Rosie Ruiz redux: it’s hard to know exactly what happened, but I think the race organizers at this marathon are on solid ground in disqualifying a runner whose second half of the marathon, according to chip timing, took just 49 minutes – i.e., sub-4:00 miles….
* Do you have spare money to spend on running-related gadgets? (And by “spare,” I mean “lots of” . . . .) If so, check out the New York Times‘ review of a bunch of high-tech wearable gear, including heart rate measuring earphones, biometric shirt, and a gaming system for indoor cardio machines.
2009 Boston Marathon (photo by Stewart Dawson)
* I’m not planning to run a marathon any time soon (or maybe ever), but I do like playing around with race pace calculators to see what my estimated finish time would be for various distances of races. The problem is that whatever race time I plug in to generate results ends up predicting faster times in the longer races and slower ones in the shorter ones, compared to what I’m actually able to do (i.e., I run a 5K faster than my 10K time predicts, but a slower half marathon). Slate has produced a marathon time predictor that seems to adjust better for people like me, as it predicts a marathon time for me that’s almost 13 minutes slower than what the usual ones predict.
* Speaking of marathons…. Fox is bringing back that game show, “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” I suppose we could have a variation on it, which would be, “Are you faster than . . . . ?” A number of celebrity athletes, actors, and others ran the recent New York Marathon, and Runner’s World compiled finishing times. Slate predicts that, among others, I would not be able to beat tennis pro Caroline Wozniacki (3:26) or former Bachelor star Andy Baldwin (3:18).
* Questions no one really wants answers to: “Is dessert really that bad for me?”
* More questions no one really wants answers to: In the long run, do low-carb, Paleo, or other diet strategies work better than eat less, move more?
* Questions we do want answers to: “How many miles should you run?” (Benefits probably top out at 70 miles/week.) But wait, won’t that just increase your injury risk? Well, maybe not . . . so long as you ramp up mileage carefully.
