You’ve seen people jogging on the greenway or plodding away on the treadmill, oblivious to all but the ear buds pumping a driving beat into their ears. And, according to science, pumping an extra boost of juice into their workout. The American Council on Exercise recently reviewed seven studies conducted since 1999 that all agreed that listening to music has a positive impact on your workout. (There’s a caveat, but first the facts.)
Category Archives: Running
Weekend plans? Hike to learn, run for fun
Cool weather returns to North Carolina this weekend, making for good hiking at the coast and the mountains, with frightfully fun running in between.
Coast
Mid- to late fall, in my humble opinion the best time to explore the coast. Temperatures have dropped enough that bugs — and snakes! — are less of a problem, yet they haven’t dropped enough to seriously affect the greenery. Lots to see, fewer things to distract you from seeing them. That’s why our pick for the coast this weekend is the Biological Wonderland hike at Carolina Beach State Park. Carolina Beach has a diverse plant community, from its pine savannas to its carnivorous plants. Let an in-the-know park ranger fill you in on this Saturday morning hike that leaves from the nature trail parking lot at 10 a.m.
Your next race: train hot, train consistently, take a calculator
News from the lab coat world that could aid your performance:
Hot workouts, cool results: You know this blazing hot, record-setting summer we just endured? The one when every workout seemed like it was taking place in an equatorial rain forest under a sunlamp? If you gutted out your summer workouts, you should be an animal in fall’s cooler weather.
The 31-mile Art Loeb Trail: A nice day’s run
It wasn’t so much the five hours of rain they endured, nor the nearly 3,000 foot of vertical climbing in three miles to start the day (there would be 17,000 total feet of up-and-down during their 11 hour and 10 minute ordeal). It wasn’t getting lost at Butler Gap, nor the “quad-shredding” descent down Pilot Mountain. Rather, it was the need for a good sugar fix after running 27 miles straight on the Art Loeb Trail, which runs 31 miles through the rugged Pisgah National Forest (including the Shining Rock Wilderness) in western North Carolina.
Are ultra’s bad for your heart? Maybe, maybe not
Ultra-endurance events can be bad for your heart. Or maybe not.
That undefinitive statement comes courtesy of contradictory studies both reported Aug. 31 on the Science Daily site. We’ll start with the up(heart)beat report.
The Karolinska Institutet and the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences studied 15 athletes (12 males, three females) at the Adventure Racing World Championships. The event covered 800 kilometers in the disciplines of mountain biking, trekking, kayaking and in-line skating and took about six days, with competitors essentially going nonstop for 150 hours at an average work intensity, measured in terms of VO2 peak, of 40 percent. Before and after the event, the athletes were assessed to see how their hearts responded. While some of the athletes registered increased levels of certain blood markers, suggestive of cardiac damage, immediately after the race, those markers were back to normal within 24 hours. Researchers believe the spike wasn’t the result of cardiac damage, but rather the body’s way of protecting and regulating growth. Further, the athletes who finished strongest and did the best had the least affected hearts.