By Mara Abbott Olympian and CTS Contributing Editor As many of readers here know, as soon as you get a coach you have an ever-present voice eager to explain training principles and the physiological changes you will experience if you follow the plan. I have been a coached athlete for most of my life – …
By Mara Abbott, Olympian and CTS Contributing Editor Two weeks ago my farmers market co-worker, Max, made a terrible mistake. He made some off-hand comment about not eating breakfast. Max works in the fields on the farm all day, yet somehow, “I am not really hungry for lunch, either.” I noted, in no uncertain terms, …
Increasing your activity level and weekly training hours leads to a lot of positive changes in your fitness and health, but many athletes notice some effects that are not as pleasant. When you exercise more, you need to consume enough energy to support your workouts and activities of daily living. Between the changes to your …
By Syd Schulz CTS Athlete and MTB Pro I’ve learned a lot about being an athlete through meditation. Or rather, I’ve learned a lot about being an athlete through the process of failing and succeeding and failing and succeeding to cultivate a daily meditation practice over the past two years. I’ve learned to let go …
In the real world, whether you are riding uphill on paved or gravel roads, mountain bike trails, or in a triathlon, you have to have more than one speed. As much as I love power meters and training with power, an unfortunate side effect is that many athletes focus so intently on improving sustainable …
By Mara Abbott Olympian and CTS Contributing Editor It may have been the opening for my entire cycling career – a super-cool upperclassman invited me to go mountain biking with her in my first weeks as an impressionable freshman still identifying as a swimmer. She said I should join Whitman College’s cycling team. Jane Rynbrandt …
By Mara Abbott, Olympian, yoga expert, and CTS Contributing Editor A yoga posture is the period at the end of a sentence. It may be important, but it is a very small part of the whole, signaling simply a brief space for pause before next phrase begins. The real meat of your yoga practice – …
By Mara Abbott, Olympian and CTS Contributing Editor My last column covered some of the mental benefits of a regular yoga practice. Here, I take the study of yoga for athletes to a level deeper and offer a few of the ways that the philosophical origins of yoga have influenced my athletic career. I do …
I’ve always been fascinated by the role of genetics in sport. Obviously, there’s the heredity aspect that sometimes helps children of great athletes become great athletes themselves. More practically for those who don’t win the DNA lottery, genes affect the way individuals respond to stimuli, potentially opening the door to even greater customization of …
By Mara Abbott, Olympian and CTS Contributing Editor My junior year of college, I spent a semester enrolled at a university in Mérida, Mexico. In part, I considered it an experiment in what would happen if I went out in the Real World where sports (forever and always swimming and at the time only recently, …