Today is the official publication date of 50/50, the new book by ultramarathon man Dean Karnazes. Why am I telling you this? Because I wrote it! After the surprising success of his first book, Dean became a huge international celebrity, creating a demand for a follow-up book but leaving him with no time to actually write it. So Dean approached me and asked whether I would help him with it. Of course I would!

The book is about the North Face Endurance 50, Dean’s challenge to run a marathon in each of the 50 states in just 50 days, which he completed in September and October of 2006. Our method of collaboration in telling the story was simple: Each day I would call Dean and ask him to tell him everything he remembered about one of the 50 marathons. I would shape his memories into a written narrative and then send it to him to massage and “make his own”. We put them all together over the course of just a few months and had our book. Voila.

It came out well, I think. We knew it would be a bad idea to try to make the book “Ultramarathon Man II.” It had to do its own thing, and it does. I think it tells a very interesting story–Dean had a lot of remarkable experiences in those seven weeks–but it also has a more practical orientation than Ultramarathon Man. It is full of the lessons Dean learned along the way and advice for other runners that is based on what has worked for him.

So pick up a copy; you won’t be disappointed!

I had a lot of fun doing the live commentary for the nbcolympics.com coverage of the Olympic women’s triathlon last night. I have no idea whether or not I did a good job, but I don’t think I could have enjoyed the work as much as I did if I’d been stinking up the joint!

I was very impressed with the whole operation at nbcolympics.com here in Stamford, Connecticut. I was so well supported with technology, production, research and human assistance that I had little to do besides watch the damn race like everyone else and type out the stuff I was thinking (and would have been thinking anyway if I had merely been watching the coverage at home for my own amusement). Of course, I had to assume that my audience was not comprised of triathlon experts, so my approach was actually more like that which I used in watching the women’s marathon with my mom a couple of nights earlier: that is, I mixed my own reactions with basic explanations and background information that helped my mom, not a running expert, better appreciate what she was seeing.

The men’s triathlon is tonight at 10 PM EDT. I would like to invite all who are reading this to submit general, relevant questions to me before the race or more specific questions during the race to be answered in my text commentary. It’s my way of giving shout-outs to a few of you who do me the honor of reading this blog. Just submit your questions as comments on this post. Include your first name and geographical location. If I get more than a few questions I cannot promise to answer all of them, but I will do my best. 

Did you enjoy the live coverage of the incredible Olympic women’s 10,000 meters? Of course not, because there was none. Not in this country. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as this is the way it has always been, but now that the Internet era has reached full maturity, I did expect more.

NBC will at least show the usual first and last five minutes of the race tonight on television. Yipee. I suppose their calculation was that the general Olympics watcher they target would be interested enough in the event to watch 10 minutes of it well after it had actually taken place, but that there were not enough serious running fans out there to make it worth NBC’s while to show the event live either on television or on the Internet. Of course, they could have shown it live on the Internet even assuming that not many people would be interested in viewing it, because they had cameras rolling there and they have the bandwidth to show as much live stuff as they want, but since they did plan to show part of the race on tape delay on television they did not want to turn away viewers by “spoiling the surprise” through live Internet coverage 10 hours earlier.

I don’t think this calculation makes much sense. The general Olympics fan is not going to skip watching the evening broadcast just because the outcome of an event he or she has only a passing interest in was revealed on the Internet 10 hours earlier, while the serious running fan may well skip the broadcast because the outcome is old news (as one can always get the results or get live text coverage on the Internet even if there’s no video coverage). After all, we running fans are just like fans of any sport. Even the most hard-core baseball fan won’t watch nine innings of a game that took place yesterday. And I think there are more serious fans in this country than NBC apparently does.

I just think NBC made a bad call here. Maybe the fact that an American won a medal and broke a record in a thrilling, gutsy performance that none of her countrymen got to enjoy in full and in real time will make them realize that they made a mistake. And just maybe in 2012 they will not longer treat running fans like the Rodney Dangerfields of sports fans.

Everyone is talking about the Olympic men’s 100-meter finals, in which a dream matchup of the current world record holder (Jamaica’s Usain Bolt), the previous world record holder (Bolt’s countryman Asafa Powell) and the reigning world champion (American Tyson Gay) is anticipated. Believe me, I’m excited for this one, too. But as a distance geek, the Olympic event I am most eagerly anticipating is the final of the women’s 5000 meters.

