From: velonews.com

Your power-to-weight ratio is one of the best predictors of your cycling performance. Understanding the negative effect of weight on performance, many cyclists are fanatical about minimizing the weight of their bodies and bikes alike.

But the wrong approach to minimizing body weight — namely, severe calorie restriction or endless moderate-intensity riding or a combination of both — will sap power even as it annihilates excess body-fat stores. So the greatest weight management challenge for cyclists is to train and nourish themselves in a way that increases sustainable power output while also minimizing body weight.

To increase your power capacity requires that you consistently perform a small amount of training at very high power-output levels. This type of training sends a message to your body that it needs to let the muscles adapt in ways that will enable them to meet the stress imposed by maximal and near-maximal efforts. A little high-power training goes a long way.

High-intensity training will only increase your power capacity if you support it with a diet that allows your muscles to fully adapt to it. If you’re currently above your racing weight, this objective is best achieved with a slight caloric deficit. Anything more than a slight deficit will deprive your muscles of adequate fat and protein to maintain themselves and adapt to training and adequate carbohydrate to fuel optimal performance. A slight deficit will reduce your body-fat percentage and perhaps also your body weight without affecting your average power output in performance tests such as a 40K time trial. A daily caloric deficit of 100 to 300 calories is most likely to yield these results. My book Racing Weight shows readers how to track calories in and calories out to achieve this deficit. You should also track your body weight, fat percentage, and performance to ensure that this deficit is in fact yielding the desired result of making you leaner without making you less powerful.

All Zones Burn Fat

For many years a debate has raged between two factions of what we might loosely call the exercise community. The debate concerns the best way to exercise to get leaner. Some argue that prolonged, moderate-intensity exercise in the “fat-burning zone” is best. Others argue that high-intensity interval training is the best way to shed excess body fat. The truth is, both types of exercise are effective for fat-burning, and a program that combines the two is likely to be more effective than one based on either type alone.

There are three changes you can make to your training to become leaner and yield better performance: increase the volume of moderate-intensity workouts, add more high-intensity training, and do more strength training.

Let’s cover moderate-intensity workouts, aka the “fat-burning zone.”

The so-called fat-burning zone of exercise intensity is a concept that has spread rapidly throughout all levels of exercise culture. Suppose you were to perform an incremental exercise test on a stationary bicycle in which you started pedaling very slowly in a low gear and then pedaled progressively faster in higher and higher gears until you were sprinting all out. At the beginning of the test your muscles would burn fat almost exclusively, and not much of it. As your intensity level increased, your rate of fat burning would steadily increase, and your muscles would also enlist more and more carbohydrate. At a still fairly moderate exercise intensity the rate of fat burning would peak and eventually begin to decrease as the rate of carbohydrate burning spiked. By the time you reached an all-out sprint your muscles would be burning carbohydrate at an extremely high rate and no fat at all. The intensity zone surrounding the point at which the rate of fat burning peaks is your fat-burning zone. Typically it falls at roughly 59 to 64 percent of VOmax in trained endurance athletes, which corresponds to a comfortable but not dawdling pace in cycling.

Exercising within the fat-burning zone is indeed an effective way to burn off excess body fat, but it is not necessarily more effective than exercising at higher intensities, where carbohydrate burning is greater and fat burning is less. The reason has to do with what happens after moderate-intensity and high-intensity workouts are performed.

Your body replaces burned calories in a specific order. In short, if you burn mostly fat during a workout, you will store mostly fat afterward. And if you burn mostly carbohydrate during a workout, you will store mostly carbohydrate afterward. If you want to get leaner, it doesn’t really matter which kind of calories your muscles use predominately during exercise.

Total calories burned is key

What matters is the total number of calories used. The more calories your muscles use during a workout, the more likely it is that you will consume fewer total calories than your body uses over 24 hours, and if this is the case, then you are likely to experience a net loss of body fat. This will happen even if you burned mostly carbohydrate during your workout, because the body always replenishes muscle glycogen preferentially and it doesn’t take a heck of a lot of calories to do it. Thus, unless your diet is carbohydrate-deficient, any exercise-induced caloric deficit will ultimately take the form of body fat loss instead of muscle glycogen loss. What matters from a fat-loss perspective is not the type but the total number of calories burned during a workout. Because high-intensity exercise burns calories faster than moderate-intensity exercise, high-intensity exercise is, in the big picture, the more efficient way to shed body fat. However, a person can do a lot more moderate-intensity exercise than high-intensity exercise, so it’s moderate-intensity exercise that ultimately has the greatest potential to reduce body fat.

