CLIF Bar has created the Meet the Moment website, where adventurous folks like ourselves can share our own moments and experiences with everybody else. Every moment shared will give you the opportunity to win any athletic adventure of your own choosing.

There will be 3 winners, judged on popularity and how inspirational and creative their entry is. The contest runs from today through July 31st and you can submit as many entries as you like since it will be judged on quality and is not a random draw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tNYzS_GhJU

CLIF Bar will also donate $5 for every person that shares a moment through the site, and you get to choose who gets the donation for your moment. If more than 10,000 people participate, they’ll double the amount that they donate.

The charities that you can choose are:

1. Leave No Trace
2. International Mountain Biking Association
3. Surfrider Foundation
4. Access Fund
5. Winter Wildlands Alliance

My first moment that I’ve uploaded is from my first race at elevation, the Ghost Town 38.5, pictured above. Other than hikes up Mount Washington, I’d never been that high, and the views and vegetation in the Gila National Forest were breathtaking.

You can get more information at the website, www.MeetTheMoment.com

Go upload your moment, and then come back and share the link so we can all check them out! Each one you upload will give you a chance to win the contest, and uploading at least 1 will help out a worthy cause. To get the link to your moment, just click the “View Moment Details” button after you’ve created your moment and get the link from the Share button that appears so you can copy it to the comments below.

This post has been sponsored by CLIF Bar.

You may remember Tom from his coaching session a few years ago about how he went from a 15-year lay off from running to become one of the most competitive senior masters runners in the country, and how you can stay healthy and competitive as you age.

PacePal is a service that lets you find others that run at or near the same pace as you during training and racing, so that you can find training partners both close to home and while you are traveling. In this 5 minute discussion, we talk about the history of PacePal and some of the cool new features that are coming out in early 2011 that you are going to want to keep your eye on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XSKeZEBVqQ

Download This Video: MP4 – MP3 – Watch on YouTube

Video Transcription

Click Here to Read the Transcript

You can check out PacePal for yourself by searching for it on Facebook or by going directly to their website at: http://www.pacepal.com

Did you know that you can find me on both of them?

Here are my pages:
http://twitter.com/RunToWin
http://www.facebook.com/RunToWin

For about a year and a half now, I’ve been putting up a quote of the day that is related to running, or motivating yourself to run, or giving you another reason to laugh about running.

If you have been following me for any length of time, then almost every weekday that isn’t a holiday you’ll have seen the quotes.

If you think back to last March (2009), you may recall a coaching session that I did with Mike Brooks.

It is not yet available for sale, but I am going to be giving away copies of the coaching session in conjunction with the 1 More Mile for Sunshine Challenge! Thanks to Mike, I am raising money for Camp Sunshine, so it seemed fitting to give away our coaching session.

In order to win one of the 5 digital copies, all you need to do is go to this article and leave a comment:

http://www.1moremileforsunshine.com/79/you-can-win-a-free-coaching-cd

If you want an extra chance to win the physical CD (I’ll even pay for the shipping costs) then in your comment you just need to leave a guess as to how many quotes you think I’ve offered up in 2008 and 2009. (My cut off date for counting them was on January 1st!)

Even if you don’t want to make a guess in order to win the physical CD, any comment is eligible for the digital versions. I’m closing the comments on this page since you need to leave your comments over at the 1 More Mile for Sunshine Challenge website in order to be eligible to win.

And while you are over there, take a look around and check on my progress. I’m now 6 days into the challenge…only 25 left to go!

The Millrose games will be televised live on ESPN2 tonight from 7-8:30 p.m. It will also be televised tomorrow on NBC, January 31 from 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. ET. If you’d like to play along with Fantasy Track, then you have until 5:40 p.m. tonight to make your picks.

Here are the details on how that works:

How it works

Fans create their ultimate track and field team each week by going to www.visachampionshipseries.com and selecting the athletes they believe will compete well at that week’s meet.

Each Visa Championship Series meet is “virtually” scored, with 10 points going to the first-place athlete in each event, 8 points to the second-place athlete, 6 points to the third-place athlete and so on down to sixth place. The selected athletes score points for your team.

During the 2008 indoor season, after the conclusion of the AT&T USA Indoor Track & Field Championships, Jim Dunaway’s team from Austin, Texas, had scored the most points during the Indoor Visa Championship Series. He won a grand prize trip for two to the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Track & Field, courtesy of Visa. David Donley won the overall second-place prize, a $250 Visa Gift Card and Nike gift bag, including but not limited to a Nike/USATF spike bag, jacket, t-shirt and cap. Anthony DeSain won the third-place prize, a $100 Visa gift card and Nike gift bag.

2009 Indoor Pick-N-Win Fantasy Game

Grand Prize: One Grand Prize winner will be awarded a $2,000 Visa Gift Card and a Nike gift bag, including but not limited to, a Nike/USATF bag, jacket, t-shirt and cap. Approximate Retail Value: $2,100.

Second Place Prize: One Second Place Prize winner will be awarded a $250.00 Visa Gift Card and a Nike gift bag, including but not limited to, a Nike/USATF spike bag, jacket, t-shirt and cap. Approximate Retail Value: $350.

Third Place Prize: One Third Place Prize winner will be awarded a $100.00 Visa Gift Card and a Nike gift bag, including but not limited to, a Nike/USATF spike bag, jacket, t-shirt and cap. Approximate Retail Value: $200.

Three Weekly Prizes: Each game week, a Nike gift bag containing a Nike/USATF spike bag, jacket, t-shirt and cap, valued at $100, will be awarded. Weekly Prize winners will be determined by the top score achieved during the appropriate week from among all eligible entries (excluding the Grand Prize winners) received by the online deadline.

