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Call for Questions

Here’s a call for questions and comments about a May 2019 article titled “Energy system contribution during competitive cross-country skiing” published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. Longtime cross-country coach and athlete mentor Adam St. Pierre will be writing a story about these academic findings. FasterSkier will publish Adam’s story at the end of the month. We’d love your questions and feedback about “Energy system contribution during competitive cross-country skiing” to help Adam shape his...

Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping (Part Five)

This is part four of a multi-part series titled “Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping”. It comes to FasterSkier from Sammy Izdatyev. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.  Sammy Izdatyev is the pen name of a Finnish sports enthusiast and unaffiliated amateur historian, who has been interested in endurance sports since the turn of the millennium. He hopes that his pro bono – research can...

What Studying Twins Can Tell Us About Fostering Motivation for Exercise

One of the biggest public health challenges worldwide is physical inactivity. As the World Health Organization a study of American Birkebeiner participants which found that participating in group-based exercise provided an important extra bit of motivation even for people who were quite self-motivated to exercise or train. Another piece of the picture was examined in Finland. There, researchers had the opportunity to use a study of twins to disentangle the genetic and environmental contributions to...

How Do You Make a Top-10 Biathlete a Medalist? Find 12 Seconds, Somewhere

Biathlon is a notoriously variable sport: besides skiing, there’s the shooting aspect which can ruin a race in a matter of seconds. Sometimes an athlete like Lowell Bailey wins a World Championship for the first time after 15 seasons competing; sometimes the most reliable guy in the sport, Martin Fourcade, finishes 46th. It’s a wild world. Norwegian PhD student Øyvind Skattebo set out to quantify just how variable the sport is, and what amount of improvement...

What Predicts Nordic Combined Success? Study Finds Out

What are the physiological capacities of nordic-combined athletes and can laboratory tests predict performance capabilities on the World Cup? Those are the questions that a team of Norwegian researchers set out to answer by testing 12 competitors from eight different countries before a 2015 World Cup competition in Trondheim, Norway. The study, led by Vegard Rasdal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Norwegian Olympic Sports Center, was recently published in the...

We’re Not Invincible: More Heart Arrhythmias in Endurance Athletes (Book Review)

When I heard that there was a new book coming out about heart arrhythmias in endurance athletes, I was interested. Several years ago, I read some of the research papers that the book’s authors refer to. One was a cohort study on participants in the Vasaloppet, the 90-kilometer ski marathon in Sweden. Those researchers found that skiers who competed in more Vasaloppets had more heart arrhythmias – as did those who finished the race the...

“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...