to recieved "wisdom" from the popular culture will note that Japanese adolescents are on average much closer in height to other people groups than Japanese adults. Naoko Takashi, the Nagano Olympic Marathon Champion, is 1.62m or 5' 3" tall, this is 1" below the average height for a woman. Not exceptionally short or tall. Furthermore, elite long distance runners tend to be shorter than average so this is not an interesting case at all. From pictures her legs don't appear to be disproportionately short, in fact they seem long but she's pretty skinny so it's hard to tell.
In some circles it has become fashionable to blame genetics for one's circumstances. Also there is usually an unspoken corollary to the athletes of African descent have a genetic advantage argument. That of course is that African's are genetically predisposed to having a lesser IQ, or other quantifier linked to intelligence. The truth is the situation is far more complex that simply asking where one was born in an attempt to identify their capability at any particular endeavour. In nearly any meaningful test, the variation in performance of any group of humans is so large as to render the ability to predict the performance of an individual impossible.
And yes, there are of course some obvious physiological caveats; stride length, ratio of upper body mass to lower body mass, hemocrit etc. as to whether one is capable of a world class performance in long distance or not. But again, there are individuals from every region of the globe who meet the necessary criteria.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:1)
It is true that athletes at the world class level must have a sense of dedication and training par excellence, but to discount the role of genetics in achieving success is foolhardy. Training of a genetically unendowed athlete will most certainly make him better, but it will never raise him to the level of excellence necessary to seriously compete at the upper echelon of athletic competition. To achieve that level the athlete must have a combination of dedication, training, coaching, facilities, and a genetic predisposition to excellence in the field. My point was that on average blacks have this genetic predisposition in greater numbers than whites, regardless of the availability of the other factors in their environment.
Even in women's figure skating, a sport conspicuously dominated by whites and asians, we see this. Arguably the most athletic women's skater is not Kwan or Kerrigan or Slutskaya. It's undoubtedly Surya Bonaly whose athleticism is unmatched by any other skater on the ice. Her only problem is a reluctance to fire her coach who is unable to teach her grace and fluidity which are both needed to excel at figure skating.
Likewise, cultural differences can account for an athlete choosing one sport over another. Hence, Brazilians tend to gravitate towards soccer, Kenyans towards long distance running, and Chinese and former Soviet states to gymnastics. Each of these fields have top class coaches and facilities for training and they can cull the cream of the crop from the many athletes who compete at lower levels. Given the accessibility to training facilities that Americans enjoy, Africans would most certainly gain a substantial lead over Americans in almost every Olympic event.
Re:Americans always lose (Score:1)
I submit that the reason people of African descent are dominant at athletics at this moment is simply because they participate more and are willing to commit to a higher level of training than relatively wealthier people who tend to make other life choices. This is a periodic phenomenon and as the Chinese sports machine cranks up to Soviet style levels we are going to see world class competitors from China in all sports. This is not because the Chinese do or do not have a special genetic inheritance, merely that they are willing to exploit their inheritance. Given that most regional groupings of humanity of size greater than 1000 share 88% of the total genetic variation of all humanity discounting for the founder effect in groups like the Mormons the Chinese have access to plenty of world class athletes in nearly any sport, it's merely a task of identification and support of these athletes. Of course that explanation is too obvious, subtle and undramatic so when the great red sports machine gets cranking your moronic ABC commentator will of course pick up on the assinine racial difference and attempt to "explain" Chinese competitors based on some loosely grounded theory of genetics, or blame drugs.
Another example of commitment is the German bobsledding program. Christoph Langen may be one of the best athletes the world has ever seen with a 350+ pound bench press and a 40" vertical leap he could have been one of the greatest running backs the NFL had ever seen if he didn't drive bobsleds. Naive American coaches subconciously believing in racial theories of perfomance attempted to improve the US bobsled team by recruiting African American sprinters and running backs to no avail. Amazingly all the drivers remain white, kind of like the white quarterback syndrome the NFL is only starting to recover from. The point here is simply that all world class bobsledders, German or not are great athletes and your chances of finding one in any region of the world are roughly equal. Of course, you'll respond with your anecdote about Vonetta Flowers. But that's my point, Langen, Flowers, Bonaly et. al. are all just anecdotes. They are the 6 sigma deviants in humanity and are not representative of anything but ultimate physical human potential.
