FasterSkier

Visit FasterSkier.com →

From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.

Tag: science

  • What Does the Climate Future Hold? Research Predicts Much Shorter Ski Seasons

    Athletes on course in Rumford, Maine, at 2011 U.S. nationals, which were plagued by low-snow conditions. (Photo: flyingpointroad.com)

    “I think if you’re a nordic skier in New England, you should definitely be alarmed.”

    “That’s one of the main take-homes: skiing is not going to disappear completely, but it will generally be higher [in elevation].”

    So says Cameron Wobus, a Bowdoin ski team alumnus and a researcher at Abt Associates, a global research firm. Wobus and colleagues based in Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C., recently published a study in Global Environmental Change assessing the impact of projected climate change on the ski industry. (The article is available free of charge here.)

    Their results: by 2090, many cross-country ski areas across the U.S. are likely to see 50-100 percent reductions in season length. That could translate to more than a million fewer visits by skiers, and millions of dollars of losses in trail-pass revenue.

    A lucky few ski areas could see only minor impacts, but a lot of that depends on greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios – basically, what the world does to curb the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between now and then.

    “I think a main finding is that elevation is your friend, which isn’t surprising,” Wobus said in a phone interview from Boulder last week. “If you’re a ski area in the Rockies and your base elevation is 10,000 feet, you’re obviously in better shape than if you’re a ski area in central Vermont and your base elevation is 500 feet.”

    The Nerdy Part of Prediction

    A previous report by Protect Our Winters and the Natural Resources Defense Council took a more detailed look at the economics of the winter sports industry under projected climate change.

    Bob Rosso, Mike Sinnott, Gary Storey, Kate Barton, Kelly McClowskey, and Colin Rodgers shovel snow onto the SuperTour 10/15 k classic distance race course in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2015.

    What Wobus and his colleagues wanted to do rather than to get bogged down in predicting how interest and tourism for winter sports would change in a warmer world, was to make the best possible predictions of how snowpack and season length would be affected at ski areas.

    “We wanted to do was a more detailed analysis of the physical snowpack modeling,” Wobus explained.

    To get to their conclusions, the research team modeled snowpack at 247 alpine and nordic ski areas by combining historical datasets, climate change models, and greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. As a starting point, they used North American Land Data Assimilation System meteorological forcing data, which has been recorded at a fine scale since 1979.

    They then put this meteorological data into the Utah Energy Balance model to derive snowpack at ski areas, based on what comes out of the sky and landscape factors that would determine how long snow stays on the ground.

    When the researchers compared this derived snowpack estimate to actual measurements of winter season length collected for the Snow Data Assimilation System – a framework that combines satellite data, airborne measurements, and on-the-ground observations – the match was solid.

    “We did a reasonably good job,” Wobus said. “Not surprisingly, it’s a little bit messy … but on a region-by-region basis, the only thing we need to get out of the physical model is the season length. So with the exception of the Pacific Southwest, we are generally capturing trends in season length from region to region.”

    With that information about winter season length in different parts of the U.S. in hand, the researchers applied different climate change models to predict the magnitude of reduction in season length.

    “We applied a simple delta from what all the climate models were telling us, to say, okay, we aren’t going to rely on the climate models to tell us what the weather is doing,” Wobus said. “We’re going to use a 30-year historical time series to look at natural month-to-month and year-to-year variation in weather. But then we’re going to superimpose on that weather, a climate change signal that is a change in monthly average temperature and monthly average precipitation, coming out of different climate models and different emissions scenarios.”

    The climate models used, known as General Circulation Models, or GCMs, are mathematical representations of the physical processes happening on and around the earth.

    “[GCMs], representing physical processes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and land surface, are the most advanced tools currently available for simulating the response of the global climate system to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change writes on its website. “GCMs depict the climate using a three-dimensional grid over the globe, typically having a horizontal resolution of between 250 and 600 km, 10 to 20 vertical layers in the atmosphere and sometimes as many as 30 layers in the oceans.”

    There are many different GCMs – and while they are pretty good at predicting temperature, their predictions about precipitation vary widely.

    “The precipitation predictions tend to be all over the map,” Wobus said. “We tried to beat it down to the extent that we could by using as many different climate models as we could, given the constraints of our budget. And by modeling as many years as we would, again, given the constraints of how much time we have to do the modeling.”

    In the end, that meant using five different GCMs. And additionally, the team put all of those models through two different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.

    The Bretton Woods Nordic Marathon. Climate-change researchers used the Bretton Woods cross-country ski center as an example to demonstrate predicted reductions in ski season length. (Photo: Mark Butterfield)

    The Findings

    Especially under the high-emissions scenario, a lot of the differences between predictions made from the different GCMs disappeared by 2090.

    The authors demonstrated this in a graph of predicted season length for the Bretton Woods cross-country ski area in northern New Hampshire. They showed the predictions for all five GCMs under both emissions scenarios, compared to the baseline season length at present (68 days, with a range of up to 150 days).

    By 2050 under a lower emissions scenario, mean season length dropped precipitously to roughly 12-33 days, but the range of possible season lengths is quite wide for some of the GCMs.

    “All these different GCMs have different parameterizations of precipitation, and so they are all going to do slightly different things,” Wobus said.

    By 2090 under a high-emissions scenario, though, the model predictions all converge between two and 13 days, and the current average season length is not even in the range of possible predictions for any of the models.

    “By 2090, it’s pretty clear that your distribution of season lengths is very different from baseline to future,” Wobus explained. “That’s kind of regardless of which [emissions scenario] you pick, but RCP 8.5 [the higher emissions scenario] is worse.

    “That’s one of the main takeaways from the paper,” he continued. “Climate change isn’t good for skiing in the future, but a greenhouse-gas mitigation scenario looks better than a no-mitigation scenario, pretty much across the board.”

    Why is that? Despite the variability in the precipitation predicted by the models, temperature increases would be so great by 2090 that precipitation largely wouldn’t matter.

    “You’re looking at close to 10 degrees Fahrenheit of warming,” Wobus said, discussing predictions for the Midwest. “It doesn’t necessarily protect you to be way up north or to be really frigid now. There’s obviously a latitudinal dependence on where things are worse, along with elevation. So maybe if you’re up in northern Michigan with [the higher-emissions scenario] you might still have half your ski season, but it’s certainly going to be shorter than you’re used to.”

    Snowmaking equipment at the Rikert Touring Center in Ripton, Vt. Snowmaking is becoming increasingly necessary to maintain winter ski areas, but should the ski industry also be developing other strategies?

    Part of this prediction arises from the fact that the team assumed that cross-country ski areas don’t use snowmaking. Wobus said that he knows some nordic areas are investing heavily into snowmaking (or snow storage), but in general, not enough currently use it to build into their projects as they did for alpine ski areas.

    But even if ski areas were to rely on snowmaking, they might be in trouble. For instance, under a high low emissions scenario, just 23 percent of alpine ski areas would have accumulated enough hours of snowmaking in 2090 to open by Dec. 15. As most of the cross-country ski areas are restricted to lower-elevation areas at the bottom of mountains, they would not be in better shape.

    Without snowmaking, a high-emissions scenario would lead to roughly 87,000 fewer visits to cross-country ski areas by 2050 and 1.1 million fewer visits in 2090 – equivalent, by that point, to $10.2 million less in trail passes sold.

    Are We Listening?

    The idea for this piece of research came while spitballing.

    “We’ve been doing work for ten years around impact of climate change on various sectors of the economy,” Wobus said. “I’ve published papers on the impacts of ocean acidification and ocean warming on coral reefs and linking that to a recreational use model. I did one on inland flooding and monetary damages from flooding. We’ve done all these different sectoral analyses for different economic impacts of climate change.”

    Living in Boulder and being skiers, the team thought – why not look at that?

    “We were basically pitching ideas, and we were like, skiing is a pretty important industry in certain parts of the country and it probably has a serious economic impact … so we did it,” Wobus laughed.

    But the findings have made a splash.

    “People seem to have been noticing,” Wobus said. “I actually credit Global Environmental Change for having a Twitter feed, of all things. Protect Our Winters picked it up, and Powder Magazine picked it up. … Most times people don’t pay any attention to my research. So it’s kind of cool to have something that’s a little more out there.”

  • Under 23 Questions with Claire Grall-Johnson

    Under 23 Questions with Claire Grall-Johnson

    Nakkertok's Claire Grall (3) leading a junior classic sprint quarterfinal at 2017 U.S. nationals earlier this month at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah. (Photo: Jackie Schneider)
    Nakkertok’s Claire Grall-Johnson (3) leading a junior classic sprint quarterfinal at 2017 U.S. nationals earlier this month at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah. (Photo: Jackie Schneider)

    In an effort to showcase the North Americans competing at this week’s International Ski Federation (FIS) 2017 USANA Nordic Junior World Championships and U23 Cross Country World Championships at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah, we asked those qualifying athletes several questions about themselves — actually, we had them fill in the blanks. Here we have 19-year-old Claire Grall-Johnson, of the Nakkertok Junior Development Team, who’s representing Canada at her first Junior Worlds.

    ***

    “My full name is Claire Grall-Johnson but you can call me Clairebear. I was born in Montreal, Quebec, raised in Ottawa, Ontario, and one thing you should know about my hometown is everyone is pretty bilingual and if ever you’re there you should hit up a sweet doughnut shop called ‘SuzyQ’.

    I started cross-country skiing when I was four, thanks to my parents (who had to drag my brother and I out the door). I currently train in Ottawa with the Nakkertok Junior Development Team.

    If I’m not skiing, you might find me working on some homework or hopefully eating something delicious. If I had to pick a favourite book, it would be ‘Harry Potter’ (duh) or ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr.

    One of the things I’m most excited about for Junior Worlds at Soldier Hollow is that it’s a beautiful venue with some tough courses. One race I’m especially targeting there is the classic sprint.

    The best advice anyone ever gave me about skiing or racing was to appreciate the lifestyle I get to live as a student-athlete. One of the best race memories I have is the final day at Canadian Nationals in Whistler in 2013 when all the girls on our team had a super good day.

    If I could meet one World Cup skier, it would be Krista Pärmäkoski.

    If I don’t end up being a professional skier, I’ll probably be up to something science related.

    I’m missing around 20 days of school to be here, and my teachers are probably thinking, ‘Good luck catching up!‘

    You can follow me on Instagram @clairegrall.”

    Nakkertok's Claire Grall (in yellow) during the skate sprint at 2016 Canadian nationals in Whitehorse, Yukon. (Photo: Jim Hawkings)
    Nakkertok’s Claire Grall-Johnson (in yellow) during a skate sprint heat at 2016 Canadian nationals in Whitehorse, Yukon. (Photo: Jim Hawkings)
  • Troubling Data: 1 in 5 Norwegian Junior Women Show Disordered Eating

    Troubling Data: 1 in 5 Norwegian Junior Women Show Disordered Eating

    Americans with the International Junior Camp in Oslo, Norway, in 2015. Nearly 20% of Norwegian junior women had disordered eating as of 2010. (Photo: Bryan Fish)
    Americans and Norwegians train alongside one another at the 2015 International Junior Camp in Oslo, Norway. According to a recent study in the British Medical Journal, nearly 20 percent of Norwegian junior women had disordered eating as of 2010. (Photo: Bryan Fish)

    A new study published in the British Medical Journal finds that nearly one in five female junior skiers and biathletes in Norway exhibits disordered eating (DE).

    Research across sports and geographic regions has shown that elite athletes have a higher prevalence of disordered eating than non-athletes. For instance, a previous study found that 25 percent of all first-year students in elite sports schools in Norway showed disordered eating, and that for female athletes this primarily resulted from concerns about their appearance.

    “Disordered eating is a disturbed and unhealthy eating pattern that can include restrictive dieting, compulsive eating or skipping meals,” Australia’s National Eating Disorders Collaboration explains on its website. “Disordered eating behaviours, and in particular dieting are the most common indicators of the development of an eating disorder. Eating disorders are severe and life threatening mental illnesses. An eating disorder is not a lifestyle choice.”

    A 2015 report found that one in three elite-sport students in high schools in Norway’s Trøndelag region were sick or injured. Although a possible connection between the two phenomena was not explicitly investigated, the high prevalence of disordered eating could be a contributing factor: it’s hard to stay healthy while carrying a high training load if one has insufficient nutrition.

    “[Eating disorders] have severe physical and psychosocial consequences, and are therefore not compatible with sports performance in the long run,” Ingvild Pettersen and her co-authors wrote in the new study.

    Their research is notable because it focused explicitly on young female athletes in skiing and biathlon, achieving a large sample size. And the team looked beyond the elite sports schools to see whether sociodemographic factors may change the prevalence of disordered eating.

    After the 2009/2010 season, Pettersen’s Oslo-based research group sent out surveys to all the young women who had finished in the top 30 of their age group in at least one Norwegian Junior Cup race. Of the 262 women contacted, 225 responded by filling out the Eating Disorders Inventory-2 and answering questions about their social and demographic backgrounds.

    The researchers found that disordered eating seemed to increase with age, with just 10 percent of women in the 17-year-old age category displaying the behavior while more than 20 percent of those in the 18- and 19-year-old categories had disordered eating.

    An athlete’s educational situation also played a role, with a high proportion — 28.9 percent — of women who were at elite-sports high schools exhibiting disordered eating. Less than 18 percent of those at any other type of school, including general studies high school, university, or a high school with a sports specialization, showed DE.

    “The high occurrence of DE within these schools may be related to their environments,” the authors wrote. “[Elite sports schools] are known for having a high performance pressure. This can result in a performance-focused climate that can predispose to the use of dieting methods in order to improve their performance if the athlete does not cope with the pressure. In addition, the students often move away from home to attend these schools, which may increase the risk of poor nutrition without the parental control.”

    The ski and sport schools have been working with a nutritionist as part of the Sunn Idrett (“Healthy Athletes”) initiative, founded in 2008 to help combat eating disorders in female athletes. Biathletes Tora Berger and Tiril Eckhoff and skiers Marit Bjørgen and Astrid Jacobsen are among the ambassadors for the program.

    The NTG sport gymnasium system formalized its relationship with Sunn Idrett this year. At least one other elite sports school, Toppidrettsgymnaset I Telemark (TIT), has a dietitian on staff.

    The authors also found a link between sport drop-out and disordered eating, although it was based on only 10 athletes who had ceased practicing their sport. But of those 10, four exhibited disordered eating.

    The study design did not allow the authors to address whether drop-out was caused by an eating disorder, as has been speculated in some previous research. The opposite could also be true: the athletes could have developed disordered eating after quitting their sport.

    “Athletes who were no longer active had a significantly higher occurrence of DE… than those who were still active, implying that DE may be caused by a morbid fear of fatness and body image disturbances,” the authors wrote.

    In other words, once athletes stop training and burning so many calories, they may develop unhealthy eating habits to try to maintain their appearance with lower caloric intake.

    In fact, in the study the researchers found that disordered eating in these young athletes was more correlated to body image dissatisfaction than by a drive for thinness.