In this event (barring any unforeseeable catastrophe in the semifinal), which will take place on Friday, August 22 (Beijing time), Ethiopians Meseret Defar and Tirunesh Dibaba will go head to head.  Defar is the defending gold medalist in this event. Dibaba is the defending bronze medalist (but she was only a child of 19 in Athens). Defar has won 13 of 22 previous matchups between the two women. But Dibaba stole Defar’s 5000m world record earlier this summer, and in a subsequent desperate attempt to reclaim it, Defar came up one second short. And to top it all off, Dibaba and Defar genuinely despise one another.

Olympic middle-distance and distance races are often slow, tactical, and boring. This one will be a barn-burner from the gun–I guarantee it.

And then there are the Americans. Three U.S. women have a legitimate shot at snatching the bronze, about half a lap behind the Ethiopians. Shalane Flanagan holds the American record at 5000 meters, but Kara Goucher and Jen Rhines both beat her in the Olympic Trials.

Don’t miss the semifinal rounds of the women’s 5000 meters, which take place on Tuesday, August 19. And note that Dibaba, Flanagan and Goucher are also doubling in the 10,000m, which takes place this Friday night, Beijing time, Thursday morning for us.

Be sure to log onto www.nbcolympics.com at 10:00 pm EDT on Sunday, September 17 for live video and text coverage of the women’s Olympic triathlon. I will be providing the text commentary. Log on the next night ant the same time for the men’s race.

I’ve never done anything quite like this before, but I think I’m ready. Ever since I received the invitation from Runner’s World editor-in-chief David Willey (NBC is partnering with Rodale Publishing for this element of their Olympics coverage) I have been conducting research and gathering notes to support my commentary. (Did you know that U.S. Olympic Triathlon Team member Julie Ertel already has a silver medal in water polo from the 2000 Games?) I feel like Al Trautwig!

I can’t wait to pass through security at NBC Studios in Stamford, Connecticut and see what it’s like on the inside. It was lucky that I just happened to have planned a visit to my parents’ home in nearby Rhode Island at this time so I could take advantage of this opportunity, as I don’t think Rodale would have paid to fly me from California.

Incidentally, since I am on vacation at present, my blogging may be spotty over the next several days.

Solutions for the Hamstrung

Tight hamstrings are a common cause of injuries and inefficiency in various activities. Fortunately, correcting them is as easy as 1-2-3.

By Matt Fitzgerald

Begin with a simple test. Stand up, bend forward at the waist, and try to touch your fingertips to your toes without bending your knees.  If you can’t, then your hamstrings — the muscles running along the back of your thigh — are probably tighter than they should be. Consequently, you have an elevated risk for low back pain and knee injuries, and your performance in sports and exercise may be compromised.  Fortunately, by incorporating a few simple techniques into your exercise program, you can quickly loosen your hamstrings and thereby reduce your injury risk and improve performance.

Why Can’t I Touch My Toes?

An important job of the hamstrings is to relax and lengthen when you’re trying to lift your thigh or straighten your knee. Having tight hamstrings means you’re unable to lift your thigh (or bend your trunk toward your thigh) or straighten your knee as fully or easily as you should be able to. According to Greg Roskopf, founder of Muscle Activation Techniques (www.muscleactivation.com), based in Greenwood Village, Colo., the toe-touching test described above is not a clinical method of diagnosing tight hamstrings. “But it’s a fairly reliable self-test,” he says.

Why do some people have tighter hamstrings than others?  “Some people are just born with shorter hamstrings,” says Sarah Wiley, associate director of strength and conditioning at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. But even when the hamstrings are not naturally tight, they often become tight to compensate for weakness or instability elsewhere in the body. “Specifically, tight hamstrings are often an indication of weak lower abdominal muscles and/or weak lower back muscles,” says Paul Goldberg, MS, RD, CSCS, who serves as the strength and conditioning coach of the Colorado Avalanche hockey team.

All three of these muscle groups — the lower abdominals, the low back muscles, and the hamstrings — attach to the pelvis. The lower abdominal and low back muscles tend to tilt the pelvis forward, whereas the hamstrings tend to tilt the pelvis backward. If either the lower abdominal muscles or the low back muscles are weak (which is quite common), these muscles will not be able to counterbalance the pull of the hamstrings, which will shorten and tighten as they tilt the pelvis backward.

The hamstrings often tighten in response to a previous injury, either to the hamstrings themselves or another part of the body, such as the low back.

The Painful Consequences

There are worse problems than tight hamstrings, but they do have three unfortunate consequences.

Low back pain: Because the hamstrings attach to the pelvis, when they are tight they pull back on the pelvic bone, creating a backward tilt of the pelvis that puts strain on the lower back. “I see a lot of low back pain in my athletes with tight hamstrings,” says Wiley.