As for Bonaly, athletic as she is, the only women's skater to attempt a quad in competition is the white, Jewish Sasha Cohen. Had Mary Lou Retton put on skates I'm pretty sure she could match Bonaly flip for flip and jump for jump.
Without that ability to control for economics and perform a proper experiment one can of course only do statistical analyses. I submit that there is simply a minimal level of investment required to be competitive at the world level in any sport. As the wealthiest country the US can meet this level in many sports. Were the playing field economically level then the result would probably be that medal counts would reflect relative population sizes.
Are you a track and field athlete or have you ever competed as one? I have, I know that from an early age in the US, coaches play favourites with athletes based on personal prejudices that may or may not have a basis in fact. If one is encouraged from an early age to pursue the dream of being a track star, as Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Gail Devers were, while others are told to concentrate on other activities like many of the excellent athletes who decided to concentrate on academics and end up at Ivy League institutions, like Bill Bradley, then of course it will look like African Americans are better athletes. I am not a world class athlete but I was reasonably fast enough (10.7 100m) to be a competitive high school athlete and I know how the sports machine works at the lowest levels. If you have a racial theory of athletic performance then I suggest you test it against the performance of junior high school aged children, before most external forces have changed the playing field. I think that you will find the best performances are proportionately divided among the races.
Finally, note that most of the Kenyan long distance runners come from a relatively small tribe in an isolated part of the country. In fact many of them are cousins. If there is any genetic effect, it's the founder effect: they share the genes of one particular individual which have propogated through the population because of relative isolation. Mormons, Jews and Icelandics show the same traits, having genetic trees that very quickly trace back to a very small set of common ancestors. There probably is a similar population somewhere in the 350 million residents of the US. The Mexicans attempted to exploit the habits of one of their indigenous tribes who put high value on long distance running ability, and the Mexican and Morroccan programs are probably the best challengers to the Kenyans. But for the rest of us, who share bloodlines drawn essentially from the entirety of the globe, we cannot benefit from a founder effect. I myself have ancestors only three generations back who come from, Europe, Africa and the Native Americans of the Caribbean basin. Although to the ignorant I'm sure you can guess what my appearance is. So yes, genetics play a component, but in general, especially now that so many previously isolated populations have mixed there is too much variation between individuals within a population group no matter how you divide the group to account for large performance differences. Furthermore genetic studies indicate that even isolated groups retain a large amount of genetic variation as long as they were separated from a larger group rather than founded by a very small population.
old news... (Score:1)
Hahahahaha (Score:1)
Training in low oxygen level pfffft (Score:1)
Altitude Sickness? (Score:4, Interesting)
But doesn't it open the athletes up to altitude sickness? Granted, 12,000 feet is low to get this, but it's generally caused as much by the change in altitude as the absolute altitude (So generally if you take a week climbing to 16,000 feet you're much less likely to be afflicted than if you do it in a couple of days). Oddly enough, it affects fit people as much as (or often more than) the unfit, so I do wonder whether they have any problem with this.
Incidentally, I know that 20,000 feet is about half an atmosphere, so I guess they're talking about 2/3 (sea-level) atmosphere at 12,000 feet.
Re:Altitude Sickness? (Score:1)
My brother is a climber/mountaineer and told me how altitude adaption is done:
First you climb, say 400 metres. Now, if you're already at 4000m above sea-level, the change in altitude will be noticeable to you.
Now comes the weird part; if you stay at 4400m, you will start to experience an increasing height-sickness which can potentially become dangerous. So what you do is, you climb down to 4000m, and the next day you climb back up to 4400m. You are now adapted to the height, and can repeat the procedure to rise another 400m.
Of course, once you reach a certain height it won't matter what you do; you're body will be strained to it's limits, and you will experience height-sickness.
Why anyone would actually use low athmospheric pressure for training is beyond me; isn't it the low oxygen-level that's important?
