On The Water

I come from a stereotypical, Mediterranean family that values education, family bonding, cultural traditions and heart-healthy food! I grew up spending most of my energy in school, learning the Greek language, literature, history and religion in a painstaking way, practicing science every day, learning good English from elementary to senior high and playing classical music on the piano for over 10 years. My parents spent most of their time at work, struggling to make ends meet, saving and investing on properties for our future and providing us with the resources for an expensive education. With virtually no parents at home, I was mainly brought up by my grandmother who spent the majority of her days in our apartment cleaning it and tiding it up and cooking our daily meals. She was also my occasional shelter and support - both emotional and financial - during the crazy days of parental disagreement against my teenagehood decisions. This was a sweet, sheltered and well-rounded litt...

Professional athletes race to make a living. The sport of triathlon for professionals is brutal. Unless you are in the world top 10 rankings, making a living from race-award money is a tough pursuit. At the professional level, sponsors will provide endorsements of many sorts but the single most important thing to pay the bills is winning. And although there are many races out there that give options to the athletes, the level of competition just seems to get faster every year. At the amateur level, elite athletes usually race with a different motivation. Since amateur races do not provide cash rewards, why so many amateur athletes line every year to the start of hundreds of local, national and world races? One may categorize the amateur athletes in three groups. Athletes within each group have a completely different motivation for racing: 1. The "enthusiastic starter" type of athlete : this is probably the majority of the amateur athletes. They start with great desir...

I am definitely not the fastest swimmer in the field but I work hard, smart and persistently to improve my weakest discipline: swimming. Since I started triathlons, I had one and only one motivation line: "If you want to get better in a sport you have to be an athlete of the sport". Do you want to be a better swimmer? Then, you need to do what swimmers do.  Simple and straightforward. I understand that there is a lifelong debate whether triathletes gain benefits from learning how to flip turn or not. I am not a high-performance coach nor a high-performance triathlete to make definitive claims here but this is what I have gained over the years of practicing and doing flip turns consistently and constantly. Practicing flip turns will make you incredibly faster on race day! 1. You maintain the continuity, the momentum and the rhythm of your swim. To give you an example: comparing flip turns with open turns or with stopping at the end of each lane is lik...

Age group and amateur athletes share more characteristics with professional athletes than you may think. At the same time, amateur athletes lack features that professional athletes have mastered to perfection. In actuality, these features may play a much more significant role in success than plain physical parameters such as VO2 max, economy, lean muscle mass, metabolic efficiency and mental toughness. First, let's just try to see how success happens. Being successful as an athlete, amateur or professional alike, has nothing to do with the number of podium wins achieved. Podium wins are irrelevant. Whether you are an amateur athlete that has just started the sport or you have been doing it for a few or multiple years, whether you are a tier 2/3 (newbie) or a tier 1 (top 10 in the world) professional athlete, the podium does not define you. You can always find a relevant race somewhere in the world that you can probably earn a podium spot, regardless of your experience, level o...

Women athletes tend to be somehow more image-conscious than men. Their concerns mostly come from coaches pressure, peer pressure, athletic body stereotypes, modern society standards or just marketing, social media and advertisement. Here, I will not be the first nor the last to touch upon such a multi-angled topic and heavily discussed issue. I will talk briefly about weight and sports performance rather than weight and athletic image. These are two completely different things. If you are a female athlete and you are exercising to lose weight, this article is not for you at this point. If you are a female athlete and you are exercising for performance, hold on tight and read on. First and foremost, performance takes into account the duration/frequency/intensity of the required  training for a specific event, it differentiates the body weight from the fat percentage, and it takes into account the individuality of the athlete. All these parameters are hard to put into nu...

My goals for 2017 summarized in two sentences: I am racing my first marathon and I am aiming for a top place at the 2017 ITU long-course World Championships! After sitting down and assessing the 2016 season, Dave asked me the magic question: what do you want to do in 2017? I said, I felt I had a good race at the 2016 ITU long-course World Championships, but for some reason, I have an unfinished business out there. I did well but I did not feel I raced the race. So, we looked at the data and he decided that I lacked running training...he actually said that my 19mi run at the Worlds was not as bad as I thought to be taking into account my 20-25 mi weekly averages during my preparation. Dave said that the best way to put some volume on the run and let your body adapt to longer distances and that way be ready for speed work in spring/summer is to prepare for a marathon race. So, we divided the season into four chunks: 1. Pre-marathon volume build: Run : increase the weekly volume s...

If you are an endurance athlete and you have not tried the First Endurance products yet, let me clarify that what you will read below is a truthful opinion of my personal experience on collaborating with the company and on using their products. It is not biased  and it does not serve any kind of advertisement purposes. If you are an endurance athlete and you have tried the First Endurance products, you know that these products are made of high-quality ingredients and they actually work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I joined the First Endurance Research Board back in the early 2013 and since then, I have been loving every moment of scientific, non-scientific, athletic and non-athletic interaction with the company. My role in First Endurance is to conduct research on various topics that span the nutritional science and deal with the dietary demands of the endurance athlete. I am part of a ...