    But as to its ultimate cause and emergence, they concluded that more data was needed. Even by age 17, one in 10 of the women showed disordered eating. Stemming that pattern requires an understanding of the sports and social environment at an even younger age.

    “To better understand the causal relationship of the predictors of DE, longitudinal studies are needed on both male and female athletes younger than the junior competing level,” the authors concluded. “There is a need for theory-based research on how we can change and prevent DE behaviour in sports. We need to identify psychological constructs that may influence eating behaviour in sport, and how those factors exert their influence.”

  • If a Skier Falls in the Forest, Does the Sound Scare the Birds?

    If a Skier Falls in the Forest, Does the Sound Scare the Birds?

    Serenity is being alone on the ski trails - but are we truly alone? Research shows that even a low-impact sport like cross-country skiing can have negative effects on wildlife. Those conflicts are likely to increase with climate change.
    Serenity is being alone on the ski trails — but are we truly alone? Research shows that even a low-impact sport like cross-country skiing can have negative effects on wildlife. Those conflicts are likely to increase with climate change.

    Schuss, schuss, schuss as you skate through the woods.

    The occasional slap of your classic skis as you head up a climb.

    Laughter as you chat with your training partner.

    As cross-country skiers, we think of ourselves as fairly quiet out in nature: aside from the groomer, there’s little motorized traffic, no spewing exhaust, no chairlifts. In the grand scheme of sports, cross-country skiing is relatively low-impact, or at least that’s what trails are designed to make you think.

    And it goes into the psychology of skiers, too. A team training session might be boisterous but most skiers also relish the solo days spent out on the trails, contemplating or working a problem through in their head, perhaps focusing on their technique, or simply admiring the natural world and beautiful views.

    But is our impact on that natural world really so minimal? Not necessarily.

    Poorly designed or sited trails can exacerbate erosion, for instance, while filling low-lying swampy areas affects natural hydrological patterns.

    But research shows that even well-designed trails can have impacts on wildlife. This happens primarily through habitat fragmentation of interior forest, and when skiers encounter wildlife and trigger their flight reactions. Such disturbances can have dire consequences for animals living on the edge of their energetic requirements in a tough winter.

    Additionally, climate change will cause increasing convergence between areas which are suitable for ski trails and habitat for native species.

    Habitat Fragmentation

    Where should new trail networks be built? As tempting as it might appear, probably not in pristine forest, according to bird researchers.

    “My research found that the greatest richness and diversity of birds occurred in large areas of forest free of trails, which suggests that much like other effects of fragmentation, protecting birds from disturbance associated with trails can best be accomplished by setting aside large refuge areas,” Bill Thompson of the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority outside of Toronto, Canada, wrote in an email.

    Trails slicing through otherwise intact blocks of habitat cause what is referred to as “habitat fragmentation”. Fragmentation is also caused by cutting down forests, building houses and other development, and increasing agricultural intensity. Globally, habitat fragmentation is one of the leading causes of declining biodiversity.

    Compared to building new towns or burning the rainforest, hiking and ski trails cause quite subtle fragmentation. Some species might not be affected at all, or might even do better where trails increase the amount of light reaching the forest floor or change the types of plants which are able to grow.

    But other species clearly do suffer. In a study of summer-use recreational trails in his area published in Environmental Management, Thompson found that in areas with walking or biking trails there was a lower density and diversity of forest birds, particularly of those which nest or forage on the ground.

    That’s in line with previous research. For instance, a 1998 study conducted in Boulder, Colo., found that in both forests and prairies, the types of birds found near trails were quite different than those found farther away. In particular, specialist species – those which require particular environmental conditions to succeed – were more rare near trails.

    Birds which are specialized to interior forest need quiet, undisturbed habitat. They may need food that is specific to the deep forest. When that habitat is disrupted, for instance by a trail, power line or logging road, the birds move out.

    “Research by the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Adirondacks has shown in the Science from the Field 2000-2010 Report that at least the 17 acres of forest surrounding a house and clearing become noisier, less sheltered, and vulnerable to invasion by domestic animals and nest predators and parasites,” Audubon Vermont wrote in a 2012 publication. “Interior forest conditions that are not impacted by fragmenting features do not occur until more than 200-300 feet away from the forest edge.”

    As noted, trails can be highways for predators to access the forest, as well as for invasive species to arrive. Furthermore, in the Boulder study, bird nests near trails were more likely to be parasitized by brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in nests belonging to another species and leave those parents to raise the extra young. This can lead to higher death rates for the host birds because the cowbirds’ loud calls attract predators.

    Thompson’s study showed that it wasn’t necessarily the intensity of trail use which disturbed birds in southern Ontario, but the presence of a trail itself.

    “In my study sites there was a real range of public use levels and levels of popularity in trails, none of which appeared to influence my results,” he wrote in the email.  “That suggests to me that it is the presence of the trail itself, rather than the presence of people which is the primary cause of disturbance. That could be a result of the localized loss of habitat, and associated loss of vegetation which acts as cover from predators and substrate to pick insects off, or that the compacted soil of the trail makes excavating for insects more difficult. I suspect part of the reason is that the major predators for songbirds in our area are mammals and snakes, which tend to use trails preferentially.”

    Thompson suspected that the impacts of winter trails would be slightly less than those of summer trails. However, it’s important to note that most trails are used year-round.

    A possible solution to the habitat fragmentation problem: setting up dense networks of trails, while leaving other tracts of land untouched.

    “The important point is that neither the extent of trails, nor their density, had an impact, which suggests that a balance can be achieved between trail development and wildlife habitat,” he explained. “Trail designers have the option of either aligning trails along habitat edges as much as possible, or in identifying the most diverse and productive habitat within their natural area, and setting it aside as refuge habitat, focusing trail development on other, less ‘valuable’ habitat.”

    Human Disturbance

    Little work about habitat fragmentation by trail networks addressed winter-use trails. But plenty of work has been done about how skiers and other winter recreationalists disturb wildlife.

    “The colder weather [increases] their energetic requirements,” Thompson wrote of his birds. “There has been a body of work which has observed that birds (even those foraging in the canopy) will stop foraging in the presence of trail users, presumably to ensure that they aren’t predators. During cold winters, some birds are living on very tight energetic margins, and need to consume a lot of food. Repeated disturbances in those situations could be extremely detrimental to winter survival.”

    Other researchers have been focusing on how disturbance affects large mammals such as moose.

    “I did some basic calculations for the animals involved in the experimental disturbances, but the real costs depend on many factors (terrain – movement uphill, downhill or plain), snow conditions (snow depth, wet/dry snow, icy snow, ice crust to walk on or not, …….),” wrote Wiebke Neumann, a moose researcher from Sweden.

    She specifically studied the response of moose to cross-country skiers. Targeting the physiological response to disturbance, Neumann and her team found that moose startled by skiers moved faster for the next hour or so, roughly doubling their energetic requirements.

    “In general we can say that winter is a period animals usually live on their energetic reserves – any extra movement depletes them more quickly,” Neumann wrote in an email. “Single disturbances may not cause any problem for healthy animals that are in good body conditions. Yet, disturbances that occur repeatedly are likely to have an impact or animals that are on the edge [such as young, old, or ill individuals] may suffer heavily.”

    A reindeer in the Kebnekaise valley in Sweden. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
    A reindeer in the Kebnekaise valley in Sweden. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

    Research on reindeer in Norway found that animals startled by cross-country skiers moved away even farther than when startled by snowmobiles, perhaps because they could detect the snowmobiles from farther away while skiers arrived quietly and unexpectedly.

    Meeting three cross-country skiers, the researchers calculated, would use 3.4 percent of a reindeer’s energy reserves for the day.

    Researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland found not only that black grouse flushed from their nests showed increased levels of the stress hormone corticosterone, but also that those living in areas with high levels of winter recreation — namely freeskiing — had chronically high levels of the hormones. The long-term impacts of such stress remains unstudied.

    Ski lifts were particularly bad for the grouse, reducing their densities and changing their behavior. In a separate paper, the research team calculated that black grouse habitat had been reduced by 12 percent in their study area by ski resorts themselves, but by another 16 percent due to outside-the-bounds activities like backcountry and freeskiing.

    Like Thompson, the team suggested using habitat models to identify areas of habitat which could be kept free of recreation.

    “By identifying zones of potential conflict, while rating its relative intensity, our model provides a powerful tool to delineate and prioritize areas where wildlife winter refuges and visitor steering measures should be implemented,” they wrote.

    For her part, Neumann said that the ecological impacts of skiing didn’t mean we should feel so guilty as to abandon the sport altogether. Along with considerate siting of new trail networks, she recommended using common sense when encountering animals on trail.

    “Being aware of having an impact as well,” Neumann wrote. “Avoid areas where animals gather to feed or rest, and do not track animals. Keep a sound distance, no need for impressive selfies with wildlife, use binoculars instead and enjoy.”

    Increased Conflict?

    Finally, human/wildlife conflict around skiing is certain to increase in the future as warming temperatures and changing snow patterns push both skiers and wildlife into smaller and smaller areas of higher-elevation terrain.

    Researchers at the University of Turin in Italy modeled how the two sets of requirements would converge under different climate scenarios, focusing on downhill rather than cross-country skiing. The paper, recently published in the Journal of Biogeography, was written by Mattia Brambilla; the senior author was Dan Chamberlain.

    “What we do is we go into the field and we study animals [or plants] in their natural environment,” Chamberlain said in an interview. “I’ve personally done a lot of bird surveys in the mountains, particularly at different altitudes … you can basically predict statistically where a species is likely to be in relation to habitat, but also to climate. So you can say, in this area, at this elevation, with this habitat, this species has an 80 percent probability of being present.”

    The team then fed their model into different climate predictions. Their finding: suitable bird habitat above treeline in the Alps will be reduced by over half with standard climate change predictions, and habitat which hosts the best diversity of species or the most threatened species will see substantial conflict with areas suitable for ski areas.

    “There’s quite an overlap already,” Chamberlain noted. “Skiing is a very common activity, and there’s a lot of ski pistes which are at quite high altitude above the treeline. So there’s already conflict … the management of the trail has a negative effect on the habitat. Often the more grassy areas, areas with meadow, not too steep or with cliffs but not too flat either, those are often the areas that birds like.”

    The mowing of alpine ski trails in winter, along with grading and filling to make the trails suitable to skiers of varying abilities, drastically changes the way that some birds would use such meadows for habitat, Chamberlain said.

    Above treeline, cross-country ski trails would likely have less impact on bird habitat requirements. But as climate change proceeds new trail systems may be built in the remaining more-suitable areas for skiing, which could lead to more of the type of fragmentation identified by Thompson in tracts of forest.

    “The message I want to get across is that these are some possible things that we should keep in mind,” Chamberlain said. “We can’t predict the future. We want to say, this might be an issue, what can we do about it? Maybe we identify some particularly important areas and put a moratorium on building ski pistes in these valuable areas. I’d like to see the information used for conservation planning… What we might be able to say is, what density of ski pistes could an area support? Or how many protected areas do we need and how big do they have to be?

    “We’re not anti-skiing,” he concluded. “It’s one of the major incomes for mountain communities. What you’re looking for is a compromise, but you have to plan for it. So you need these things in order to try to develop skiing sustainably.”

  • Välbe’s Asthma Comments Off The Mark, Medical and Scientific Community Says

    Välbe’s Asthma Comments Off The Mark, Medical and Scientific Community Says

    Martin Johnsrud Sundby of Norway celebrates the fruits of his labor over eight stages of the Tour de Ski (TdS), after winning the final climb. He has told Norwegian media that his lung capacity is 80% of a normal man's, which is why he trains so much; Russian cross-country ski federation president Elena Välbe says that if he's really so sick, he shouldn't be competing. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)
    Martin Johnsrud Sundby of Norway celebrates the fruits of his labor over eight stages of the Tour de Ski (TdS), after winning the final climb. He has told Norwegian media that his lung capacity is 80% of a normal man’s, which is why he trains so much; Russian cross-country ski federation president Elena Välbe says that if he’s really so sick, he shouldn’t be competing. (Photo: Fischer/NordicFocus)

    Elena Välbe, the President of the Russian Cross-Country Ski Association, recently had some thoughts on how the Norwegians attain their dominance in cross-country skiing: through inhaler use.

    “It’s annoying because this team, everyone has asthma,” she said, according to a translation of an interview with the Russian news service Izvestia. “I personally don’t understand what kind of asthma you can have, and still ski so fast… [Martin Johnsrud] Sundby said in a recent interview that in Oberstdorf it was bad because it was warm, and he lost his breathing and had to use powerful drugs. For us, this is nonsense. If a person is so sick then how are they going as if they were healthy? It seems to me that if someone is sick, they don’t have to compete.”

    She went on to say that the trend of inhaler use in young Norwegian athletes was “alarming”.

    Many of the former World Champion’s statements are far off the mark, scientifically speaking. But Välbe isn’t the first to imply that the Norwegians obtain an unfair pharmaceutical advantage.

    Back in 2010, Polish superstar Justyna Kowalczyk said that Norway’s Marit Bjørgen never would have won her three Olympic gold medals in Vancouver without her inhaler – not because she had asthma and needed them, but because she didn’t have asthma and was simply using an inhaler to boost her performance.

    Russian Ski Federation President Elena Vyalbe in 2004. (Photo: Ivan Isaev, Russian Ski Magazine)
    Russian Ski Federation President Elena Vyalbe in 2004. (Photo: Ivan Isaev, Russian Ski Magazine)

    Inhalers using albuterol (also called salbutamol) and other drugs of that class, called beta-2 agonists, seem to have an unfair reputation as narrowly-disguised cheating in parts of the sports world. This is despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that such drugs are not performance-enhancing.

    And with Bjørgen currently on the sidelines after having her first child, Sundby appears to be the new poster child for winning with asthma. The winner of the Tour de Ski and the current World Cup leader, Sundby initially didn’t respond to Välbe’s comments.

    Besides asthma, there are also other reasons to use inhalers containing beta-2 agonists or other drugs. A number of disorders fall under the umbrella of airway hyper-responsiveness, when the airways narrow in response to some challenge more easily or quickly than they would in a healthy person. Symptoms include coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath.

    “Airway dsyfunction as described by Price in 2014 includes the following: airway hyper-responsiveness, exercise-induced asthma, and/or asthma,” explained Dr. Michael Kennedy, a researcher at the University of Alberta who has studied airway inflammation in cross-country skiers. “Airway hyper-responsiveness in reality is the most important of these specific definitions because it accurately describes the phenomenon of airway narrowing (bronchoconstriction) due to exercise or physical activity.”

    American track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee is an example of a famous athlete who succeeded despite an asthma diagnosis. (Photo: Wikipedia)
    American track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee is an example of a famous athlete who succeeded despite an asthma diagnosis. (Photo: Wikipedia)

    Those with airway hyper-responsiveness and another disorder in that family, exercise-induced bronchospasm (EIB), also treat their challenges with inhalers. Most individuals with asthma also have EIB, but many people have EIB without having asthma.

