On The Water

The first symptoms showed up at the local 10k, January 2012. Sharp pain below the right rib cage. "Just a side stitch" I thought. Then the pain came back at a local triathlon race. And again at running intervals and at long runs and eventually every time I was attempting to jog! I lost the 2013 racing season doing the "hospital crawl", visiting various docs and specialists and going over all the exams and tests you can possibly imagine without success. At the end of the 2013 season, I could not jog at all: I actually thought I wouldn't be able to ever run again! Then I met Nathan Henderson , a really great massage therapist, who undertook my case and slowly brought me back to life. Nathan utilized various techniques, like rolfing and deep tissue massage, he re-aligned my pelvis and spine, released my psoas and opened up my rib cage. At the start of the 2014 season, I got optimistic: I was running again and I was making racing plans. I got exciting supporters a...

If you want to run a faster 5K or a marathon or just get better in the running leg of a triathlon you gotta learn to tune with your body and understand what is often called, perceived effort. The majority of the runners out there start out a little faster than they can maintain over the course of the race and gradually slow down their pace or fade out. They may run a fast time this way but the question is: could it be faster with negative splitting? There has been lots of discussion on the subject over the years and there are lots of examples on elite athletes racing with different strategies. Excluding the exceptions (exceptions always exist to general rules) most records have been broken either by even splitting or negative splitting. The latter is what describes the time of the second half being faster than the time of the first half. And this is hard to accomplish. Understanding how fast you should go during the first half so that you can save a tiny bit to run the second ...

My racing season has not officially started yet as my rehab plan is still on, but I do train a bit and I do have to complete some key races in order to monitor my rehab progress and get the green light for the start of the season. One of those races was the 2014 Duathlon Regional Championships last Saturday. I got into the race day feeling great. I had been running totally pain free (from my abdominal/psoas pain) the past two weeks and my goal for the race was to enjoy a fast pace without having to suffer any side-stiching-like pain. I chose the standard distance 10k run-40k bike-5k run. The race course was really technical with lots of hills and ups and downs both on the run and on the bike. Despite the difficulties, the roads were magnificent and the run portion had stretches of trail running into the woods, which was really awesome. Once we started, I zoomed in and felt ok for the first 4mi then I started feeling weak but nothing to worry about. On a 10k run, things start ...

Maturing as an athlete is a lot more than just getting faster or becoming more efficient. I believe that what makes an athlete mature is a great mindset.  From my own small-world perspective, my athletic attitude has changed dramatically over the years. I remember my first season that started in October 2011: I was restless. I wanted to train every day. The more the better. I was getting excited with every little success, from clocking faster 5K times every month to winning the smallest local race in town. I was also getting depressed easily: whenever my knee was hurting or my shoulder was pinching. I was becoming really pessimistic if I had to take time off training in order to deal with smaller or bigger injuries. I remember I was crying for days when I had to stop swimming for nearly 4 months to rehab my left shoulder from chronic rotator cuff injury: I went to the 2012 Collegiate Nationals having practiced 0 swimming for 4 months (I finished 4th overall). The majo...

I am sure you have heard over and over again how yoga can benefit your endurance sports ambitions. I was myself among those who were reading and hearing about the power of yoga but never really wanted to give it a shot. I was kind of feeling a little out of the whole yoga-spiritual-relaxation kind of attitude. Up until I was suggested to try it by my doctor. I finally have a sort of diagnosis about my chronic injury and an action plan. I have a soft-tissue injury in the connective tissue between my psoas and my illiacus (something that apparently is not detectable with any current visualization methods: MRI, CT scans, Ultrasounds, etc). Lots of reasons may have caused that over the years: office-work lifestyle (I have been reading, writing and working at a desk for as long as I remember myself-from my elementary school years till now), trauma, accidents, etc. Over the years, the lifestyle or an accident or a trauma (which I had so many as a cyclist) had created imbalances that favo...

When it comes to training and racing for a goal or some few goals for the season, things do not always go right. They go left, up or down. Shopping for "going right" this year. Anybody? I spent last year in the shadows, training and racing minimally and trying to fix a problem that killed my running. After tons of exams that only proved my body is in perfect condition and after spending a good amount of six months on the massage table in the hands of Nathan Handerson, I finally got it under control. I got optimistic, I thought that all of my patience and persistence have finally paid off. I started running some pre-season races pain-free. Yes! I thought I got it! Unfortunately, timing is not always right. I am still on the roller-coaster train. Sometimes I am racing pain free and other times with some pain. So, things are not yet right 100%. Therefore, my scheduled training periods have started getting canceled and I started going south. But only for a little while. T...

Yesterday, I came across this recent publication in the Association for Psychological Science, written by Hambrick and Meinz*. Quite successfully, the authors illustrate their arguments on the oh-so-debatable, "talent" vs "hard work" for success and performance. The first to introduce this debate scientifically was Dr. Ericsson from Florida State University in 1996. To remind you or inform you if you haven't heard, Ericsson's theory is based on the concept that one needs 10,000 hours in order to acquire expert performance in a field of science, music, art, sport or other complex domains. (more: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html ) I will not overload you with technical terms and complicated graphs but I will just discuss a little how perplex this matter is. Based on their own research and on a series of experiments, Hambrick and Meinz, conclude that basic abilities (i.e., "talent") can predict success but acquired characteristics (i...