Tag Archives: sports

Little Bird Fly

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On a field in Warner Robins, Georgia this Sunday past a group of thirteen 12-year-old girls from Charlotte, North Carolina made a date with destiny. The newly crowned state champion, Rowan County All-Stars were 2 and 0 in the Little League Softball Southeast Regional tournament, set to play the returning championship team from Tennessee, also undefeated in the tournament so far.

Solid, back and forth play from both teams found the score tied, North Carolina at bat in the bottom of the sixth and possibly last, inning with two outs and a runner in scoring position. At bat was my grand-daughter, number 16. Lovingly referred to as ‘the softball warrior,’ she ate, slept and bled softball, playing basketball, volleyball or anything else at a high level to kill the time in between softball seasons.

Living as we did a laundry list of interstate highways apart I seemed to retain the images of our last meeting several years back even in the onslaught of hundreds of social media posts and regular barrages of school portraits and sporting events. She ever remained the small, slender waif with round, rosy cheeks and long, beautiful, brown hair, the apple of her papa’s eye. Watching her team progress through this tournament showed something new, something unexpected.

This wasn’t a child with a bat, a ball and a cherubic smile, but a practiced team player, snagging string-straight liners and making 6-3 putouts with ease. She took practice cuts with the bat as she settled into the batters’ box, ignoring everything around her except the pitcher, 43 feet away. If I was guessing, she never heard the contact but felt it as the ball sailed over the first baseman’s head, landing in fair territory several steps in front of the right fielder. The runner on third had scored well ahead of the fielder’s throw to home and she looked at the crowd gathering around the plate as they and the rest of her team began running towards her, not yet realizing that her hit had won the game.

I stared blankly at my TV as an epiphany began to wash over me. At that moment she would never again be thought of as a child. She had led her team that day, led by example, with singular purpose and fervent resolve. I would forevermore be the student, she was now the teacher. She had flown high up into the clouds and would never be satisfied with the ground again. I chuckle to myself when I think of her older brother’s one word summary of his little sister’s performance, ‘Clutch.’

What Do You Do For Sports?

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I hate broadcast TV, 20 minutes worth of ads an hour, they never seem to care about the sports I am passionate about, just revenue. Then there is cable sports, cable was supposed to be the answer to broadcast TV because, no advertising. Well, that turned out well. I quit watching football, baseball, basketball, even bowling because of the ‘lets make this sport better for TV’ attitude.

12 years ago a partner and I were hired to video the local Junior A hockey team that was new to town. I was hooked. Let me tell you, there is no more exciting way for me to spend 3 hours than to watch people skate back and forth fighting over a rubber puck. Now I still get on the internet and watch snooker, UK Masters, World Championships, all of the opens, and all because of Ronnie O’Sullivan, I love the Rocket. I also enjoy the Spring Basho, and any tournament that is likely to crown a new Yokozuna, but my abiding love will always be hockey.

The owner of the team has decided to step away from the team and with him goes any hope of another season, that is not acceptable to me or any of the many other die-hard fans. I had to accept the fact that in order to feed my hockey jones I would have to subsist on substandard network feeds from the internet or the infrequent roadtrip to Dallas to watch the Stars from the nosebleeds.

I thought about this and decided that the alternatives were unacceptable. I had to do something. Crowdfunding. It was the single solution that would accomplish all of the goals that were needed. We would have the capital to show the league we were serious and could fund a team for the entire season. We could hire a coach in time to get the right players on the ice. We would be in control of the front office and able to correct the egregious wrongs that were done to season ticket holders in the past. But the most important goal of all, getting our players scouted by college teams. Over the years we have been able to get a large number of our players scholarships at Division I schools. Scholarships that changed their lives for the better in every way possible. This is the point. This is the purpose. The rest is just the mechanics of how to get them there. Altruistic, sure, I can accept that, but if that is what it takes then I will gladly take one for the team, our team.

How far would you go to save your local team?

Stretch Shortening Cycle

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301.4

box-jumps

The fundamental elements of human power production are: high-speed strength, low-speed strength, speed of force production, strength-shortening cycle and muscle memory or skill. The first three elements are trained in the gym, the fourth is a gift of nature and the fifth means that you could be the most perfect physical specimen ever to walk the earth and you wouldn’t be able to chew gum and walk, unless you practiced chewing gum and walking, of course. Let’s talk for a moment about number 4.

Do you remember the classic scene in the doctor’s office where the patient is sitting on the exam table and the dr. hits his knee with a rubber hammer and the patient’s leg kicks out? That is a demonstration of the stretch shortening cycle. A perfect example of the body’s defense mechanism against overstretching, when the hammer hits the tendon over the knee and quickly shortens the quadricep muscle, the brain immediately tells the quad to contract and simultaneously keeps the opposing muscle, the hamstring, relaxed so that there is no opposition to the leg’s movement, preventing overstretching. The same phenomenon can be seen in weight training, called ‘bouncing out of the squat’, the athlete lowers the weight under control until, at the very bottom of the squat the pre-stretched muscles rebound to start the weight up again.

The stretch shortening cycle is a built in part of the human machine but knowing what it is and what it does can help us in getting to know our bodies better. Plyometrics is a subject that really embraces the stretch shortening cycle, many of the movements rely on it for their effectiveness. One of my favorite exercises is platform jumping or box jumping. Many people do this in their workouts, but there are two ways to do this and two very different results.

