The Great Ganesha

The Finisher’s Medal, front and back
Well, folks, we did it! 26.2 miles! My second marathon, the wife’s first. Here’s our route, freshly uploaded from the GPS into Google Earth.

Temperatures were in the low 60s with fog, which made it perfect for me and perfect for running. In fact, it was so foggy, I couldn’t [...]

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If relations between your friends have sunk to a new low because you’re blaming them for your obesity, listen up. Just because you’re fat, it doesn’t mean you’re unfit. Particularly, if you’re a biker.
…cycling is a lot more forgiving of body type and age than running. The best cyclists going up hills are those with [...]

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Perusing last month’s Men’s Health I came across an ad for one of those super-duper, miraculous pills which, when you just have 150 of them (each costing $1), you lose all the fat on your body. As it is, they are all ripoffs. The makers are just aiming to exploit overweight or extra-vain people who [...]

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Picture courtesy: Andy Day

An article by Alec Wilkinson in last week’s double-issue of the New Yorker is about parkour – the art of running up walls, going down the rails (as opposed to the stairs) and jumping across rooftops. As it says in the magazine:
Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means [...]

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Apparently, running when you’re injured is good for you. An article ($) in January’s NYT talks about running through injuries and how it helps them heal faster. Now, before you naysayer couch-potato-types jump on me, it’s not like you should run with shattered kneecaps and fractured tibias, but you can run with certain not-so-serious (that’s [...]

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An article in yesterday’s Times says that too much marathoning might just be a bad thing. What? After all I’ve said about how much running is good for you? Well, it’s not quite that simple. Running is still good for you, however,
After years in which almost no deaths were attributed to heart attacks at this [...]

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Are you one of those cynical people who sit on park benches and laugh at the joggers who pass you?
“Ha!” you scoff, “We’re all going to die anyway!”
Berating all joggers, you wait patiently for the next one to die of a heart attack, at which point you will say, with smug satisfaction, “What did I [...]

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Every year, there is a series of four races that take place across the globe. The only difference between this series and other series is that these are 100-mile runs across four of the world’s deserts. The last one, is called the the Last Desert competition and it’s in Antarctica.
Part spiritual quest, part kamikaze mission, [...]

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If you’re a fitness freak, then you should already know that muscle soreness is not caused by lactic acid, and neither is lactic acid buildup a bad thing. In fact, lactic acid is actually a fuel and muscles produce it directly from glucose, burning it to produce energy.
The understanding now is that muscle cells convert [...]

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For you distance-running, techno-lovers, I found this podcast from a runner-friendly DJ. DJ Steveboy creates 1-2 hour long podcasts, also listing the beats-per-minute of the track. Pretty cool.
Incidentally, there is pretty solid evidence that the right kind of music can enhance athletic performance. This meta-analytic study (that means an analysis of other people’s analysis) in [...]

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