Duluth’s original triathlon training group!
In the pool.
2nd round of 50’s and 100 Free were on May 12, 2008.
2nd 500 was on April 28th, 2008.
The 1st 500 was on 12th of December and the 50’s were on the 19th, of 2007.
Click Here for the full spreadsheet.
Great improvements everyone, keep up the good work!
Reminder that registration opens tomorrow (april 1st) for RSOP Summer Tri Team.
Swim, BIke, Run
M-Th 6:30-8:30 am
June 2nd-July 31st
$165 Students/ $225 Others
Call 218.726.7128 or goto www.umdrsop.org for details.
From the Duluth News Tribune, Sunday, March 16th, 2008.
NEAR ATIKOKAN, ONTARIO — The concept seemed reasonable. We’d make a little winter camping trip up north, in March, when winter wasn’t so — well, wintry. You know, balmy days in the upper 20s. Maybe even the 30s. Sunshine. Lots of daylight.
But at 6:15 that first night, the thermometer hanging outside our tent registered 9 below zero. At 8:30 p.m., the needle would hit 15 below. By 9 p.m., it would be 19 below.
By daybreak, the temperature would drop to minus 22. Crisp.
Fortunately, the four of us camped on the shore of Nym Lake near Atikokan, Ontario, had come prepared. Our tent was a pyramid of canvas. A sheepherder’s woodstove, its belly full of spruce and birch, was radiating plenty of heat through the 9-by-9-foot tent. Clint Moen and his wife, Kris Kolenz, and Wayne Bogen, all of Duluth, relaxed on sleeping pads in their shirt sleeves, sipping tea or hot chocolate before a dinner of 15-bean soup.
We had skied across four miles of Nym earlier in the day, headed for Quetico Provincial Park a few milesfarther south. We had come north for snow and silence and stars in this quiet country, about 40 miles north of the Minnesota-Ontario border. The going had been slow across the brittle snowpack of Nym. Each of us pulled a sled or toboggan loaded with winter gear.
We had hoped to reach Pickerel Lake in Quetico Provincial Park, Ontario’s 1.2-million-acre canoeing wilderness. But by midafternoon that first day, the cold had us reconsidering. We might have made another four miles to the park, but it seemed more prudent to camp early, make wood while the temperature was still around zero and settle in to a comfortable camp.
“All of our trips are these epic things,” Kolenz said. “Why does it have to be that way? It doesn’t take much to get away.”
Watching the temperature drop that evening, snug in a handsome camp on Black Bay of Nym Lake, we liked our decision.
COLD BUT GOOD
Over the next three days, we rediscovered the joy of living close to the land in a northern winter. We day-tripped into Pickerel Lake. We poked around Nym. We skied. We snowshoed. We fished for only a couple of hours and found no willing trout. But we were more than rewarded with the simple pleasures of moving through this austere land and maintaining our little oasis of warmth.
The cold prevailed until the last day. After that first night of 22 below, we saw 19 below the second night and 16 below our last night. But, perhaps surprisingly, we were never cold.
“Many of the hours were below zero,” Bogen said late in the trip, “but I was never cold for more than a couple of minutes. I’m way colder leaving Fitger’s [Brewery Complex in Duluth] on a cold night and driving home.”
It was just a matter of dressing right, moving around and having a warm tent waiting whenever we returned. Your fingers would get cold trying to light a campstove outside the tent. Or you might get the cold aches while dipping water from a hole in the lake. But we never stayed cold because, frankly, that isn’t one of the choices when you’re out on the land in winter. You solve your problem. You put your choppers on if your hands are cold. You get moving if your toes are cold. Along the way, you realize what an adaptable creature you are.
“If you told people you had a wonderful time at 20 below, they’d think you were crazy,” Moen said.
Maybe we are. But it’s a good crazy.
SOLITUDE IN QUANTITY
Clearly, nobody else wanted this kind of crazy, at least while we were out. In four days, we didn’t see another person. Our last morning, we heard a couple of snow machines in the distance. What we heard was a hairy woodpecker chipping insects from a jackpine, a great-horned owl playing oboe behind the tent and the wind working its way through the pine needles.