    “Both asthma and EIB are likely under-diagnosed, but diagnosis can be tricky and there are look-alikes, like vocal cord dysfunction,” Dr. Krystian Bigosinski, a sports medicine doctor in Maine who works with the U.S. Ski Team, explained in an email. “That is why it is very important to get a solid diagnosis with the help of testing, such as spirometry with exercise or cold air challenge.”

    Beta-2 agonists are generally prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, but inhaled salbutamol, formoterol and salmeterol (common ingredients in inhalers) are allowed up to certain doses without a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE).

    That’s good news for a lot of athletes.

    “The treatment for both asthma and EIB is similar, and in both cases, the first line treatment is albuterol,” wrote Bigosinski. “If that doesn’t work, other medications are added, such as long-acting beta-agonists, inhaled corticosteroids, mast cell stabilizers, and leukotriene inhibitors. EIB, if not accompanied by true asthma, typically responds better and often only necessitates the use of EIB, by itself, is rarely if ever life-threatening. However, EIB with a background of asthma is more likely to need other medications as mentioned above, and EIB with asthma can be a medical emergency.”

    Välbe seems to suggest that if you need treatment, you shouldn’t be competing.

    “It is mostly a lack of understanding for the use of medications,” Vidar Löfshus, the chief of the Norwegian ski team, told Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten regarding Välbe’s comments. “Use of asthma medications are strictly regulated in doping legislation, no one does it for performance enhancing reasons. There are many people who have some issue or another with their airways, and when they are allowed to use drugs they can get to a normal level with their airways.”

    The data backs him up: a lot of athletes have asthma or other airway hyper-responsiveness, and even for those who don’t, using inhalers does not provide a performance advantage.

    Many Asthmatics in Elite Sport

    In fact, asthma and other respiratory problems are extremely common in elite athletes, especially those who compete in unusual air conditions: very cold air, very dry air, or the chlorine-filled air inside a swimming hall.

    The prevalence is high enough that a team of British researchers and doctors from, among other institutions, the National Heart and Lung Institute recommended that airway dysfunction be classified as an “occupational disease” in athletes.

    “Applying a label of occupational disease in this setting raises implications for the care and treatment afforded to elite athletes,” the authors wrote. “Indeed it is a key mandate of the International Olympic Committee–Medical Commission (IOC-MC) that no athlete is harmed by exposure to sport and that all care is taken to ensure their health is maintained.”

    Among athletes, most asthma diagnoses could be broken down into two categories. A research team from Portugal and Norway set out to see how prevalent the diagnoses of each were, hoping this could lead to better targeted treatment.

    The first type of asthma they identified is classic asthma, associated with allergy problems. The second is what the authors called “sports asthma”: induced by exercise and lacking the connection to allergy that often underlies the disease. In water and winter sports, athletes were three to nine times more likely to have this second type of asthma than those who did not compete in cold weather or in aquatic sports complexes.

    “Sports asthma” might be more recognizable when called a term you have probably heard: “exercise induced asthma.”

    “There is exercise induced asthma (EIA) and exercise induced bronchospasm (EIB),” wrote Dr. Ed Merrens, the Chief Medical Officer of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire and the former team doctor for the U.S. Biathlon Association. “It is different than childhood asthma. Winter athletes certainly have higher incidence of EIB and EIA.”

    What does that mean, in terms of numbers?

    An Italian study of 659 summer and winter Olympians over a 12-year period found that 15% of athletes had asthma, and for almost a fifth of those, their asthma was not “under control”. The researchers also found that the proportion of athletes on an Olympic squad who had asthma increased from quadrennial to quadrennial.

    A study in Sweden found that depending on the age class investigated, between 20 and 35% of current and former elite skiers reported that they had been diagnosed with asthma by a doctor. Diagnosis was usually during adolescence, and prevalence was higher for women than men.

    “Nordic athletes have a high prevalence of airway dysfunction and it is clear (and I mean definitive) that both the cold, dry air that nordic athletes inhale plus the volume of air (total exchange of air over months and years) as well as the flow rate (shear stress on the airway lining) caused by high-intensity intervals and races all combine to induce this,” Kennedy wrote.

    Effects of Inhalers

    Many, though certainly not all, of those athletes treat their asthma with inhalers of various kinds. And that’s allowed by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

    “Inhalers using beta-agonists have absolutely no ergogenic or performance enhancing abilities,” wrote Merrens. “They do not require a use exemption from WADA.”

    There’s plenty of research to back up this assertion: inhalers using salbutamol and beta-2 agonists do not enhance athletic performance.

    They don’t enhance it in five-kilometer running races, whether using the maximum or half the allowable dose set by the World Anti-Doping Agency, a team from the United Kingdom found.

    Salbutamol increases lung function in male cyclists but not power output, a group of researchers from Vancouver agreed.

    Nor did a combination of beta-2 agonists (including salbutamol) enhance performance by elite swimmers, a team in Denmark reported.

    There are other results, too, but the message is clear: using an inhaler isn’t cheating. That’s in fact why the World Anti-Doping Agency took inhaled salbutamol and salmeterol off the Prohibited List (you can find the classification and legal dose limits, as well as information on which doses are contained in common inhalers, here).

    “Everyone can use these in a FIS race if they so choose,” Kennedy, the researcher, wrote. “However the net effect for anyone whom does not have [exercise-induced bronchioconstriction] is negligible: you can’t relax smooth muscle in the airway if it has not been contracted. So Välbe is really politicizing something that is a non issue.”

    Can Asthmatics Win?

    Asthma can clearly have negative effects not only on health, but on athletic performance. Those are both reasons that the British team suggested designating airway problems as an occupational disease in athletes: the issues seem to be caused by the huge training loads that are part of athletes’ profession, and the diseases also have consequences in both professional and personal life.

    But depending on the type and severity of respiratory problems, athletes may still be able to turn in winning performances.

    For instance, the Italian study of 12 years of Olympic participants found that asthma had no impact on whether an athlete qualified for an Olympic team or not, and that at the 2008 Games, two of Italy’s 26 medal came from athletes who had asthma.

    “Asthma, especially in its moderate or severe forms, can absolutely reduce athletic performance, but not necessarily so,” Bigosinski explained. “There are plenty of athletes who also have asthma that are able to train and compete at very high levels.  Developing a good asthma treatment plan can significantly decrease asthma’s effect for many athletes with asthma.”

    “There is no question that with proper treatment and even better, warmup, athletes with EIB/EIA can perform at the elite level,” agreed the former U.S. Biathlon Association doctor, Merrens.

    Kennedy, the researcher, suggested that perhaps the reason that so many Norwegian skiers have a diagnosis of asthma is that their team is ahead of the curve on detecting and treating the disease. Rather than assume that shortness of breath or post-race cough is just a normal product of racing in cold weather, they look to see if there’s a clinical explanation.

    “Using an inhaler is not cheating and many World Cup athletes need and should use an inhaled beta-agonist or inhaled glococorticosteroid for health reasons, and secondly to reduce EIB during racing and training,” Kennedy wrote. “In essence the Norwegians are on top of their game and have a comprehensive screening program for [airway hyper-responsiveness] so that all athletes in all their systems get screened at least once per year and use the best Therapeutic Use Exemption available to them. That is a great example of sport science at work because the Norwegians are using at their at disposal the available evidence to ensure that their athletes have the best performances possible.”

    And furthermore, shaming atheltes for using inhalers is dangerous, he concluded.

    “I find this disconcerting because having shortness of breath and wheeze that is severe due to EIB can lead to extreme emotional and psychological discomfort, and can be life threatening,” Kennedy wrote.

  • Young Perfectionists are at Risk of Burnout, but Good Parenting Helps

    Young Perfectionists are at Risk of Burnout, but Good Parenting Helps

    A key to avoiding burnout in young athletes? Keeping parents from emphasizing perfectionism, and focusing on learning and enjoyment rather than winning or avoiding mistakes. Here, kids are excited to ski at the start of the day at the fourth-annual Lickety-Splits Ski Camp for Kids on Dec. 22 in Kincaid Park in Anchorage, Alaska. (Courtesy photo)
    A key to avoiding burnout in young athletes? Keeping parents from encouraging perfectionism: parents should emphasize learning and enjoyment rather than winning or avoiding mistakes. Here, kids are excited to ski at the start of the day at the fourth-annual Lickety-Splits Ski Camp for Kids in December, 2014, in Kincaid Park in Anchorage, Alaska. (Courtesy photo)

    When we think of top athletes, we often think perfectionist. We picture an athlete working and working to hone a task or technique and never believing that they are good enough or have reached their potential. It doesn’t help that some of them describe themselves that way, voluntarily. In the pages of this website, World Champion Devon Kershaw and Paralympic and IPC World Championships medalist Oksana Masters have both said that they are perfectionists.

    But is that really something to strive for? As the old saying goes, perfect is the enemy of good. Sean McCaan, the psychologist for the U.S. Biathlon Team, identified that endurance athletes have perfectionist tendencies.

    New research shows that junior athletes who are major perfectionists are at higher risk of burning out from sport.

    Published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science and Sports, Henrik Gustafsson of Karlstad University in Sweden along with colleagues York St. John University and Umeå University wrote, “junior athletes high in perfectionism may be at comparatively greater risk to burnout and that this may especially be the case when they perceive their parents to emphasize concerns about failure and winning without trying one’s best.”

    Gustafsson and his colleagues had previously researched other sources of stress on the lives of junior athletes, like increasing school demands or dealing with heightened training loads as each season goes by. They also identified what leads to burnout in older, elite athletes: things like high expectations and lack of balance with other parts of life.

    Gustafsson also works as a psychology expert for the Swedish Olympic Committee, including with cross-country skiers and biathletes. So he knows about the pressure of having a perfect result – and how a lot of that pressure can come from within.

    “Because everyone is so well trained, nerves and psychological causes become decisive for the outcome of races,” he said in an interview before the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. “Many participate in the Olympics only once. It is bad if it’s a big disappointment.”

    Being emotionally and physically exhausted, as well as feeling like results do not show any real accomplishment or value, can lead to a loss of interest in sport, Gustaffson found. In a 2007 paper, he had found that burnout was not correlated to training load, so something else must be at play.

    In the most recent study, the authors studied 216 Swedish junior athletes attending sport high school for sports like soccer, hockey, track and field, and swimming. They administered three questionnaires:

    • the Athlete Burnout Questionnaire, which analyzes attitudes about athletic accomplishment, exhaustion, and the value of spending time on sport;
    • the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, which asks questions about self-set standards, attitudes towards mistakes and failure, and parental pressure towards perfection growing up; and
    • the Parent-Initiated Motivational Climate Questionnaire, which asks how parents support learning and performance in terms of praise, reaction to mistakes, and the amount of effort required.

    Overall, the Swedish athletes seemed quite healthy. They reported that parents emphasized the enjoyment of learning something new. They also said that as athletes they were only moderately concerned about making mistakes and set moderately high standards for themselves. As a result, they showed only low to moderate symptoms of burnout.

    To see whether those which did score as a greater risk for burnout had consistent profiles from the other questionnaires, the researchers grouped the athletes according to four profiles ranging in perfectionism and parental pressure.

    Athletes who reported a tough parental climate, with worry about mistakes and less emphasis on enjoyment of learning, and who were also themselves perfectionists, scored higher on the metrics of burnout than other groups in most cases.

    Interestingly, even highly perfectionist young athletes could cope with the challenges of sport if they did not also face pressure from perfectionist parents. Only in terms of having a reduced sense of accomplishment – that is, feeling that their results weren’t good enough and that they weren’t performing up to their ability level – were they significantly more burnt-out than athletes who were only moderately perfectionist.

    Indeed, having supportive rather than critical parents has been previously suggested as an essential part of the athlete-parent relationship.

    “In sum, we would contend one of the primary characteristics of expertise in sport parenting is the ability for parents to consider sporting opportunities in the best interests of their child, and to be able to provide support that complements the demands of training and competition experienced by children,” wrote Chris Harwood and Camilla Knight in a review paper in Psychology of Sport and Exercise titled “Parenting in youth sport: A position paper on parenting expertise.”

    To prevent burnout, Gustafsson and the co-authors suggest interventions in cases where parents put pressure on winning without also emphasizing enjoyment, or where they penalize or criticize mistakes too much.

    That way, they might have a greater chance of sticking around in the sport for fun – or perhaps all the way to championship events like the Olympics, where they would receive another sort of advice from Gustafsson.

    “Once [performance anxiety] slams them and becomes a problem, it doesn’t work to simply think positively,” he said in the 2014 interview. “More importantly [they need to have] the courage to practice and compete, and not to hope to avoid the unpleasantness. They must be prepared to accept that tiger of anxiety but not to feed it.”

  • Female Skiers Accumulate Airway Injury and Cough During Race Season

    Female Skiers Accumulate Airway Injury and Cough During Race Season

    Racing and training in cold weather causes airway damage and inflammation to a much greater extent for female than for male skiers.
    Racing and training in cold weather causes airway damage and inflammation to a much greater extent for female than for male skiers.

    Dr. Michael Kennedy, a researcher at the University of Alberta, is a cardiovascular specialist. He has spent time working on a variety of different projects: studying muscle oxygenation, fatigue in athletes, the relationship between fitness and injury, even the effects of caffeine.

    But recently he returned to a question which had kept him curious since his days as a wax technician with x-c.com, a Canadian senior race team in the mid-2000’s.

    “In Silver Star [early season] the big house we rented was always quiet but by the time Nationals rolled around [in March] you could hear the women hacking away while they tried to sleep,” Kennedy wrote in an email last week. “This sparked a conversation with my colleague and friend Neil Eves whom at that time was working in respiratory health… it became clear from Neil’s standpoint that the cough was not a respiratory infection, but a chronic cough much like he would see in clinical populations.”

    So last year, Kennedy and some colleagues recruited 18 Canadian women who were competing full-time as cross-country skiers, and surveyed their lung inflammation over the course of a season using a technique known as sputum sampling.

    What the team found was that, indeed, airway inflammation and injury increased significantly over course of a season in ways that were completely unrelated from the prevalence of colds and respiratory infections. By the end of the season, the cough was affecting the women’s ability to sleep and recover.

    The paper was recently published by the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.

    “We were very careful to make sure that we were investigating what we thought was inflammation and chronic cough,” Kennedy explained. “We did not test a participant at a time when they had a cold or felt they were coming down with something. It made things certainly more challenging in terms of testing, but we feel like we did a good job of not having a participant who had some sort of infection going on.”

    Kennedy explains that this syndrome is different for women and men: because women have smaller lungs, they are operating at peak airway respiration much earlier in the max-effort race or training session. That leads to greater airway damage in dry, cold weather.

    We caught up with him by phone to learn more about the study, and what it means for the health of female cross-country skiers. This interview has been edited and condensed.

    FasterSkier: So between your work on the cardiovascular system and Neil Eves’ expertise, it sounds like this was an interdisciplinary project.

    Dr. Michael Kennedy: I was always interested in respiratory issues. It’s something that lots of skiers talk about on a weekly basis.

