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The shutter clicked at the most perfect moment for this.
(Photo by Tim Shaffer via Reuters Photographers Blog)
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But obviously if you’ve got a wage that’s under a dollar a day, it’s gonna take a very long time to save up for a pair of trainers. So they tend to use trainers well past their sell-by date. Every time we went, we took secondhand trainers out—occasionally new trainers where we managed to get a sponsor. And those were really welcome. Trainers are kind of prized possessions there. For those that are into barefoot running today in the States, there is an issue in the sense that trainers do change your running style and do encourage you to sort of run on your heels—and are therefore even more prone to injury. And actually when you look at the running style of the girls, it’s a running style built on barefoot running.
The town of people who can’t afford running shoes produced two long distance runners who won 4 Olympic gold medals total in 2008 at Beijing. Meanwhile, some people who can afford running shoes buy ugly running shoes that simulate barefoot running.
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A lovingly made Dutch Paris-Roubaix TV special worth checking out for cobble pr0n and intimate interviews with a few pro riders. Really captures what makes this such a treasured race on the calendar.
Mostly in Dutch & French but few English interviews.
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Rodeo, Uruguay.
(Photo by Andres Stapff via Reuters Photographers Blog)
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The Best Time I Doped by Accident
This morning, in the shower, I thought about my easy progress coming back to running since re-injuring my back in November. I began running again early last week. Half mile at first, but quickly adding up to 2 miles, my leg muscles feeling so supple I declared to my chiropractor that I was running even better than before my original back injury that put me out.
Then, I remembered I forgot to take a dose of prednisone with breakfast. My brain unconsciously balanced the equation plugging in the missing variable. The reason why I felt fantastic running: I was doping unwittingly with prednisone, a corticosteroid used as an systemic anti-inflammatory, which I’m taking to treat an issue unrelated to my back.
After the initial Dr. House a-ha moment faded, I was devastated. This time, I thought I’d done everything right from the new eating regimen to vigilant, nay, obsessive stretching of hamstrings, quads, inner thighs. I assumed I tamed every muscle cell into executing my will to run and run until I felt exhausted and happy. But I was doping. The good sensations were fake. Prednisone was taming my body, not my diligence and will.
Then, finally, I became worried what it would be like when I finish my course of prednisone. After my original back injury 9 months ago, my first attempt back to running was a herky-jerky procession of elation and disappointment. Sometimes I felt on top; most times, I felt like a gasping mess of a goldfish swatted out of its bowl by a mischievous cat. I had to space my runs by at least two days lest I felt like my rickety body was unraveling, leaving a trail of appendages and limbs. This time, I could run consecutive days. This time, I ran consecutive days feeling better on the second day—a testament to the power of the systemic anti-inflammatory.
Because I follow professional cycling closely, I do think about doping more than the average person. Now, I was an accidental doper. It doesn’t matter if the act was unwitting or that I’m not competing because the disappointment in not having achieved the result on my own is crushing. When did my efforts reach their futile end and prednisone take over? I’ll never know. If you spend a good 20 minutes stretching your legs in every conceivable direction before and after every run, you need it to have worked.
It’s strange to be in a doper’s shoes. I suddenly understand, at least on a very small scale, why it’s hard for some athletes who test positive and serve bans to admit to doping. Dopers cheat to win, not to slack off on training. When you train, eat right, and dope on top of that, it’s going to be impossible to allocate how much of your success was due to ingesting banned substances. The need to believe it was your discipline, your effort, your sacrifice is enormous. The need to believe it wasn’t the dope is even greater. I still want, so much, the pure joy I felt when my muscles were moving correctly and effortlessly that I wonder “Well, is 30mg of prednisone from that day really enough to have made so much difference?”
What bothers me most about the doping discourse in cycling are the fans who take the moral high ground without having experienced the enormous pressure of, for example, racing or coming back from a debilitating injury—one had to have felt cornered if doping seemed like a viable option. I hate the way it’s too easy for these armchair moralists to deride athletes and demand that we toss them away in a lifetime ban. When we all agree doping is wrong, why be so unbendingly righteous? And where does this righteousness come from if not from having lost a race or turned oneself inside out training?
