Pushing Past Pain - NY Times

While I assemble pics for a couple posts on trips to the Red and Jackson, here's an interesting performance article from the NYTimes.

In short, if you spit, you will climb harder.

Just kidding. There's a part of this article I found painfully funny; it talked about top runners finishing races with saliva covering their faces. I assume they're spitting instead of swallowing as they run, and certainly not bothering to turn their head while doing so. All in an effort to conserve energy and keep focus.

This part was very akin to the redpointing process and certainly made sense:

"And as athletes improve — getting faster and beating their own records — “it never gets any easier,” Dr. Swart said. “You hurt just as much.”
But, he added, “Knowing how to accept that allows people to improve their performance.”
One trick is to try a course before racing it. In one study, Dr. Swart told trained cyclists to ride as hard as they could over a 40-kilometer course. The more familiar they got with the course, the faster they rode, even though — to their minds — it felt as if they were putting out maximal effort on every attempt.
Then Dr. Swart and his colleagues asked the cyclists to ride the course with all-out effort, but withheld information about how far they’d gone and how far they had to go. Subconsciously, the cyclists held back the most in this attempt, leaving some energy in reserve."

I'll hopefully have pics and some words up soon. Enjoy your Fall climbing!