On The Water

Hold on tight and pay attention to this one! You workout hard and you improve your nutrition for optimal training and performance. You train your muscles, stretch them, feed them right, hydrate them, you do anything to get them the best oxygen transportation. If you think that it is all about your muscles* then you are WRONG! I was one of you out there till I faced a dreadful injury that put everything on hold for more than a year. As a scientist and as an athlete trying to resolve my mysterious injury (after excluding any possible injury or pathology), I had the chance to educate myself a little deeper. FASCIA: What is it? Fascia is a connective tissue network that basically surrounds muscles, bones and organs all over our body. Initially thought to play a passive role, fascia is considered nowadays one of the most powerful part of our body! It is designed to protect and lubricate organs, tissues, bones and muscles. It has strong biomechanical properties, it can contract, el...

It's been incredibly cold right? One of the reason lots of us moved down here was for the weather. But 6F (-15C) in the winter? Hm...not quite normal for Atlanta!It's been killing our fitness!!! Not so much tho... Here is a cool workout I enjoyed the other day. You don't need any heart rate monitors or crazy gadgets for that! If you don't have too much time, if you are a beginner or if you are coming back from an injury, this is a quick workout that may take you up to an hour or so and you can combine it with weight lifting and stretching at the end. Got my CycleOps trainer down to the gym of my apartment's complex and did: BIKE -10 min warm up, easy effort -5x2 min (1 min break) @ about 50-60 RPM* on my big chainring, steady effort (~60% of your max effort) -5x1 min (1 min break) @ about 80-90 RPM* on my big chainring, fast effort(~80% of your max effort) RUN 3mi run on the treadmill @1-2min/mi slower than race pace Weight lifting/Stretch...

My chronic injury that lasted almost a year and a half is finally giving up. I am happy, I can run and bike faster and further. Yet, last week, my knee let me down, and I thought: "Why?Why are you not letting me enjoy a completely pain free period of training?" Well ... guess what? If you are an elite age group athlete, who puts in about 25 to 30 hours of training each week, you will always have small aches and pains...like, always or almost always! Some serious ones some not so serious ones. I have an IT band syndrome (hey, it's one of the most common running inflammations!) and once every so often it hits me on the outside part of my meniscus. This means pain every time i flex my knee, pain when I go up and down the stairs or when I sit at my desk for too long. The well-known  RICE (Rest-Ice-Compression-Elevation) works miracles. One of the things my chronic injury taught me is how to deal with other major or minor injuries and how to work around them: 1. I...

This is from last year's interview (2013) of my coach at TriathlonWorld (TW) online magazine [ link ] Dave Williams has served as a Cross Country Head Coach at Flagler college for 14 years and a Swimming Head Coach at Episcopal High School and St. Augustine Swim Teams for 8 years. In a coaching career that spans over two decades, Dave Williams has earned 13 Coach of the Year awards while guiding teams to numerous conference and regional championships. While at Flagler, Williams has qualified an unprecedented 44 individuals to intercollegiate national championships. Williams has served on the Florida Swimming Technical Planning Committee, the NAIA Cross Country Rating Committee, seven terms as the Cross Country Chair for the Florida Sun Conference, and four terms as the Cross Country Chair for Region XIV. He is now the Associate Director of the Campus Recreational Center (CRC) of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA), which is the former host of the 1996 Olympic G...

I used to think that training to perform at your best will also make you look and feel fit all the time. Well, this is not quite true. At the 2011 Intercollegiate National Cross Country Championships An extreme example to what I am going to talk about in this post can be found in the bodybuilders. The sport of bodybuilding has a really tough lifestyle. The athletes have to balloon in size  most of the year and then trim down dramatically during competition. Most of the year they just look like really fat people. Do you have any idea what it takes in terms of nutrition, exercise and ability to combat with emotional swings in order to be a successful bodybuilder? It turns out that elite endurance athletes, who train and taper to compete in a way similar to bodybuilders, face similar challenges: they don't have to bulk up and then trim down to compete but instead, they have to build up and then go fast. They are not happy all the times and they certainly do not look fit and...

Sooooo...you hate kicking right? Me too! Up until I injured my shoulder two years ago (the typical rotator cuff injury from overuse). I was in such a pain that I couldn't sleep at nights and I couldn't move my arm above the head level without some kind of discomfort. Four months off swimming, physical therapy and trigger point dry needling (the last one hurt!) The only good thing that came out of it is that I learned how to kick! I was four months off swimming but my brilliant coach did not get me off the pool. I was doing all the swim practices with just kicking. All kinds of kicking: free, fly, breast, back, side, sprints, long sets, sets with flippers, sets with snorkel ... anything you can possibly imagine that a swimmer can do with or without a kickboard. Fun! Well, not so fun back then, but certainly fun now. Here is how my swimming got better after learning how to kick well: 1. Better body position in the water (hey am not drowning!) 2. Better hand entry in ...

Don't you ever have these moments that hearing of a single fact makes you think of the past and dream of the future in a tenth of a second? What I love the most during my training and racing period are the little things that can boost my confidence and motivate me every day. Things like, how awesome was that race I won two years ago, how much I struggled to get that 5K PR, how good I was in everything I was focusing to give myself 100%. One of those thoughts snapped me yesterday as I found out a cool fact about my former cycling career. I was not top-notch as a cyclist but at the same time I didn't have the chance or the time to develop as an athlete. The fire was there but never got lightened up. During my only 4 years of competitive cycling, I had the unique chance to finish 12th overall at the 2003 1st International Tour of Rhodes, a Cat 2/3 4-stage road race. I just found out that the overall winner of 2001 and 2002 was the now famous Fabian Cancellara, although b...