Pick-N-Win Fantasy Game New Features

• Invite a Friend: From the Pick-N-Win website, players have the ability to email a friend the Fantasy Game link and invite them to participate.
• News Page: Athlete scratches and additions to start lists will be updated on the news page.
• Facebook: From the Pick-N-Win site, players can click on the Facebook link and go to the USATF Facebook page to discuss strategies with other players and interact with their competition.

You can find all these items at
http://www.usatf.org/events/2009/VisaChampionshipSeries/play/

Fantasy Game timeline:

• The game kicks off with the historic 102nd Millrose Games (Jan. 30) and continues through the Reebok Boston Indoor Games (Feb. 7), Tyson Invitational (Feb. 13), and the USA Indoor Track & Field Championships (Feb. 28-Mar. 1).
• The first deadline for players to make their final 102nd Millrose Games picks is Friday, Jan. 30th at 5:40 p.m. ET. The game will conclude on Feb. 28 at 11:55 a.m. ET.

There’s a craze going around right now about doing 100 non-stop pushups. The craze was started by one of the readers of this site, Steve Speirs.

He started the Hundred Pushups, which provides a 6 week program designed to get anybody into shape fast so that they can complete 100 pushups. It may take some people a little longer than 6 weeks if they have to repeat any of the weeks, but it is a proven system that will build up strength and endurance in record time.

Steve told me about his new site when he first launched it, and it was right after I started my own program for the Summer. I am looking forward to this Autumn, though, when I plan on following Steve’s program to see how many pushups I can work up to.

The site allows you to follow each week separately or download the complete program all at once. You can also choose to be listed with others taking the challenge so that you can provide mutual support and encouragement while getting public accountability.

If you are in the market for a new weight training program, then this is a good solution to throw into the mix and can give you something to be proud of once you have completed it. Pushups are one of the best exercises that you can do and having a strong base can really improve your running.

Have you joined the challenge?

You may also want to take a look at the Complete Running Family, who has been providing the same service for the past few years.

I’ve been in Ryan’s private coaching club for the better part of the last year, and he has a lot to offer. His prescribes Tabata workouts, which are high intensity 4 minute workouts that fast, efficient, and that leave you gasping for breath. You spend 20 seconds doing work and 10 seconds resting repeated 8 times. Normally I keep a piece of paper in front of me that have the exercises listed in order, and then program my watch to beep at the appropriate intervals.

Ryan has simplified the process, though, and has created the BodyBot, a web program that will let you set up a program, will lead you through it, and will show you on the screen what you should be doing at any given time.

I bought a membership to the program on Friday evening, and have been using it ever since. I’ve even gotten my wife doing the workouts with me, and trying to get her to lift weights or do body weight types of exercises can be like pulling teeth sometimes. The program isn’t perfect, but it does have a lot to recommend it. I’ll get into some specifics about what areas need improvement, but first let me demonstrate how it works so that you have an idea of what I mean:

The process is simple:

1. Open the webpage.
2. Choose a category, then drag the exercise that you want onto the timeline. (Repeat as necessary until you have 8 exercises chosen.)
3. Choose a tune to work out to.
4. Optionally, do a 2 minute warm up before you begin.
5. Press Start, and follow the on screen instructions.

What is this process good for?

Tabata intervals are a super compressed workout that is ideal for burning fat. Even if you don’t want to lose weight or burn fat, it can work your muscles quickly and efficiently and is a great supplement to your running program. Using it as a cross training activity can help build strength and prevent injuries during your middle distance or marathon training program.

Step 1: Exercise Selection

There are 70 different exercises in the BodyBot, which means that you could do a different workout every day for 7 years without repeating the same workout. This is a good way to keep yourself from getting bored, and to prevent your body from adapting to the point where the workouts are no longer a challenge.

There are plenty of open slots for future expansion, so I expect to see new workouts added over the course of the next year. The majority of the current exercises can be done with just your bodyweight, and the ones that do use implements can be done with a simple dumbbell or a chair.

If you don’t know what an exercise is, you can just look at the video in the center of the screen to see Ryan demonstrating it for you.

When choosing your workouts, you just need to click and drag them onto the desired exercise slot. It is a very easy and intuitive process.

Unfortunately, it took me a few tries to figure out that it is the left side of the box that depicts your exercise that determines which slot your exercise will appear in when you drop it, and not where your cursor currently is. This makes it easy to accidentally drop the exercise into the wrong slot. This is easily fixed, and even easier to avoid once you learn that it’s the left side where you need to drop it.

Even easier would be if you could double click on an exercise and it would fill the first available slot so that you don’t have to drag it at all.

Step 2: Tune Selection

Once your 8 exercises are chosen, you are given the option to move forward and select the music that you want to listen to while you are working out. You aren’t given the option to change the exercises that you’ve chosen, though. It isn’t very difficult to just refresh the page and start over, or even to just do the workout you chose instead and then fix it for your second set, but it would be nice if you could move backwards through the selection process and make changes.

There are 13 different tunes to choose from that you can listen to while you are working out. Most of them are pretty upbeat and I am sure are just the thing to get your heart pumping. You could rotate through the different options to avoid getting bored if you wanted.

Personally, I’m not a very big fan of any of the available tunes. This bothered me a lot the first couple of times that I used the BodyBot, but I’ve since discovered that you can skip this step and not have a music track playing. Just click on the warm up button to move to the next step. You can then listen to your own music or just work out in silence like I do.

Step 3: Warmup

Before beginning your workout, you have an optional warmup that you can do. It lasts for about 2 minutes and involves a few simple motions that will get you loosened up and ready to work out. I wracked my brain but couldn’t find anything wrong with this section of the program. You have the option of skipping it if you have already performed a set or if you are doing these workouts after your run (which is what I normally do), or if you just don’t want to warm up.

