Suffer Fest

Around this same time every year it is customary to look back on the year that was and make resolutions for the upcoming year.  For many of us one of those resolutions comes in some form of living a healthier lifestyle.  Gym memberships will go through the roof and then by the end of January, 55-60% of them will stop being used.

This time last year, I was one who had stopped racing and therefore was lacking the motivation to just ride.  I had lost the desire and couldn't find the fun factor in racing so I found new hobbies.  Those new hobbies left my competitive side feeling unfulfilled.   I got back on the bike with a goal in mind.  I was going to attend a 12 hour race in Ohio and then possibly more after that if I enjoyed it.  I did enjoy it but I didn't do any other races the rest of the year.

Here we are and once again I am looking to set some goals for the upcoming year.  I have spent the last couple of days researching and debating which races I want to attend this year and which ones I do not.  I am beginning to narrow down the list but it looks like I will need to do some riding this year in order to accomplish them.

Instead of waiting for Jan 1 to come around like I did last year, I took the opportunity to do a fitness test last night.  With it being late (I actually kept Jenn from going to bed until I was done) I popped in the Spinerval Vol 27 Threshold Test / Suffer Fest.  The workout started with a couple of hard intervals before doing a 20 minute time trial at your threshold.

My legs felt stronger than I expected them to but my cardio just couldn't keep up.  It took no time for my heart rate to go into a zone 5 and it didn't leave it for the 20 minutes.  I am encouraged I was able to keep my cadence nearly the same for the entire test without changing gears.  Although I wasn't expecting great results from this first test with all the time off of the bike I have had in the last 6 months, I am expecting to learn a lot about my fitness levels as my training progresses.  I am going to do this test every 6 weeks throughout the year.  Hopefully it begins to become less of a complete suffer fest.

New sensor

Be careful of what you ask...

The Christmas season is always my favorite season of the year.  It is full of good food and a never ending supply of family.  Sadly most of them we haven't seen since the last holiday season.  Earlier in the month as I was putting up the lights outside and decorating the yard, I made the comment that we were the Griswald's in training.  Jenn didn't really like the idea of me turning the house into a tacky light tour stop but the decorations continue to grow each year.

As most of you will remember during nothing seemed to go right for the Griswalds in the movie.  That was not the sort of Christmas I was asking for when I said we were in training.  I just wanted our house to glow like theirs but it is exactly what we got.

When we awoke yesterday morning, we did so to a heating unit which would not turn on.  Lucky for us we live in a house built in the early 80's which still have the original windows which do anything but keep the inside temp in and outside out because it was 35 outside and 52 and dropping inside.  After not being able to figure out a quick fix we just decided we would worry about it later and head over for Christmas breakfast.  We weren't going to take the pups but we didn't want to strand them in the cold house all day so they jumped in the back and headed out with us.

Once we arrived, Sage decided he was going to go lap surfing and ran across the laps of 3 unsuspecting family members before getting to our Grandpa who was drinking a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper.  A split second later, the coffee is in his crotch and Sage is running for his life.

Moments later, our darling Petra is running around the living room with a poo covered elastic band hanging from here rear.  She had torn up a pair of my old sweatpants about a week earlier and it was finally ready to pass it.  Outside we ran followed by a lot of gagging.

After that things seemed to calm down and bit and the only thing we weren't sure of was the heat situation back at the house.  I was really hoping we would be able to return home and find a fuse blown or a reset button which needed to be hit up in the attic which we didn't have the time to check for before breakfast.  Once home Dad came over and we crawled up to the attic.  Sure enough one of the fuses on the inside unit had gone bad.  Now the living room was being heated by a few space heaters we took from our parent's houses.  I could finally relax.

Once I sat down I decided to balance the old checkbook since we had done a lot of spending the last couple of days.  Now, I'm upset because to the list of everything which had already gone wrong yesterday, I can now add identity theft.  A quick phone call to the bank has my account on hold while they investigate.

