To the Future...

     I am an exercise science graduate student. A former collegiate runner, I have a great love for and interest in the sport of running. Hopefully over the next few months I will begin to compile articles, thoughts, and opinions here in this blog.

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Lactate, Lactic Acid and Acidosis

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With respect to exercise, what do you think of when I say, “Lactic Acid?” Legs burning? Acidosis? Horrible stuff that slows me down? Lactic acid and lactate typically get a bad rap from athletes, but what if I said that rather than slowing you down, lactate production enables high-intensity exercise? Well, it does. Lactate vs. Lactic Acid      First, let’s discuss the compound itself. Lactate is not lactic acid. Lactate is a carboxylate, whereas lactic acid is a carboxylic acid. This means the carboxyl group of the lactate molecule is deprotonated and cannot contribute further to acidosis.  The image below shows the difference between the two molecule types.      The reason lactate does not exist as it's protonated acid form in the body is because the pKa of lactate is a low 3.9. This means is that in a solution with a pH higher than 3.9, the compound will exist as the deprotonated carboxylate, lactate.  As shown below, in Table I from Cairns ( 2006 ), the
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Don't believe everything that you read.

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Leave it to Twitter to get me riled up. A tweet caught my attention a few days ago. It read: "Greater improvements in cycling performance parameters following HRV-guided vs. block training." I was intrigued, so I read the abstract . I didn't have access to the peer review journal at the time, but I could see in the abstract, "Between-group fitness and performance were similar after the study." So I called out the original "tweeter," saying there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Claiming one is superior, misrepresents the study's findings. By this point I noticed the individual is a  professor and researcher and maintains a blog devoted to heart rate variability (HRV) research - which surprised me. If he's a professor, surely he understands statistics - I couldn't help but think he was misrepresenting the findings to support his bias in favor of  HRV-guided training... After I pointed out
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Death March Revival ITT Ride Report

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 I don't know what got into me Last year my wife, Courtney, rode all three of Tennessee Gravel's  individual time trial (ITT) routes. And she really enjoyed it. But I had very little interest in trying to ride these long, hard routes as fast as possible - all by myself. I saw Chad Hungerford set the fastest known time (FKT) on the Death March Revival (DMR) route last May at 7 hours 41 minutes and I thought, "that looks miserable." I had a hard time imagining putting forth a constant effort, suffering for 7+ hours over these rough roads and long climbs. That said, I did ride the DMR route last May - but I rode it with Courtney and a few friends. It was a long day out at a casual pace, completing the loop in about 11 hours. And that was really enjoyable. It wasn't super exciting - I might rather spend my time ripping down some singletrack, but it was a beautiful day through my favorite mountains. I had also ridden most of the route (excluding the Big Frog loop) with
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