Re:Altitude Sickness? (Score:2)
There's a standard rule about sleeping lower than you've been climbing - for two reasons:
* If you start to get affected while climbing, it's easy to notice it, and you just have to walk down to recover. If you get affected while sleeping, you won't notice it as quickly, so the symptoms can become worse (and it'll be harder to go down in the middle of the night).
* When you're walking/climbing you are active (so thinking about breathing - if you're not getting enough Oxygen then you breath harder). When asleep you're breathing by reflex, so might not breath enough.
(I'm simplifying - as you say it is a bit wierd and noone fully understands it). Anyway - these athletes are doing the exact opposite of what climbers do by sleeping at altitude and exercising at sealevel!
Re:Altitude Sickness? (Score:1)
More than that. It works exponentially. I'm too lazy to work out the math, the difference between 0 and 12,000 feet is much more than the difference between 12,000 and 24,000
Re:Altitude Sickness? (Score:1)
benefits of altitude? (Score:2)
Re:benefits of altitude? (Score:2)
Re:Altitude Sickness? (Score:2)
I doubt if these are the first people to change altitude daily; airline pilots and skiers, etc. have been doing the same for years.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let it go! Go... go play with your silly oblongated ball.
jocks... an entire country of them.
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Do the Americans play rugby?
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and don't criticize American football too much. Some of the atheletes that play that game are quite impressive. If you get a chance to see some highlights of Sooner football from the '50s, you will be impressed. I never will understand why it is called FOOTball...
Legalize Drugs! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Legalize Drugs! (Score:1)
Baseball is setting a terrible example for this right now by ignoring rampant steriod use among the players. Kids see their role models in the major leagues using roids and make the decision to use them if it means helping them achieve their goal of becoming a pro baseball player.
Re:Legalize Drugs! (Score:2)
Totally offtopic, does anybody know the title of the book I'm talking about? I've searched everywhere and I can't find it.
Re:Legalize Drugs! (Score:1)
The title refers to the choice mythic hero Achilles was offered by the Gods: to have a short but glorious life as opposed to a long and peaceful but anonymous one.
It has to be said.... (Score:2)
And then there's the obvious solution: (Score:1)
The real problem (Score:1)
I hate being slower than George W. Bush. (Score:1)
The racially-based arguments around why 'Americans' get their asses kicked at long distances are pretty absurd. In the US, we have a deep, deep gene pool that should pretty well ensure that certain individuals of any generation could be competitive at the marathon distance. To over-hype the genetics of Kenyans is to diminish the personal achievements of the runners themselves. Currently the men's world record is held by a Moroccan-born American citizen. As of last year, when he got his citizenship, Khalid Khannouchi has as much "American" genetic material as anyone, and probably as little Kenyan genetics as most.
People who complain about the physical genetic superiority of a race they don't belong to (e.g. excuse-spewing complacent white slackers complaining that blacks are stronger) need to either hit the gym more often, hit the track more often, or shut up and eat their potato chips. In the '30s these racial arguments were put forward to explain the higher than expected numbers of elite Jewish basketball players. Shaddup already.
'American' marathoners got handed their asses time and time again by smart, highly-motivated INDIVIDUALS. Even the 8k mentioned in the article is a race demanding not just technical ability, physical gifts beyond muscle-twitch [gait and other factors], but strategy--strategy about how to get yourself through 4.97 miles fast. You need to know a lot about your body to run 8k fast, you need to be able to monitor the body's telemetry closely and respond accordingly. I've never won an 8k, but I've beaten certain snide individuals in the 8k, and you need to know a certain amount about what their bodies are capable of as well. To toss this all off as genetic disposition is to miss most of the race.
Lastly, in response to the "why bother doing this" mentality, I'd format a proper response, but I've got to work on overclocking my processor so I can eke out a few more meaningless megahertz, then I've got to figure out why Eterm's transparency stopped working.
Re:The real problem (Score:2)
I suspect that the real problem has turned out to be soccer.
