The race manual warns runners about the possibility of losing consciousness, search-and-rescue operations and well, death. Of course, when you’re talking about a 100-mile foot race that includes more than 33,000 feet of climbing (to altitudes over 14,000 feet), running on scree, the possibility of unscheduled meetings with bears, and […]

The easy part of water polo, Merrill Balassone writes in the Los Angeles Times, is about wear and tear on the joints.  Everything else is murder. Balassone, a masters athlete who came from a family of competitive swimmers and polo players and recenly played her first water polo game, reports […]

You’ve got your pedometer. Your GPS monitor. Your power meter. And your heart rate monitor. Good. Looks like your ready to do some exercise, but the real exercise, it turns out, is making sense of all the data generated by the many wearable devices that cost you a couple o’ […]

“The truth is, the majority of people are not great swimmers–they’re just comfortable swimming badly.” So says Steve Cutt, swim instructor and truthteller to the appropriately named Jan Masters, who wrote this comforting piece in the London Times about her revelation, at the age of 40, that proper swimming was […]

Here’s another great locker room myth that you can now forget: If you stop working out, your muscles will turn to fat. Anahad O’Connor, writing in the Times handy Really column, says it just isn’t so. What is so, on the other hand, is if you stop working out your […]

The good news, revealed by a new study that measured the  decline in maximum exercise capacity over seven decades of aging, is that exercise can raise one’s aerobic capacity 15 percent to 25 percent, or the equivalent to being 10 to 20 years younger.  The bad news is that no […]

What is it, exactly, that boosts Lance Armstrong to the lead position in a pack made up of the best athletes in the world?  Is it his blood lactic acid levels? (6) Or his power output per kilogram of body weight? (6.8 watts) Or his VO2 max? (85) The New […]

For years, researchers have suspected that flavonoids, found in such foods as fruits, vegetables, tea, red wine and chocolate, were good for our cardiovascular systems. Now the first clinical study to look at the relationship of dark chocolate and blood pressure has found persuasive evidence that eating a small amount […]

If you don’t think tetanus is a serious threat, you’re in good company. Most Americans under the age of 60 are similarly unconcerned. That’s because most the those people were immunized to the deadly bacteria when they were kids, and haven’t given the sneaky bacteria much thought. Unfortunately, that immunization […]

Here’s a health tip that is not, as they say, intuitive: walking on cobblestones can lower your blood pressure.  A SFGate report reminds us that cobblestone walking paths are common in China, where traditional medicine teaches that the uneven surface of the stones stimulate "acupoints" on the soles of the […]