Some endurance coaches promote training in the fat-burning zone to increase an athlete’s fat-burning capacity and ultimately increase fat-reliance in racing. Research has shown that training in the fat-burning zone does improve fat-burning capacity. However, it only improves fat-burning capacity within the fat-burning zone itself—that is, at lower exercise intensities. No matter how fit they are or in what manner they’ve trained, all endurance athletes rely on carbohydrate when racing at intensities that are near or above the lactate threshold.

That said, workouts that serve primarily to enhance fat-burning capacity certainly have their place in any endurance athlete’s training regimen. The workouts that have the greatest effect on fat-burning capacity are those that most deplete your muscle-glycogen stores—namely, very long workouts that you finish cross-eyed and drooling. If you do not currently drive yourself this deep into the pit of fatigue in your longest workouts, you might want to consider extending them for the sake of possibly increasing your fat-burning capacity.

But simply doing a high overall volume of moderate-intensity training will stimulate more or less the same benefits as doing very long workouts. Like a long individual workout, a daily succession of moderately long workouts or morning and afternoon workouts will challenge your muscles to perform in a glycogen-depleted state. Even with adequate carbohydrate intake, your muscles will not be able to fully replenish their glycogen supplies between workouts, and as a result your fat-burning and glycogen storage capacities will increase (provided you periodically give your muscles a chance to fully recover).

In fact, epic rides can be counterproductive. That’s because very long training sessions are extremely taxing and create a significant recovery demand. Once your long endurance workouts exceed a certain critical duration, they begin to limit your overall training volume because they require you to take it easy for a day or two afterward. In most cases you’re better off making high training volume a greater priority than single-session duration and limiting the duration of your longest endurance workouts to that which is strictly needed to ensure you can “go the distance” in races.

Finally I can agree with Ann Coulter.  Although I don’t agree with everything she says here, much of it I do….There are better ways to handle this than sending 100k troops…eliot cobb

by: Ann Coulter

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was absolutely right. Afghanistan is Obama’s war and, judging by other recent Democratic ventures in military affairs, isn’t likely to turn out well.

It has been idiotically claimed that Steele’s statement about Afghanistan being Obama’s war is “inaccurate” — as if Steele is unaware Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. (No one can forget that — even liberals pretended to support that war for three whole weeks.)

Yes, Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. Within the first few months we had toppled the Taliban, killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaida fighters and arranged for democratic elections, resulting in an American-friendly government.

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence.

Having some vague concept of America’s national interest — unlike liberals — the Bush administration could see that a country of illiterate peasants living in caves ruled by “warlords” was not a primo target for “nation-building.” …[exactly right, ec]

By contrast, Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.

If Saddam Hussein had been a peach, it would still be a major victory in the war on terrorism to have a Muslim Israel in that part of the globe, and it sure wasn’t going to be Afghanistan (literacy rate, 19 percent; life expectancy, 44 years; working toilets, 7).

But Iraq also was a state sponsor of terrorism; was attempting to build nuclear weapons (according to endless bipartisan investigations in this country and in Britain — thanks, liberals!); nurtured and gave refuge to Islamic terrorists — including the 1993 World Trade Center bombers; was led by a mass murderer who had used weapons of mass destruction; paid bonuses to the families of suicide bombers; had vast oil reserves; and is situated at the heart of a critical region.

Having absolutely no interest in America’s national security, the entire Democratic Party (save Joe Lieberman) wailed about the war in Iraq for five years, pretending they really wanted to go great-guns in Afghanistan. What the heck: They had already voted for the war in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 when they would have been hanged as traitors had they objected.

The obsession with Afghanistan was pure rhetoric. Democrats have no interest in fighting any war that would serve America’s interests. (They’re too jammed with their wars against Evangelicals, Wal-Mart, the Pledge of Allegiance, SUVs and the middle class.) Absent Iraq, they’d have been bad-mouthing Afghanistan, too.

So for the entire course of the magnificently successful war in Iraq, all we heard from these useless Democrats was that Iraq was a “war of choice,” while Afghanistan — the good war! — was a “war of necessity.” “Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan!” “He got distracted by war in Iraq!” “WHERE’S OSAMA?” and — my favorite — “Iraq didn’t attack us on 9/11!”

Of course, neither did Afghanistan. But Democrats were in a lather and couldn’t be bothered with the facts.

The above complaints about Iraq come — nearly verbatim — from speeches and press conferences by Obama, Joe Biden, and Obama’s national security advisers Susan Rice and Richard Clarke. Also, the entire gutless Democratic Party. Some liberals began including them in their wedding vows.
Continue reading ‘Cheney and Kristol Should Resign’

Saturday, 7:30 a.m., 60 miles (spring, summer – 6:00am)
Founded: 1974
Starts: University Blvd. and Park Ave.

