Musings of a little boy runner

The trials and tribulations of a PhD student learning the ropes of gaining a doctorate in the field of running biomechanics.

[littleboyrunner]

CAN vs MEX. First soccer match in Vancouver. Great atmosphere! #worldcupqualifier #streakerswithclotheson #toocold (at BC Place Stadium)

[littleboyrunner]

My new screensaver. I can watch snow fall forever! #whistler #winterlodge #roadbacktothecar (at Whistler Blackcomb)

[littleboyrunner]

Can't beat a home cooked meal from the gramps #homecooking #morethanonedish #hk

[littleboyrunner]

My new beater is ready to hit the streets of Melbourne #hipsterlife #bianchi #pleasedontsteal

[let-theoceandrain]

[littleboyrunner]

Hi Pandaaa

[littleboyrunner]

A great night for a run! #northmelbourne #lovesummer #runningintothenight

[littleboyrunner]

Usain Bolt: A Freak of Nature

Hey Everyone,

The Olympics has come and gone with countless amazing performances by athletes competing in various events. 

I would like to focus on one specific Olympian who defies all logic. His name is Usain Bolt and he is the fastest man alive. I recently watched a documentary about the rise of Usain Bolt, from his rural roots in country Jamaica, his love of cricket and how he got introduced to athletics.  During his early life, Bolt always loved to play cricket like many of the teenagers in the Caribbean, following the West Indies with the likes of Chris Gayle and Brian Lara. However fate had other ideas and on one faithful afternoon during cricket training, one of the sporting coaches saw Bolt and noticed the amount of speed he had during his run-up. So he suggested Bolt to try his hand at track and field due to his natural raw speed and the rest is history. 

Bolt has become one of the most recognisable athletes of all time holding both 100m and 200m world records and a dual world and Olympic champion in both respective disciplines. As a student studying running biomechanics, I'm interested in why Bolt can run at speeds that are unmatched by any other human being. 

In short, to increase your running speed, you need to have a balance of two contradictory criteria, stride length and frequency. Stride length is the distance from one step to another while stride frequency is the amount of times your foot contacts the ground over a period of time. If you want to run faster, you can do one of two things, you can increase your stride length by stretching out the distance between your steps. This however, will compromise your stride frequency due to the time you spend increasing the power you need to make the extra distance. You can also run faster if you increase your stride frequency but this causes the distance between steps to decrease. Therefore, a balance between the two criteria is ideal (neglecting variation in muscle and tendon properties). 

The point I want to make is most sprinters are relatively short but very muscular thereby using their stature to increase stride frequency but compromising their stride length. Usain Bolt is different to other sprinters because he is much taller than most elite sprinters. This puts him in a disadvantage because taller people like to increase their stride length because of their long legs. The reason why Bolt is a freak of nature is that he has found a way to balance both his stride frequency and length so he has the stride frequency of a short sprinter but also the stride length of a tall one allowing him to break all sorts of sprinting records.

One of the big questions is "Can he run even faster and break the 9.50sec point?" and the answer is...YES (theoretically)! According to various experts, our muscles and tendons can work more efficiency than they currently do when maximally sprinting. So some of my research questions are "What's limiting us from sprinting to our muscle's maximum capacity? Is it that the body doesn't allow us because we are more likely to get injured? Is there specific muscles that hit a peak early than others? Is how we evolved limiting our speed (compared to running on all fours)?

Sorry, I'll have to leave it there but I could talk about this topic later if anyone's interested especially in terms of our muscles and tendons (my primary PhD focus).

Thanks for reading!

[littleboyrunner]

Why do we run when we can walk?

This is a question I've been looking into the past few weeks and the main theories underlining why it happens. 

But here is some background information on the field. So basically, there is a speed where your body decides to run instead of walk. This is around 2m/s or 7km/h (average normal walking speeds ~1.7m/s) and although you can force yourself to walk faster than this speed, if your mind is somewhere else, your body will voluntarily run or slow jog and this is known as your preferred transition speed.

Understanding the mechanics of why this transition happens has become one of my projects. There are many hypotheses put forward by research experts to explain this transition mechanism. The most obvious one is to increase metabolic efficiency or in other words, you run so that your body saves more energy (walking really fast is tiring). There have been many publications that support both sides of this hypothesis. In the scientific world, there is never a correct answer or there is one till someone proves it false (i.e. the never-ending quarrel about Einstein's time-space continuum).

My research looks at the question from a different approach producing an alternative hypothesis. Because my background is in biomechanics, I am looking into the biomechanical factors that differ between the two types of gait (i.e. types of locomotion) especially when someone walks and runs at their preferred transition speed. My hypothesis is based on the role of the muscle complex lying in your calves known as the plantarflexors. These muscles can effect how much the ankle and knee flex and the amount of force you use to push off the ground to get your leg to swing to your next step so you don't trip over yourself.

