Comments on The Science of Sport: Ross speaks: Fatigue and the brain

I found the Fatigue and the brain - Anticipatory r...

2009-10-19T18:02:53.330+02:00

I found the Fatigue and the brain - Anticipatory regulation of exercise thread fascinating reading. However, based upon my experience in a half marathon yesterday, I was wondering if there was an additional aspect to the topic not covered. Here is what happened to me. I had a problem with my left glute after 9 miles of the race. This weakness caused me to slow down by 15-20 sec/mile. As a result of this, several runners passed me which was very frustrating. With about a 1/3 of a mile to go, one more runner passed me and I decided he was not going to beat me. I struggled to stay with him and with about 150m to go he had about an 8-10m lead on me. At that point, I went into a dead sprint, blew by him and ended up beating him by 4 secs (or at least 3.1 sec with the round-up). Now obviously, my glute did not miraculously heal itself to allow me to do this. I think what may have happened is that by going anaerobic I utilized the fast twitch muscle fibers and neurons and these fibers were less damaged than the slow twitch fibers of the glute. Therefore, I could sprint without a problem.

Now one of the main points in the Fatigue and the Brain piece is that runners are able to speed up at the end of the race because the brain (governor) knows the race is almost over and allows the body to go all out without fear of damage, i.e., psychology over physiology. I think that is a very valid point. However, I’m wondering how big a factor, if any, the fact that the runner is going from an aerobic pace to an anaerobic pace may be. Perhaps that physiology plays an important role as well.

This is the first I have heard of your site and af...

2009-10-19T03:44:32.353+02:00

This is the first I have heard of your site and after some perusing, excellent job! As someone with twenty years in the medical field with an understanding of blood physiology, oxygenation, etc, it is refreshing to see you put your topics into scientific terms with some evidence based research. I am often told by my coach to do certain things when I am training-only when I have scientific reasons does it really click and motivate me to do so. That said, I may need to correct some of his theories... Your website is a tremendous help to this aspiring age grouper triathlete. Sometimes it takes that third person to drive home things you already know to finally connect the dots.

PS Shortly after we had moved to the tropics, we g...

2009-10-17T15:28:41.090+02:00

PS Shortly after we had moved to the tropics, we got talking with an old chap who told us that he had lived in the tropics for much of his adult life, but was now moving south to cooler climes.

When we asked him why, he said that he could no longer cope with the heat and humidity now that he was that much older.

Thanks you once again for a very interesting overv...

2009-10-17T15:20:43.547+02:00

Thanks you once again for a very interesting overview of this topic.

It was not until I moved to the Tropical Far North of Queensland fifteen years ago, in 1994, that I gradually began to discover from personal experience some of what you have described.

Training in the UK, say running 800 m intervals, was psychologically something to which many years of practise had accustomed me from my days as a schoolboy runner. Long habit had taught me exactly what to expect on a typical English summer evening when I was half-way through a series of say six repeats of 800m at, say, 2:24 pace (3 min/k).

Trying to do the same around an 800m loop around the two saltwater ponds in Cairns Centenary Park was to prove a quite different experience. Put simply, I now could not get the same feeling of what I had always assumed was lactate build- up in my legs, as when I had used to train in the UK. This was because, rightly or wrongly, I now perceived that I was overheating long before I believed I was feeling the build-up of lactate in my legs that I had grown to expect when I trained hard.

Staying cool in the Tropics, then, had become my overwhelming training need, physiologically, or so at least it seemed, and certainly psychologically. Further, and I know you are probably sick of me repeating this, but the effects of humidity and solar gain when training hard in the tropics during day-light now became overwhelmingly important in ways that they had never been for me when I used to run even in the height of summer even in the middle of the day somewhere fairly hot, in Southern Spain for example.

Also, I found that being relatively heavy, compared to my eventual racing weight (and of course to most of the better distance runners), when I was undertrained, often starting off with BMI of 25+ at the re-beginning of training seriously, also seemed to have a much larger effect on my sense of comfort when training in the tropics. Of course, I appreciate that this could also have been as much to do with the fact that I was now older, and that my ability to cope physiologically and/or psychologically with the sensation of feeling bloody hot and uncomfortable had diminished.

I am now so affected by the ambient temperature, plus humidity plus solar gain leading to the unpleasant sensation of intense overheating, when training hard in the tropics, that I find it very hard these days to train in the full sunlight of a typical day in the tropical north - I feel that I am about to explode, I feel so hot.

So I now do all my serious training late at night, many hours after the sun has set and the tarmac road surfaces have started to cool.

Increasingly, in fact, I run long distances (fast and slow as is my custom) only when running barefoot on the beach, in the dark, letting the sea water occasionally cool my legs as I run. This all driven by my overwhelming need, as I see it, to try to run hard yet cool.

How closely do you think the body's ability to reg...

2009-10-17T05:22:11.166+02:00

How closely do you think the body's ability to regulate pace is related to your body's ability to keep track of time? Reading this article in conjunction with yours made me consider it.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/14/circadian-rhythm-math-technology-breakthroughs-brain.html?feed=rss_popstories

When will there be Science of the Sports t-shirts! I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

Sorry to say this, but after 3 minutes of video, w...

2009-10-17T05:07:46.034+02:00

Sorry to say this, but after 3 minutes of video, what I can say is that all I heard was some acoustic noise.