Pacing and Avoiding Performance PredictionsWritten by Matt Russ
No athlete likes to be passed during a race. A natural reaction is speed up and attempt to keep pace with person whose dust you are now eating, but in doing so you just got pulled out of your game and put into theirs. Most likely you have no idea of their performance potential, pacing, or strategy (if any). Multi-sport events often have a relay team category in which a single athlete will use up everything they have in one leg. The point is, to be truly efficient and race your fastest you must know and race within your limits, not someone else’s. There is only one pace that is most efficient for you and a very fine line between it and over pacing. Proper pacing becomes especially important in distance races such as marathon and Iron Man distance. It is very easy to get caught in a moment and push too hard at wrong time, only to pay for it later. The scenario athlete who passed you could actually be slower and pacing themselves incorrectly, or a faster athlete who is going to eat your legs up and leave you flat. In either case, if you are at top of your performance envelope chasing them will only slow you down. If you go anaerobic even for a short period of time you are going to have to recover, and recovery takes time. Anaerobic efforts are very fatiguing, especially if you are not trained at these intensities, or to repeat these intensities. It is important to know your performance potential and pace and train yourself accordingly. An athlete should get metabolically tested, or perform performance tests and race simulations to determine such heart rate intensities as lactate threshold and max VO2. These numbers are critical to proper pacing. Where you should be in relation to these heart rates will depend on your race and conditioning. Shorter sprint races may have you at or above LTHR if you are highly trained. Longer endurance races may be mainly at an aerobic level with brief periods above this zone.
| | Whitetail Deer's Digestive SystemWritten by David Selman, Tracker-Outdoors.com
Deer are ruminant animals which means they have a four chambered stomach similar to cattle. A fascinating characteristic about ruminant's stomach is that it allows animal to gather a lot of food at once and then chew and digest it later. The four chambered stomach is needed to process large amounts of low nutrient food that deer eat in order to get most benefit possible.Depending on type and abundance of food, deer can fill its stomach in about one or two hours of grazing. When a deer eats, food is chewed just enough to swallow and store it in first stomach chamber. The deer has a four section stomach similar to that of cattle. The food goes into first chamber which acts as a fermentation vat. Most of digestion occurs in this area of stomach. Deer depend on billions of microorganisms that live in its stomach to break down fibers, cellulose, and other basic plant components, and convert them into materials that can be used by deer's digestive system. Over 40 percent of a deer's energy is derived from acids absorbed through walls of its first stomach.
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