amkelley wrote:
I'm a laser spectroscopist, using mainly resonance Raman spectroscopy to study the dynamics of molecules and materials following light absorption.
My dad did a lot of x-ray crystallography. He enjoyed it a lot more than teaching, so most of his published work bears the name of the institutions where he worked summer "jobs" and in "retirement." I didn't understand a speck of it but it was fun to see his name atop papers like
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic00094a009Hey mopac, I'm wondering if you have thoughts about PEDs and cycling. A standard argument I've heard over the years is "it is IMPOSSIBLE to race these races without PEDs, they're all cheating," etc. But really, you're on a machine for five hours. No impact. (Unless you crash, of course.) You're drafting with your mates, or should be (Team Kipchoge have been saying for some time that this is the future of distance running). And you get to hang with the peleton for at least one-third of a grand tour.
So....is it REALLY impossible to recover enough to compete at a high level in a 20-stage event taking place over 22 days?
Fascinating to see last year's TDF winner Bernal turned into Bernaise sauce so far from the finish. Whoever wins, it seems,will be getting a call from our First Lady....
In local news, Kid Coach gave me a plan for the Labor Day 5K and I almost ran it to perfection. We did the Race Predictor (3x1600 w/4:00 recovery) five days before, and that determined my speed. I say "almost" because unfortunately I did have gut issues for the last mile that seriously slowed me down. Oh well. But the execution was thrilling. I stayed on my time for 1.5 miles and then let 'er rip. Finished in 17:49 in 73F heat, that's easily a PR if I run it in December with one more pit stop before the race. As longtime thread readers here know, I've struggled to figure out a good way to run a simple 5K. It's a relief to have a plan for a race that I know I can execute on. Also, one of the Daves noted a long time ago that running longer distances has a way of making you faster at the shorter distances, and I'm learning the truth of that now.
Finally, for those of you stuck indoors, Steve Seiler or one of those fitness geeks measured the fitness of a bunch of Scandihoovian runners when they took several weeks off and saw almost no decline in fitness. Jack Daniels, in the aforementioned Running Formula, has a formula for what intensity to run in your first runs back from a layoff, and even if you do no cross training, sit like a bump for 10 weeks, you're still at 80.5% of your original fitness. Cross train, and that number jumps to 90.2%. Table 9.1 in the first edition. Book it!