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Chariots of Silicon
ToddML writes "I just spotted this article at wired.com which talks about the current deficiencies of the U.S. long-distance running program, and more importantly, what is being done about it. An interesting story from both a gadget perspective, and for the source of the program -- private industry."
Soccer. Once the Americans dominate that sport by creating a team of ubermenchen they can finally tell the rest of the World to stop calling it 'football', too.
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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
The core feature of this (apart from all the bio-monitoring) seems to be the idea of keeping a whole house at equivalent air pressure to 12,000 feet. This lets the athletes train at sea level, while resting at altitude (which is seen as a 'good thing').
But doesn't it open the athletes up to altitude sickness? Granted, 12,000 feet is low to get this, but it's generally caused as much by the change in altitude as the absolute altitude (So generally if you take a week climbing to 16,000 feet you're much less likely to be afflicted than if you do it in a couple of days). Oddly enough, it affects fit people as much as (or often more than) the unfit, so I do wonder whether they have any problem with this.
Incidentally, I know that 20,000 feet is about half an atmosphere, so I guess they're talking about 2/3 (sea-level) atmosphere at 12,000 feet.
This is what's wrong with us today. Assuming things about people based on their race or their appearance.
Oh come off your high horse! That's how the human mind works. We try to perceive generalities and rules and we apply those to individuals we meet. We make assumptions about *everybody* we come across. Assumptions are based on probabilities. The thing is to recognize those assumptions for what they are and not hold them as absolute truth. None of us are stereotypes.
The poster was making a point that black athletes are, in general, more accomplished than white athletes. Being white, I could get offended by that, but the thing is that he's probably right. Better genes for that sort of thing, no doubt.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
I don't understand why americans are so concerned about winning at every damn sports competition in the bloody planet.
Let it go! Go... go play with your silly oblongated ball.
jocks... an entire country of them.
MoitaCarrasco "Everyday I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I've stayed alive." - CARLIN
They should have two categories for sports like distance running and track-and-field, one would be drug- and tech(blood doping, etc)- free, the other would be "anything goes". It would be interesting to see the steroid-charged atomic supermen in the "anything goes" category competing against each other. I wounder how fast we could engineer a human body to run?
Generalisations are bad enough, but generalising inaccurately - I mean, Kenya isn't known for its sprinters. I'd suggest that being largely at high altitude and having a culture of long distance running helps distinctly. Kenyan kids want to be long distance runners in the same way that English kids want to be footballers.
RUN FOREST RUN!
Oh I'm not disputing that at all. Cultural backgound and environment play a huge part. Genetics is a factor as well. Admittedly, all things being connected, environment is a key factor in culling the gene pool.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
What you are saying is drastically over simplified, and largely wrong!
On average there are differences in muscle composition between whites and blacks. Blacks tend to have more muscles of the fast twitch variety, which contract very quickly, and are well suited to things like running and jumping. Whites tend to have more slow twitch muscle fibers whisk are well suited to things like weightlifting, cycling and swimming. This only accounts for a small portion of the difference.
The main difference is cultural. In America the high profile sports are basketball, baseball, and American football, the fact that these sports are so popular causes many of the gifted athletes to want to do these sports; we don't have someone allocating America's great athletes to different sports, they allocate themselves. Now in many parts of Africa, there is only one sport (unless you are one of the social elite), that sport is running (think about it, if you were extremely poor, what sport could you afford to do). Running in Africa is a way of life, school children run to and from school further than many of us drive to work. Running is the way out of poverty there, poor children dream of being world class marathoners, the same way many poor Americans dream of NBA careers.
Wish me luck, my first Marathon is on October 13th...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
It's pretty normal behavior for a geek to be ashamed about it as well...
It's how we are made.
If you cant beat 'em, spend loadsamoney out-teching them.
Whats the frigging point of having impeccably fair races, drugs testing, etc., when countries can do this sort of thing, giving athletes an unfair advantage over poorer nations' competitors? Granted, the results have yet to be seen but I doubt it will make them any worse athletes. The winning seems to count more than the sportsmanship and fairness.
A bit like U.S. foreign policy, then :-|
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
Other than that, the term "african-american" is a VERY bad term. What would you call a person of african decent, who's family have lived in England for three generations, when you describe him/her to someone else? African-american would be completely off base.
