Holiday Food

Cookies

The holidays are upon us. If we aren’t careful they will be on top of us, in front of us, and adding to our girth. Instead plan on developing and following a healthy diet for 2012.

The Bacon meme has embedded itself in the Internet over the past few years. So instead of just bacon with your eggs (or turkey bacon if you want to pretend to be healthier) and bacon meatloaf, you can find veggie bacon or “fakon” if you look. But that doesn’t make for good fodder for the Internet.

So, we’ve found Chocoloate, Peanutbutter, Bacon cookies. Now, of course we don’t recommend this as a staple in your diet. But, it does make for a colorful looking cookie. I’m not sure exactly what flavor would dominate.

You’ll have to go far beyond the bacon meme to mix your exercise program with a healthy diet. You may start with the cake vs. pie question and make sure during the holiday season you go with one or the other and not both. And that it is a small portion at that!

The Source of Chocolate, Peanut Butter, Bacon Cookies

I had a pleasant chat with Jon Anderson who writes for a number of the military times publications. This past week he covered the current status of minimalist running shoes in the service. The article, “On Your Toes” appeared in the Army Times. He quotes the figure of up to 35% of Navy Seals are incorporating minimalist shoes in their training. In addition to the interview questions we discussed what may make the minimalist shoes acceptable on more bases. One is that if wearing the shoes gets you out the door and has you enjoying your training this will support you mission of fitness.

Minimal Maximalist: I'm Free

This past summer Diane Rehm had a lively interview of Christopher McDougall, Amby Burfoot and myself. If you haven’t listened to it, I recommend the show in general and this session titled  “Running In America“. During the interview I was asked if I thought barefoot running was dangerous. My reply was “sitting down is dangerous”. Amby brings much wisdom to the discussion. Chris is the author of the best selling “Born To Run” and brings his thoughts on the subject which were summed up in his interview on “Real Sports Episode 158” in which he said at the end of the story “You were born to run. You were designed to run. Running is not going to hurt you…..When you get rid of all the shoes and all the technology and actually rely on your legs the way they have evolved to be used, you can actually run injury free for the rest of your life”.  This statement has converted a good number of runners to minimalist shoes. Is it true? That is the start of the discussion. There is more to the story. If you are interested in the topic, you have the chance to listen to an hour long chat.

If things are going well for you, don’t make unnecessary changes. If you are changing your foot strike or your shoe type, make the changes very, very gradually. This can not be emphasized enough.

Is there one opinion on this topic that will universally satisfy everyone? The answer is no. In the Diane Rehm show the concept of there being an necessary “great schism” in the running community was mentioned. It is important to recognize that exercise is good for you. Movement is good. It could be running, walking, hiking, swimming, and cycling that you enjoy. It could be with traditional shoes or not. Whatever works for you is what is best for you. All the articles you read may not offer guidance that is specific and right for you. The current exercise recommendations for adults are for a minimum of 30 minutes of moderate aerobic activity 5 days per week (or 20 minutes of intense aerobic activity – and  I recommend at least a 5 minute warm up and 5 minute cool down) and 2 days per week of strength training.

Freedom Comes In Different Flavors

PEN has partnered with ESPN to create the PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing award. This award will honor the best non-fiction book on sports for 2009. The winner will receive $5,000 and be invited to speak at the 2010 CUNY Pen Literary Awards  ceremony on October  13, 2010.

Any guesses on the possible winner?

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

I wish good luck and a strong finish to everyone running tomorrow in the New York Marathon and to the runners participating in other marathons coming up the rest of this fall!

As the media frenzy leads up to the New York Marathon, there is more than one story to pay attention to. There is history, current competition, excellent runners, ordinary runners, and a whole city gearing up for a big day. For most runners, today is a rest day and for the evening, a bit of pasta. I recall watching the New York Marathon all the way  back when Bill Rogers and Alberto Salazar each won it multiple times. The first year Salazar won, I watched along first avenue and wondered who was this guy in the bright yellow shorts running so upright and far ahead of everyone else. I then jogged over to Central Park to see the early finishers. Then at the end of the race, I’d be out for my run and watch the “slow runners” coming in at over 4 hours. Of course, no fussing or teasing about a 4 hour finish now! Back then it was also wonderful to watch Greta Waitz win consistently year after year. The New York Marathon continues to be exciting. Paula Radcliffe has an amazing string of victories. And the race itself going through all the boroughs with so many people watching and cheering, and crossing so many (difficult) bridges is a tremendous event.