Joint Injuries: Tight hamstrings often alter movement patterns during sports and exercise activities, which may put excessive strain on certain joints. “It’s like having bad alignment on your car,” says Roskopf. “Eventually you get increased wear and tear on the joints.”  A good example is bicycling, an activity in which tight hamstrings cause some cyclists to ride with their knees splayed wide, which puts torsional strain on the knees, often causing injury.

Inefficient movement: Tight hamstrings reduce the efficiency of sports and exercise movements in two ways. First, they limit range of motion, which, for example, limits stride length and therefore speed during running. Tight hamstrings are also unable to relax properly during thigh lifting and leg straightening movements, creating internal resistance against these movements.

Three Ways to Loosen Up

Increasing hamstrings flexibility isn’t difficult. All it requires is that you slightly modify your workouts to incorporate three types of exercises that are known to lengthen and relax the hamstrings: dynamic warm-up exercises, corrective strength training, and post-workout stretching.

1. Dynamic Warm-up Exercises

Dynamic warm-up exercises are movements that actively stretch the muscles that will be required to elongate in a workout.  These types of exercises stimulate the nervous system, preparing it for the movements to come, and elevate the core body temperature, increasing the pliability of the muscles and connective tissues. “Doing dynamic warm-up exercises may not help you overcome tight hamstrings immediately,” says Wiley, “but it helps you work out with a fuller range of motion, which will lead to improvement over time.”
 Dynamic warm-up exercises also reduce the likelihood of hamstrings strains during subsequent high-intensity training. Here are two dynamic warm-up exercises that Wiley recommends doing before each workout. Do five to 10 minutes of light, non-stretching activity (such as stationary cycling) before doing these exercises.

Tilt Walk

From a standing position, take one step forward and balance on the forward foot. Tilt your torso forward at the waist until your trunk is parallel to the floor. Extend your free leg behind you for balance. Return to an upright position and then step forward with the opposite foot and tilt once more. Continue for 30 seconds.

Frankensteins

Begin in a standing position with both arms extended straight in front of you like Frankenstein’s monster. Begin walking slowly forward by kicking each leg forward as high as possible, aiming to touch your right toe to your right palm and your left toe to your left palm. Keep your legs as straight as possible and don’t let your trunk flex forward. Continue for 20 to 30 seconds.

2. Corrective Strength Training

There are two types of strength exercises that you can use to overcome tight hamstrings. First, you can strengthen the muscles whose weakness tends to cause the hamstrings to tighten as a compensatory reaction. As these muscles gain strength, your hamstrings will naturally relax. In particular, focus on strengthening the muscles of the lower abdomen and the low back. Good examples are reverse crunches for the lower abs, back hyperextensions for the low back, and full sit-ups for the hip flexors.

A second type of corrective exercise for tight hamstrings targets the hamstrings themselves. Specifically, Wiley recommends doing weighted exercises that require eccentric hamstrings contractions (where your hamstrings resist their own lengthening, such as during the lowering phase of a squat) through a full range of motion. Says Wiley, “Using weight to force a muscle stretch seems to do a better job of producing an adaptive response [i.e., improved flexibility] than regular stretching.” A good example of this type of exercise is the forward lunge, where you take a large step forward and then slowly bend both knees until the knee of your back leg almost touches the floor.

3. Post-workout Active Stretching

The best time to stretch your hamstrings (and other tight muscles) in more traditional ways is after your workout. “You can’t get a good quality stretch when the muscles are cold,” says Goldberg. But even now there are better options than conventional static stretches such as toe touches. Numerous research studies have shown that active stretching techniques such as active isolated stretching and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching produce faster and greater improvements in range of motion.

PNF Hamstrings Stretch

Lie face up with your left leg on the floor and you right leg elevated.  Loop a towel around the heel of your right foot and hold the ends in your hands.  Lift your right leg as high as you can without bending your knee.  Pull gently on the ends of the towel to maintain this position.  Hold the stretch for 15 seconds and then contract your hamstrings as though you’re trying to pull your leg back to the floor, but keep your leg from moving by pulling on the towel.  Hold this contraction for 6 seconds and then relax your hamstrings and contract your quadriceps, pulling your leg a little farther toward your head.  Hold this enhanced stretch for another 15 seconds and relax.  Now repeat this sequence with the left leg.

Active Isolated Hamstrings Stretch

Lie on your back with both legs bent. Begin with one foot resting flat on the floor and the other leg elevated so that the thigh is perpendicular to the floor and the shin is parallel to the floor. Loop a strap or rope around the bottom of this foot and grasp the two segments together in your stretching-side hand next to your knee. By contracting your quadriceps, straighten the rope-looped leg completely. Pull toward your head on the rope until you feel a good stretch in your hamstrings. Hold it for one to two seconds and relax. Repeat this stretch a total of 10 times, then stretch the opposite leg.

