Tole's Take

Barcelona FC "Gladiator" video - if you ever want to inspire the troops

This is awesome.  Check out the Gladiator-inspired video that head coach Pep Guardiola put together to get his squad fired up before they took the pitch against Manchester United in this year's Champions League final.  We all know that Pep's tactic worked to perfection (Go Barca!).

Pep gives a little pep talk (all puns intended) for the first 2 min, then the video really gets going.  You can also buy a commemorative t-shirt on Objectivo.com.

US Soccer - good start to World Cup campaign

Even though the US team lost 3-2 to Brazil in the Confederations Cup final today, fans of Sam's Army should feel good about the team's progress.  I watched nearly every game the US played, and after a rocky start to their Cup campaign (epitomized by a hapless 3-1 loss to Italy), the Yanks finally started to play loose and benefit from some good luck.

Consider the murderer's row that the US had to get through to get to the finals: 2006 World Cup champs Italy, South American champs Brazil (twice) and European champs Spain, all in the span of two weeks.  The match against Spain, a shocking 2-0 win that sports historians have already ranked as one of the top five greatest team upsets in US international sports, showed the US defensive strength up the middle by continually disrupting the devastating Spanish midfield's touch passing game and not permitting them any space to operate.

Brazil was another story, as they are a team unlike past Brazil teams that developed the "beautiful game" (which, ironically, Spain and not Brazil plays today) and one that wins with quick counterattacks and set pieces - witness the final goal, a perfect header off a corner kick.  While the US ultimately could not keep up with the pace of the South Americans, the final showed that we could switch styles and play the current Brazilian game as well - Landon Donovan's searing run from midfield as part of a two-man counterattack for the second US goal was a thing of beauty.

Looking forward to seeing the US in action in South Africa next summer in the 2010 World Cup (maybe in person, making it two World Cups in a row ...). 

Thoughts on the Landis case, now that it's finally over

The Floyd Landis affair is finally over, now that the CAS has ruled against him and effectively stripped him of his 2006 Tour de France title for using performance-enhancing drugs.

There were a lot of red herrings thrown up throughout this case. In the last couple of years, I've done plenty of reading and listening to podcasts during long rides and runs and have always tried to cut through the BS and clutter to what is really going on in sport these days. Some thoughts:

- Labs are not biased, and are not out to get any particular athlete. Listen to Dr. Michael Ashendon explain it.

- Our initial reaction is nearly always with the athlete, whom we have just spent the better part of 3 weeks watching on TV. We are athletes ourselves, and positive in nature, so seemingly-heroic comebacks feed into our desire to believe in the good side of sports.

- The athletes themselves feed on this "need to believe" with their public pronouncements about their impeccable character/ethics/background. Remember Tyler Hamilton's dog who passed away? Landis's straight-laced Amish upbringing? Listen to reporter Mark Zeigler if you want the BS-free scoop from someone who has covered drugs in sports since 1988 and has been taken in by all the boy scout-type athletes who later turned out to have a dark side.

- The athletes' side of the story is the only one the public hears while the case is prepared for trial. Defense lawyers do their best to sway the court of public opinion and can talk freely to the press (unlike the prosecution), which serves to distort the picture of what really occurred and paint the athlete in a more sympathetic light. This is exacerbated by (or exacerbates) the public's "need to believe."

- Do I think cycling is the dirtiest sport out there? Hell, no - they just test more. There isn't a single drug test in the major US sports immediately after a game, unlike in cycling; the only "testing" is a handful of offseason tests, not the 24/7 unannounced on-demand testing anywhere in the world to which cyclists must submit. Plus, without any sort of testing for HGH it is hard to take mainstream sports seriously - take a look at videos of football, baseball and basketball players from 20 years ago as compared to today's players. Advances in nutrition and weightlifting can't explain everything.

Cycling has a long road to recovery if it wants to regain its good name in the public eye, and this will likely take a generation or more. While the questions raised about the effectiveness of current EPO tests makes you wonder if we are in for more of the same this year, the "need to believe" in me says that the public anti-doping stances adopted by Slipstream-Chipotle and Team High Road are a step in the right direction, as are the recent team sponsorship announcements by Garmin (now Garmin-Chipotle), Columbia Sportswear (replacing the High Road name) and Saxo Bank (taking over for CSC at year's end).