A ridiculously lean cyclist is on the front, stringing out the 20 or so surviving riders. The signal is clear: The finish of the Shoot Out is close.

As we round a sweeping bend, the finale is unveiled–a three-tiered, half-mile climb that had been described to me as a “kicker.” My ambitions fade. My legs seize. The aftertaste of a sesame bagel gurgles in my throat and a blur of spandex swarms me. As we reach the crest, Toyota-United pro Bobby Lea and I exchange deflated glances. “A lot different than the Derby, eh?” he says.

Lea, whose home in the Lehigh Valley sits at the top of the Derby’s Topton Hill, is in Tucson to log warm-weather miles. He’s not the sole import. At least half the jerseys of the 150-plus riders who rolled out from a quaint strip west of the University of Arizona campus bear out-of-town sponsor names. There are collegiate racers, elites, women, a few actual pros and dozens chasing the dream.

Ralph Philips, the owner of the town’s premier bike shop, Fair Wheel Cycles, cofounded the ride in 1974 with fellow University of Arizona student Bob Cook, an Olympic team member who had just returned from a training camp and envisioned a ride in the style described to him by his coach, the iconic Eddie Borysewicz, better known as Eddie B. Cook died of cancer in 1981; Philips still starts each ride by waving his arm and yelling, “Time to go!”

The 60-mile loop cuts south from Tucson into desolate, mountainous desert. After 10 casual miles, the massive pack rolls through the final stoplight at Valencia Road, and for the next 15 miles it’s game on. At first, a somewhat congenial echelon forms as we pass through the San Xavier Indian Reservation on Mission Road. But the choppy, unrelenting false flat, which is as exhausting as riding across wet sand, wears on the field, and the organization and cooperation disintegrate. Attacks fly.

I couldn’t agree more:

HAMPTON, Va. — President Barack Obama, addressing graduates at historically black Hampton University on Sunday, said that it is the responsibility of all Americans to offer every child the type of education that will make them competitive in an economy in which just a high school diploma is no longer enough.

Moreover, Obama said, the era of iPads and Xboxes had turned information into a diversion that was imposing new strains on democracy. “You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter,” he told the students. “And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.”

Obama told the nearly 1,100 graduates assembled in the university’s sun-splashed Armstrong Stadium that they have the added responsibility of being role models and mentors in their communities.

Obama said education can help them manage the uncertainties of a 21st century economy. For much of the last century, a high school diploma “was a ticket to a solid middle-class life,” he said. But no more, as jobs today often require at least a bachelor’s degree – or higher.

“All of us have a responsibility, as Americans, to change this, to offer every single child in this country an education that will make them competitive in our knowledge economy. That is our obligation as a nation,” the president said.

Obama said the graduates also must be role models and mentors in their communities. And they must pass the sense of an education’s value on to their children, as well as the sense of personal responsibility, self-respect and the “intrinsic sense of excellence that made it possible for you to be here today,” he said.

Virgil Coffman, 101 years old, stands by his brand new yellow Camaro SS with a 426 horsepower engine.

Mr. Coffman hasn’t seen “Transformers.” He said he just liked how the special-edition Camaro looked — and that only 1,500 are to be produced. He traded in a Chevy Monte Carlo for the new car. “Driving by myself, I didn’t need one of those big cars anymore.” he said. “I wanted a sports car.” He has owned 35 to 40 cars over his life-time, mostly GM.

No word on whether he will be doing any racing with the new car.

Malignant cases of Mesothelioma can be very difficult to treat. There are a few reasons for this difficulty in offering care for the ailment. Like any other form of cancer, mesothelioma is more challenging to care for as it progresses. This is also a form of cancer which can go undetected and undiagnosed for decades as it silently damages the patient. For this reason, it is often not discovered by physicians until its later stages. Even worse, mesothelioma generally responds less well than other forms of cancer to the typical stable of cancer treatment options. It’s being situated on the lining of internal organs also presents special difficulties to the oncologist. Demographics are also a large factor here: the average mesothelioma patient is over fifty years of age, which makes some treatments that might be considered for a younger patient being simply too risky for a person of their age. This all adds up to mesothelioma patients being given a very poor prognosis…

Mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer. The parts of the body affected are the lining around the organs of the chest cavity, the abdominal cavity and the heart. Symptoms include weight loss, fever, swelling and many others. Mesothelioma is thus far, inevitably deadly. This disease is caused by inhaling asbestos fibers, and can be cause by as little as a month’s exposure. The symptoms do not develop for decades however, so victims rarely know they have the disease until it is far too late. Victims have little recourse other than to sue the company who put them at risk on a job site with asbestos…. what is mesothelioma really are there survivors