The warm up includes exercises like neck rolls, arm and leg swings, and hip rotations. If you don’t feel that you’ve warmed up enough, then at the end Ryan will point at you and then start all over again. When you are ready to begin your workout, just click through to the next step.

Step 4: The Workout

Once you are on the workout screen, you can press Go and the workout begins counting down the first 20 seconds for exercise 1. The video in the center of the screen will display what exercise you are supposed to be doing so that you can follow along. After 20 seconds have passed, the video blanks out and counts down from 10 seconds before moving into workout #2. This continues until you have done all 8 exercises, whereupon you are given the option to do another workout or recommend the BodyBot to a friend.

As I’ve said before, the process is simple to follow and makes doing the workouts much easier. There are still a few areas for improvement, though.

First, I think that the rest and the work should be reversed, so that you rest first. That way when you press go you aren’t immediately thrown into exercise number 1, which means that you won’t waste the first 3 or 4 seconds moving away from the computer.

Second, it would be nice if the exercise that you are doing would be listed on the side of the screen. That way somebody who isn’t familiar with the exercises could begin to associate the name of an exercise with the exercise itself. The names of the exercises are only listed in the bonus workouts that come with the program (or that you can buy separately). It would also make it easier to anticipate what exercise is coming up next if you don’t remember off hand which exercises are in the current workout, especially if they swapped the 10 seconds of rest and the 20 seconds of work.

Third, it would be nice if your current workout could be listed at the end so that you could write it down if you liked the workout and wanted to do it again some time. There is no method for saving workouts, and if you click on the workout again button you are put back at square one. That makes sense because it forces you to take a minute or so of rest while you set up the next workout, but it would be a nice feature.

Is this program worth buying?

I certainly think that it is. I am a big fan of the Tabata Intervals methodology, especially since I began doing them with my bodyweight workouts. It saves me the 30 minutes to drive to the gym and the 40 minutes to an hour of lifting weights, and I think that the results tend to work better with my running programs.

Ryan Lee is not a fan of long aerobic exercise, but he doesn’t run marathons (or even 5k races) so that is understandable. I think that as a supplement to a running program this can make weight lifting more approachable for the average person who doesn’t have any experience. Even for those who do have experience, it can simplify your workout and let you make the most of your time. Doing 2 or 3 sets through the BodyBot only takes 10 or 15 minutes, which anybody can fit in first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening.

What I have been doing is bringing my wife’s laptop into the basement for workouts that involve jumping, and hooking the laptop up to our television for other workouts so that the videos are easier to see on the big screen. Doing a couple of sets after a run has worked well for me, as has doing 3 sets first thing in the morning before work to wake myself up and then going for a run in the evening.

The program comes with 5 or 10 workouts that you can try right away, or you can just jump right in and start experimenting with putting your own programs together. There is also an option to purchase 100 “Done For You” workouts if you want some ideas to get you started. That is the option that I went with. I printed them off 9 to the page and am currently working my way through them 1 at a time to decide which ones I like and which ones I don’t.

If you have already purchased the BodyBot, let me know what you think of it or if there is anything that I’ve missed in this review.

Here are the official entries in the order in which they were received:

1. Nick Cross wrote: It was -34 windchill and I was running. 3 Inches of snow on the ground. People commuting on bicycles. That made me feel less crazy but am I?
2. Pathfinder wrote: Round a corner. Hint of red. A tree, a leg. Pump my arms. There he is! Fast legs, heavy breath, his head turns. I am on him and he knows it.
3. David Parry wrote: A Running Story:Toddler throws her shoe out the window of a car. I pick it up and chase car. Two stoplights later return to surprised mom.
4. Aaron Engulsrud wrote: The finish was in sight. He knew the reward would be worth the price. He dug deep. The big clock told the story: 4:29:08, a new PR. Victory!
5. John Frenette wrote: In the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge becomes clearer with each stride through the fog. Headwind pushing back, I’m ever-nearer to my goal.
6. JoLynn Braley wrote: The rain never stopped her from running but this was a bit too eerie. A dense fog hung in the air, like that time when she ran for her life.

While my wife and I were waiting for our flight at the airport, we went through the entries and decided which ones that we liked the best. There were really only 5 entries to choose from, because one of the entries didn’t exactly follow the rules; it was only 138 characters long.

The story that we chose was Nick’s story, about crazy commuters! I’ll be sending you a PDF copy of my book about Marathon Preparation and Recovery, Nick, so you can expect that in your inbox sometime tonight.

Thanks to everybody who participated, and good luck if you also entered your story into the parent contest over at CopyBlogger!

Update: @Copyblogger Twitter Contest Results

So get creative, write a story in exactly 140 characters, and then click here to link to your story so that you can be entered into the contest! There are 6 submissions so far, so you have a good chance of winning a copy of my book. If you don’t enter, though, you will not have any chance to win.

That’s the challenge that was thrown down by Brian Clark at CopyBlogger, a website devoted to improving your writing.

Can you tell a story in exactly 140 characters?

That’s the idea behind the first ever @copyblogger Twitter writing contest.

It should be a great exercise and a lot of fun. Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation.

The rules for his contest are simple. You need to use Twitter to write your story, it must be exactly 140 characters long, and it must be interesting. The best story wins a 4 GB iPod Nano. Not only that, but I’m going to sweeten the deal by offering a digital copy of my book to the best running related story!