On our day trips by snowshoe or ski, we came across the tracks of otter, weasel, pine marten, ruffed grouse and snowshoe hare. We saw wingprints in the snow that depicted a grouse lift-off. Without seeing any of the actual animals, we felt their presence in the woods around us.
Mostly, a winter trip full of silence slows you down. Living this way makes you realize how complicated and fast-paced life is back home. And how good the absence of that pace feels.
On one snowshoe walk, Moen and Kolenz had happened upon a pileated woodpecker and watched it for some time.
“When the highlight of your day is seeing a pileated woodpecker — and it truly is exciting — it tells you you’re in the right place,” Moen said.
BACK IN CAMP
We spent part of each day making wood. We would snowshoe down the shore pulling an empty sled and fell a long-dead spruce or jackpine. Back at camp, we cut and split it. Not only does making wood keep you warm, it is also satisfying. The sound of the saw cutting through the years is a good sound. The smell of sawdust is a good smell. And what is it about driving an ax through a piece of wood, watching the splits fly, that is such pleasant work?
Inside the tent, life was good. One night, about 8:15 p.m., it was 12 below zero outside. Inside, up where our mittens were hung, the temperature was 96. Where we sat on our insulated mats, it was just right.
We told stories that took us from Bhutan to Beaverhouse Lake, from Baffin Island to the Baja, from Basswood Lake to Badwater Lake. Kolenz baked brownies one night, and it was all we could do to remain awake until 9 p.m. to sample them. How can doing so little make you so tired?
Kolenz got the Most Valuable Player award for the trip. She slept near the stove and fed it more wood every couple of hours during the night. We always awoke to a warm 9-by-9-foot world.
Of course, when it came time to hitch up and go home, temperatures soared to near freezing. Sunshine flooded Nym Lake. It seemed like 70 degrees.
The trip back to the landing seemed like nothing. When she approached the parking lot, Kolenz stopped short while she was still on the ice. Still in the traces of her sled, she said what all of us were thinking.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said.
Don’t Forget!
By Baron Baptiste and Kathleen Finn Mendola
Although yoga and running lie on opposite ends of the exercise spectrum, the two need not be mutually exclusive. During the course of an average mile run, your foot will strike the ground 1,000 times. The force of impact on each foot is about three to four times your weight. It’s not surprising, then, to hear runners complain of bad backs and knees, tight hamstrings, and sore feet.
The pain most runners feel is not from the running in and of itself, but from imbalances that running causes and exacerbates. If you bring your body into balance through the practice of yoga, you can run long and hard for years to come. Although yoga and running lie on opposite ends of the exercise spectrum, the two need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, running and yoga make a good marriage of strength and flexibility.
Striking a Balance
Runners who stick with running are most likely structurally balanced individuals who can handle the physical stresses of the workout with minimal discomfort. Yet, many runners don’t survive the imbalances that running introduces. Often, they suffer from chronic pain and are sidelined by injury.
A typical runner experiences too much pounding, tightening, and shortening of the muscles and not enough restorative, elongating, and loosening work. Without opposing movements, the body will compensate to avoid injury by working around the instability. Compensation puts stress on muscles, joints, and the entire skeletal system.
If you’re off balance, every step you take forces the muscles to work harder in compensation. Tight muscles get tighter and weak muscles get weaker. A tight muscle is brittle, hard, and inflexible. Because muscles act as the body’s natural shock absorbers, ideally they should be soft, malleable, and supple, with some give. Brittle muscles, on the other hand, cause the joints to rub and grind, making them vulnerable to tears.
Muscle rigidity occurs because runners invariably train in a “sport specific” manner—they perform specific actions over and over again and their focus is on external technique. This repetitive sports training or any specific fitness conditioning results in a structurally out of shape and excessively tight body.
Yoga’s internal focus centers your attention on your own body’s movements rather than on an external outcome. Runners can use yoga practice to balance strength, increase range of motion, and train the body and mind. Asanas move your body through gravitational dimensions while teaching you how to coordinate your breath with each subtle movement. The eventual result is that your body, mind, and breath are integrated in all actions. Through consistent and systematic asana conditioning, you can engage, strengthen, and place demands on all of your intrinsic muscle groups, which support and stabilize the skeletal system. This can offset the effects of the runner’s one-dimensional workouts.