So unlike other muscles that keep increasing their force as the walking speed increases, these plantarflexors actually lose their ability to produce force. But if we start running at that same speed, the force the plantarflexors produce suddenly increases up to two fold allowing the muscles work more efficiently (another post I might need to do is what I mean by efficiency) and maybe this is the reason why we voluntarily run at this speed rather than walk. Currently, I'm working on a data set to prove the phenomenon on why there is a sudden increase in muscle force. There are many hypotheses put forth  to suggest why this happens and my supervisor and I have our own theory that we can hopefully input into the field. I will try to keep you up to date on my progress!

My next blog post will be on the current hot research topic of barefoot running versus shoe/shod running and the constant bickering between the two support factions. 

If you have any advice or comments about my research, please contact me or leave a comment for this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible! Thanks for reading!

[littleboyrunner]

Scribble all over my papers

If you have a look at all the papers on my desk, there is a very distinct pattern...besides all the printed text from the journal article, there's my own graffti everywhere!

I'm sure this doesn't work for everyone but after reading 40-50 papers, I've started to get into a routine that allows me to prolong the period of time I remember main points of a paper. It all starts with deciding the importance of the paper to the relevant topic I'm trying to work on that day/week. At the moment, I have a relatively small volume of papers to divide into different areas to work on (e.g. musculoskeletal modelling, muscle/tendon properties, etc.)

After I finish the abstract to get the gist on what the paper is going on about, I go through the paper and highlight key aspects that could be important to my research in the future. At the start, I found that I would highlight every second line so I ended up with the whole paper highlighted which was quite counter-productive. The more I read however, the more I could narrow down the main points and highlight the points that are most relevant.

From there, I would re-read the highlighted points and work out the reason I've found it relevant and write a few keywords on the side of the margin to denote the highlighted passage. This way, if I look at the paper in a month/year's time, I can  quickly locate the important points to look out for.

Lastly, even though the abstract is the summerised version of the paper, I would  write my own points and keywords on the front page so when I wanted to locate related papers, my searching method was more efficient.

This method works well for me but it can be quite time consuming and I've ended up only doing it for papers that relate very closely to my area of research. For the papers that are fundamental to my research, I like to write some extended notes on a worksheet on the computer so I can refer back to them in the future.

I would like to know the different ways people keep track of their readings. If you have some methods, please comment below.

Thanks!

[littleboyrunner]

Conquering Procrastination!

Throughout my high school and undergraduate/masters, concentrating and resisting procrastination was not my forte. Constantly, after 10-15 minutes max, I would subconsciously click my single shortcut button which conveniently opens all my favourite pages. If I happen to see something of interest, I could spend up to an hour meddling through the different links and pages. Without even knowing, time passes and when I finally realise it doesn't relate to my work, it's too late, half a day gone without anything to show for it besides a few new random facts floating around in my head. 

Even while writing this post, my mind would wander and randomly open one of the many bookmarked links in my google chrome toolbar. I really had to find a solution to my addiction if I wanted to finish my PhD in reasonable time. So naturally I ended up procrastinating at work again but this time with a purpose, to find my productivity enlightenment!

Through some epic googling, I found some new techniques to try out. This week, I've been trying out the combination of the apps pomodoro technique (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/) and EpicWin (http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/). Pomodoro is a simple timer that sets a time for you to be working and a time for breaks. The default setting is 25 mins of work for 5 mins break with a 15 min every 3 pomodoros. While EpicWin is a program that rewards you for completing tasks in the form of upgrades to a hero character you've created. 

These techniques were recommended by other PhD bloggers such as "The Thesis Whisperer" (http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/), "PhD Talk" (http://phdtalk.blogspot.com.au/) and many more (follow the links from their websites). They have been an absolute saviour to guide me through my first few weeks. In the coming weeks, I'll probably refer back to either these blogs or similar ones because it is a wealth of information from people that are further along their PhD adventure or have finished their PhD and are reminiscing on their journey.

Anyways, my productivity has definitely increased from using pomodoro. EpicWin is a bit of a hit and miss but I've been trying to use it as much as possible because I used my hard earned itunes credit on it!

More updates on my journey for productivity enlightenment in the future. 

Hopefully some people can relate back to my procrastination problems and find their own solutions. Please comment if you have any techniques I can try in the future that have worked for you. 

[littleboyrunner]

Some comic relief from a busy day of reading and concentrating. The situation in the comic happens to EVERYONE! Just shows that taking a break can work wonders when your stressed and can't find a solution for your problem.

Message for the day: Take your breaks! you might find the answers you seek.