    But yes, it really was. I know a lot about respiratory physiology because obviously the respiratory system and the cardiovascular system are deeply attached. But Neil, and working with a few key clinicians in Calgary, made it interdisciplinary. Warren Davidson, who is a respirologist, and Richard Leigh who developed the sputum analysis technique. So you put together cellular biology with clinicians and respiratory physiologists to pull off the project.

    FS: What was the process of the sputum sampling?

    MK: In our development of the project, Neil and I discussed ways in which we could explore analyzing inflammation in the lungs. Really there’s two ways you can do it. You can do it invasively through a tissue sample, so you put a scope down someone’s throat and clip off a little bit of the airway and analyze the cells within that sample. That really still is the gold standard because you have a physical tissue sample. There are some risks, and it’s very difficult on people, it’s not the funnest.

    The new technique, the sputum sample, is non-invasive. It doesn’t require being in a sterilized environment with a scope. By inhaling a high dose of what we call nebulized saline, so basically a big breath of water vapor with a lot of saline in it, which basically begins to activate and draw cells off the airway wall – by doing that, it’s like trying to scrape paint off of siding. You peel off little sputum chunks.

    Then through a deep cough that you coach the person through, you cough those out. It’s a way to basically get the same cells that you would with a physical tissue sample, without having to clip off a piece of the airway.

    FS: What were you looking for in the sample?

    MK: We went after the key inflammatory cells which would be indicative of airway injury. The key ones would be neutrophils, which are an early responders to injury, and eosinophils which are inflammatory responders. And then macrophages, which come along and are like the garbage trucks but also very involved in the inflammatory reponse. And lymphocytes which are ones that are often activators stimulating the immune system to fight the infection or the inflammation.

    FS: How did the findings link to quality of life indicators that you checked in your questionnaires?

    MK: The fundamental question was, first is there inflammation occurring that increases as you move into fall and winter month, and second, whether that leads to cough and quality of life symptoms.

    With the quality of life indicators, we chose what we believe was the most valid measure of quality of life, which is this recovery-stress questionnaire, REST-Q. We didn’t see any changes in REST-Q, because my experience with these female athletes was that they really were struggling towards the end of the season. But what we did see was certainly an increase in cough-related symptoms and disturbed sleep due to coughing bouts.

    I think what you can take home from that is that the cough is prevalent and does improve through the season, but that athletes don’t feel like athletes feel like it’s affecting their quality of life necessarily. It comes with the territory and they’re coping pretty well.

    FS: If these are longtime skiers, do you think it’s possible that they just see it as normal winter quality of life, and don’t realize that it’s abnormal?

    MK: That’s a really good point. Normal for them might be this persistent cough, and so when they fill out a quality of life index it might not seem different, even though relative to a healthy population it might be quite different.

    And I’m sure you’ve experienced post-race cough, which is frustrating and affects your conversations and you feel a tight chest and then it goes away. And you just deal with that and say, well it’s winter, that’s normal for me.

    FS: You talk about why women might be more prone to airway damage due to their smaller lungs. But because of that, women are also moving less air through their airways, right? So how does that work?

    MK: It’s an interesting phenomenon. Ironically, with the cardiovascular system, these years and years of training essentially overdevelop the cardiovascular system in relation to the respiratory system in female athletes.

    In male athletes, you get the same overdevelopment of the cardiovascular system relative to another adult at the same age, but men’s lungs are significantly larger. They have a larger capacity. So with the overdevelopment of the cardiovascular system in males, they don’t operate at this same maximum percent of airway function because they have a bigger thorax.

    In female athletes, that overdevelopment of the cardiovascular system puts them right at the upper limit of their respiratory system. They just don’t have the same amount of volume to operate with. So that does then create really really hard shear stress. So there is higher flow along the airway which potentially increases the amount of injury and inflammation.

    This has been documented a number of times, where basically on a flow-volume measurement of the respiratory and expiratory volumes and flow rates reaches the maximum very early on in intensity. So put another way, if you’re doing a VO2max test, at about 75 to 80% of VO2max female athletes are at their absolute maximum respiratory flow rate. They can’t increase their ventilation any more essentially. For male athletes that occurs at 95 or 100%. Their respiratory capacity is much more matched to their cardiovascular capacity.

    FS: In terms of how this injury happens, do you have any sense of whether it is primarily the day-to-day wear of training in winter, or is it worse if you have one super cold day, maybe weather that’s not legal to race?

    MK: I think there’s two things. One, I would be remiss to not say that these very cold days or races where organizers still have people race, they can create airway that some athletes never recover from. I’ve known female athletes who have to leave the sport because of one really horrible cold race where they did severe airway damage.

    But I think in general, there’s some knowledge of that. The athletes and participants we had in our study were pretty savvy of that. I would say that they don’t train on those days. So it really it is really that general accumulation, ventilation with dry air that happens in the fall, and cold dry air in the winter especially with intensity. And that’s just part of being a ski racer.

    As part of my concern for the well-being for endurance athletes, I’d like to say that [even without cold weather] if someone is struggling with cough symptoms, or wheeze, or tight chest, go and get screened. Go and get tested. Get a full pulmonary function test done, so that it’s medically documented and so that if there’s potential that any of the new classes of inhalers or corticosteroids could help you, that’s really helpful not only to your performance, but also probably to your long-term lung health. That’s the public health message: people really should go see a respirologist.

    FS: You mentioned at the end of the paper that there are some more testable hypotheses out there. Is this the end of your research on this subject?

    MK: No, I’ve become much more interested in this area!

    One thing is that in January we will look at the acute response. We’ll find some really cold days in Edmonton, and have some skiers run a 5 k at race pace and then measure their acute airway inflammation responses. So we will track them immediately, and then 12 hours, 24, 48, and 72 hours after. We want to try to get some more information around this post-race inflammation and cough pattern.

     

  • For Better-Feeling Marathons, Try Taking More Feeds

    For Better-Feeling Marathons, Try Taking More Feeds

    Caitlin Gregg (Team Gregg/Madshus) gets a feed on the high point of the course in the 20 k freestyle mass start at U.S. nationals at Soldier Hollow, Utah, last January.
    Caitlin Gregg (Team Gregg/Madshus) gets a feed on the high point of the course in the 20 k freestyle mass start at U.S. nationals at Soldier Hollow, Utah, last January.

    What’s the best strategy for feeds in a ski marathon? How many carbohydrates do you need, and how often?

    That’s the question asked by a team of researchers from Mid Sweden University in Östersund and the University of Bath in Great Britain. With a group of experienced, but not elite, adult ski racers, they investigated high and low carbohydrate feeds delivered at high or low frequency over the course of several 30 k rollerski time trials on a treadmill.

    The results were recently published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science and Sports. While the skiers did not perform differently under the various feeding regimes, a number of physiological variables did change.

    “The take-away message I would give to athletes, from this study, is to understand how nutrition can affect metabolism,” lead author Ben Stocks wrote in an email. “There are certain metabolic things we want to see during endurance exercise… One of those is maintenance of normal blood sugar levels and this study would suggest that, on average, drinking smaller volumes of carbohydrate more regularly is beneficial in that regard. Additionally, the little and often approach appears to cause less discomfort than the larger drinks taken less often.”

    The feeds were calculated to provide particular rates of carbohydrates per minute, with amounts calibrated to each athlete based on how long they took to ski between the set distances where feeds were delivered.

    Jakov Fak of Slovenia fueling up en route to a World Championship title in the 20 k individual at 2012 World Championships in Ruhpolding, Germany.
    Jakov Fak of Slovenia fueling up en route to a World Championship title in the 20 k individual at 2012 World Championships in Ruhpolding, Germany.

    The high carbohydrate treatment delivered about double the rate of the low carbohydrate treatment. In the low frequency treatment only two feeds were given, while six were given in the high frequency treatment. This required also adjusting the amount in each feed, so that in the high frequency treatment athletes only received a third as much carbohydrate per drink.

    The treadmill was slowed for the feeds as well as blood sampling, somewhat mimicking a downhill on the racecourse (although of course treadmills can’t go downhill). Each athlete did four time trials, one for each feeding regime, in a randomized order with at least four days in between.

    The researchers found that with only two feeds, athletes could not maintain a normal, steady blood sugar level.

    “This is important because glucose is transported from the blood into the muscles and forms a critical fuel during exercise performance,” Stocks wrote in his email. “We know from studies in other sports, such as cycling, that a reduction in blood sugar levels is related to the onset of fatigue and, therefore, an inability to continue exercising at the same intensity. Maintaining blood sugar levels is therefore a crucial strategy to maximising performance in endurance sports.”

    Feeds aren't just important for naitonal and world champions! Kids hand out drinks on the Marcialonga trail in Italy.
    Feeds aren’t just important for naitonal and world champions! Kids hand out drinks on the Marcialonga trail in Italy.

    They also found that athletes experienced greater gastrointestinal discomfort when consuming a lot of carbohydrates but only infrequently.

    However, performance did not improve under any particular feeding regime. Instead, times to complete the 30 k test improved with each successive time trial, no matter what order the treatments were completed.

    “Increased gastrointestinal discomfort is not going to improve performance and, anecdotally, will negatively affect performance in some individuals,” Stocks wrote. “Therefore, in the absence of any obvious performance effects, increased gastrointestinal discomfort and poorer maintenance of blood sugar levels suggest to us that low frequency carbohydrate drinking should not be a recommended strategy.”

    As for the amount of carbohydrate delivered, there didn’t appear to be major differences in physiological variables between the high-carb and low-carb feeding treatments when both were delivered six times over the course of the time trial. Frequency seemed to be more important than amount.

    One suggestion in the paper was that after a baseline carbohydrate ingestion rate of 1 to 1.3 grams per minute, adding more and more carbs doesn’t give much benefit, at least over the 30 k distance. In a longer race, that may change as the body would be forced to dip into and deplete glycogen stores.

    While the results seem to be clearcut that frequent feeds provide for a better race experience, if not necessarily better performance, Stocks cautioned that the real takeaway message was to get to know your body.

    “It is important to stress that every individual responds differently to these things and that it is important to work out for yourself how different nutritional approaches affect you,” he wrote. “While it may be difficult to measure blood glucose without visiting a specialist sports science centre, your feelings of gastrointestinal discomfort are easy monitor, as is your performance and that is the ultimate goal. Get to know what works best for you.”

  • The Mind Makes a Winner: An Interview with Emotional Intelligence Researcher Sylvain Laborde

    Dr. Sylvain Laborde. (Photo: German Sports University Cologne)
    Dr. Sylvain Laborde. (Photo: German Sports University Cologne, where you can find out more about Dr. Laborde’s research.)

    In July, we reviewed a recent paper summarizing research into how emotional intelligence is important for athletic success. It turned out to be one of the five most popular articles of the month.

    Why so much interest? Besides physical training, mental and emotional training are keys to a winning trajectory. Sylvain Laborde, the researcher who penned the original review paper, defines emotional intelligence as “how people manage and deal with their own emotions, and with others’ emotions- so it’s both the personal and the other.”

    Concepts included in emotional intelligence have helped athletes in the nordic sports find success already.

    Last January Sean McCaan, a sports psychologist employed by the U.S. Olympic Committee to work with the biathlon team, said that one of the big things that he focuses on is resilience and how to manage emotions around failure, which is a big part of the volatile skiing and shooting sport.

    “It’s been interesting to see that a lot of veterans on the team have learned through trial and error that being resilient, letting it go, allowing you expect good things to happen the next day – it’s absolutely essential,” McCaan said.

    So with emotional intelligence so key to success and with so much interest by the ski community, we caught up with Laborde for a chat about his research and what it means for athletes. Laborde is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the German Sport University in Cologne.

    This interview has been edited and condensed.

    FasterSkier: What got you interested in studying emotional intelligence in relation to sports?

    Sylvain Laborde: I started by studying sports psychology, and I did my PhD on the influence of emotions on decision-making. In sports, emotions play an extremely important role. Whatever sport you do, you can notice it at different levels. To be able to produce in a high-pressure competition, you can train that.

    We have a symptom in sports that we call the “Training World Champion”, someone who can do everything at training, and as soon as it comes to competition it’s like nobody is there anymore. This has everything to do with emotions and stress management.

    At our research institute, we have shown that emotional intelligence will act like a shield against stress. It’s like a protector… What is stress in the end? It’s just the way that you think about stress. If you think that stress is a threat to you, then of course it will have negative consequences. Emotional intelligence will make you appraise stressful situations more like a challenge that you have the resources to cope with.

    FS: So is there a lot of variability in existing levels of emotional intelligence in different people?

    SL: Yes. And those individual differences will be reflected in how we can observe that some people can cope with pressure, or others will be more likely to choke under pressure.

    Very interestingly, at the biological level we can see a lot of differences in, for example, the way the heart is beating.

    Let’s imagine a bottle. If this bottle is full, then I can regulate myself very well. People with high emotional intelligence will have high vagal activity going from the vagus nerve in the heart to the brain, and will help this person cope with anything in their environment. People will high emotional intelligence will have a bottle full of this vagal activity.

    People with lower emotional intelligence will have a bottle half full of this vagal activity, and that means that in stressful situations they can’t use as much of this energy.

    FS: And how is that connected to your heart rate?

    SL: Basically, your heart can race much faster. It’s simplifying it, but the heart will have much more pronounced signs of stress when there’s low emotional intelligence.

    At a similar level, we find things at the hormonal level. For instance cortisol, the hormone of stress. We can [test for] it in people’s saliva. So we had tennis players and we stressed them, and we found that people with higher emotional intelligence had lower cortisol.

    Maybe you are familiar with this: if you are nervous when you have to speak in public, you notice that your mouth is dry. This is mainly because of the effects of cortisol.

    FS: So is this one way that you can tell if you have high emotional intelligence or not?

    SL: It’s just one parameter, but if you combine it with the heart, yes, you can have some idea.

    I like it because we have hundreds, if not thousands, of questionnaires which claim to assess your emotional intelligence. But actually there are only a few which really do a good job. We can see that because we find links to those things in the body which I just explained. If they can’t do that, then they aren’t really helpful.

    Then on the reverse, with those good questionnaires, it’s very interesting because by answering a couple of questions you can learn about how your body might react in stressful emotional situations.

    [Note: Laborde later explained by email that one of the best questionnaires is the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire, by Dino Petrides of University College London. If you’re interested in taking it, you can find more information at http://www.psychometriclab.com and look at the options under TEIQue. The questionnaire takes about 30 minutes.]

    FS: How do you study emotional intelligence? Is it a lot of observational study, or can you do experiments?

    SL: We are trying to design experiments where we assess the emotional intelligence of athletes or students, and then we manipulate something. For example, we like to manipulate stress situations. Here are the German Sport University, we love to put people under stress. [laughs]

    FS: What kind of stress?

    SL: Normally in our experiments we try to include both low-pressure and high-pressure situations. Emotional intelligence doesn’t really play a role in the low-pressure situations, but as soon as we put people under pressure, yes, it does play a role on behavior, on the heart rate, on the cortisol. This can affect their performance at the cognitive or the motor level, specifically what they will do on the competitive field.