How to lose weight: the first 20 pounds are the hardest

I lost 20 lbs. last year, and you can too.  How?  I'll lay out a series of topics below that I'll cover in future posts, but there are a few overriding principles that you'll have to get your head around to make this happen:

• No "diets".  A diet has a start date and an end date.  You have to look at the structure of your overall life, and your nutrition in particular, in order to make lasting, meaningful changes.
• Take the long view.  You didn't get to this point overnight, and you won't get out of it overnight either.
• Be realistic.  Your initial plan will undoubtedly be overly optimistic in what you can achieve.  Make your plan and then scale it back by 25% to make it achievable.
• Make time to exercise.  Look at your daily calendar.  It's likely filled with lots of meetings, appointments, and other scheduled events; treat exercise just like any other recurring event and put it down in your schedule ahead of time.
• Set goals that are defined, measurable (to assess progress), and have a date attached to them.  The last is key to sharpening your focus -- it's been said that "goals are dreams with a deadline".

If you love the sport of cycling, you should be rooting for Team Slipstream-Chipotle

Jonathan Vaughters, the director sportif of Team Slipstream-Chipotle (team links here and here), was interviewed recently on The Competitors Radio by Bob Babbitt and Paul Huddle, and you can find the podcast here.  If you haven't heard their weekly podcasts, you are missing out on a ton of knowledge (and laughter) about endurance sports that make all those long runs & rides less boring and more entertaining.

Vaughters gives the most open and honest appraisal I've ever heard of the predicament that professional cycling has gotten itself into, and his team's approach to taking the first steps to solve it.  It involves thousands of drug tests, an open-door policy for any media outlet that wants access to such results, and, most importantly, sponsors who share his vision that race results are not the ultimate prize.  The last reason is critical since this is what has bedeviled cycling for the last decade -- by simultaneously demanding top results from riders in order to stay employed but turning a blind eye towards what those riders were forced to resort to just to stay competitive, cycling teams created and fostered the drug culture which is only just starting to loosen with the coming of age of the young generation (witness rising American star Taylor Phinney's sticker on his top tube: "Dopers suck").

Here are the podcast notes:

Jonathan Vaughters was a professional cyclist who basically quit his sport young, at the age of 30, partly because he was frustrated by the rampant drug use. Now Vaughters is running the Slipstream Cycling Team and accountability is the name of the game. His team will administer 1200 drug tests to their athletes this year alone and the media will be invited to training camps so that they can see that Team Slipstream is clean. He is out to change the culture of the sport of cycling by hopefully proving that you can be competitive and drug free at the same time. Vaughters was incredibly open and honest in this conversation.

Highly recommended listening.  If you are a cycling fan who loves this beautiful sport, you should be rooting for their team to experience success in the Grand Tours.  While you're at it, throw a little love to the sponsors who make it all possible; a list of the oh-so-tasty Chipotle restaurants in your area can be found here.

Giants win the Super Bowl -- another NY football upset!

Wow, talk about an upset of epic proportions -- this has to rank up there with Broadway Joe Namath (at left) predicting that the Jets would beat the Colts in 1969 and then going out and doing it.

Great work by Eli Manning and the gang, especially as a testament to the value of perseverance and never giving up on oneself.  Belichick storming off the field like a prima donna before the game was even over -- now that showed an incredible lack of class, but par for the course by the Spygate mastermind!

How much more fit is "Ultramarathon man" Dean Karnazes than you?

This one blew me away when I heard it on an archived Competitor Radio podcast (which I listened to while running, appropriately enough).  When Dean Karnazes, author of Ultramarathon Man and all-around ultraendurance guru, was training for the North Face Endurance 50 (running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days, which he completed in one piece),  he worked with Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong's coach, to fine-tune his training.

In addition to using 100-mile ultramarathons like The Western States Endurance Run as mere training runs (!), Dean and Chris established a benchmark that let them know when he was ready for the Endurance 50:

>> Complete a sub-four hour marathon with an average heart rate of 110.

Read that last part again -- an average heart rate of 110!  Most people hit that getting off the couch; try running even a mile at that HR and you'll know what I mean.

Wow.  Double wow.

Johan Santana's a Met!

Unbelievable.  Amazin' even.  I'm a die-hard Mets fan but I never thought this would happen.  After the Yankees and Red Sox were falling all over each other this winter to try and pry Santana, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, away from the small-market Twins, Omar Minaya earns his stripes and reels him in for the Mets!

Easily an upgrade over Tom Glavine, Santana is sure to make Met fans forget about their epic collapse at the end of last season.  Combined with a full year of a healthy Pedro Martinez, the Mets have to be the early favorite in the NL East and likely the whole NL.  Giddyup!