Body Wisdom
In addition to physically counteracting the strains of running, yoga teaches the cultivation of body wisdom and confidence. As you develop a greater understanding of the body and how it works, you become able to listen and respond to messages the body sends you. This is especially important in running, where the body produces a lot of endorphins. These “feel good” chemicals also double as nature’s painkillers, which can mask pain and the onset of injury or illness. Without developed body intuition, it’s easier to ignore the body’s signals.
Awareness translates to daily workouts, too. You learn through the practice of yoga that each day is distinct, much like each run. Your energy levels fluctuate daily, even hourly, thus it’s important to have a sense of your reserves. The calmness you glean from yoga practice allows you to manage and economize your energy. You can learn to intuit where you are on a given day and what resources you have to give. Therefore, you don’t power drive through every workout mindlessly but rather respect your body’s limitations.
You can, however, maximize those varying energy levels by focusing on another nonkinetic aspect of yoga: relaxation. When you’re able to bring your body into a state of repose, you become more effective at using and conserving strength. If you’re in a contracted state—tight muscles, limited range of motion, chronic pain—your body requires more energy for all activities, running included. Relaxation allows you to burn energy at a more efficient level. The resulting increased vigor means a greater freedom of movement and ultimately, more enjoyment of all your physical activities.
Tension is the athlete’s downfall, and breath awareness is key to reducing it. Conscious breathing and pranayama exercises, which soothe the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and relax the entire body, can be of great benefit to runners.
Many runners know that improving VO2 Max—aerobic capacity—is vital for running and racing success. Runners with a high VO2 Max have the capacity to pump large amounts of oxygen-rich blood to working muscles. Maximum oxygen intake is a crucial physiological variable determining performance and endurance for runners. With pranayama and asana conditioning, you can maximize the size of your pump and the quantity of fresh blood coursing through your body. A somewhat vigorous yoga practice can increase your oxygen capacity.
Pain Prevention
Even the most centered and relaxed runner can face injury—the bane of all athletes. Damage to a runner’s body is often the result of overuse instead of collisions or falls. It all comes back to—you guessed it—balance, symmetry, and alignment.
The body is the sum of its parts and impairment of one affects them all. A bad back is going to affect your ankles just as weak knees can throw off your hip alignment. For example, shin splints are the result of a seemingly minor misstep: an uneven distribution of weight that starts with the way the feet strike the ground. Each time the foot hits the pavement unevenly, a lateral torque travels up the leg, causing muscle chafing and pain up and down the tibia known as shin splints.
Knee pain, too, is related to other parts of the body. If the ankles are weak or the hips are not aligned, that can put strain on the anterior ligaments in the knees. Meant to work like a train on a track, a knee thrown off balance is equivalent to a train derailing. Due to constant forward motion, hip flexor muscles shorten and tighten and can cause hyperextension in the lower back. This constantly arched position holds tension in the back and can hamper the fluidity of hamstring muscles as well.
What does this mean for the runner with pain in his lower back? Or a painful heel condition? First of all, don’t ignore your body’s signals. Take a break when your body needs one. Learn to intuit when rest is appropriate. Secondly, start incorporating yoga postures into the warm-up and cool-down portions of your workout. Think of running as the linear part of your workout and yoga as its circular complement.
There’s no need to be sidelined by injuries and discomfort brought on by your running program. Chronic injuries can eventually self-correct through a gentle yet consistent yoga practice. Remember, your body is on your side. It has an inherent intelligence to bring about a state of equilibrium no matter how many times your feet hit the pavement.
Baron Baptiste is a yoga teacher and athletic trainer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known for his work with the Philadelphia Eagles and as the host of ESPN’s “Cyberfit.” Kathleen Finn Mendola is a health and wellness writer based in Portland, Oregon.
| May 13, 2008, 4:25 pm | |
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Rain current temperature: 51°F |
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Showers 36°F wind speed: 4 m/s WNW Windgusts: 7 m/s |
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Intermittent clouds 62°F wind speed: 4 m/s WNW Windgusts: 7 m/s |