The New York Times joined in the media frenzy. After a “run-up” of articles the last few months that have been quite good and resulted in a lot of participation at their forums, the marathon made it to their OP-ED page today. Unfortunately the article on the op-ed page lamented our missing champions and the fact that an American hasn’t won the men’s division in 27 years since Alberto Salazar won. The author deems this failure a lack of “narrative”. The piece concluded by making fun of runner’s world for having general articles on improving muscular fitness and articles for beginners.

In actuality, I’m going to recommend the Runner’s World New York Marathon coverage as the best place to read about what is coming up and for fine overall stories and profiles of the runners participating. Runner’s World both profiles world class runners and offers excellent information on the sport of running to lesser mortals. Running is a participatory sport. At a time in which 65% of U.S. adults are overweight, a magazine offering tips about starting running without feeling bad because you are slow, how to improve, what shoes might be best for you, nutritional recommendations, recipes, motivation tips, and even advanced training, can not be a bad thing.

With Runner’s World publishing excellent articles on stretching, overall fitness, strength training, nutrition, along with articles on the best and the fastest, it can only help the overall health and fitness of their readers. I’d encourage all runners to both visit their web site and get a copy to read. There is much inside for every runner, and the articles go deeper than the newstand cover may suggest. Other fine magazines geared to runners include: Running Times, and Marathon and Beyond.

There are a few things we can consider doing to improve our runners. At the same time we need to work on the overall fitness and health of everyone. Runner’s World encourages everyone, and has always done so. While there were many exciting past races, many are still excited to be out running and doing the best they can. To improve the sport (and our health) we have done a disservice to everyone by requiring only one year of gym in high school. Childhood obesity is at an all time high and this does not help. Encouraging more athletic participation and demonstrating team, carry over sports,  and individual sports and making it school centric would be helpful.

Better coverage of track and field and running events  in national news and sports shows would be helpful. Live coverage of major races and track events on television would be a good thing. And how can we not have live coverage of the Olympic events? With a million cable stations available why was there not a package for sale that included multiple channels along with many different events for those few weeks. Years back this was done, and it would have been quite successful the last few Olympics.

We have no failure of narrative, publishing, or research. The American College of Sports Medicine is the most respected organization of professionals in the world. Their journals (especially Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise) are eagerly awaited by researchers and clinicians working in the field of sports medicine. We have the tales of Dean Karnazes. This year has seen one of the most enjoyable reads on running in Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall.  We have research, topical magazines, participants, web sites, bloggers, and as much narrative as we could hope for.

The media could certainly do a better job in presenting running events, and the benefits of the sport and helping to publicize  appropriate goals and how they can be established. Complaining that not enough Americans have won lately doesn’t give adequate credit to those who have both talent and have worked hard for their success. And we need to remember that we are all a part of the human race. Going beyond sport is a book published earlier this year by Johns Hopkins Professor David Calleo, Follies of Power: America’s Unipolar Fantasy which points out the reality and significance of  a multipolar world. The international lessons here extend beyond politics, trade and international affairs and into sports. If one pays attention, you may yet find yourself bringing back accolades to your country perhaps even in the form of a Nobel prize.

The United States has a fine and growing group of excellent men and women runners, yet New York is open enough over the years to have welcomed and been joyful for all of the marathons winners and their participants from wherever they come from. (Even those from Boston during the world series. )

Runner’s World NY Marathon Coverage

New York Times Marathon Coverage

Related:
Running In Central Park: Interactive Map

Frank Sinatra: New York, New York

24 Hours To See New York: Gene Kelley, Frank Sinatra

Empire State of Mind (Jay Z, Alicia Keyes)

I enjoy listening to a variety of podcasts from science and exercise to arts and current issues. While listening to podcasts transfers information a bit slower than a quick read of a book chapter or a web page, the discussions and often interviews can be very enlightening.

Selected Favorite Podcasts

Fitness Rocks – Evidence Based Medicine. Discussions and interviews with medical authors on current literature and issues. Great and through discussions. Monte Ladner, M.D. has amassed over 130 podcasts in the past 3 years, but has recently stopped producing them. I recommend listening to his old ones while waiting for Dr. Monte’s next step. Visit his website and drop him an email after listening to a few of his podcasts.

The Fitcast – Discussion of fitness, focusing on strength training and wise diet. Main host: Kevin Larrabee. Also features Leigh Peele, Jonathan Fass among others. Makes a bit of fun of cardio, but you can ignore that. Even Kevin has come around to realizing that low level cardio can be helpful in a mix. (Of course low level, steady state cardio is not what many, if not most runners feel is something to be done day in and day out, despite the “urban legend” that it is all runners do.)