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It's okay to call a white guy for both white and caucasian, but not okay to call a person of african decent anything that can come close to describing their basic features, other than calling them african-american, or "of african decent". I know plenty of black people (here in Europe) who are pissed off every time they're described af "of african decent" because they're not - they're from Sri Lanka, but to you or me they don't look much different than someone from Nigiria. They prefer the term black (or as one of them said "pigmentedly challanged"). Using such terms doesn't mean I'm a racist, and I wish people would pull their head out of their asses and realise that.
But then again, PC-people are probably just intellectually, gravitationally and cosmeticly challanged
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
And here is the thing that you cannot do in football. Out tech them! There is no tech to football. You could give a team more endurance, but at the end of the day it relies on the individual, team and trainer.
Otherwise Brazil would not dominate the way it does. Brazil has no tech, just cut throat competition and the football lifestyle. I watched how Brazilian players are trained and it starts when they are seven or eight. It is in their "blood". The truly elite players in football, live, breath and eat football. And more often than not they come from poor areas, eg Zidane...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
its as simple as that, baseball players do it, and their breaking more records than ever, plus, their not stopping them so it must be legal.
$.02 charged
I want 2D games back.
There are some real aggregate genetic differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds. People of European descent never have sickle-cell anemia. This is because the genes that cause this disease are never beneficial in the European climate. Having one copy of the allele that causes sickle cell anemia provides better resistance to malaria, while two makes you deathly ill - so many people of African origin have inherited one allele from their ancestors because of the prevalence of malaria in their ancestral environment.
Many genetic disorders are far more common in a particular ethnic group, sickle cell anemia is just the most striking example. There's a genetic disorder that almost exclusively affects people who are ethnically Jewish and are born to two ethnically Jewish parents. The name escapes me.
On the whole, Kenyans appear to blessed with an extraordinarily high slow fast twitch/fast twitch muscle ratio. You cannot take someone with a lot of fast twitch muscle and turn them into a good marathoner; it just can't be done. Try this at home: jump as high as you can without bending your knees substantially. If you can't get more than six inches off the ground, your genes will never let you be a great sprinter, even if you started training at six and had all the training in the world. The colder you ancestors' climate, the more likely you are flunk, which makes the Kenya thing kind of weird.
But except in these corner cases, this stuff doesn't matter. A white person can be a great athlete, and a black person can be a brilliant scholar. Sadly, some people seize on these relatively trivial differences to make a case that are ancestry is far more important than it really is. Just because a particular group of people can or can't jump very high (on average) doesn't mean they should be treated any differently.
great to see corporate industry wasting shareholder's money.
oops, sorry, i'm mimicking american conservatives incorrectly. i'm only supposed to short-sightedly criticise all gov't spending as waste, not corporate spending. damn, never could get the hang of shutting down 99.9% of my neurons to reach that level...
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We can't feed, clothe or house a large segement of the US population. WHY IN THE HELL do we need to spend millions of dollars on "long distance running deficiencies." Why don't we instead subsidize cock enlargments for the entire nation, just so we can say ours are the biggest. Someone should tell Nike about the rest of the world.
--Should work--
First of all genetic variations between people groups across the various regions of the 2nd largest continent in the world are nearly as large as that of humanity across the entire globe. So your second sentence is a meaningless gross generalization.
Secondly, athletic prowess is also poorly defined. This article is about one particular event: long distance running. No one seems to comment on the dominance of Slavs in power lifting or Slavs and East Asians in gymnastics and diving. These are also basic sports in that they emphasize excellence in one particular area: power or flexibility, while not requiring the level of training in technique of sporst such as golf or baseball where good hand eye coordination can compensate for a difference in power. At this point I will make the obligatory mention of the lack of success of Kenyans at events shorter than 800m.
Third of all, anyone paying attention to the standings at world class competitions will note the rise of competitiveness of South Koreans and Mexicans at 10000m and longer events, Morroccans at events from 1500m to 10000m, Eastern Europeans in the Decathlon and so on.
Which brings me to my next point, we are discussing world class performances here. By definition this requires a level of training and commitment that most people are not willing to achieve. Excellence at the world class level depends on many factors: equipment, training and and taking advantage of whatever genetic advantages one has. Since Bikila's breakthrough at the Rome Olympics, there has been a concerted effort among East African nations to provide top athletes for the long distance events. This has led to national programs that identify, support and promote the best available talent on a scale that the US Olympic effort has only recently begun to match. Note that the original "African" long distance champions were Ethiopians who are as distinct from the current crop of Kenyans as a Swede is from an Italian when compared visually. No one was complaining when the US had a running obsession in the 70's and regularly produced long distance champions. There is no reason to suspect Kenya's current dominance, which I predict will fall to Mexico within a decade, is any different.
