When walking down hill, my natural response is to lean backwards, to brace myself from falling. Often it is better to lean forward. Leaning forward places your body weight on your entire foot and the pressure on your foot causes it to make better contact with the ground. This means that you are less likely [...]

From Inside Tri comes this nugget about training to swim at race pace: If you have a hard time hitting your desired race pace during a given workout, try shortening your intervals until you can. For example, if your goal race pace is 1:20 per 100 meters, but you can’t hold that pace over 100 [...]

How many times will I relearn this lesson? Breathe. A full deep breath cause my abdomen to protrude and puts a spring in my step.

Once again Lance Armstrong and his team are in trouble. Ha. How many times are we going to have to read from that script. Every Tour de France Lance’s team, or Lance himself, appear to be in trouble, appear to be struggling around the stage 8 to 12. Lance struggling to keep up with Ulrich [...]

Lance Armstrong put in a stellar performance today. He made up more than a minute on Jan Ulrich within 15 km, and placed second on the stage, 2″ behind David Zabriskie, but more importantly, 51″ ahead of his nearest rival. On OLN, Phil, Paul and Bob were considering the possibility that Lance had pulled up [...]

Lance Armstrong is one of the greatest athletes of all time. He is younger than I am, but I consider him one of my heroes and I strive to emulate him in many aspects of my life. The thing that I respect most about him is his incredible mental power and focus. Just looking at [...]

The Tour de France starts Saturday! This is a highlight of my year. I think that the major cycling tours are the most interesting sporting events on the planet. Part of it is length. Three weeks is a long time. Strategy and tactics are cumulative. You can’t go all out on day 10 unless you [...]

From a question in rec.sport.triathlon Does anyone know how to easily convert web-based race results into an Excel spreadsheet readable format or import it into Excel? Excel (2000 on Windows at least) has this wired. It will pull down and convert data from the web automatically. On a new spreadsheet do: Data -> Get External [...]

USA Triathlon and Ironman North America have announced that they are splitting. USA Triathlon (USAT) won’t insure Ironman North America (IMNA) races, or give points to age group athletes for their particiapation in those races. IMNA will require that athletes purchase individual insurance for participation in races. Annual USAT memberships will be accepted for IMNA [...]

In our last installment we were considering whether Kevlar or wire beaded tires should be more prone to failure in a downhill braking situation. I had promised that I would write to Glenn Erickson concerning his recommendation to use Kevlar beaded tires because of a theory that the metal in wire beads gets hot and [...]