Science Friday - Ira Flatow from NPR is the regular host. Touches on a variety of science issues and topics.

Ask Leigh – Leigh Peele – Leigh is a certified trainer. She is an expert in athletic nutrition and fat loss. One of her maxims is the short secret on how to lose body fat and unwanted weight. “Eat less, Move More”. But Leigh is much more than the sum of any simple description. Visit her new website at leighpeele.com and try out her new podcast.

Selected Miscellaneous Podcasts:

Beach Walks With Rox – Roxanne Darling. Video Podcast. 3 minutes to chill to. Rox walks with Lexi along a beach, Shane films,  and they all provide mellow wisdom on life from Hawaii.

Diane Rehm – Book reviews and discussions by Diane Rehm on a wide variety of topics. Good listening while traveling or commuting. If people enjoy being interviewed by Larry King, I believe they would enjoy being interviewed even more by Diane Rehm. Informative and gently probing and personal interviews.

There are other podcasts I often listen to and enjoy including 360, Fresh Air, Science Magazine’s weekly podcast  and “The Instance” and  “World of Warcast”.  Some of these go on for a considerably long time and listening to all of them would keep you in your chair and away from exercise for far too long a time.  But give them a try if the topics interest you.

Or perhaps a little less. But ask me on Twitter or Friendfeed or below and I’ll tell you more.

This weekend was spent time updating the main web site. (And also some excercise, some warcraft, a trip to the libary, bringing a computer in for a new fan – working it so hard the fan decided to complain, some reading, and some fun). Added significant material on Turf Toe and a touch on the biomechanics of hamstring pulls. Small update on Gait. Look for hallux limitus, sesamoiditis and more on running gait shortly among others. Don’t forget when searching here, you are only searching the blog. Visit the Running Injuries site for the bulk of sports related information and site wide search.

I’ve been using Woopra to take a look at some live statistics. It adds immediacy to the dead data that resides in the log files. Instead of looking sequentially at sets of data files, I can look at a live picture and see the 4 or 12 to 20 or so people online at once. Much of the data has always been there in the log files, but looking at it live I see:

• Browser
• Referral source
• Screen Resolution
• Search Term if search engine used
• Landing Page
• Navigation sequence
• Current Page and Other pages surfed to
• IP Address
• Country (indicated by a flag)

I can watch, for example, someone referred from google Canada go from the running injury main page to the running shoe list, to socks, to pain in athletes and pain scale, to stretching. And as I wrote this the same individual moved on to top ten tips to avoid injuries and tips for a successful marathon. So I sense some optimism there!

I can see trends occurring. When a series of “running in 50 degree weather” hits from South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, I know it is cold down south. When a bunch of people are suddenly landing on my page on iliopsoas injury, I’ll start to wonder and then find that a popular plot summary page on “How I met Your Mother” linked to that page. When I see many landings on the gait page, I can look and see the referrer, and then assess weak points and add to them.

I’ll look to see how do the search terms measure up to what people find on the page they are looking at. When someone was searching on cuneiform stress fractures, I realized I did not have anything specific on that term and added it in. I also added specifics on a series of other stress fractures and angular relationships of speed work to site of injury in metatarsal stress fractures. Clinical observation backed up by vector analysis indicates the stress fractures move more proximally on the metatarsal. A recent article which viewed applied stresses in relation to trabecular orientation was later added. While some of this may sound highly technical, we try to add it in a manner that is understandable, but is also useful for the student and health care practitioner. This type of observation led me to update many pages over the past week and to generate note pages for many more.

While some speak of google as a future “fail”, they are looking through the narrow blinders of social media alone. Social media serves many functions, but alone it can not be serve as a reference site. Tips, connections, and pointers are among the strengths. Forming connections and communicating with others are strengths. Answers can come quickly. But google still serves up reference material. Articles of recent vintage and hopefully those of enduring quality will come up in google. And while searching twitter, friendfeed and Youtube are both informative and fun. They are useful now and will become more useful in the future. But still, when I want the latest information on a medication, on research or a discussion on literature or date facts, I’m off to google. When I want to hear a current band or a long dead band, I’m off to Youtube. To see exercises demonstrated, I have selected people I’ll check initially, and they often have material at Youtube. When I want to watch a series of people chat on a variety of topics it is off to Friendfeed or Twitter. More and more sites will have integrated multi-media now that we are on the high speed data highway. Other search mechanisms will come into play. Google seems to have been adapting well to this.