    To give you some ideas, to induce pressure, we tell them that the results of the task or competition will be displayed publicly on the campus- which is of course not true, by the way. Or we film them and tell them that experts will analyze their performance. We can tell them during the experiment, “please don’t forget the camera, the camera is on.” Or we have a room with a one-way mirror, and we tell them that experts are currently watching them.

    FS: How does emotional intelligence affect post-competition anxiety, and long-term performance and attitude?

    SL: I believe that emotional intelligence has both acute effects, and long-term influences. It is highly linked to resilience.

    No matter what the result of the competition, even if you are the winner, you still have to deal with being the winner and potentially being the favorite in the next competition. So that is pressure and needs emotional management. And if you lose, then emotional intelligence helps you to reconsider things, how and why things went this way.

    It helps you to bounce back from failure, no matter what that failure is. In many sports, already the second position is a failure, because you didn’t win. You need to cope with that.

    FS: What are you working on at the moment? What’s the next step?

    SL: I’m actually very interested in those emotional intelligence trainings. All the emotional intelligence training that exists is not specific to sport. There are a few trials that I referred to in the review, but I’m not fully satisfied with them. So I tried to inspire myself from the work in general populations, and to try to integrate this into sport.

    If you provide athletes with a specific emotional intelligence training, targeting for example emotional understanding, expressing emotions, perception of emotions, and so on, then yes, we can improve emotional intelligence.

    The best emotional intelligence training so far was proven to decrease the cortisol reaction to stress not over a short period, but over a longer period of six months to one year. I believe it was a total of 15 hours of training over one month, plus some homework.

    I want to prove to people that this kind of training for 15 to 20 hours can have a really significant effect on athletes’ emotional intelligence, and that this has a direct impact on how their body will react to the next competition.

    FS: When you talk to coaches and athletes and teams, are they generally receptive to this idea?

    SL: I have to say, indeed yes. In the first try I did, it was with a rugby team. In the beginning it was not easy. It was professional rugby players in France and they were not so open to the idea.

    But I was working with the sports psychologist of the team, and as soon as the players saw that they were getting some very interesting feedback from their emotional intelligence result, some of them even said oh, last time I did the questionnaire I was watching TV and I didn’t do it very seriously, so can I do it again?

    They understood after the first session that they could really get something out of this.

    So we might still face some barriers which are due to the way that sports psychology is perceived. You see athletes who want to show that they are tough and that they don’t need mental training. That’s really the wrong approach.

    FS: A lot of the very best athletes probably do very similar physical training; they are all at the top of their form. So is this the training that can make the biggest difference?

    SL: If you ask a sports psychologist what makes the difference, at the end of a competition, between a gold medal, a silver medal, and a bronze medal, the amount of training is very similar between these athletes. They will differentiate themselves on very few variables.

    The very top athletes, what differentiates them, is in the mind. You can see it sometimes. I like to think about tennis players, sometimes you see them doing very well but then they get to the end and they start to think too much. And then they lose the game. Then they lose the set. In the end they lose the match.

  • All About Emotional Intelligence and How It Boosts Sports Performance

    All About Emotional Intelligence and How It Boosts Sports Performance

    Staying positive and motivated is something the U.S. women's cross-country ski team is famous for. Is it a sign of high emotional intelligence? Here, USST's Caitlin Gregg (r), Jessie Diggins (c) and Liz Stephen (r) in the finish of the 2015 Holmenkollen 30 k. Stephen led the three in ninth, while Diggins and Gregg Placed 14th and 19th. (Photo: Madshus/Nordic Focus)
    Staying positive and motivated is something the U.S. women’s cross-country ski team is famous for. Is it a sign of high emotional intelligence? Here, USST’s Caitlin Gregg (r), Jessie Diggins (c) and Liz Stephen (r) in the finish of the 2015 Holmenkollen 30 k. Stephen led the three in ninth, while Diggins and Gregg Placed 14th and 19th. (Photo: Madshus/Nordic Focus)

    Emotional intelligence (EI) is associated with both increased performance in athletes and with healthy engagement with exercise in the general population. So what is it, and can you train it?

    A recent review, penned by Dr. Sylvain Laborde of the German Sport University in Cologne with two collaborators in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, sought to answer just those questions.

    “EI refers to individual responses to intrapersonal or interpersonal emotional information and encompasses the identification, expression, understanding and regulation of personal or others’ emotions,” the authors explain.

    Self-awareness, empathy, patience, respect, positivity, and self-control are all things associate with EI – and things that can be beneficial to athletes.

    Emotional intelligence is sometimes thought of to as a trait, something which is relatively unchanged through time or situation and is intrinsic to the individual person. It’s also sometimes thought of as an ability, which someone can learn and improve over the course of their career.

    Depending on which viewpoint research is coming from, assessing EI might be done with a test, like the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test – think Myers-Brigs, but different. Or it might be assessed by giving athletes a survey and asking them to self-report their emotional intelligence.

    To really understand how EI might influence sports performance or engagement, the best viewpoint might be the one that Laborde and his coauthors seem to advocate: the tripartite model. In this model, components of EI are based on knowledge, trait, and ability.

    “An athlete might know that using a challenge reappraisal technique [to minimize stress] before a competition would help them (knowledge level) and can perform the technique efficiently (ability level), but does not often incorporate the technique (trait level),” the authors wrote. “In this example, we can see that the three levels are loosely connected and an understanding of all three would be most useful for the practicing sport psychology consultant.”

    Surveying the scientific literature, the French-German-Austrian team found 33 papers examining EI, which is also sometimes called emotional competence, in relation to exercise.

    Most of the research had to do with athletic competition. But to address that might be jumping ahead. An under-investigated, but very intriguing, line of research first showed that EI was associated with the difference between an inactive person and one partaking in a healthy amount of exercise.

    In six studies about the relationship between EI and exercise, this manifested in different ways. In one study of undergraduates, EI was correlated with exercise behavior and diet. In another, high school students with high EI were able to intentionally use exercise to stabilize and improve their mood. As a result, they both got a healthy does of exercise, and also stayed mentally and emotionally more balanced.

    What might the connection be? Staying true to an exercise regime requires motivation, and understanding and managing ones emotions is key to staying optimistic and motivated. Furthermore, a lot of recreational exercise and sports are done in groups, and being able to manage interactions with teammates, instructors, and exercise buddies makes the workout itself more enjoyable, and more likely to be repeated.

    So it’s not surprising that these relationships between EI and exercise carry through to a more serious sporting environment, for instance one where practice is mandatory. Although everyone shows up to practice, for instance, what an athlete gets out of that practice might easily be related to their EI.

    And there are new dimensions, too: recognizing emotions in others might mean that an athlete works better with his or her teammates, and expressing emotions might allow teammates to do the same. Recognizing and understanding emotions might also reveal a competitor’s mental state and use that towards victory.

    Awareness and empathy might make an athlete a better team leader, or a better coach.

    Indeed, studies of both teams and individuals found that higher EI scores were correlated with better performance metrics or objectives. In an earlier paper, Laborde used a technique called Structural Equation Modeling to reveal one mechanism for why this might be so. He wrote in 2014 that EI helps athletes deal with stress, and assists with coping mechanisms.

    (For more on coping and what it means in sports, read our story on “competitive suffering”.)

    Other researchers found that athletes with high EI were more likely to use psychological strategies and skills, such as task-oriented coping strategies or success motivation.

    Emotional intelligence might even be related to physiological performance. One study found that as a trait, EI was related to cortisol responses to anxiety in competition. Another found that EI was related to the maximal muscle contractions an athlete was capable of. These relationships need much further study.

    In the life of an elite athlete, managing emotion is key, especially when competition goes on for days, or regularly for months through an entire career. Endurance runners with high EI felt more positive over the course of a six-day competition, and track and field athletes had less anxiety over the course of a meet than their lower-EI colleagues.

    Even when the outcome of a competition is negative, researchers have repeatedly found that athletes with high EI have more positive feelings. It’s logical to think that this might help them move on to the next competition more easily.

    So, with all of this evidence that EI is important for athletic success or even just healthy exercise, is it something that can be trained? Laborde and his colleagues list this as one major area that needs to be studied. But of the two studies which looked at EI training, there were some encouraging findings.

    For instance, a South African cricket team was randomly divided into control and treatment groups. The treatment group was sent to 10 sessions of EI training, 3 hours each, teaching emotion perception, facilitation, understanding, and management. At the end of the experiment, their EI had increased.

    Another study found that simply discussing the results of an EI test in a 30-minute coaching session led athletes to improve their EI in future tests.

    “The theoretical advancement brought by the tripartite model makes it possible to envisage long-term changes in EI through interventions that target all three levels of the model and we recommend future applied studies to take steps toward designing interventions that target knowledge, ability, and trait components in sport and physical activity,” the authors conclude.

    Unsurprisingly, EI is also being touted in the business world as a desirable trait in employees. Online seminars abound; for a sports application, the best strategy might be to find a sports psychologist to consult with (one option: the Association for Applied Sports Psychology). Many university athletic departments also have in-house staff.

  • Is Cross-Country Skiing Predictable?

    Is Cross-Country Skiing Predictable?

    One thing was pretty predictable last season: Marit Bjørgen was better than almost everybody else, almost all of the time.
    One thing was pretty predictable last season: Marit Bjørgen was better than almost everybody else, almost all of the time.

    How predictable do you find the results of a cross-country ski race? A study published in December comparing within-athlete and between-athlete variability in multiple sports found that cross-country ski races were among the most predictable of athletic competitions.

    The study, published in the journal Sports Medicine by New Zealand-based researchers Rita Macata and Will Hopkins, compared sixteen different studies of competition in different sports. First, they assessed data on how consistently top athletes within each sport performed compared to themselves. Then, they looked at how large these variations in performance were compared to winning margins.

    For cross-country skiing, the data was based on a 2014 paper in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance written by Matt Spencer, Hopkins, and others, who were based at the time at the Norwegian Research Center for Training and Performance in Oslo. Spencer and the co-authors looked at results from the 2002 to 2011 seasons for more than 400 skiers competing in World Championships, World Cup, and Olympic races.

    After removing effects like snow conditions and altitude, the authors found that the coefficient of variation for skiers was about 1.5 to 1.8% of race time from race to race, with the best athletes (the top 10 on the World Cup that season) having more consistent performances and only varying by 1.1 to 1.4%. This is perhaps not surprising: the best athletes are the best-trained and able to turn in good performances race after race.

    In the December paper, Macata and Hopkins compared that to values calculated in other sports. Within-athlete variation in skiing fell somewhere in the middle, along with many other endurance and running-like sports.

    The competitions with the smallest within-athlete variation came in skeleton and 1,000-meter speedskating. The authors explained that this was because most of the outcome in these races was determined by having a very fast start, and little changed after this initial burst. Thus, they called these “low-skill” sports which depended mainly on one highly trainable factor.

    Those with the most variation? Surfing, where competitions are won and lost based on a judge’s objective score and tricks can either be successful and go wrong, and women’s weightlifting, which the authors explained might have extra variation because it is relatively new as an Olympic sport and the field is not so deep or well-developed.

    The next step was to compare this within-athlete variation to among-athlete variation. To do this, researchers often use a metric called “ICC”, or the Intraclass Competition Coefficient. It essentially tells how well-correlated the results of one competition are to another.

    Interestingly, the Spencer paper found that while overall results in cross-country skiing were very predictable, with >90% correlation between competition results both within and between seasons on the World Cup, it was much harder to predict the top 10. In the men’s field, there was practically no correlation between results of races from one weekend to the next. In the women’s field, the ICC was about 30% in distance racing, but much lower in sprints.

    Why so low, particularly in the men’s field? Because the top athletes are so well-matched, within-athlete variability in performance was able to affect the outcome. The women’s field was less deep, the authors argued, so the within-athlete variations did not so often overwhelm the differences between athletes.

    However, when Macata and Hopkins compared the ICC values to that of other sports, they used the high values of all the results rather than the low values of top-10 results. They also did this for the other sports, since it was difficult to find published ICC values at all, much less for only the best athletes (more papers had calculated within-athlete variation than ICC’s).

    And with that overall World Cup field, cross-country skiing is more predictable than most other sports, they concluded. Rowing had an ICC of 65%; speedskating 74%; triathlon, 36%. Down at the bottom was surfing, where the difference of scores for any given athlete between two competitions could be extremely large. There, the ICC showed that results from one event to the next were only 18% replicated.

    Of course, the review was not completely exhaustive. They used only sports which have time-, weight- or distance-based results, like track and field, rowing, speed skating, triathlon, and cycling. Surfing was the anomaly in terms of being a judged sport, and potentially other judged sports (like gymnastics, figure skating, or freestyle skiing) would have similarly low ICC numbers.

    They also excluding team scoring-based sports like soccer, basketball, and hockey, where it’s difficult to directly compare performances between games.

    But for the type of sports they could analyze, and find data for, cross-country skiing came out on top.

    “For highly predictable sports, such as cross-country skiing, placings in any single competition are a good representation of a ranking of athletes’ abilities,” the authors wrote.

    One takehome message? This should make it easy for coaches to calculate, using testing, what magnitude of improvement would win an athlete an extra medal.

    “In this review we focused on the within-athlete variability as a statistic to derive the smallest and other important magnitude thresholds for changes in competitive performance,” Macata and Hopkins concluded. “These thresholds can be transformed into thresholds for research on factors affecting performance in laboratory and field tests.”

  • Fast Start Wins the Race? Increasing Effort, Not Pace, is Key

    Fast Start Wins the Race? Increasing Effort, Not Pace, is Key

    A recent study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology showed that in a 10 kilometer race, skiers slow down over the course of consecutive 2.5 kilometer laps and do not match the speed of the opening lap.

    The study used eleven Norwegian cross-country skiers who were training 12 to 15 hours per week and had competed at the national level. They had plenty of experience racing and deciding how to pace themselves over the distance for the best end result. So what was going on? Were they starting too fast, to the detriment of their performance?

    The answer, it seems, is not necessarily. While it’s a commonly-stated goal for athletes to have even or negative splits (i.e., the last lap faster than the first), research across different endurance disciplines shows that most commonly, especially in interval-start events, a quick start gives way to a steady, but slower, rest of the effort. And that doesn’t necessarily mean a slower overall time.

    Research in speedskating shows that in distances from three up to 10 kilometers, competitors slow their lap times over the course of a World Cup race. This was true for both the slower athletes and the race winners.

    And in running, a study found that competitors slow after a fast start in a 10 kilometer time trial – but that the speed drops much more abruptly over the course of the competition for lower-performance athletes than for top athletes. Both groups, however, kicked it in for the final 400 meters.

    The key may be the individual-start nature of the races in the cross-country skiing paper. When racing against the clock, there’s not necessarily a benefit to having a strong finishing sprint, as long as a competitor is fast throughout the whole race.

    The limited prior research into pacing in ski races has shown that this is true even in sprint qualifiers: in a study using nine elite Swedish skiers, the second lap of a two-lap sprint qualifier time trial was 3% slower than the first lap.