In order to be eligible for a copy of my book about Marathon Preparation and Recovery, your story must have something to do with running or walking. It can be related to a race, to training, to walking on a nature trail, or even to watching somebody else run or walk. You must also leave a link to your Twitter story in the comments below. If you want to be eligible for the iPod, you should also leave a link in the comments over at CopyBlogger, of course. There is only 1 entry per person allowed, so make it a good one. That being said, you don’t need to enter the same story into his contest and into mine, since mine has a content restraint.

Here is an example (and my entry into Brian’s contest):
http://twitter.com/BlaineMoore/statuses/815241805

I passed 1st place at mile 19. I mustn’t let anyone catch me. I am getting so tired. There’s the finish line! The course record is now mine.

By the way, if you sign up to Twitter and want to follow me, you can do so at http://twitter.com/BlaineMoore.

(New to Twitter and not sure what to do or how to use it? Click here for some simple, step by step directions.)

So start getting creative, writing your 140 character stories, and leaving a link here so that I can read them all! The deadline is this Friday, May 23^rd, 2008 at 6:00 EDT.

Well, this Summer the fun begins again. Both the USATF and the IAAF are providing an outdoor Fantasy Track series.

The USATF is going to center around it’s popular Visa Championship Series of races again, with the first meet happening this weekend at the Adidas Track Classic. There are two deadlines for making your picks. The 800m and the 5000m events are tomorrow night (Saturday) so those picks need to be made by 10:55 PM Eastern Time tomorrow. All other picks need to be made by 1:55 PM EDT on Sunday. A cool new twist on this season is that you can see who the favorites are based on who has already picked which athletes to win in each event. The entrant list sorts each athlete by their fantasy popularity.

The IAAF Fantasy Track game will begin with the June 1^st meet at the Golden League meet in Germany. The rules are a little different than they were for the Osaka games or for the USATF games. Rather than picking the athletes in individual events, or choosing a full complement of athletes with a maximum of 1 athlete from each country, you choose 4 captains that follow you from meet to meet and then you choose 5 additional athletes for each meet. If you choose athletes who score in the top 8 of their events, you score points.

Both leagues are free to join, although you are of course welcome to wager locally with your friends. Speaking of which – is anybody interested in a little friendly competition? Time is short for the start of the first USATF meet, but we could certainly get something together for the additional meets in the season and for the entire IAAF season. Let me know if you have any interest.

This was the first time that I really used the checklist generator, since I haven’t done any destination trips for a race since I’ve developed it. And you know what, it worked great! The default list had quite a few items that I wasn’t going to need, so I cleared those items out. There were a couple of items that I needed to include in the pre- and post- race bags that weren’t already on the list, but not many.

Mostly I just changed the items to be more specific. The luggage list, though, I highly customized. Since I’m going down to Georgia for 4 or 5 days, rather than just making a weekend trip of it, and since I am taking a class, I needed to add quite a few non-running related items onto the list. I then printed the list, interrupted my wife while she was studying so that she could tell me what I’d missed, and now I have an easy checklist that I can use to make sure that I don’t forget anything.

There are a few things that I think are worth changing in the default list, so when I get home next week I will probably do that. I just checked my database, and it looks like over 600 people have used the application to create a checklist, which is pretty cool! I haven’t actually checked that number since shortly after I created it, so that’s over 500 people in the last 2 or 3 months. Hopefully that number expands a bit now that the marathon season is coming upon us!

I had originally created the following video for Complete Running, but around the time I created it I was also busy getting ready to sell my book, and Mark was busy with the redesign over at Complete Running, so it never made its way over there. I’ve got the original video on my hard drive somewhere, so I’ll try to upload it to a better service than YouTube at some point, but if you want to see how the checklist generator works then you can watch this 5 minute introduction to it.

The checklist generator is a very simple tool, it only does one thing, but it does that one thing really well. And now that I’ve used it in a real situation as opposed to a theoretical testing situation, I’m glad I finally got around to creating it! It was on the back burner as a project for at least 2 years. Next time you are going to be traveling to a race, give it a whirl:

http://marathoning.org/checklist

Table of contents for Visa Championship Series (2008)

1. Win a Trip to the Olympic Trials with Fantasy Track & Field
2. Fantasy Track & Field Week #2
3. Fantasy Track & Field Week #3
4. Fantasy Track & Field » Final Week

How did your fantasy track team do at the Tyson Invitational “Pick & Win” for the Visa Championship Series? My team didn’t do nearly as well as at the Reebok games, but better than at the Millrose Games, and put me into 231^st place overall with 228 points between the three events. I am now 102 points behind first place, which means that I need to step it up this week to still not have a chance of winning!

This week’s fantasy track meet involves a return to Boston for the AT&T USA Indoor Track & Field Champs. You have until Saturday, February 23^rd at 11:59 a.m. EST to make your picks. This week promises to offer some high scores for folks as there are 26 events to choose competitors for.

You can watch the meet on ESPN2 on Sunday, February 24^th, from 5:00-7:00 p.m EST.

Table of contents for Visa Championship Series (2008)

1. Win a Trip to the Olympic Trials with Fantasy Track & Field
2. Fantasy Track & Field Week #2
3. Fantasy Track & Field Week #3
4. Fantasy Track & Field » Final Week

How did your fantasy track team do at the Millrose Games “Pick & Win” for the Visa Championship Series? My team didn’t do nearly as well as at the Reebok games, but still put me into 296^th place again with 156 points between both events. Hopefully this week I will do a little better, but at least I made the top 500. I am now 64 points behind first place.

This week’s fantasy track meet is the Tyson Invitational in Fayetteville. You have until Friday, February 15^th at 7:59 p.m. EST to make your picks.

