Running in the News... Five for Friday

The summers featuring Olympic Games or World Championships are some of the most exciting for Track & Field fans. I've been glued to my television just about every night this past week, watching the World Championships at the famed (and newly-renovated) Hayward Field in Euguene, Oregon.

With that in mind, this week's selection of Top 5 Running Stories is, by default, World Championships-heavy, but not exclusively. I tried to showcase some of the stories behind the scenes that piqued my interest.

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1.

Syndney McLaughlin's youth track coach knew what was coming

Late tonight we all saw Syndney McLaughlin not only break her world record in the 400H, but SMASH it to smithereens. As a bonus, she's also now a World Champion. This article from The New York Times is an interesting Q&A with one of McLaughlin's earliest coaches. A woman who saw her potential from the start.

[Doug Mills, The New York Times]

Lisa Morgan, ...A five-time U.S.A. Track & Field junior national team coach, was also a longtime coach at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. McLaughlin, who grew up in central New Jersey and ran at Union Catholic High School, was a friendly rival and then ran for Morgan on multiple junior national teams.

What was the most important thing you instilled in her?

Believing in who she was. The confidence. Step on that line and believe in you and use your God-given talent to do what you are supposed to do. That is what I instilled in her. You are competing against the world, across the globe in another country and you are competing for your country. You have to ste up. Your team is counting on you to bring back gold for your country.

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2.

Writer Erin Strout gets the inside scoop, for Women's Running magazine, on a spectacular moment captured at the end of the women's World Championships Marathon. 

Splits: A World Championships Marathon Moment Captured—and Adored

A single photo illustrates all those finish line feels.

[photo credit: Kevin Morris]

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3.

And speaking of interesting moments captured at the World Championships... Unless you're REALLY not a track & field fan, you've no doubt heard (or, more likely, seen) the moment when a television videographer stepped right into the path of the men's steeplechase final. I'm still waiting to find/read an in-depth interview with this man to see just what he was thinking (or not thinking) when this happened.

A cameraman became an accidental obstacle in the men's steeplechase.

Whoops.

Credit...

[Lucy Nicholson/Reuters]

Have you ever experienced obstacles in a race?

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4.

Opinion: The Day the Shoes Blotted Out the Sun

Oiselle CEO Sally Bergesen asks: Who are we short-changing when we choose to ignore the shoe tech dilemma?

[Sound off in comments below, please.]

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5.

This 100-Year-Old Vegan Athlete is Still Running and Setting World Records

Defying claims that plant-based diets lack for protein or hinder athletic performance, vegan athletes worldwide have proved otherwise, including some of the most accomplished competitors in the world. The latest to prove the naysayers wrong: Vegan runner Mike Fremont, who turned 100 years old in February and celebrated with a run around Vero Beach in Florida.

Fremont adopted a vegan diet at the age of 69 after receiving a daunting cancer diagnosis. He turned down what his doctors told him was life-saving surgery in favor of switching to a whole food plant-based diet. Now, Fremont, the oldest known vegan runner, holds the marathon distance world records for single-year age groups of 88 and 90.

Make sure to keep scrolling this article to read mini-profiles of surfers, professional tennis players, NFL & NBA players, etc. all of whom are THRIVING on a vegan diet, including ultra-runners Scott Jurek & Matt Frazier and sprinters Morgan Mitchell & Elijah Hall.

Is Walking the new Running?

Ever since I adopted the world's cutest Labradinger (that's a Labrador/English Springer Spaniel mix for the uninitiated) I've found myself doing longer walks and shorter runs. Next month (August 6) will mark Drake's Eight Year Adoption Anniversary or "Gotcha Day."

His Royal Highness, Sir Barks-A-Lot [aka Drake]

Don't get me wrong, Drake was running 13 miles before he was a year old. I was a little leery about running that much with him when he was so young, but he had (and still has) seemingly boundless energy and is whip-smart. He always lets me know if/when he's had enough on any given run (or walk, for that matter). A number of trainers, vets and vet techs, upon meeting him, have said, "Run him. Run him hard!" He needs the mental stimulation and loves the exercise.

