Usain Bolt, 2012
* Usain Bolt and sprinting may be uber-popular in Jamaica, but it looks like road racing in more middle/long distances is gaining in popularity there too. Bolt doesn’t look like a distance runner but I’m guessing he could give Brian Bernier a run for his money!
* Is running just chopped liver? It doesn’t even make the list of top 20 fitness trends! Bodyweight training and strength training are in the top 5, but running is nowhere to be found. Quite weird, even more when you see that #5 is “Exercise and weight loss” . . . .
* It’s not always about how fast you are. This is a pretty cool story about a senior runner who suffered an incident of “ventricular tachycardia — a dangerously rapid heartbeat that can lead to a heart attack,” leading doctors to implant a defibrillator in his chest. But he is still able to run, and he still does! The only concession he’s had to make is to slow his pace from 7:30 miles to 9:30 miles. Hey, better to run more slowly than you’d like than to have to give up running altogether.
* Running is cheaper than therapy, and it also works to bring adult daughters closer to their dads, or at least, it did for the author of the linked story. My 70+ year old dad’s regular jogging was a key factor in my taking up running a few years ago, but that story is for another day.
* Here are five fitness apps that supposedly get results. #4 on the list is RunKeeper, which is quite possibly at the top of my list of apps I couldn’t do without. #2 is GymPact, which I don’t use but which I’ve heard of; basically, it motivates you to work out by making you pay real cash when you don’t fulfill your exercise regime, whereas if you do work out, you get paid (from other users who didn’t work out).
* U.S. Marines are pretty rugged. Are you fit enough to be one? Check out this story about the fitness tests that recruits have to pass: pull-ups, crunches, and a three-mile run. For the run, women get 31 minutes and men get 28 minutes, which means just over 10 min/mile and just over 9 min/mile respectively. As for the pull-ups, well, you have to work on those . . . .
* If the Marine fitness test is too easy for you, what about The 4 Desert Race? You get a whole year to finish it, too. All you have to do is run four separate . . . (wait for it) . . . 250-kilometer (i.e., 155 mile) races in the Atacama Desert (South America), Gobi Desert (China), Sahara Desert (Africa), and the Antarctica Desert.