Evaluating the utility of portions of my site: a tiny bit over 100 follows on Twitter. A small number of people, so small, that I can say all of whom I like and respect following on Friendfeed. A relatively small number, but growing number of visitors to the blog. Over the past year, however, the main site served up well over 1,000,000 pages to over 750,000 visitors. With Woopra, I can watch the visits for short bits of time and learn what people are looking for and what may be lacking. Twitter of course is not a place in which I am trying to stay “on message” or develop  a  “brand”, but a place for general information, social interaction and a tiny bit of fun. Another Twitter Fail, but in a sense for the rest of the site, hopefully it remains a helpful internet resource and success. It remains free with no advertising. And google remains a great place to reach it from. (Along with some very special non-search engine referrers.)

Each site must add what it needs to reach and communicate with their users. In some cases a blog is the most useful portion of the site. The immediacy of a recent entry, and the poignancy of an older one add value. Timeliness is a strength of social media. From that was so yesterday, we are at that was so 20 minutes ago. But in some cases up to date details are what make the site. In some senses Wikidpeda does this, but subjective opinion lingers for too long on far too many areas. Evaluate your site and determine how you can make it better. Employ tools that will help you see what your visitors are coming for, what they are looking for and relate that information to what they find. Determine your own goals, both those who are looking for information and those who are building it. We can all do better. And we can chat about it on Twitter and keep each other updated on Facebook. Oops viruses, and malware, this may be a new Facebook fail potentially on the rise. Many areas of the US Government and private businesses  are eliminating in office Facebook access. But social media disease spread through social web interaction  is another story. In the meantime, I seem to be eliminating the Facebook apps and their annoying notifications.

Have fun on the web and on Web 2.0. Be careful, enjoy, and I hope you find what you are looking for.

Thanks to Brian Morrissey, who on his blog The Internal Pigdog, in this post , pointed out a video of Will Smith touting running and reading as the keys to life. I like both, but I’d encourage a bit of wisdom in eating, strength training, and a touch of cross training in many cases to add to your list of useful keys. Some of my recommended reading is in the Amazon script off to the right below. Sooner or later, I may add a subdivision on useful relevant and a bit of selected fun reading. In the meantime, thanks again Brian for highlighting this video.

Running is a fine, speedy way to achieve cardiovascular fitness. Reading is a way to stay in touch with your world, explore alternative worlds, learn how to improve yourself, help others, see what others are thinking now and have thought in the past. The Inernet, modern libraries, Amazon, and even your local book stores have made more knowledge available faster than ever before. While the social media and Web 2.0 have helped change the phrase from “that is so yesterday” to “that is so 20 minutes ago”, it is important to sit back, power the computer down, or at least let your screen saver take over, and grab your kindle or read a book.

Whatever your politics are, wherever you live, not just in the United States, but all over the world, people are hoping for change. And there is a lot that needs to be changed. In fact some things have been so bad that any change will have to be for the better.

But, as the expression goes, all politics is local. And right at home is where you can get your goal list out, review it, and see how those changes are going. That’s the list of things you want to accomplish this year. The list you made a few weeks ago. And if you didn’t get that list made, do it now. Some people have been working on change for years. Some have been working on how to express the changes they want for months, if not years. We are bound to hear some inspiring phrases this week. But you have to get inspired to get that list made, plan how you’ll accomplish your list, and consider it done. Fitness goals, weight goals, body composition goals, life goals: figure them out, write them down, and plan to get things done. Most of the things you want to accomplish will not happy overnight. Some things will take months or longer. Patience will be important. So will a plan. And short term, intermediate term, and long term goals need to be determined, followed, evaluated, and checked off.

And one more thing, it is time to evaluate what is standing in your way of your goals. Clean them up and move on. If it is not enough sleep, bad food, too much alcohol or cigarettes, give those up and move on. For the example-in-chief, who’ll be inspiring many this week: Yes you can! You can give up those cigarettes. Then those gym trips, or that personal gym in that right in the middle of DC home will feel even better.  Yes you can and yes we can! We all can and should.  Change starts at home. Be The Change. 

David Bowie: Changes (Ziggy Stardust version)

For those of you on the go and keeping everyone updated via Web 2.0 – Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, etc. we have a limited use beta code for Ping.fm.

Ping.fm let’s you update your social networks from anywhere, including your phone, via an on the go interface or from email.

Visit ping.fm to sign up and the code – good for only about 500 users or so is: pingyoulater

Now you can Twitter or Pounce your jogs from anywhere.