That said, he is slowing down a bit. Not much, but enough that our runs have been shortened. But he'll still willingly do a 2-hour, up-tempo walk in all kinds of weather.

I've been a fan of walking-as-transportation since my earliest days at the University of Minnesota. Back then, it was out of necessity – I didn't have a car during college. But I learned to embrace the concept of walking for both exercise AND as transportation for errands, etc. It was a great habit to start early-ish in life and has served me well for many years.

One of the (many) reasons I wanted to adopt a dog was so he would do long walks with me. I really lucked out. This little dude can walk a LONG distance and still have energy left to bark at cats, motorcycles and skateboards. He also loves to "flirt" with everyone. It's fun to have the world's cutest dog, because all he has to do is look directly at people and I immediately see their face melt into a smile. Male, female, young and old - they're all VERY susceptible to this little guy's charms.

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Creative ways to walk smarter...

This article from The New York Times, 6 Ways to Level Up Your Daily Walk, was part of the publication's "Why Not Try" columns. It offers some good advice for creative and well-tested ways to make your walks even more productive.

Any writer who can work the phrase "Embrace the Fartlek" (#6 on the "6 Ways...") into a general-audience article, is a-okay with me. (I'm looking at you, Emily Pennington.) As anyone who has coached high school athletes can attest, the first time you say the term out loud, be sure to pause and wait for the inevitable laughs and smart-aleck comments.

Embrace the fartlek.

Swedish for "speed play," fartlek workouts use a type of interval training that involved a series of high-intensity bursts with recovery periods between them. The beauty of the fartlek is that, unlike in traditional high-intensity interval training workouts, walkers or runners don't have to glue themselves to a watch or a fitness tracker to boost their muscular endurance. Just amp up your gait to a light jog or a power walk for a short stretch to get your heart rate up, slow back down until you feel recovered and repeat.

Have you ever used Fartleks in your workouts? I can tell you, doing them as a team, on a track, is the MOST fun way to enjoy this workout. I challenge anyone who thinks overwise to convince me why that's NOT true. [Feel free to try in the comments below.]

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10,000 steps/day - Marketing hype? Scientific fact?

Speaking of The New York Times and Walking... 

Do We Really Need to Take 10,000 Steps a Day for Our Health?

The advice that we take 10,000 steps a day is more a marketing accident than based on science. Taking far fewer may have notable benefits.

According to Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on step counts and health, the 10,000-steps target became popular in Japan in the 1960s. A clock maker, hoping to capitalize on interest in fitness after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, mass-produced a pedometer with a name that, when written in Japanese characters, resembled a walking man. It also translated as "10,000-steps meter," creating a walking aim that, through the decades, somehow became embedded in our global consciousness – and fitness trackers.

But today's best science suggests we do not need to take 10,000 steps a day, which is about five miles, for the sake of our health or longevity.

What do you think? Is 10,000 steps/day a realistic goal? [Comments are welcome.]

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Running in the News... Five for Friday

It's been WAY too long since I've posted one of my "Five for Friday" columns (or any TJ's Turf blogs, for that matter). With a number of interesting articles making the news this week, it was the perfect time to reinstate this routine.

The first article came across my desk just as I was trying to decide on a fifth notable article. The Jim Thorpe news quickly made its way to the top of this list.

Before we all hunker down for the weekend to watch the World Track & Field Championships, take a look at what I found remarkable in this week's running news.

1.

Jim Thorpe, first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the U.S. 

Just today the Associated Press announced that Jim Thorpe has been reinstated as the sole winner of the 1912 Olympic pentathlon & decathlon – nearly 100 years after being stripped of those gold medals for violations of strict amateurism rules of the time. Read more about it here: 

Jim Thorpe reinstated as sole winner for 1912 Olympic golds

And in this article in The New York Times:

Jim Thorpe Is Restores as Sole Sinner of 1912 Olympic Gold Medals

Thorpe, to some, remains the greatest all-around athlete ever. He was voted as the Associated Press' Athlete of the Half Century in a poll in 1950.

(AP Photo, File)

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