Do one or two post-workout hamstrings stretches two or three times per week, along with some stretches for other tight muscles you may have. Add some dynamic warm-up stretches before every workout. And whenever you do a lower-body strength workout, be sure to include one or two exercises that require your hamstrings to lengthen against resistance through a full range of motion. If you’re consistent in these efforts, your hamstrings you’ll be touching your toes and enjoying the other benefits of optimally functioning hamstrings soon!

Hamstring Strains

Many athletes and exercisers believe that tight hamstrings predispose them to hamstring strains, or sudden, painful tearing of muscle fibers during intense activity. This is not exactly the case. 

Hamstrings strains almost always occur during eccentric contractions of the hamstrings — that is, when the hamstrings are trying to resist their own lengthening, as during the lowering phase of a squat exercise. They most often occur when the hamstrings are stretched beyond their normal resting length while trying to contract. The best example is during sprinting, when you lift the thigh of your leading leg very high, stretching the hamstrings, and then suddenly contract the hamstrings to move your thigh back toward the midline of your body as you prepare for foot-ground contract.

It’s not hamstring tightness, per se, but poor eccentric strength of the hamstrings that leaves one prone to a strain at such moments. The best defense against hamstrings strains, along with a dynamic warm-up, is to regularly perform eccentric hamstrings strengthening exercises such as weighted squats. A study of elite Swedish female soccer players found that a preseason program of eccentric hamstrings strengthening reduced the incidence of hamstring strains by more than 300 percent.

I’m currently working on an article about overtraining for one of my commercial clients, and it got me thinking once again about the difference between overreaching and overtraining. Do you know the difference?

Overtraining itself is defined in a variety of ways. I make a distinction between overtraining syndrome, a serious illness of the neuroendocrine and immune systems that affects elite athletes almost exlusively, and garden variety overtraining, which is a decline in performance over a period of more than a week that occurs ”despite” (really because of) consistent, intensive training (as opposed to slacking off).

Overreaching, then, is simply controlled, intentional overtraining. It is purposefully taking on more training stress than your body can adequately absorb over the period of a week or two and then significantly reducing the training load to permit full recovery and adaptation. During a period of overreaching, fatigue accumulates and workout performance stagnates and eventually begins to dip. But the process is not allowed to get out of hand. Just when the body is one step from the precipice, the athlete pulls the ripcord (to mix metaphors) and enjoys some well-earned relative rest.

What is the point of overreaching? When done right, it yields a big increase in fitness. So does training in a more cautiously progressive manner, but I believe that the two methods are complementary. In the normal course of training, you get more out of individual key workouts, which are usually done in a fairly rested state so that you can perform at a high level in them. In a period of overreaching, it’s no longer the individual workouts that matter so much; rather, it’s the cumulative stress imposed by training hard every day.

I couldn’t speculate about the physiological details of the differences in how the body adapts to progressive training and overreaching, but those differences  certainly exist. What I do know is that one must overreach sparingly. I do it once or twice only per training cycle.

I had a great time at my “Brain Training” seminar at Petranek Fitness in Santa Monica last night. Some 40 men and women paid $45 apiece to attend, which was stunning to me because none of these people new anything about me. They were just interested in my topic.

And boy were they interested. I’ve never spoken before a more enthusiastically engaged audience. I had a whole outline planned for the two-hour presentation, but I wound up abandoning it after 20 minutes, when the questions started flying. The event took on a life of its own, and I stepped back and allowed it to go where it wanted to go.

Petranek Fitness is a CrossFit facility, and the CrossFit ethos is all about mind over matter, developing and exercising mental toughness, and overcoming self-imposed limits. Several of those in attendance remarked that my seminar provided theoretical validation for CrossFit’s philosophy and methodologies. “This is CrossFit!” said one of them, all but slapping his forehead.

Because my schtick went over so well, and because I did not get to cover everything I planned to cover, the facility’s owner, Andy Petranek, suggested I come back sometime for a second seminar. He also suggested that I could do my brain training thing at CrossFit facilities across the country and expect a similar reception at each.

That got me thinking… If I were so inclined, I could turn brain training into a business. I could write a more general brain training book that applied to all sports, travel around the country giving seminars and clinics, and perhaps even develop a brain training certification program. It would be the sports psychology equivalent of Nicholas Romanov’s POSE Running enterprise.