    “… the overall time of the winner needs to be faster in absolute terms (racing against the clock) because the best athletes are not directly competing against each other,” wrote the authors of the speedskating study. “According to this, energy that is left at the finish is useless. As a consequences, ice speed skaters may self-select a pacing strategy that does not allow to hold some energy back.”

    Indeed, the authors of the more recent skiing study found that while the pace declined over the course of the 10 kilometer time trial, effort did not. Skiers’ heart rates remained more or less constant, and then went up in the final 2.5 k lap of the race. That last lap was slightly faster than the middle two, but not to a statistically significant extent.

    Furthermore, the one skier who adopted a different pacing strategy suffered for it. Despite the fact that the sixth- and tenth-ranked skiers had similar VO2Max values, they ended up in very different positions. The authors believe this was because the skier who ended up tenth tried increased his pace in the second lap of the race, only to run out of energy later. They called this a “non-appropriate pacing strategy.”

    A Case Study

    While the women’s 10 k freestyle at 2015 World Championships in Falun, Sweden, was influenced by weather, the men’s 15 k was not to the same extent. Looking at pacing over the two 7.5 kilometer laps of the race could test whether the pacing found in the recent study holds true in high-stakes racing. Johan Olsson of Sweden won the race (results here).

    While the lengths of the two laps aren’t necessarily exactly the same – the start and finish lines were not evenly distributed on the lap – one can make the assumption that this slight difference affects all skiers the same way. So while a slower second lap might be due in part to the extra length of the finishing chute, differences in the amount slower the second lap is are still representative of skiers’ different pacing strategies or abilities.

    First of all, a strong first lap was generally indicative of success in the World Championships 15 k.

    firstlapAnd furthermore, being fast on the first lap did not necessarily lead to a bigger slowdown on the second lap. Skiers throughout the top 26 finishers had varying differences between the speed of their first lap and their second lap, and it had little relation to what place they ended up. The one exception was Canada’s Ivan Babikov, who skied a much faster second lap. That pacing strategy did not prove ideal, as although he had one of the faster second-lap times he still finished 20th.

    slowdownBecause this variation in how much skiers slowed down was distributed evenly throughout the field, the relationship between second-lap time and finishing result looked fairly similar to that of first-lap time and finishing result. The skiers were slightly reshuffled on the plot, but the same general pattern held.

    secondlap

    Takeaway

    Prior research has looked at how to adapt pacing to terrain in cross country skiing, for example, adopting a higher intensity on uphill sections with the assumption of recovery on downhill. This type of information feeds back into training strategies, as athletes can prepare themselves for shorter, harder efforts within a long race and train themselves to recover as much as possible in short intermediate sections.

    But there has been very little research into pacing strategies over longer time periods and multiple laps in distance racing. Thus, the results of the new study carry some weight.

    The author’s conclusions are upheld by a look at data from 2015 World Championships: starting at a fast pace and maintaining a more-or-less even effort – not necessarily an even time – seems to be a better strategy in an individual-start race than starting at a strikingly slower pace and saving energy to speed up in the final kilometers.

  • WADA Sets Priorities for $12 Million Research Pot: Using Chemistry and Omics to Study Doping

    WADA Sets Priorities for $12 Million Research Pot: Using Chemistry and Omics to Study Doping

    With almost $12 million pledged for a 12 different countries and the International Olympic Committee for a new fund for anti-doping research, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has released some of its priorities for what the fund will address.

    Among the first action items are autologous blood transfusions: when an athlete removes some of their blood, stores it, and then re-infuses it before a competition to boost their oxygen-carrying capacity. Although Lance Armstrong is now famous for using an actual drug, erythropoietin, blood transfusions were also described in gory detail in Tyler Hamilton’s cycling exposé, The Secret Race.

    Such transfusions are hard to detect because they do not involve any chemicals or drugs – only the athlete’s own blood. They are also dangerous, but because of their undetectability may be a major strategy in doping in endurance sports. WADA understandably wants to prioritize research in this area.

    According to a press release, several of WADA’s other proposed focuses are extensions their current program. The first is an emphasis on the Athlete Biological Passport program, which tests athletes repeatedly to get baseline readings on different biological parameters; if a variable, for instance hemoglobin, then spikes in a later test, this may be evidence of doping. (For a great illustration of typical and atypical biological passports, see here.)

    WADA also seeks research on the prevalence of doping in general and in specific sports. As has been previously discussed on this site, it is difficult to say exactly how much doping is happening because testing does not detect all doping offenses and athletes do not admit their activities.

    And perhaps to help with this, part of the funds will go to developing lower-cost and less-invasive tests so that more athletes can be tested. One idea mentioned in the press release was to develop blood tests that can be based on a finger prick, like lactate testing in exercise science.

    Finally, the funding will be directed to several scientifically sophisticated areas:

    • Genomics: the field of genomics upscales from genetics and instead of considering genes, considers whole genomes. Genomics could be used to, for instance, match a bag of blood found in an anti-doping sting to an athlete whose DNA profile is on record (WADA has not suggested this use, and did not describe how they wish to use genomics). Through genomics, researchers can also examine RNA, double- or single-stranded genetic material that comes in many functions. MicroRNAs, or miRNAs, for instance, have only around 22 nucleotides and regulate gene expression. Importantly, there are many different miRNA’s – and in 2013 a team published a (free, open-access) paper showing that some were much more prevalent after an autologous blood transfusion. This tool could be used to detect blood doping.
    • Proteomics: the field of proteomics considers not genes, but their products – proteins. The kinds and abundances of all proteins expressed in the body can tell scientists what kinds of genes are turned “on”, and this may provide clues to whether athletes are doing something to boost their oxygen-carrying capacity. For instance, some proteins expressed within red blood cells change their abundances over the lifespan of the cell, meaning that old cells – like those taken out of the body and stored in a refrigerator for six weeks – have a different signature than new ones.
    • Metabolomics: metabolites are the intermediate products when the body processes any kind of molecule. While many doping tests focus exclusively on the banned substance itself, metabolomics could go one step further by detecting some of these intermediate byproducts. For instance, clostebol, a testosterone derivative sometimes used for doping, has at least fourteen different metabolites as its structure shifts during these reactions. One of the metabolites can currently be detected for up to 25 days.
    • Detecting doping through hair samples: there is considerable scientific literature discussing the possibility of using hair samples to detect drug use, primarily anabolic steroids and testosterone in a doping context. This method is not appropriate for substances that are banned only in competition (but not in training), because time of use cannot be determined. On the contrary, however, it could be very useful for detecting the use of substances which quickly clear the body and may have a short time window for detection through blood or urine tests, but which (like steroids) improve performance for a much longer period of time.
    • Detecting doping through wastewater: a 2010 paper in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry tested using mass spectroscopy to detect steroids, stimulants, and other drugs in sewage. Some doping drugs have very short half-lives in the human body, but that means that they are excreted in urine or other bodily waste. In the 2010 paper, a team worked at fitness centers in Aachen, Germany, and found traces of testosterone, ephedrine, and amphetamines in the sites’ wastewater. It will be interesting to see how WADA would use this in actual doping investigations.

    The research will be performed in laboratories around the world, and scientific teams can apply for funding by laying out their proposed questions.

    WADA will also devote a portion of the funding to research in the social sciences, with specific research focuses to be announced later.

  • Skiathlon Explained: Physiological Differences from Classic to Make Transition Tough

    Skiathlon Explained: Physiological Differences from Classic to Make Transition Tough

    Don't do this: Therese Johaug (NOR) and Justyna Kowalczyk (POL) come into the transition during the skiathlon in Lahti, Finland. Kowalczyk's fall cost her valuable seconds. Photo: Fischer/Nordic Focus.
    Don’t do this: Therese Johaug (NOR) and Justyna Kowalczyk (POL) come into the transition during the skiathlon in Lahti, Finland. Kowalczyk’s fall cost her valuable seconds. Photo: Fischer/Nordic Focus.

    When you step out of your classic skis and into skate skis in a skiathlon, there’s a brief period where skiing feels very strange: the shorter skis, the lack of tracks, and the longer poles are all a distinct change from the previous style, as your body says, “what are you DOING?”

    This is the subject of a recent study by researchers from University of Franche-Comté in France and Mid Sweden University. One of the researchers, Sarah Willis, is an American who previously skied for Gustavus Adolphus College.

    “To our knowledge, no previous researchers had examined skiathlon performance and we were intrigued by this as well as investigating the impact of an initial period of classic skiing on subsequent skate skiing,” she explained in an e-mail. “Realizing the effect of one bout on another is similar to research performed in the sport of triathlon, we used some previous triathlon studies as a ‘guide’ for an initial skiathlon study.”

    Classic skiing is generally recognized to involve greater oxygen uptake and greater muscle mass involvement than skate skiing. Thus when a racer transitions to skating halfway through a skiathlon, their body is coming out of a very different physiological stress than it would have been from a skate race of the same distance.

    The team worked with eight national-level Swedish skiers, who were asked to participate in two 6 k time trials on a rollerski treadmill. In one, they classic skied for 3 k, then switched gear and skated for 3 k. In the other they skated two 3 k sections, stopping for a brief time in the middle to simulate an equipment change.

    Interestingly, they found that the time for the second portion of the time trial was unaffected by the previous section’s technique.

    “In my opinion, it is interesting that the performance times were similar,” Willis wrote. “However, it is understandable in some ways since we, as skiers and athletes, race at race pace and alter our effort based on what we can do while giving our best in each moment. Sometimes we make alterations or changes in our technique, breathing, pacing strategy, etc., while our effort and outcome may be the same as we give all we can. We are well-trained machines and our mental approach to pacing the effort has a lot to say about our performance outcome.”

    However, just because the times were more or less the same did not mean that the team didn’t find some effects of the initial classic portion of their simulated skiathlon.

    For instance, in the first three minutes after the transition in the classic-to-skate time trial, VO2 and minute ventilation had higher increases than during the skate-only time trial. The cadence of the skating strides were also faster in the initial section of the skate portion of the skiathlon time trial, than in the skate-only time trial.

    (What is minute ventilation? “Minute ventilation is literally the volume of gas you breathe into your lungs (inhale) in one minute, so, basically, a parameter of how much air you can move into your lungs,” Willis wrote.)

    Some part of this might be fatigue. But it also seems likely that the difference in technique makes it difficult for skiers to immediately find a good and efficient rhythm when they snap into skate skis.

    “Skiers may notice that it takes about 3-5minutes to get into a good rhythm, including cardiovascular and respiration (ability to increase heart rate and rhythm with breathing), and their natural technique (biomechanics of skating) before they really feel they can perform ‘normally’ in skating,” Willis wrote.

    And the physiological differences, too, she chalked up to technique.

    “There are alterations in the muscle requirements and biomechanics of the new technique,” she explained. “A combination of alterations in oxygenation and extraction of the blood, or simply the consumption of oxygen is most likely involved in the explanation of some factors affecting the transition from a cardiopulmonary standpoint.”

    One thing is clear: skiathlons present a novel physiological challenge that athletes never encountered before the invention of the two-discipline race format.

    To make the transition and subsequent skating section easier, Willis had a few suggestions: lower the pace in the final minute of the classic section to facilitate a good transition, and adjust the pace and effort during the initial phase of the skate section.

    But like everything else in sport, it also simply comes down to training.

    “[You can do] specific training to increase ability to perform skate after classic, at race speed or during an endurance session with higher speed before and after the transition,” she wrote.

  • This Month in Journals: Does Birthdate Matter in Winning, or Staying In, Youth Sports?

    This Month in Journals: Does Birthdate Matter in Winning, or Staying In, Youth Sports?

    Born in November 1993, Lennart Metz of Germany was one of the oldest competitors at Junior World Championships in 2013. Did that help him win the classic sprint? Photo: Liberec2013.
    Born in November 1993, Lennart Metz of Germany was one of the oldest competitors at Junior World Championships in 2013. Did that help him win the classic sprint? Photo: Liberec2013.

    From children’s racing through Masters World Championships, athletes are divided into age classes in order to ensure fair competition and to identify the best racers at different developmental stages. In fact, only at the senior elite level is birthday a non-factor in determining what race you can win.

    But how are these age groups defined? A group of researchers in Switzerland asked whether being born earlier or later in the year impacted athletic success and opportunity.

    The concept is called “relative age effect” (RAE) and describes how within a given a give age class, for example J2 ski racers in the United States, birthdates might have a skewed distribution. For instance, being born earlier in the year might confer an advantage because young athletes might have developed further or simply grown taller.

    At junior national championships, a skier who is 15 years and 11 months old, for instance, might be significantly stronger and have more developed ski technique than one who is 14 years and 3 months old. He or she might also be more mentally mature and have a better handle on high-pressure competition situations.

    Looking at age distributions at championship events, you can see hints of this pattern. Look at 2013 World Junior Championships in skiing, for example. In the men’s classic sprint, half of the final heat comprised athletes born in the last five months of 1993, at the edge of the age eligibility window. It might have been because they were bigger, stronger, or faster – or that they’d had better development opportunities because as very young skiers, they were identified as talent earlier.

    (In other sports, there is a “reverse RAE” where being younger is advantageous.)

    Michael Romann and Jörg Fuchslocher applied these questions specifically to young female athletes in primarily individual sports. Both are areas lacking substantial research: across all sports science, male athletes are much better-represented as study subjects, and furthermore there is plenty of money and resources to investigate high-profile team sports with robust development structures, such as soccer.

    Those previous studies found that young male soccer players were more likely to drop out of sport if they had late birthdays making them relatively younger than the rest of their age class, for instance. But with significant physiological differences between men and women, differences in the ages at which male and female athletes hit puberty and mature, and even in technique and ideal body type for men and women in some sports, the same wouldn’t necessarily be true for girls.

    For instance, look back at that World Junior Championships in 2013: in the women’s sprint final, the second- and fourth-place finishers, Victoria Carl of Germany and Natalia Nepryaeva of Germany, were born in 1995 – they weren’t even the oldest classes of juniors at that point.

    Romann and Fuchslocher used data from 301,428 young women (age 10-20) participating in Switzerland’s recreational “Youth and Sport” programs, and looked at a subset of 1,177 young women involved in the National Talent Development Program in several sports to look for RAE’s.

    Among the greater dataset of women in the recreational program, athletes had earlier birthdays than would be predicted by the overall Swiss distribution in alpine skiing, tennis, track and field, snowboarding, and fencing.

    Results were different among the most dedicated young athletes, though. In the National Talent Development program, where athletes train at least 400 hours per year, there were more early birthday for alpine skiing and tennis, but more late birthdays for snowboarding, table tennis, and fencing.

    The authors noted that this represented considerably more variation in the strength and direction of relative age effects at the elite youth level than has previously been found for male athletes. One reason, the authors suggested, might be that societal pressure contributes in different ways to girls’ decisions to participate or stay in sports.

    For instance, media and culture push the idea that being feminine means having a specific body type – a thin and delicate one. That is at odds with the idea body type for many sports, where size and muscle are advantageous. They argue that girls who mature earlier might be more cognizant of these pressures, drop out of sports where physicality is important, and switch, for example, from tennis to table tennis, which is more technical and where having a traditionally “feminine” body type might be less of a disadvantage.