For a long time, if you weren't the big enough for football in the Fall, you went out for cross country. Nowadays, high schools have soccer in the Fall to compete with the cross country programs. Which of the two sports, cross country or soccer, will ol' dad -- who's still disappointed that his boy didn't grow up to be halfback material -- be encouraging junior to take up? And which one's more likely to have high school girls cheering on the sidelines? (We never got cheerleaders to even show up until they found out we were ranked sixth in the state.)
McDonalds might be something of a problem because it's crap food but when I was running it took a hell of a lot of calories to do the mileage we would be putting in (sometimes up to 20 miles a day during the season and usually a dozen or so in the off season). A cross country runner was basically a calorie-to-speed converter. A Big Mac doesn't hurt so bad when it's a smaller proportion of the other food you were eating just to keep yourself going (lots of carbs and fruit).
We'll use more money (Score:1)
Re:We'll use more money (Score:1)
Latex. What a great material.
Oops (Score:1)
take a tip from the MLB (Score:2)
its as simple as that, baseball players do it, and their breaking more records than ever, plus, their not stopping them so it must be legal.
$.02 charged
corporate waste... (Score:2)
oops, sorry, i'm mimicking american conservatives incorrectly. i'm only supposed to short-sightedly criticise all gov't spending as waste, not corporate spending. damn, never could get the hang of shutting down 99.9% of my neurons to reach that level...
Re:corporate waste... (Score:1)
Re:corporate waste... (Score:2)
WTF (Score:2, Insightful)
What Nike needs are better shoes (Score:1)
What I really hate are these companies like Foot Locker and Champs whose employees have no clue about the sport they support. With running shoes look should be the last thing you are looking for. It should all be comfort. The fact that some company designed a shoe for some athlete does not mean that I have the exact same foot as this athlete.
I have found that The Running Room (which is a chain in Canada) seem to have the most knowledgable staff. Course this may be because they specialize but at least their main criteria for a good shoe is not how pretty it is.
Amen. Nike is just a fashion brand now. (Score:2)
As for your mention of the Asic Kayanos - Asics, Saucony, Mizuno and the other small brands cleaned up the serious running market years ago. The Kayano is probably the best all around running shoe for advanced runners.
Nike will continue to build junk - they want you to buy new shoes every four months. This is why serious runners who have a choice won't touch them anymore.
i dunno... (Score:1)
Re:i dunno... (Score:1)
shox ain't too bad (Score:1)
i ran a loooong (~15-mile) slow workout in shox a few months ago, they actually seemed pretty nice - they have the same resilient feel as Air shoes, but without any of the squishiness. The impact absorbtion is much stiffer - not a harder percieved impact, it just seems there's less "give" with just as much "softness" (runners, you know what i mean). my legs felt pretty fresh afterwards, too; if the things weren't like $130 i'd consider investing in a pair (nothing to pop!)
Re:shox ain't too bad (Score:1)
One thing I can recommend of Nike is the PSA Play MP3 Player (actually they are made by Rio) but get better headphones they are really tinny.
Re:i dunno... (Score:1)
I love the Air Durham, from the Bowerman series, I am breaking in my 3rd pair. It is Nike's motion control shoe, for big runners.... I did 20 miles in them last Saterday, and at 210 lbs, that is a lot to ask of a shoe... I also had losts of pain when running until I discovered the Durham
What?!??! (Score:1)
What is wrong with you people??!?!
We can rebuild you... (Score:1)
money is the root of all evil (Score:2)
Nike and the fitness industry in general, capatilized on the salad days of US marathoning in the 70's and early 80's, promoting it and profiting from its popularity. One thing that happened was that marathon racing (and other track and field sports) became quasi-professional. Athletes were allowed to accept prize and appearance money, and if it was laundered through a "training fund," they would still be eligible for the Olympics as an amateur. Nike was one of the big corporate sponsors who supplied the prize money.
For the top marathoners, it became profitable to run 4 or 5 marathons a year. Just showing up meant a paycheck. This type of schedule quickly started taking its toll, and US marathoners stopped being competitive on the world stage. As US atheletes' performance dropped, the sport's popularity nosedived as well, and marathon running has never recovered.
oxygen level, not air pressure (Score:1)
-Mike_L