I have no doubt it could fly. The new neuroscience of exercise performance is mind-blowing stuff. There are so many cool experiments and findings out there that most athletes and fitness enthusiasts know nothing about. And the practical implications–the actual brain training methods suggested by the science–are of tremendous and immediate value.

But I don’t think I ever will realize this vision, for one simple reason: I’m a writer first and foremost. If I were traveling and giving seminars and training brain trainers all the time, I would be writing none of the time, and that would make me miserable. I would much rather write about new and different things than incessantly preach the doctrine of something I’ve written already. That’s just who I am.

But I will be happy to visit Petranek Fitness again to finish what I started there. It’s a happy place.

This morning a gentleman named Henry Siegel visited the offices of the Competitor Group, where I do my 9 to 5. He brought with him several Delta Pulse machines, which are used for something called pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. The business end of the machine is a hose-like tube that ends in a loop inside of which an electromagnetic field is created. The idea is to position the tube around or against a painful body part and let the magic happen.

I placed the tube against my painful left hamstring. When Siegel turned on the machine I immediately began to feel a pleasant throbbing that reached all the way down to my femur.  The treatment lasted 15 minutes. After turning off the machine Siegel asked me to stand and stretch the affected muscle to determine whether there was any change in the level of pain. Before the treatment I was conscious of soreness even when sitting still. After the treatment I felt no pain, but instead a bit of numbness, even when I stretched the muscle.

Siegel was honest and told me that the soreness would probably return, at least partially, within a few hours. He said it usually takes several treatments to clear up a problem such as mine. Unfortunately, there will be no follow-up treatments for me because Siegel was just making a quick promotional visit and is already on his way back to LA.

He left behind some literature explaining how the machine works. It reads much like the supportive literature for various other alternative healing methods that don’t actually work. I’m withholding judgment, though, because I really know nothing about it. I am very curious to find out how my hammy feels when I run later today.

Ever Raced a 30K?

Earlier this week I received an email from Doug Klingensmith, director of the Labor Day 30K, which takes place in Milford, MI, on August 30, which is actually two days before Labor Day. Doug suggested that it represents a good chance for runners preparing for fall marathons to “test their marathon pace,” and I agree. So if you are in fact training for a fall marathon and you don’t yet have plans for Labor Day weekend, consider making a trip to Milford.

I never cease to be amazed by how difficult it is to predict how well I will run on any given day. Sure, there are some days when I just know I’ll feel terrible, like this past Monday, when I did a couple of recovery runs coming off a 36-mile weekend. And more often than not I predictably feel and perform at least decently when I do a hard run after two or three relatively ease days which themselves follow some harder training. But not infrequently I feel and perform surprisingly poorly in these runs in which I should run well. It happened a couple of weeks ago when I set out to do a 10K tempo run in a fairly fresh state and had to abandon it halfway through.

I don’t think I’m abnormal in this regard. The other day U.S. Olympic marathoner Brian Sell made the following comment in a “Brief Chat” on runnersworld.com:

I’ll have runs where I feel there’s no way I’m going to get through it, and it ends up being a pretty quick one and I’m feeling pretty strong. And there are other days when I take a day off from work and I take a nap and think “I’m going to feel great” and I go out and just slog through it. It’s a day to day thing.

A year or two ago I wrote an article on tapering for Triathlete in which I speculated that, historically, it took athletes in all endurance sports a very long time to develop the tapering methods we consider standard today because day-to-day endurance performance is so unpredictable that the relationship between restedness and performance was in no way obvious to them.

Why is this so? As usual, I look to the brain for an answer. Your brain makes decisions about how hard to let you run on any given day by assessing signs of lingering fatigue such as muscle damage levels, stress hormone levels and so forth in the context of the degree of running stress you conciously plan to impose on your body that day and perhaps in the coming days. When your brain determines that you risk overreaching by training as hard as planned, it will make you feel terrible and limit muscle activation so that your times are disappointing. If it determines that you are up to the planned task it will make you feel good and allow a level of muscle activation that is commensurate to your actual fitness level. The nature of your brain’s information gathering from bodily feedback and concious intentions is very complex, as are the calculations based on this aggregated information, and that’s why predicting how well you will perform in your next run is as difficult as predicting the future of the stock market.

There is an interesting theory that chronic fatigue syndrome represents this mechanism of the brain choosing to protectively inhibit activity gone haywire. Just this week there was a study published that provided evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Researchers from the University of Regina found that impaired exercise capacity in CFS patients correlated with lower levels of cerebral oxygenation as compared to healthy controls. In healthy persons, low cerebral oxygenation also causes fatigue but only does so when there is a legitimate underlying cause, such as heavy demand for oxygen in the working muscles.