As for taking advantage of genetic heritage; any American whose family has been here for more than 3 generations can likely trace portions of their genetic heritage to ancestors from virtually any part of the globe. This is especially true of "African" Americans as they usually have ancestors originally from Europe at some point in their bloodline. The primary example is Tiger Woods who's ancestry is almost equally divided among Asian, European, African and Native Americans. As it becomes easier for population groups to intermingle Woods is going to be the rule rather than the exception.
Finally, anyone who has actually been to Japan as opposed to recieved "wisdom" from the popular culture will note that Japanese adolescents are on average much closer in height to other people groups than Japanese adults. Naoko Takashi, the Nagano Olympic Marathon Champion, is 1.62m or 5' 3" tall, this is 1" below the average height for a woman. Not exceptionally short or tall. Furthermore, elite long distance runners tend to be shorter than average so this is not an interesting case at all. From pictures her legs don't appear to be disproportionately short, in fact they seem long but she's pretty skinny so it's hard to tell.
In some circles it has become fashionable to blame genetics for one's circumstances. Also there is usually an unspoken corollary to the athletes of African descent have a genetic advantage argument. That of course is that African's are genetically predisposed to having a lesser IQ, or other quantifier linked to intelligence. The truth is the situation is far more complex that simply asking where one was born in an attempt to identify their capability at any particular endeavour. In nearly any meaningful test, the variation in performance of any group of humans is so large as to render the ability to predict the performance of an individual impossible.
And yes, there are of course some obvious physiological caveats; stride length, ratio of upper body mass to lower body mass, hemocrit etc. as to whether one is capable of a world class performance in long distance or not. But again, there are individuals from every region of the globe who meet the necessary criteria.
As for your mention of the Asic Kayanos - Asics, Saucony, Mizuno and the other small brands cleaned up the serious running market years ago. The Kayano is probably the best all around running shoe for advanced runners.
Nike will continue to build junk - they want you to buy new shoes every four months. This is why serious runners who have a choice won't touch them anymore.
Nike is trying to solve a problem they helped create. Marathon running is very demanding on the body. Many experts say that a person can't run more than 2 competitive marathons per year without seeing a degradation in performance. It just takes too long for the body to recover.
Nike and the fitness industry in general, capatilized on the salad days of US marathoning in the 70's and early 80's, promoting it and profiting from its popularity. One thing that happened was that marathon racing (and other track and field sports) became quasi-professional. Athletes were allowed to accept prize and appearance money, and if it was laundered through a "training fund," they would still be eligible for the Olympics as an amateur. Nike was one of the big corporate sponsors who supplied the prize money.
For the top marathoners, it became profitable to run 4 or 5 marathons a year. Just showing up meant a paycheck. This type of schedule quickly started taking its toll, and US marathoners stopped being competitive on the world stage. As US atheletes' performance dropped, the sport's popularity nosedived as well, and marathon running has never recovered.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
While it has been shown that training at altitude helps an athelete compete at altitude, I don't believe there is much evidence showing that training at altitude helps performance at sea level. So, while training in Denver would help an athelete compete at the Mexico City Olympics, it wouldn't offer significant advantages at the LA Olympics.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
I suspect that the real problem has turned out to be soccer.
For a long time, if you weren't the big enough for football in the Fall, you went out for cross country. Nowadays, high schools have soccer in the Fall to compete with the cross country programs. Which of the two sports, cross country or soccer, will ol' dad -- who's still disappointed that his boy didn't grow up to be halfback material -- be encouraging junior to take up? And which one's more likely to have high school girls cheering on the sidelines? (We never got cheerleaders to even show up until they found out we were ranked sixth in the state.)
McDonalds might be something of a problem because it's crap food but when I was running it took a hell of a lot of calories to do the mileage we would be putting in (sometimes up to 20 miles a day during the season and usually a dozen or so in the off season). A cross country runner was basically a calorie-to-speed converter. A Big Mac doesn't hurt so bad when it's a smaller proportion of the other food you were eating just to keep yourself going (lots of carbs and fruit).
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M