Luckily nothing else happened as I was able to just lay around for the rest of the evening and watch tv before falling to sleep. This morning I reflect back and I am extremely thankful for all the love and support we have in our life.  I am also thankful Dad just brought us a new fuse for the heat!  Merry Christmas everyone!

Tuesday Night Track Run

Just like most Tuesday nights I tagged along with Jenn to her workout with the EF crew.  Once we arrived we found the track in less than prime condition.  It was still covered in an icy slush and where it wasn't icy it was soft like peanut butter.  Now because I am not part of the team I usually do my own thing while Jenn works out with the team and coaches.   They took the party off into a neighborhood across the street and I stayed on the track.

A big part of me thought it was not a great idea to run in such conditions.  My biggest fear was slipping on the ice and falling.  I was also worried about how my knees would like running on such unvaried terrain.  Since I was there I decided to go ahead and put in the work while I had a slight bit of motivation to endure the cold.  I was glad to see my lungs didn't mind the cold and my knees held up to the challenge. 

My hip flexors however didn't fare so well.  Once they begun to hurt a bit I eased up finished the mile I was on and then walked a lap before I started to stretch.  My flexibility was once described as slightly better than a steel bar so I am not sure why my hips hurt me to the point where I cannot sleep the night following a run.  One of these days I will have to start listening to my body as it wants to react differently to the abuses as it is getting older.

The Performance Enhancer of the Future?

 A conversation with a Team in Training teammate last night about stretching sent me looking for the link to the article I re-posted here back in October.  Not only did I find it, but I also found another article which was just posted on Wired.com about a future performance enhancer which I found quite interesting.

The Next Sports Performance-Enhancement Fad? Blood Pressure Cuffs

• By Brian Mossop
• December 17, 2010

Forget illicit drugs and questionable supplements. New research suggests that a small, constrictive band that wraps around an athlete’s arms or legs may lead the next wave of performance-enhancing fads in competitive sports.
A study published this month in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise demonstrated that highly trained swimmers that used a blood pressure cuff to restrict blood flow to their arms a few minutes before maximum-effort time trials improved their performance in a 100-meter race by 0.7 seconds. The study team was led by Greg Wells and Andrew Redington at the the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
So, in just a few minutes’ time and with minimal effort, athletes were able to significantly boost their performance, making gains that — according to the authors — would normally take an average of two years of intense training to accomplish.
The study builds off research first conducted in the 1980s by cardiovascular pioneer Keith Reimer that examined infarcts, areas of dead cardiac tissue that resulted after heart attacks, when blood flow (and, hence, oxygen) were cut off for extended periods of time. Reimer and his colleagues discovered that much less heart muscle deteriorated when the tissue had previously experienced a few training sessions where blood flow was slightly reduced.
It was as if practice makes perfect, and the previous bouts of low blood flow, which researchers refer to as ischemic preconditioning, primed the heart muscle to endure more serious, even catastrophic, events. When a life-threatening heart attack transpired, instead of shriveling away, the preconditioned heart muscle seemed to stand strong.
In 2009, a research team led by Maria Hopman from Radbound University in the Netherlands posed a question: If Reimer’s team was able to use ischemic preconditioning to protect the cardiac muscle during a heart attack, would the technique protect different types of muscle tissue from the stress and damage that occurs during another type of ischemic event, like exercise?
Though immensely different than a heart attack, exercise is technically an ischemic event, as athletic performance hinges on how much blood reaches a tissue. And insufficient blood flow, which also translates to reduced oxygen and nutrient delivery, can be one factor that limits exercise duration and intensity.
Hopman recruited 15 healthy, trained cyclists, asking each participant to complete two maximum effort bicycling tests, where the intensity was slowly ramped up over time. But before one of the bicycling tests, the subjects underwent three 5-minute rounds where an inflatable cuff, similar to what’s used to measure blood pressure, limited the circulation to their legs, followed by a five-minute rest period where the cuff was deflated.
The researchers found that the subjects performed better when they underwent ischemic preconditioning before the exercise trial, touting gains in both maximum power (1.6 percent) and peak oxygen consumption (3 percent).
Yet, the performance improvements were not due to differences in heart rate, respiration or lactate levels, all of which seemed to stay the same, regardless if ischemic preconditioning was used or not. Rather, it seemed possible that the ischemic preconditioning treatment may have given the participants their edge.
While Hopman’s work recorded the benefits conferred to the average athlete, the latest research from Wells and Redington pushes the understanding of ischemic preconditioning one step further, looking at whether the technique works in elite athletes, a group whose bodies run with machine-like efficiency.
Using a group of 16 to 18 swimmers who previously competed at the national or international level, the research team devised a double-blind crossover study where the same athletes swam mid-intensity and maximum-effort trials, but on two different days.
To counterbalance one of the main criticisms of the earlier studies conducted by Hopman — that the study design potentially allowed the placebo effect to creep in, inadvertently making participants try harder when they had an inflatable cuff strapped to their legs preceding exercise — Wells and Redington decided to alter their protocol: On both days of the experiment, a cuff would be inflated on every athlete’s arm. On one day, to induce ischemic preconditioning, the cuff would be pumped up enough to surpass the systolic blood pressure, slowing the flow of blood to the arms for four cycles of five minutes. The other day, the cuff was still inflated, but only enough to slightly squeeze the muscles for each 5-minute period, which provided a better sham, or control condition, than Hopman used.