Table of contents for Visa Championship Series (2008)

1. Win a Trip to the Olympic Trials with Fantasy Track & Field
2. Fantasy Track & Field Week #2
3. Fantasy Track & Field Week #3
4. Fantasy Track & Field » Final Week

How did your fantasy track team do last week at the first “Pick & Win” for the Visa Championship Series? My team put me into 296^th place with 91 points. Hopefully this week I will do a little better, but at least I made the top 500. I was less than 30 points behind first place.

This week’s fantasy track meet is the 101^st Millrose Games in New York. You have until Friday, February 1^st at 5:40 p.m. EST to make your picks.

Relevant Links:

• Maine Running History
• Maine Marathoners
• Maine PRs

Table of contents for Visa Championship Series (2008)

1. Win a Trip to the Olympic Trials with Fantasy Track & Field
2. Fantasy Track & Field Week #2
3. Fantasy Track & Field Week #3
4. Fantasy Track & Field » Final Week

The USATF has put together a Fantasy Track & Field game for the Visa Championship Series called Pick & Win. You need to live in the United States and be at least 18 years old to win, but each week you can win a gift bag by picking the athletes who perform the best in the meet.

After the conclusion of the 2008 AT&T USA Indoor Track & Field Championships, the person whose teams have scored the most points during the Visa Championship Series will win a grand prize trip for two to the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Track & Field, presented by Visa!

Overall second-place prize is a $250 Visa Gift Card and Nike gift bag, including but not limited to a Nike/USATF duffel bag, jacket, t-shirt and cap. The third-place prize is a $100 Visa gift card and Nike gift bag.

If you are interested in playing, be sure to get your first picks in before tomorrow afternoon. The first meet is the Reebok Boston Indoor Games on January 26^th, 2008 at 5:30 p.m. EST. Picks need to be made before 3:00.

I’ll be setting up my account and making my picks tonight.

For more information:

• Pick & Win Fantasy Game home page
• USATF Press Release
• Official Rules

I have signed up, and the giveaways begin tomorrow. I can not (yet) vouch for the quality of the giveaways, or whether you will be able to download them directly or if you are going to have to sign up for different mailing lists for each item. It is worth taking a look, though, I think, so I am passing the site along.

Here is an email that I got today after signin up a few days ago:

Hey Blaine

Just thought I’d drop you a quick reminder to keep an eye on your inbox for the first of your 12 days gift bundles.

This first day of fitness email will be delivering you THIRTY great gifts (and that’s just the first days!).

Each day after that for 21 days I’ll be sending you the links to yet another page with even more gifts for you to choose from.

You can take what you like or you can take ‘em all, the choice is yours.

The main thing is that you actually use them, ok?

Deal?

Great!

Til tomorrow!

Happy Holiday!

Dax Moy and Pat Rigsby
www.12daysoffitness.com

Table of contents for Information (November)

1. A list of strength training forums
2. The best sources of running advice…
3. Strength Training Books
4. What’s your favorite running forum?

In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we wrote about great sources of information for the month of November. Today I’d like to wrap up the month by asking what is your favorite running forum?

There are a few that I visit off and on, and a couple that I participate in regularly. Here are a few of the ones that I check in on now and again:

Running Ahead

Running Ahead is the best training log software that I have played around with. There are a few that I haven’t tried yet, but this is the one that I have been using for most of this year. There is also a great forum and community attached to the site, with a strong group-level forum behind the scenes.

Cool Running

I am not sure what is going to happen to the Cool Running forums now that Active has bought them and begun integrating them with the rest of their site. I am sure that they will continue to be an active community (pun intended.) The interface as it is right now is actually really bad, but there are a lot of people that are quick to chime in with an opinion any time that somebody has a question. Update: Active has closed down Cool Running and brought them into their own system, which has left a lot of the CR users disgruntled as the transition was anything but smooth. There has been a mass exodus to other forums, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens after things cool down a little.

Active

Honestly, the only time that I’ve been to Active’s discussion boards was when a search result sent me there. I don’t know much about it, but since Cool Running will probably be integrated into it sooner or later it is worth noting.

Taper Madness

I just recently discovered Taper Madness. It caters more towards the marathoners and the ultramarathoners than most of the other boards. They do offer a customizable pace band that you can print that allows you to set different pace goals throughout the race, which is different from most other pace bands that you can create online.

Running Mania

If you are a Canadian runner, then you probably already know about Running Mania. While the site caters to those north of the border, the community is very welcoming to those of us in the States and over one pond or the other when we want to drop in from time to time.

Complete Running

Complete Running is a great resource in and of itself, but the forum is a bit of an afterthought. It never really became particularly active, but I check in on it every week or two and converse with the folks that trickle in now and again.

Let’s Run

The Let’s Run forums also suffer from a lack of usability, although it is very popular. The site is extremely difficult to navigate for new users, and unless I follow a link into it I will rarely visit. Everything is just kind of jumbled together and I have trouble dealing with the information overload. That being said, there are a lot of users in the community and quite a few notable athletes and coaches that frequent the forums.

Runner’s World

I should have known that Runner’s World would have their own forums, and by glancing through they seem to be pretty active. There are certainly a lot of subforums and topics in each area. The link to the forums isn’t the most obvious one on the overly busy Runner’s World home page, but the title above will send you straight to them.

MilePosts (GMap-Pedometer Forums)

The GMap-Pedometer (my original review) was the first Google Map Mashup that helped runners figure out how far they have run by clicking on a map. It suffered from a few issues and has since been improved many times over on quite a few different sites. There is a forum on the backend where you can show off your maps, ask for technical support, read some spam, or chat. It was never very active and I only check it maybe once every few months if that.