I was never Manichaean in my views on doping. I’m more comfortable with a nuanced, empathetic approach. And empathy I now have because I am an accidental doper. I can assure anti-doping fundamentalists that dopers aren’t at peace with their offense. I’ll never forget the pure ease and joy of running doped. Whether I’m coasting effortlessly or choking on my seared lungs, every run from now on will be measured against the artificially enhanced performance. I will stretch obsessively, drop a few pounds, do anything to assure myself I can replicate it on my own. We dopers will always chase the asymptote of our perfect doped day. There is no peace of mind.
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Miller can’t tell you how to eliminate cramps altogether—there isn’t enough research—but stretching seems to be the best option to relieve acute cramping once it’s set in. That and pickle juice. In one of Miller’s recent studies, cramp-stricken cyclists who drank 2.5 ounces of it recovered 45 percent faster than those who drank nothing.
Pickle juice is such an esoteric fluid to test in a fitness study, no?
Posted on December 30, 2011 with 8 notes
Source: outsideonline.com
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As millions watched on television, Nosrati appeared to be trying to push his hand between Rezaei’s buttocks. It remained unclear Wednesday whether Rezaei had engaged in a similar action earlier in the game.
Iran’s football federation immediately suspended both players for an unspecified period and fined them nearly $40,000 each, Fars reported. According to the federation’s Web site, the ban is indefinite because a final decision cannot be made until “other authorities” are consulted.
A judiciary official told Fars that Nosrati and Rezaei could also face public lashings, to be carried out on the soccer pitch where the behavior occurred.
Iranian soccer players could face lashing after victory groping - The Washington Post
Click through for the video of the grope. It does look a bit WTF because he goes for the crack, but not worth corporal punishment whatsoever.
Posted on November 3, 2011 with 8 notes
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Watching Federer increasingly feels like looking in on something private. It’s as if his game is just somewhere else, on some secret corner of the map where it can stage its weird encounter between beauty and death.
The long autumn of Roger Federer - Grantland
The strangeness of Federer’s decline, which is a decline that’s not a decline as he’s never out of the running to win tournaments just yet. And the strangeness of people like us, mere mortals, doing a play by play of a tennis deity’s decline as if we know everything.
Posted on October 23, 2011 with 24 notes
Source: grantland.com
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Only one time, Heinicke says, did her grunting almost get her into trouble. One year, in advance of Wimbledon, a player who she had faced many times (and who she declines to name) asked the tournament referee to stop her from grunting. Heinicke thinks it was probably gamesmanship—a ploy to mess with her head. The referee denied the request, the grunter and the complainer didn’t end up facing each other, and Heinicke never changed her sound.
Slate tracked down the first known grunter in pro tennis, Victoria Heinicke. Also a brief history of grunting in both men’s and women’s tennis.
It is true that because of the shrieking, I stopped watching women’s tennis at some point.
Posted on September 22, 2011 with 15 notes
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As distance runner Joan Nesbit Mabe puts it, “a man can only become a faster man. A woman can become a man and get faster. They have a double boost. A woman who becomes more male, she’s basically not a woman.
An argument for resetting the world records for women’s track and field so only records after random dope testing remain. The gatekeeper International Association of Athletics Federations says there is a statute of limitation of 8 years in expunging records. If you set a record, then test positive or some doping evidence comes to light after 8 years, your record remains in the books no matter what. Is this fair?
Posted on September 9, 2011 with 8 notes
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I was laid off 2 days before my birthday in 2009, a dismal blessing. I miss health insurance and payroll, but I haven't bought bread since the pink slip because I have time to bake.
Sometimes I'm a serious job hunter, sometimes a serious slacker, but mostly, I'm an underemployed, freelance Jaqueline of many trades including writing and dogsitting. Either way, I scrapbook my finds and activities here for your benefit and amusement.
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