    Likewise, the combination of RAE’s and reverse RAE’s might be because girls initially enroll in the most high-profile sports (in Switzerland, alpine skiing and tennis), but the younger, less physically strong participants might drop out when they realize they don’t have as good a chance of success. If they then switch to sports like snowboarding and fencing, this could explain why there are a higher prevalence of late birthdays in these second-tier sports.

    At the recreational level, though, it seems clear that girls at the younger end of the yearly age distributions are less likely to enroll or stay involved in sports. This presents two problems. One is elite- and woman-specific. In countries like Switzerland where women’s national teams are often quite small compared to the full rosters of men’s teams (for example, the country didn’t send a female biathlete to the Olympics until 2010), as many young female athletes as possible should be encouraged to continue in sports.

    But at a more general level, for both girls and the previously-studied young male athletes, dropping out of sports represents an obstacle for those pushing the health and social benefits of lifelong recreational sports. If having a late birthday means that you are less active and less likely to develop sports-based social bonds with friends, there are potential public health consequences.

    Several unwieldy solutions have been suggested, such as making competitive or weight classes rather than age classes, as is done in judo; making age classes narrower, for instance with 6-month spans to minimize the age differences between competitors; or changing what time of year the cutoff dates fall at each season so that athletes will always have a relative age advantage at least once in their career.

    Instead, the authors suggest, perhaps a solution can begin with the attitudes of youth sports coaches. If youth teams prioritize long-term development and potential rather than immediate performance, they might be more likely to select or invest in a smaller, younger athlete who nevertheless might excel in a few years’ time. After all, schemes like Switzerland’s National Talent Development Program by definition should be thinking long-term.

    The concept and consequences of relative age effects should be taught in coaching education programs, they added.

  • This Month in Journals: Detecting Xenon Gas, A New Banned Substance – and Why You’d Want To

    This Month in Journals: Detecting Xenon Gas, A New Banned Substance – and Why You’d Want To

    Xenon gas isn't usually thought of in a medical context, but its applications are growing, from use as an anesthetic to a neuroprotectant to a performance-enhancing drug. Photo by Jim Nelson, creative commons.
    Xenon gas isn’t usually thought of in a medical context, but its applications are growing, from use as an anesthetic to a neuroprotectant to a performance-enhancing drug. Photo by Jim Nelson, creative commons.

    Xenon gas has been in the sports news since this winter, when it was revealed that Russian skiers had been breathing the gas to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood. It caused something of an uproar, but only a quiet one because people were confused: what exactly is going on here? Isn’t xenon a noble gas that has a purplish spectra? Regardless of whether it makes you faster, why would you breathe that? Should we be outraged?

    Xenon has many properties which have been used in relation to medical fields for decades. It’s an anesthetic which will soon be introduced to broader use in Europe, in part because it is more potent and thus requires a lower proportion in the bloodstream in comparison to commonly-used N2O. It’s also a neuroprotectant, and clinical trials are being developed to determine whether breathing xenon gas when the body is oxygen-starved (or recovering from such a state) can help prevent brain damage.

    In the doping context, breathing xenon leads to a series of steps which may increase athletic performance. First, the presence of xenon increases the production of a transcription factor (HIF1A) – a protein which binds to a specific region of our DNA. This transcription factor codes for a protein which is usually produced only in low-oxygen, hypoxic environments. This in turn boosts erythropoietin levels, so that the blood can carry more oxygen: an obvious benefit for endurance athletes.

    Yet very little research has confirmed that this actually translates into athletic improvement. One of the only studies ever published on the topic of using xenon in a training regime is in Russian, and thus inaccessible to most of the rest of the world.

    So despite the perplexed look on everyone’s faces when the Russian xenon-huffing scandal broke, most were quick to condemn the practice. In fact, some argued that it might already be breaking the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code. Although xenon was not, at that point, expressly banned, the following sentence described prohibited methods. It’s banned to:

    “Artificially enhancing the uptake, transport or delivery of oxygen, including, but not limited to, perfluorochemicals, efaproxiral (RSR13) and modified haemoglobin products (e.g. haemoglobin-based blood substitutes, microencapsulated haemoglobin products), excluding supplemental oxygen.”

    Since breathing xenon does artificially enhance the uptake of oxygen, it seemed like a slam dunk. Former WADA president Dick Pound told the German news service WDR, which was doing an investigation into xenon as a performance-enhancing drug, that he was “in no doubt that it is doping.”

    The team doctor for the Garmin-Sharp cycling team said that his team had considered using xenon, but decided not to because it was potentially dangerous and, they had concluded, definitely illegal. And cycling teams aren’t usually the most trustworthy people on doping issues.

    But WADA was quiet until it added an amendment this spring expressly banning xenon (and argon, a neighbor on the periodic table) in no uncertain terms.

    Now, scientists have been trying to develop a test to detect the use of xenon. Writing in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectroscopy, a team from Cologne and Düsseldorf, Germany, report on a new test that seems to be working.

    The team used a combination of techniques including gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy, accounting for the specific mass of three different xenon isotopes, to detect xenon concentrations in the blood. In the first part of their trials, they fortified blood plasma with xenon to specific concentrations, and then tested whether their method could detect it.

    With that success under their belt, they moved on to realistic human trials. Their subject was a woman who was undergoing anesthesia using xenon gas. The team collected blood samples during the anesthesia as well as 4, 8, and 24 hours afterwards, and then ran the samples through their test – sometimes after storing them for up to 36 hours. Even the samples collected 24 hours after the anesthesia had xenon detected by the team’s test.

    The team writes that the application of the test for antidoping purposes is not necessarily a slam dunk. From reports, for instance, athletes might breathe xenon through a mask for just a few minutes, which is different from the amount of the gas which might be taken in during anesthesia – and potentially harder to detect. It’s also unclear whether samples taken further after breathing xenon would still show detectable signs of the gas.

    But it’s a first step towards testing for the use of this newly-banned substance.

    “… accredited laboratories are in need of adequate detection assays, and the pilot study presented in this communication demonstrated the suitability of conventional [athlete biological passport] doping control samples for detecting the anesthetic substance by commonly available GC/MS (or HRMS) instruments,” the authors conclude. “Further studies are required to allow the assessment of detection windows for xenon under different gas mixture and exposure time settings.”

  • How Your Sports Psychology Research Gets Done: Based on Days Spent Ski Racing

    How Your Sports Psychology Research Gets Done: Based on Days Spent Ski Racing

    Dr. Blair Evans. Photo: Eys lab webpage.
    Dr. Blair Evans. Photo: Eys lab webpage.

    In our monthly series highlighting research relating to skiing, we have twice covered the work of Dr. Blair Evans of Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. First, we summarized his work on how group dynamics affects performance in individual sports; then we dedicated a whole story to his study on competitive suffering, when athletes fail to meet their goals mid-competition. The latter was extremely popular on the site, so we figured at this point we should probably just call Evans up and chat.

    As it turns out, Evans (who just recently defended his PhD dissertation and acquired that “Doctor” in front of his name) was a college skier, and his experience has informed most of his research questions in sports psychology ever since.

    “I grew up doing all team sports,” he laughed in an interview last week. “Then I went to university with the idea of getting on the basketball team. That didn’t work out my first year, so my second and third year I started training with the ski team. I actually had a lot of assumptions about what individual sports were like, and most of them were shattered when I joined the team.”

    What’s Special About Skiing?

    Evans’ PhD work revolved around the influence of teammates on athlete’s ability to perform in an individual sport. As summarized earlier, he found that having strong friendships and collective goals was extremely important to individual performance.

    “If you’re on a team in an individual sport, having a collective goal always helps but it’s especially important when you have teammates who are competing directly against one another,” he explained. “If you’re in a sport like cross-country skiing where everyone is in the same race, if you don’t have that collective outcome then things can get really competitive.”

    Aside from the specific questions he has researched, Evans believes that there are a few unique and remarkable things about cross country skiing from a psychological viewpoint. The group dynamics aspect was one thing that stood out early – it’s a sport where there is very great potential to develop strong bonds between teammates.

    “One of the things involves the year-round training and the different types of training you have to do, which I think is really unique,” he explained. “And also the amount of travel that’s required. Those things might change the types of relationships that you might develop with your teammates.”

    Doing drills on a basketball court, laps in a pool, or running stadiums is very different than level one aerobic training for a couple of hours outside.

    “A lot of the training is often pretty enjoyable, and the training is in a setting that’s outdoors and quite [beautiful], so it might create the opportunity for a lot of really positive shared experiences between teammates,” he said. “If you have to go run up a mountain with them or go travel to the top of a glacier, you might be forced to make some friendships… If you’re training 15 hours a week, that’s probably 4 hours of really intense, and then 11 hours where you’re just coasting. You can just chat and make those relationships.”

    Furthermore, because skiing requires a lot of different types of training – on snow, on rollerskis, running, biking, bounding, work in the weight room – it’s likely that an athlete will dislike or be weak in at least one of those areas.

    “I’ve heard this from a lot of people, if you didn’t have your teammates it would be just terrible,” Evans said. “If you had to go for a 3-hour training run, if you don’t like running, you’d have a really terrible experience, but if you’re there with really close teammates, it can make it a really positive experience.”

    Evans will soon move to Queens University in Kingston for a postdoctoral fellowship, focusing on youth sports. He might have the chance to look at some of these topics as they relate to young athletes, a prospect he’s excited about.

    “I think that will give me a really good opportunity to look at these things in youth settings, maybe how your sport team might shape your development in sport,” he said. “There’s a lot of different stages that an athlete might go through in sport. They’ve showed some of the really negative outcomes of early specialization in certain situations. I’m really excited about that, for the chance to take some of this work and look at it with younger age groups.”

    How To Do Science?

    All these questions, plus many more, were raised when Evans began skiing. But when he moved first to a masters program and then into a PhD, he was tasked with the challenge of turning them into testable hypotheses that could be addressed in studies using human subjects (there are strict rules about consent, privacy, and ethics, and researchers must apply to a board for permission before conducting studies; the Canadian guidelines are here).

    Plus, people are a little more unpredictable than, say, bacteria, mice, or plants, common study organisms for researchers in other fields.

    “The one thing that I’ve started to learn is that you’re never going to have a perfect study when you’re working with human participants,” Evans laughed. “Do you want the study to be really perfect – they call it “internal validity”, which means that you can be confident that what you’re seeing is really what’s going on. But at the same time, if you take a study like that, they are almost always going to have less meaning for the average individual. There’s always a balance.”

    Plus, Evans’ goal is to have his findings interpreted in a way that is useful to athletes and coaches – after all, the questions were generated in his own athletic life. But it takes a lot to move from a hypothesis to an applicable message.

    “You have to make it a progression in order to have a big impact,” he said. “You have to start with these really stringent methods, and then slowly but surely advance to something where it’s more applied and can be directly picked up.”

    The competitive suffering study, for example, was part of Evans’ masters work. Although he feels like it needs a lot of follow up, his masters ended and the work was dropped. In the group dynamics work, on the other hand, he had a four-year PhD to follow up on as many leads as possible, so he was able to look at the topic using several different kinds of studies, from broad to quite specific, and questionnaire-based to experimental.

    Evans tries not to chase publicity by claiming an application for each result. Studies typically only address a specific question in a specific framework, or only measure a few variables. While that adds to the understanding of a concept as a whole, in general single studies can’t explain everything about how athletes act.

    “I’m always cautious about providing really clear and specific conclusions if I haven’t tried it myself,” he explained. “If you look at the suffering paper, I could make some suggestions for athletes and coaches, but without having tested it first, I might be leading people down the wrong pathway. There’s so many questions to ask.”

    And even when a study is done, challenges remain.

    “The desire to do it always comes from an applied need,” he said. “But you have to balance that with the need for, when you’re developing concepts you have to be really specific and academically-minded. In my writing I try to do the best I can to make it palatable at least for the average Joe to read, but at the same time it’s a matter of trying to balance that. It’s a struggle.”

    There’s a few more challenges in academia. First of all, grant funding might not be available for every interesting question – for instance, the government is more likely to fund research which has implications for the general public in terms of health and happiness, than research about elite athletes which impacts relatively few people.

    And then there’s the issue of whether a study on one group of athletes can be applied to another.

    “For instance, in the competitive suffering study, I had a very wide range of athletes in terms of their 5k times,” he said. “If you’re chasing that 15:30 5k time, you need to overcome emotions – you have a shorter time frame. Someone doing a 25 minute or 30 minute 5k, probably the most important thing is to come out having enjoyed the race. That was one of the struggles with that work. The huge range really changed the findings.”

    About That Suffering…

    The suffering study generated a lot of interest on this site, and Evans was able to fill us in a little more on how it translates out of large, scientific words into real English. First of all: yes, it was inspired by experience.

    “Of course, with competitive suffering, I’ve had lots of experiences where you may have set your goals too high or maybe something goes wrong during a race, and you try to cope with that while still trying to compete,” he laughed.

    And that was a big part of the reason why he found the issue compelling. From a completely logical point of view, if we are failing at our goals and are totally miserable, we should probably just quit. Academics told Evans that very thing.

    “I think that’s the biggest question with competitive suffering,” Evans said. “I had a professor I discussed it with, and he said, ‘if you’re not making your goal, I would just drop out of that race.’ But there’s a lot of cases where you might not be making your goal, but it’s still important to perform as well as you possibly can. Even if you’re not getting that top-10, you’re not going to give up. The only way to perform in that situation is to try to maintain some sense of drive to attain some goal.”

    As proud, stoic, endurance athletes though, we’re conditioned that it’s shameful to DNF, even if there’s not anything (for instance a team score) on the line. And so Evans reiterated the findings of his work.

    “There’s different ways of dropping out,” he explained. “If you’re not meeting your ideal goal and you don’t have a secondary goal prepared beforehand, you have a couple of choices. You can completely drop out, or you can still stay in the race but let off on the gas pedal, or to try to reframe your goals or change the situation so that you’re still competing at the best of your abilities.”

    And while some people thrive under adversity, re-setting those goals is probably the best way to cope for most people.

    “Based on what we know about sport and endurance sport, people have different emotional states that they are going to perform best at,” Evans said. “Some people perform best if they are as negative as possible, but for the majority, a lot of us do need some sort of positive mindset and a goal to pursue. I think being able to cope well that kind of competitive suffering is pretty important.”

  • This Month in Journals: How We Suffer

    This Month in Journals: How We Suffer

    Canada's Alex Harvey stops for a moment to tell head coach Justin Wadsworth (not shown) that his skis aren't gliding. Harvey completed the second lap, but did not finish the 15 k classic individual start at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
    Competitive suffering: faced with skis that didn’t glide, Canada’s Alex Harvey stopped for a moment to gesture at  coach Justin Wadsworth (not shown) in the 15 k classic at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Harvey later used an avoidance coping strategy, i.e. he dropped out.

