Kara Goucher and the Nike’s Oregon Project

On Monday (April 20th, 2009) Kara Goucher became the first American woman to finish in the top three in the Boston Marathon in 16 years, which is a great achievement.

Kara belongs to a project by Nike, called Oregon Project, lead by Alberto Salazar.  This is a group created in 2001 to promote American long distance running, using air thinning technology. By living in altitudes with thinner air, where less oxygen is available, the body increases its production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. When these athletes compete at lower altitudes, the extra red cells  supply their muscles more efficiently with oxygen, making them faster than their competitors.

Lance Armstrong, is also a believer in air thinning technology and was one of the first ones to try it in cycling.

Wired magazine wrote an excellent article in 2002 about the project. You can read it here.

The Los Angeles Times in 2007 also wrote an interesting piece on air thinning technology that you can read about here.

So it seems that the experiment is working at least for Kara. Although Ryan Hall, who  is not part of this experiment, also did really well (3rd place).

Cool triathlon t-shirts

There are a few places online that you can buy t-shirts and other stuff like mugs or mouse pads designed by simple people like you and me.

These sites also allow you to make your own designs and to sell them and make money from them.

From what I have found, the best designs are available from Cafe Press.

Cafe Press has the larges amount of designs.

 

Other similar sites are:

• Spreadshirt.com
• Zazzle
• Printfection

If you have a design that you want to upload for a shirt for you or to sell over at the sites, it is a very simple process and you can have your own store in a matter of minutes.

Read Alberto Salazar's Guide to Road Racing

I recently posted on Lactic Acid Threshold here.

You can read what Alberto Salazar** has to say about Lactic Acid Threshold in his book called Alberto Salazar’s Guide to Road Racing. It’s available at Google Book Search.

You can read from pages 32 to 37 about Lactic Acid Threshold. All these pages are available.

You can actually read most of the book online.

Here is the link:

Alberto Salazar's Guide to Road Racing

 

** According to wikipedia:

Alberto Salazar (born August 7, 1958 in Cuba) is an American marathon runner of the 1980s. Born in Cuba, Salazar immigrated to the United States with his family. They ultimately moved to Wayland, Massachusetts, where Salazar competed in track and field in high school. Salazar is best known for his performances in the New York City Marathons in the early 1980s and his American track records of 13:11.93 for 5,000 m (July 6, 1982 - Stockholm) and 27:25.61 for 10,000 m - (June 26, 1982 - Oslo).

You can read all his profile here.

Good sports books available for free (limited preview)

Google book search, is a good source to preview or read books online. They do not have the latest books available but you can find some interesting books with limited preview where you can read full chapters online.

Some great books I’ve found with limited preview are:

• Total Immersion. This is a revolutionary technique for triathlon swimmers. (click on the image to go to the book)
• Bicycling magazine’s 1,000 all times best tips. Link.
• Triathlon 101 by John Mora. Link.
• Triahtlon training by Michael Finch. Link.
• Triathlon training in four hours a week by Eric Harr. Link. (You can read the complete book online).
• Galloway’s Book on Running by Jeff Galloway, Richard Golueke, Edna Indritz, David Willis. Link.
• Alberto Salazar's Guide to Road Racing by Alberto Salazar, Richard A. Lovet. Link.
• Becoming an Ironman by Kara Douglass Thom. Link.
• Become an Ironman by Cherie Gruenfeld. Link.

There are many more books you can search and read online.

(If you run across other interesting books, drop me a note.)

Improve endurance by increasing lactic acid threshold

Paul Collins, M.D.,  an  orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine at Orthopedic Health Care in Boise, wrote an interesting article at Idahostatesman.com about lactic acid threshold.

In the article he says:

For many years, scientists thought lactic acid was a detrimental byproduct of exercise, but this is not the case. It turns out, the body uses lactic acid as a fuel to produce energy without oxygen.

You can read the rest of the article here. 

A New York times article also confirms this. In an article called Lactic Acid is Not Muscles’ Foe, It’s Fuel the author states:

Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.

The notion that lactic acid was bad took hold more than a century ago, said George A. Brooks, a professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. It stuck because it seemed to make so much sense.

He also noted:

…Even though coaches often believed in the myth of the lactic acid threshold, they ended up training athletes in the best way possible to increase their mitochondria. "Coaches have understood things the scientists didn't," he said.

Through trial and error, coaches learned that athletic performance improved when athletes worked on endurance, running longer and longer distances, for example.

That, it turns out, increased the mass of their muscle mitochondria, letting them burn more lactic acid and allowing the muscles to work harder and longer.

Finish reading the article here.

In the following days I will provide some exercises you can make to increase your lactic acid threshold.

Foods that keep extra weight away

This article talks about 9 foods that can help you keep extra weight away.

Among the foods are:

1. Green tea

(In November, 1999, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published the results of a study at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Researchers found that men who were given a combination of caffeine and green tea extract burned more calories than those given only caffeine or a placebo.)

1. Yogurt
2. Beans
3. Water

You can keep reading here.

Some nice triathlon / marathon fotos from Flickr