Favorite Run

I only recently found the Favorite Run forums. The forums exist on top of another Google Map Mashup (similar to the GMap Pedometer) which I haven’t played with yet. The forum has a lot of categories and subcategories, which given its relatively low number of active users means that quite a few don’t have any recent posts.

Most of the other forums that I belong to are not specifically geared towards running, although a few of them do have runner’s sections. Do you have any forums that you visit regularly that I didn’t list?

Table of contents for Information (November)

1. A list of strength training forums
2. The best sources of running advice…
3. Strength Training Books
4. What’s your favorite running forum?

In a continuing collaboration with Scott over at Straight to the Bar, we will be writing about great sources of information for the month of November.

Scott begins the discussion this month with a list of strength training forums.

Scott lists 7 of the best strength training forums that he frequents, although I have only been to one on anything like a regular basis. I am not too familiar with most of his list outside of the Cross Fit forums.

How many of the sites that he lists are you familiar with? What are your favorite forums to take care of your weight lifting needs? Head over to Scott’s site and check ‘em out.

• Your login name will now be your email address and not your member name.
• You will now have an editable Display Name that will default to your former member name.
• If somebody in the Active Network is already using your display name, then you will get some random numbers added to your name.
• If you already have an account with Active that uses the same email address, then you will use the Active login information.
• The forums will remain at Cool Running, but they will be upgraded and offer new tools to users and moderators.
• Threads from the old forums will be copied into the new upgraded forums.
• Training logs will be imported into Active Trainer.
• Active’s privacy policy will take over for Cool Running’s policy. You can read it here: http://www.activenetwork.com/privacy-policy.htm

I have only recently started using Cool Running’s forums, and have never used their training logs. This merger will probably not affect me too much. As long as I can still get my race results as easily as I do now, I will be happy.

Some aspects of Cool Running’s site already point to the Active Network, such as the articles and the runner rankings.

To enter the contest, leave a comment below or write about the contest on your own website and leave a trackback. One normal comment per person, and one trackback per website is allowed if you want extra chances to win. You have until Tuesday, October 9^th to enter, when I will close the comments and announce the winner by random drawing.

Any comment will do, but if you don’t mind, I would prefer that you leave a question or a suggestion for something that you would like me to discuss here on the website. Doing so will not improve your chances of winning, but I am just curious about how well I am doing and what sorts of areas I need to pay more attention to. Is there anything that you think deserves more attention that is getting ignored by the running community? Do you have a specific question that you think that I could answer?

Contest rules and disclaimers:

1. There is one gift card that is being given away, and the code will be emailed to the winner. On request, I am willing to mail it as well within the continental United States. Delivery is not guaranteed but I will make a best effort to get it to the winner before the card expires on October 31, 2007.
2. I will be the complete and final judge. I can change the rules on a whim. The winner will be chosen by random drawing.
3. It is the winner’s responsibility to ensure that they are eligible to use the eMusic download service.
4. One entry per person is allowed, as well as one entry per website. Subsequent entries from any given person will be ignored.
5. If you win and do not get back to me within 4 days, then I reserve the right to give the prize to somebody else.
6. I will make my best effort to contact the winner, but a valid email address must be left on comments. If a trackback wins, then I will do my best to find a contact link on the web page linking to here, but if I do not see one then you will have to look back at this site to see if you have won.
7. Local laws, rules, and regulations apply. No purchase is necessary.

If you are interested in checking out the eMusic service, then click here to get a 2 week free trial that allows for 25 mp3 downloads.

Please Note: If you have never discussed an article here before, then your comment will be held in moderation. It may take a short time for it to appear on the site.

Update: The winner has been announced! It is Patrick.

The other type of race report that I write tends to take up to a week to publish and is detailed enough to be spread out over 3 to 5 articles. I will write a few thousand words (interlaced with pictures as available) summarizing the experiences, talking about what led up to the start of a race, the race itself, and how things went when the race was completed. My most recent race report of this style was for my first ultramarathon, the Pisgah 50k. In these reports, I am really accomplishing two things. I am first capturing my thoughts for myself, so that I have a record that I can look back on to remind me of the things that I did correctly and the things that I did wrong. Reading over these reports months and years later can make me both proud and humble, and remind me why I run these things in the first place.

The second reason, and one that is just as if not more important, is that I write these reports for other people. I have been running for almost 2 decades, which is a significant chunk of my life, and it can be helpful for other people to know what passes through my mind when I run a race. It lets them know what to expect about a given course or distance. It lets them know what they can do better than me, or what they can work on. I am not the only person that tries to find out everything that I can about a race ahead of time as I can, and I like to provide that service to others when possible.

So what makes up a good race report? Is it better to write a short mention of what happened, or is it better to write multi-page opuses that take half an hour to an hour to read through?

Based on the feedback that I have gotten from you and my other readers, I have to recommend leaning towards the longer articles when you write about your races. If you are just training through a race and it did not mean much to you, then you probably will not write a good race report and it would not be worth spending a lot of time on it. If you have been training for a specific race, though, and you gave it a good effort (whether you succeeded or failed), then use as many words as you can to record your journey from the starting line (and earlier) to the finish line (and beyond.)

Inject your personality into your race report, and not only will you have something that you will be happier to go back to in the future, but your readers will enjoy reading the report more and will better manage to sympathize and relate to you whether they have similar experiences or not. Tell a story, and you will have a better chance of keeping the attention of your reader and yourself.

Photo by Ian ParlinFor some examples from other websites, I have recently read two very good race reports that really make me want to try new things. I have spoken previously about the Vermont 100, and Stephen Wells has finally finished describing exactly what it felt like to run for 100 miles in Vermont this past Summer. When you have a few moments, I recommend reading his report, glancing through his pictures that he has interspersed, and try to imagine what it would feel like to follow in his footsteps.