    You’re in a ski race. It’s midway through the season, and you’ve been racing better and better – your team is starting to rely on you. This, you think, could be your first top ten. But halfway through the 10 kilometers, your coaches start telling you something else. First your splits have you in 15th. Then in 20th. You try to fight for every spot, but you’re weighed down by a feeling… the feeling that you just aren’t achieving what you set out to do. It’s hard to care about whether you are 22nd or 23rd when you had been planning to fight for many more points than that. And the less you care, the further you slip back.

    If you’ve ever had this experience, you’re not alone. It’s so common that scientists have a name for it: competitive suffering. That’s when an athlete feels a sense of failure and helplessness at not being able to achieve a pre-competition goal. It’s an example of a negative affective state, where a person experiences negative emotions and poor perception of themselves (examples of emotions you might feel in a negative affective state include anger, disgust, guilt, contempt, fear, and nerves).

    And when you do experience this sense of impending disappointment, you do the same thing that everyone, everywhere, does in discouraging situations: you cope. In a psychological sense, this is defined as constantly re-appraising your environment and yourself and trying to solve the conflict.

    As scientists note, athletes pretty often fall short of the lofty goals they set for themselves, so this is fertile territory for research. There’s plenty of studying to be done for anyone who enjoys watching suffering. So far, scientists have done enough work in endurance sports to identify a few main coping strategies.

    A positive coping strategy is problem-focused coping, or trying to proactively change the situation. That could include setting a new goal, one that you still have the possibility to achieve. Or it could mean changing your pacing strategy or technique in order to attain a different outcome.

    On the other hand, emotion-focused coping (the attempt to ignore negative emotions) and avoidance coping (giving up on the goal completely, and possibly dropping out of the race) usually lead to further stress and negative emotions.

    Thinking back to that 10 k race, there’s plenty of time for endurance athletes to think about how they are failing. So recently, Blair Evans of the Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, set out to investigate how many different strategies athletes use over the course of a frustrating race. He and his co-authors recently published their results in the European Journal of Sport Science.

    The researchers used 26 endurance athletes with a wide range of ages and abilities and put them through 5 k running time trials. The runners were told to set a tough but realistic goal time for the trial, which took place on a track, and that they would be given splits on their progress towards attaining that goal time.

    They knew that the researchers were studying coping strategies for suffering, but they didn’t know that actually, they were being set up for failure. 2 k into the race, the researchers began giving them negative feedback – that they were 5% over their goal splits – regardless of how the runners were actually doing.

    The whole time trial was videotaped for each athlete, and the researchers reviewed the tape with the athlete immediately afterwards and asked them questions about their emotional state throughout the entire race. They then did a separate time-series analysis for each of the three types of coping strategy to see how their use changed over the course of the “competitive suffering task”.

    The researchers found that initially, participants were disappointed that they weren’t meeting their splits and considered abandoning their goals. But as the time trial went on, they replaced these avoidance coping strategies with more productive problem-focused strategies. They tried harder to regulate their emotions – in fact, the worse they felt about potential failure, the harder they tried to improve the situation.

    Overall, the researchers found that the athletes were fairly successful at banishing their negative outlook, perhaps in part by adjusting their goals to something that seemed more attainable. They note that handling both the emotional situation and the goal-related problem itself go hand in hand for successful coping. Without coping, they say, the unattainable goals can actually lead to worse and worse performance.

    So chin up, everyone, even when the going gets tough.

  • This Month In Journals: Acetominophen, Huffing O2, and the Difference between Men and Women

    This Month In Journals: Acetominophen, Huffing O2, and the Difference between Men and Women

    Finland's Sami Jauhojärvi crosses the line ahead of Russia's Nikita Kriukov to win a gold medal in the Sochi Olympic team sprint. A recent study looked at whether breathing pure oxygen from a mask between laps of a team sprint would help recovery.
    Finland’s Sami Jauhojärvi crosses the line ahead of Russia’s Nikita Kriukov to win a gold medal in the Sochi Olympic team sprint. A recent study looked at whether breathing pure oxygen from a mask between laps of a team sprint would help recovery.

    Welcome back to This Month in Journals! After catching up with what happened in scientific and social research this winter, we’re back on track. Here is what was published in scientific journals in April.

    * At the European Journal of Applied Physiology, a discussion is raging about whether acetominophen should be considered a performance-enhancing drug and places on the WADA Prohibited List.

    Several studies in the past few years have found that acetominophen, also called paracetemol, can improve sprint performance and reduce the slowing-down that usually occurs over the course of a race or intervals/heats. It is the main ingredient in Tylenol and is widely available over-the-counter to treat pain, fevers, and colds, and other illnesses.

    One such study was published in the journal this winter. A team from the University of Kent and the University of Bedfordshire found that giving active men a 1.3 g dose of acetominophen improved their power output during a series of sprints on stationary bicycles, and reduced the decline in power output from one sprint to the next.

    Drs. Giusppe Lippi and Fabian Sanches-Gomar of the University of Parma and the University of Valencia, respectively, voiced concern in a letter to the editor: if this has been shown over and over, why is acetominophen not on the banned list? They pointed out that not only is the drug dangerous in high doses (safety is a common rationale for banning performance-enhancing drugs), but it is easily detectable in urine using a fast and cheap testing technique.

    This prompted a response from the original authors, who first hurried to assure readers that though they test the effects of acetominophen on sports performance, they do not condone doping.

    Next, they acknowledged that the drug certainly seems to be performance-enhancing. Their research over several years has shown that although it also has effects such as preventing core temperature from shooting up in a hot environment and improving nervous system activation, the main mode of performance enhancement is by reducing the sensation of pain.

    The Kent/Bedfordshire team explained that acetominophen is safe at therapeutic doses, and that amateur athletes are widely acknowledged to use many other pain-masking drugs which are much more dangerous. Should those other drugs not be a bigger priority to regulate? Like another common compound which enhances performance – caffeine – acetominophen is possibly not banned because it is so widespread. Furthermore, there are many legitimate reasons to use the drug, so implementing a TUE requirement would likely be tedious.

    “Consequently, more robust definitions for what constitutes doping, and clearer criteria for establishing a banned substance are warranted,” the authors concluded in their reply.

    This debate is probably not over!

    * Next, the debate over xenon gas brought up at the Sochi Olympics is not the only instance of skiers breathing something special to enhance performance. A team of researchers from Switzerland and Germany looked at the effects of the oxygen content of air breathed in between laps of a team sprint on recovery and performance. The results were published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

    Eight well-trained male skiers did team sprint simulations on a SkiErg, with race distance based on that at the Turin and Vancouver Olympics. The elevation, meanwhile, was simulated at 1800 m (the elevation of the Sochi Olympic venue) via an oxygen mask. Each skier did the team sprint twice. Once, in between laps they breathed air with an excess of oxygen. The other time, they breathed air with very low oxygen. The order of the trials was randomized and the athletes didn’t know which air they were breathing – except by how they felt, of course.

    The researchers found that neither power output nor perceived exertion differed between the two trials. However, breathing the oxygen-enriched air did improve the oxygen saturation of the skiers’ hemoglobin. The skiers also didn’t accumulate as much lactate in their blood when they breathed the oxygen-enriched air during their recovery time between laps.

    So why was there no performance response? Lead author Anna Hauser of the Swiss Federal Institute of Sport guessed that maybe the recovery time of just 3 minutes in between laps was not long enough for the body to respond to the benefit of extra oxygen.

    Or, there might be another explanation. The team did find that there were athlete-specific responses: some skiers did improve when breathing the oxygen-rich air, while others didn’t. With a small sample size of only eight athletes, this likely confounded their ability to find statistically significant results. Individual variation in response to this technique deserves further research.

    * Dr. Sandra Hunter of Marquette University took on the task of reviewing research on muscle fatigue in men and women. Writing in Acta Physiologica, she pointed out that it’s difficult to get a clear picture of how male and female athletes differ in terms of fatiguability because the vast majority of sports science research is performed on men.

    Then, however, she went on to give an in-depth analysis of what we do know. Men are generally assumed to be stronger than women, but for some muscle groups, women are much less fatiguable. For instance, men are stronger at isometric (static) contractions of knee extensors or elblow flexors, but they also have a shorter time or number of repetitions to failure.

    The same is true of repeated dynamic muscle contractions, such as lifting an object. Men also showed a greater relative reduction in the force they were applying, although not necessarily a bigger absolute reduction, because they started off as stronger in the first place.

    With repeated dynamic muscle extensions however, such as lowering an object, women were actually more fatiguable than men. Muscle extensions lead to muscle damage and delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), so some researchers hypothesize that the reduction in power output by women is because they have lower pain thresholds and are feeling the burn.

    Forget strength – what about power? In sprint repetitions on a stationary bike, men usually experience bigger reductions in power output over a set of intervals than women do, and women recover more quickly between sets.

    Hovering around all of these phenomena is the big question: do men tire more quickly because they have higher strength or power to start out with? In many of the studies where pairs of men and women are matched for their initial strength or power, the sex differences disappear. Nevertheless, scientists don’t feel like they have finished answering this question.

    There are many other potential explanations, from sex hormones to the sympathetic nervous system. Women have higher lipid metabolism in their skeletal muscle than men do, but men have higher rates of glycolysis; is that it? When generating a force, women have greater vasodilation in their muscles, but men have higher mechanical compression; what about that?

    Interestingly, when women are stressed or distracted, their reduced fatiguability goes away. If men and women are asked questions, told to do mental math, or given electric shocks during isometric work, the women’s performance declines at a much faster rate than the men’s. Basically, stress may affect men’s and women’s bodies differently through the sympathetic nervous system.

    * Lastly, a quick one. Has your coach ever had you run a bunch of sprints, and then do a set up pushups? If so, they were a smart coach. A study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology compared strength training to combined strength and sprint training. Even though the group doing the combined protocol had half as many sessions a week compared to the strength-only group, the researchers found that both groups got stronger at the same rate – and that the combined training protocol produced improvements in VO2Max and time to exhaustion, whereas the strength protocol, unsurprisingly, did not.

  • This Winter in Journals, Part Two: Skis and Boots, Injuries and Eating

    Welcome back to This Month in Journals! After taking the winter off to focus on race reporting, we’re doing a series to catch up on the ski-related research that has been published in scientific and social science journals this winter.

    * In the journal Sports Engineering, five researchers from Trondheim, Norway, reported having built an “instrumented rollerski.”

    Come again?

    The team built full bridge strain gauges into the shaft of the rollerskis so that they could measure force while a skier trained on a treadmill. A wireless sensor picked up the information and transmitted to a base station via a radio transmitter. They also used a motion-capture system to track the rollerski’s position in three-dimensional space.

    That allowed them to be able to detect differences in technique between two skiers, or for instance between the same skier when he was skating with and without poles. The researchers hope that the system will allow better work on ski technique – but they wrote that a few adjustments still had to be made to the system.

    * Meanwhile in Austria, researchers were focusing on boots.

    “Ski boot quality is determined by mechanical properties and comfort,” Dr. Patrick Hofer and four coauthors wrote in their abstract in Applied Ergonomics. “Comfort is strongly affected by cold feet.”

    Point taken. The group set out to determine the “microclimate” in ski boots: temperature, humidity, and how much water the boots absorbed. They asked five skiers to participate in their study, using two different brands of alpine ski boots. The men went into a climate chamber set at various temperatures and simulated skiing (rounds of squats, followed by rests so simulate riding on a chairlift); two of the men also did field tests.

    The ski boots were outfitted with sensors to detect the temperature and humidity. After the simulation was done, the wetness of the boot liner was measured by weighing it on a scale and seeing how much water weight it had gained.

    Alpine boots are completely different than cross-country ski boots, but some of the researchers’ conclusions are still quite valid for our community. Because there are no large muscles in the foot, feet are kept warm only by blood flow. That means that once boots (and feet) start to get cold, they just keep going. In every case, the temperature in the boots declined once the skiing began.

    The men began saying that their feet were cold and hurt when their toes reached about 20ºC (68ºF), or when they were about 5ºC colder than the main part of the foot (toes and feet had different sensors). The coldest temperature any of the mens’ toes reached was 11ºC (52ºCF), at which point he said his toes were numb.

    The researchers also found that ski boots got far wetter in the field than in the climate chamber (duh) and noted that although boots have good insulation, when they are exposed to snow and get wet, that insulation doesn’t work as well.

    In order to keep feet from getting cold – important! – the researchers said that boots would probably have to be built with different materials and maybe even different designs.

    * Other researchers were studying the health effects of sports. The American Medical Society for Sports Medicine published a position statement in the British Journal of Sports Medicine about overuse injuries and burnout in youth sports. Noting a culture pushing children towards excellence at younger and younger ages, the panel gave an overview of possible effects with the aim of helping doctors identify young athletes at risk.

    Among the consequences of heavier training loads for young athletes, they discussed that:

    • overuse injuries are most likely to occur during the adolescent growth spurt
    • prior injury is the biggest risk factor for developing an overuse injury
    • growth cartilage may be particularly susceptible to repetitive stress
    • early “sport specialization” increases injury and burnout; participating in a diverse array of sports should be encouraged early in a child’s athletic “career”
    • scheduled rest periods are essential in maintaining a physically and mentally healthy relationship to sport
    • emphasis should be placed on skill development and correct technique, not just competition
    • pressure from family and peers is discouraged
    • the female athlete triad places girls at increased risk of injury

    * While we’re on the subject of the female athlete triad…. Two other research groups addressed the phenomenon. Defined as a combination of disordered eating and irregular menstrual cycles, which eventually through hormonal effects can lead to decreased bone density, the triad, also sometimes referred to as relative energy deficiency syndrome, is assumed to be common in female athletes.

    Not all three symptoms have to be present for a woman’s health to be affected. Even without disordered eating, for example, a female athlete can be taking in few enough calories to stress daily body function, at which point reproductive functioning is diminished. Regardless, reducing the energy deficiency – that is, making sure an athlete is taking in more calories than they are burning – can solve a lot of the problems.

    The IOC put out a consensus statement pointing out that male athletes are also affected, although few studies have examined to what extent. In any case, the IOC listed the potential effects of relative energy deficiency: decreases in metabolic rate, menstrual function, bone health, immunity, protein synthesis, and cardiovascular health. Because of these risks, which can have long-term consequences, it is important to remedy the symptoms of the triad.

    The group called for better clinical approaches to dealing with the syndrome, and suggested dividing athletes into three categories, each with different treatment plans in relation to when they should be allowed to return to sport.

    Low-risk athlete should be encouraged to play their sport full-time, with an emphasis on healthy eating. Medium-risk athletes should be placed on a training plan and diet plan, and allowed to train if they follow these plans; they can be cleared for competition by their doctor. For high-risk athletes, competition should not be allowed, and only minimal training under supervision.

    The statement was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which also published a paper by a group of Scandinavian researchers who developed a questionnaire to determine whether athletes are affected by the triad. Consisting of 25 questions, validation showed that the survey was effective in identifying female athletes who showed signs of the triad. The researchers suggested that such a questionnaire (called LEAF-Q) be used for early detection of the triad so that female athletes could change their habits before the effects became more serious.