The basic box jump starts with the athlete standing in front of a wooden platform and jumping from the floor to the top of the box, fully extending the hips each time and jumping back down to the floor. If you can do this, awesome. Now think about this, start on top of the box, jump to the floor and spring back onto the box without pausing at the bottom. This is where the stretch shortening cycle lives. Try this ten times with a small box or snatch block, 6 to 8 inches tall to begin with. Rest at the top instead of the bottom if you need to and try to keep your heels from touching the ground when you land at the bottom, this leaves all of the stretch in your legs. The first several times be careful as there is a component of skill and balance involved in getting back to the same spot you started each time. Think unicycle, don’t hurt yourself trying to help yourself.

workout: run 1 mile, no stops

Day 16: Adding Rest Time Between Sets

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297.0

The large number of sets in the bench is beginning to tell, the last two sessions I have had to split the last set in two to finish. I had been doing one set every two minutes, I am going to go to every three minutes on the bench and see how the work goes for the last two days of this cycle.

Landmine 180’s 5×25@52.5#
FS 5×5@115#
BP 10×10@115#

Countdown to the Hotter’n Hell 100…

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The big endurance ride of the year is only a hundred days or so out now, time to fine tune the bike and get some serious saddle time, this is the year we go for the big one, the hundred mile course.  And we are going to do it with a team of at least 5 people, so we have to be serious about our cadence and especially our rest stop discipline.  We cannot stop every 10 miles or even 20 like in years past, the cutoff for the 100 mile course is closed at 11:30AM or earlier, depending on the weather, which gives us about 4 hours to get the first 70 miles done making ‘Hell’s Gate’ before the cutoff.

We all have camelbacks and know how to use them, we should probably try to make the first stop at 50 miles, somewhere to the west of Burkburnett on the way back from Electra.  Getting 5 people to adhere to that sort of schedule will be tough but the alternative is to leave the stragglers behind and go for the gate without them.  The start will include about 14,000 cyclists and we will start in front of maybe 12,000 but still, passing up the first three rest stops should seriously thin the herd in front of us so that when we do stop the lines will not be as long, keeping stops short is key though.  Rest is for after the ride, stopping is for hydration only, and then back up and ride.  Since we rode together last year I know that we have 3 strong riders and me and the rest can keep up, practicing taking the lead and rotating through the pack practice would help us immensely, both with drafting and keeping our minds off of the road and the monotony of pedalling, which can be mentally draining especially into the wind.

It will be interesting to see if my training this year will serve me as it has in the past, I am getting better at hydration too, I think, which should serve me extremely well, we are due a real scorcher, the last two years were pretty mild for the end of August(the ride is always exactly 9 days before Labor Day).  I have been drinking at least a gallon and a half of liquid a day, some days two, this seems about right as the temperatures here are in the 100’s most days and I work outside in it all day.

I plan on taking as much advantage as I can of the community rides we have here every day and getting out on the bike trails as much as I can, I have to wear in the new Brooks before August.  Yall be good and watch for cyclists when you drive.

 

Beginning a Prilepin cycle…

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OK, in the 60’s and 70’s a Soviet named A. S. Prilepin charted the workouts of thousands of weightlifters and boiled all of his raw data down to a simple chart, The Prilepin Chart.  Using this chart an athlete can program workouts to maximize the strength gain and lessen recovery time and exposure to injury through overtraining.  Basically, intensity equals adaptation until the overall demand impacts speed.  Enough of that, simply put you train a single movement a finite number of reps/sets at some percentage of your 1 rep max.  

Since I am starting an overhead squat strength cycle, today I had to find my 1RM in the overhead squat.  2 sets of 5 with an empty bar to warm up the movement then, 5 @ 65#, 5 @ 75#, 3 @ 85#, then singles of 95#, 105#, 110#, 115# and 120#.  I didn’t fail at 125# but my form sucked so badly at 120# that I called it right there rather than risk injury, train smarter, not harder.

Now that I have my number, 120, I need to calculate three more numbers to use the chart, 70%, 80% and 90% which is 84, 96 and 108 or rounded to my available plates, 85, 95 and 110.  The chart states that if you are using less than 70% of your 1RM you should do sets of 3-6 reps with a total of between 18-30 reps with the optimum number being 24.  Between 70% and 80% of 1RM sets of 3-6 reps and a total of between 12 and 24 reps with the preferred number being 18.  80% to 90% of 1RM calls for sets of 2-4 reps and between 10 and 20 reps with the desired number being 15.  Above 90% us 1-2 reps per set, 4-10 total and the magic number being 7.

My workout scheme for the foreseeable future is training OHS every night, I plan on using a three day cycle for strength adaptation in a rotation of:  Heavy adaptation using the Prilepin chart on day 1, intense 5 by 5 sets on the second day and technique/muscle memory on the third day of the cycle with low weight/high rep GVT(German Volume Training).  The way I see the next three days shaping up is this:

Day #1:  Warm up with 5 sets of 5 on empty bar then 6 sets of 3 reps @ 85#.

Day #2:  Warm up with 2 sets of 5 empty bar then 5 sets of 5 @ 65# then 5 sets of 5 @ 75#.

Day #3:  Warm up 2 sets of 5 empty then 10 sets of 10 @ 50#.

Programming will vary cycle to cycle, but you get the idea.  The heavy day sets up the adaptation and the other two allow for technical practice and spending time in the hole.  Time will tell, obviously, now go lift something heavy.