If 100 miles seems as foreign to you as it does to me, then you can read about Chuck’s 50 mile run which also took place in Vermont. Chuck hurt his leg not too long ago, but he was able to move past his injury and ran the entire 50 miles in Vibram 5 Fingers “shoes”, which are basically rubber socks with a separate little pouch for each toe.

If you are looking for inspiration about your running, or if you are looking for some tips about how to put together a good story about a race, I recommend reading both of those stories about racing distances that very few people would ever consider.

Table of contents for Hornet Juice

1. What is hornet juice, and how can it help athletic performance?

I was recently contacted by Rina Ward to sample and review Hornet Juice, a powdered drink that is supposed to boost athletic performance. For all of the buzz about Hornet Juice, I did not really know all that much about it. There are two websites that the company maintains. At HornetJuice.com, you can purchase the product, and at Vaam-Power.com you can learn a bit more about what it is and how it works.

First, hornet juice is not your typical energy drink. Unlike Gatorade or Gu or other products of that nature, hornet juice does not actually replenish the fuel in your body as your work out. You could mix it with those products to get that sort of an effect, but that is not the purpose of taking it. The idea behind hornet juice is that it helps your body to metabolize fat for energy rather than glycogen. Theoretically, this would cause your glycogen stores to last longer, provide you with more readily available fuel than you might otherwise have during endurance exercise, and will help you burn off fat if you are currently trying to lose weight.

Despite the name, Hornet Juice does not contain any substances that are actually harvested from live hornets. It is not even juice; it is a powdered mixture that you shake into your water bottle. The idea for Hornet Juice comes from the Giant Japanese Hornet (Vespa Mandarinia), which can fly 50 to 100 kilometers per day despite being unable to eat any solid foods. The hornet kills other insects, and grinds up their bodies into a “meatball” that it feeds to young larvae. The larvae then secrete a protein solution that the adults consume. The ingredients in Hornet Juice are synthesized versions of the amino acids that are present in the solution created by the young hornets.

The concept does not sound completely preposterous, but it is hard to believe the claims made by the company. There are quite a few happy customer testimonials included on the websites, and Hornet Juice is known to have been used by at least a few Olympians. I recently read a positive product review by Thomas Bubendorfer over at Complete Running.

The website has a pretty good FAQ Page if you are interested in reading more about the product. The price ranges from $2.25/serving to $1.70/serving depending upon the quantity that you order, which while not cheap does put it at in the range of what you can expect to pay for most sports drinks.

If you are interested in the hornets themselves, I found this video on their site that is pretty interesting. It does not discuss the drink at all, but you can see where the inspiration came from:

I will write a review of the product itself once I have had a chance to sample it on a couple of long runs. Have you ever used Vaam (an earlier product available in Japan based on the same principles) or Hornet Juice? How did it work out for you?

Please Note: This is a sponsored post.

By joining this introductory program you get access to exclusive features, personalized training and support, tons of useful articles and information to take your running to the next level, a pre-race party where you’ll meet fellow athletes, and membership in an active community of athletes who share your passion.

Signing up is very easy; the site uses some neat effects to show you the different options you need to set when joining the site. If you have any disabilities then you may have a little trouble, as there is a captcha on one of the pages that you have to type in to prove that you are a human.

Once you sign up, you are given your own blog. You get your own subdomain, and for anybody with a wordpress website then the interface will be quite familiar. The training log is actually integrated right into the normal article posting system, which is very neat. There are quite a few reports that you can look at, although my charts are not very exciting as I have only recorded one workout in it. There is a very good blog stats plugin installed, though; I am going to need to check that out and install it here at Run to Win. You can see my sample site at: http://runtowin.konamoxt.com/

There is a library of articles about different sports that you can browse through, and a user forum with a few hundred posts. The forum does not seem to be very active, but that may change as the half marathon comes closer.

The main page once you have logged into your personally branded site has the main options front and center, making it easy to navigate through the administrative interface. There are quite a few options for customizing the look of your site, and if you wanted you could import your current blog into this Konamoxt. On the flip side, there is also an option to export your site out of Konamoxt.

The welcome email includes your login details, and links for where to sign up for the Las Vegas half marathon. It also lets you know to expect to be contacted by the coach in the near future to set up a training plan for you. I am not sure whether she will get in touch with me or not, since I do not actually plan to run the race this year.

If you are looking for a half marathon in December, and have any interest in traveling to Las Vegas, then this site would probably be worth signing up at. You would get a racing singlet, a pre-race party, and somebody to give you a training plan and help you along with weekly emails.

If you are not planning on running the race, I am not so sure that it is worth signing up. I already have my own website and am happy with my current training log solutions that I use, so I do not intend to track my training through this site. While the website is quite ingenious and would be very appropriate for somebody who has not set up their own website yet, it does not seem to have quite the level of power and control that I would require for myself.

You can sign up (or browse around) the site at the following address:

If any of you have signed up for the program, let me know how well the training program works for you. I am curious about how successful this program is going to be and would love to hear your stories.

Please Note: This is a sponsored post.

Photo by
Refracted Moments™

I especially found the second panel funny, where the addiction level is pointed out. Take a look at the the strip, and let me know what you think. Am I the only person that finds this humorous?

You can find it at:

I have registered my fantasy team, and I have set up a “buddy league” called “Run to Win” that you can join after registering. The meet starts in just a few days, so if you want to join you will need to do it soon. I will be willing to add a prize to whoever wins our buddy league if anybody is interested in joining in! You need to hurry though, because you must have your team completely chosen and set before midnight the day of competition (local time to Osaka Japan, which is GMT + 9.)