Yet it seems that ischemic preconditioning is not a placebo effect at all. Similar to the Hopman’s findings in average, healthy volunteers, Wells and Redington found that when elite athletes used ischemic preconditioning before the maximum-effort trials, they swam faster. In fact, the athletes bettered their personal records by 1.1 percent on average.
And just as Hopman observed, the performance boost was not a result of heart rate or blood lactate-level differences. Consequently, ischemic preconditioning had no effect on the less rigorous, mid-intensity trials.
All of the researchers investigating ischemic preconditioning seem to agree that temporarily reducing the blood flow to a tissue causes protective molecules to be released into the bloodstream. But many are still scratching their heads as to why.
Hopman thinks ischemic preconditioning may cause vessels to dilate once blood starts flowing again, increasing nutrient and oxygen delivery to the formerly deprived tissue. Wells and Redington, on the other hand, think altered metabolism of mitochondria — the energy powerhouses of muscle cells — may contribute to more energy available for exercise.

Though the exact mechanism of ischemic preconditioning may not be known, it hasn’t stopped researchers from commercializing their discovery. On the published paper from Wells and Redington’s lab, a few of the study’s co-authors are listed as shareholders in a company called CellAegis, whose website says it is patenting “non-invasive technology to protect the heart from injury during heart attacks and medical/surgical procedures.”
And U.S. patent application 20100292619, co-assigned to the Hospital for Sick Children and CellAegis and processed last month, lists Andrew Redington as an inventor on a new device (seen above) that uses “methods for enhancing physical performance without requiring repetitive training,” with claims that ischemic preconditioning can be used to enhance maximal performance in physical activity.
If further research validates the findings from Hopman’s lab and the work of Wells and Redington, a new era of performance-enhancing devices could soon hit the market. And once again, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) will have to decide what to do with these devices.
The controversy around ischemic preconditioning devices could prove eerily reminiscent of the debate surrounding altitude training tents in 2006. WADA initially viewed these tents, which simulate a low-oxygen, or hypoxic, environment, as unsportsmanlike, since they required “no investment of skill or effort beyond entering a room or tent, donning a mask and flipping a switch.”
WADA eventually granted their use, no doubt at least partly due to the difficulty in enforcing such a ban.
Humans are fast approaching their physical limits. And as more research unfolds and inventions emerge, biology may have to nestle into its secondary role in sports. At least for now, it seems that technology is in the driver’s seat.

Image: Flickr/jasleen_kaur, CC

 The Mayne Event with Buffalo Bills Safety Bryan Scott

 Welcome to the Holidays!

 The Holidays aren't the Holidays without egg nog.

 They were outside before Jenn got home.

Griswald's in the making...

 

Our first of many trees from an actual lot