You can make changes and substitutions once per day after the competition begins, but you lose any points of athletes that you drop, and you can not get any points from athletes that you pick up from events that they have already competed in.

The main requirement to be aware of is that you must have a full team chosen before the competition begins. That includes 10 men and 10 women, who are from 20 different countries, as well as 4 relay teams. You must also choose a team captain, who is awarded double points when they score. The full list of rules and official prizes can be found on their help page.

So hurry and join up! Once you have registered, remember to join the Run to Win buddy league. The website to join is at:

click here for video

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an ad for trails.com on a website that I was visiting. I investigated, and I thought that the site was pretty neat and had a lot of potential, so I played around with it for a little while. I really liked it, so I decided that I would promote them and thought that I would share what you can do with their website. I also happened to have recently purchased a neat program that allows me to capture what I am doing on screen and I am teaching myself how to use it, so you can click on the image to the right to watch a video of how to use the website.

Trails.com is a site meant for scouting out trails, be it for your hometown and surrounding area or for someplace that you plan on visiting. They offer topography maps and trail guides, and make it fairly easy to search for specific locations or for what is available throughout a region. They also cater to quite a few different sports and activities, ranging from skiing, hiking, and mountain biking to fly fishing or bird watching. You can also search on natural landmarks such as waterfalls or hot springs, not that I would find many hot springs here in Maine.

Signing up is pretty straightforward, although you do need to provide them with a credit card for the trial. The trial gives you access to the site for a couple of weeks, and allows you to view and print up to three trail guides. They also offer some free trail guides if you would like to see how their system works without signing up. You do not get to choose which trails you want to see for those. To get to the free samples, click on the subscription overview and then find the view free samples link. You will see the the half dozen topo maps and a bit shy of a dozen trail guides that are all west of myself. Not that that means much, since I live on the Atlantic ocean. You can watch the video to see exactly where to click; instructions are about 3 minutes into the video.

If you cancel before your trial ends then they will not bill your card; but if you like the site and want unlimited access to their guides and maps then you can get an annual subscription for less than $50. Cancelling is as simple as clicking on “my account” and choosing the cancel option. That will also give you the opportunity to sign up for the “light” version of their annual membership, which is under $20. That allows you to download up to 10 trail guides and have access to them for the entire year.

You can search your area without logging in, if you don’t mind seeing a few extra popups asking you to login or sign up for their free 2 week trial. You can find trails in your area, but you can get a lot more information about those trails when you are logged in. The first page that you are presented with upon login is the trail finder page. You can click on your state, search based on zip code or keywords, or look for one of the categories at the bottom of the page that suits your fancy. You’ll see the list of state and canadian trails, and the different activities that the site caters to.

Click through to the video if you want to see examples of the trail guides and how I have been using the site, and please let me know what you think of this format. The video is about 11 and a half minutes long, and will start playing once it has a small buffer downloaded. Is this too long? Would you prefer that I went into more detail? Is the file too large? Is the video itself too tall or too wide? Does it all work fine? This is a new medium for me so I hope that you have some good comments, either because they are positive and you liked it or that are constructive because there is something that I can do better next time.

There are three prizes:

• Grand Prize: Free groceries & supplements for 1yr
• 1st Runner Up Prize: Free meal delivery for 3 months
• 2nd Runner Up Prize: Free camera & Results Tracker

There are a few catches to the contest, though. First, you need to own Precision Nutrition to take part. Second, you have to want to change your body. That singles me out; I am happy with my body and have no desire to transform it into anything else. My interest in his site is all about performance and not about fat or weight loss.

The contest starts next week and registration for it is open through mid-July. Head over to Body Transformation Challenge home page for full details, and a slew of before and after pictures of people that have already succeeded with the program.

• Get Fit & Sexy While Blogging – the Top 5 Unusual Things to do at Your Computer…
• How to make it to top5 in an individual time trial
• Top 5 Different Workout Approaches by Men and Women in the Gym
• 5 Back-to-Basics Strategies For Renewing Your Energy
• The 5 most important features to look for in a new sports watch
• The Five Keys to Optimal Health
• Top 5 gym free exercises
• The top 5 things that make me run
• 5 Reasons Why You Are Fat
• 5 Things that Helped Me Cross the Ironman Finish Line
• Top Five Methods to Check How Physically Fit You Are
• My five favorite 100-calorie meals
• [ # ] Top 5 Ways to Get (and Stay) Fit!

These aren’t in any particular order other than what I saw them in as I went through the list.

The website might be ugly, but it was originally designed as a concept with mock-functionality. The functionality was built in so that the website works, but I have not had a chance to make it look pretty yet. For full results, you can navigate over to:

BackBay.RunToWin.com

I will be adding features and making the site easier on the eyes as the season progresses.

You sign up for an account, you make a blog post with a few special properties set that denote the date and time of a race or event, and you publish. Now your race or event will appear on the calendar, and you can even add widgets to your website that list upcoming races. It beats having to scour a few hundred RSS feeds in order to find when people are racing and how they did.

(Official Announcement – My Races)

I signed up for the forum about a half hour ago, and I have seen enough to know that there are a few programs that I am going to try out after I run the Boston Marathon. You don’t need to register to be able to read the topics; you can just click through and see what other people have written. You can download some of the PDF e-books that are on the site, but some of them are still protected and for member’s of the system only. It looks like all of the interviews are for member download only. There is still a lot to see, though, and I am looking forward to digging through the archives.

I will link some of the more interesting ones that I find here at Run to Win.

I’ll have a full review after I have had a week or two to play with all of the new features. I highly recommend checking it out in the mean time, though.