If you wear Adidas Copa Mundial cleats you know two things:

• They're great.
• They're expensive.

Rock-bottom price I've ever paid is $80. Prices gust up to $100. But at the moment you can get 'em for $63 through Amazon.

Regular price is $83 (and that's the price that shows up on the page above). Hopefully you'll see a "Special Offers Available" link on that page. If so, when you add the item to your cart and check out, the $20 discount should be applied (it will show up prior to final confirmation, so you can cancel if it doesn't happen). Shipping is free.

Not sure how long this promotion will last.

The catch is there's a 3-to-5 week wait. I'm going to have to make due with my old ones and some duct tape until then. As long as the new ones are here for Regionals...

Roger Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace. He uses the first paragraph to lovingly describe an amazing "Federer Moment". He then concludes:

Anyway, that's one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV—and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

I don't know where that puts YouTube on the video porn/actual sex spectrum, but they've got a clip of that exalted Federer Moment, starting at 8:10 in. I think YouTube might be off the bottom end of the metaphor, actually, and the moment strikes me as one of subtle greatness, only really appreciable by fans. Love the article, though.« via kottke »

Couple things:

• Poking around in this Crossfit thread, I clicked through on one of Greg Everett's links and noticed how nice the Evolution Athletics and Performance Menu sites are. At Evolution Athletics, check out the resources, particularly the videos (oops, quick sample suggests quite a few have "video coming soon" notes, but there are some good ones there). Also, don't miss this, The Performance Menu has a free issue offer, and you get to choose which one you want. Tough choice!
• One of the nutrition sections of Ross Enamait's Never Gymless is all about milk. In particular, pasturized and homogenized vs. raw. His latest blog post, Milk, addresses the topic again, and includes lots of good resources for making your own decisions.

Just subscribed to the What's New @ Peak Performance blog. They carry all kinda of interesting stuff. Two leapt out at me from my quick scan of their first page:

• Sports drinks or water: what is the best choice for sports performers?

Contrary to what you might expect, fluid absorption tends to take place in the small intestine rather than the stomach. Studies have shown that the larger the volume of fluid in the stomach, the more rapid the emptying into the small intestine, which means that maintaining a large fluid volume in the stomach by repeated drinking will maximise the rate of fluid (and nutrient) delivery to the small intestine.

Alas. I can't carry a large fluid volume in my stomach without feeling like it's sloshing around and making me feel generally bloated. Interesting, nonetheless.

• Warm Up Activity : The dynamic alternative to static stretching

Is there a better way? [than a jog followed by static stretching] I believe there is. In my view, an active or 'dynamic' warm-up is an infinitely superior way to prepare for physical activity.

Although this type of warm-up has been used by track and field athletes for years, it is not widely practised within other sports - eg football, basketball and baseball - at junior, senior or professional levels.

I keep reading everywhere that pre-competition static stretching is a bad idea (except, perhaps, the hip flexors). I switched from my only stretching occurring pre-play to a model where I stretch for flexibility regularly throughout the day, and do dynamic warm-up pre-play, and I prefer it.

Alrighty, yesterday's workout. Give it a shot, do better than I did:

• Warm-up: 50 one-arm, light-weight (20 lbs.) DB swings per arm, done in sets of 25. This has become my new favorite warm-up. Hits lots of muscles, doesn't take long to break a sweat. I do the first 25 for a given arm swinging up to vertical, then the second set swinging to 90 degrees to up the tempo.
• The Dreaded Leg Matrix as described by Skwigg (see paragraph 3). Took me 120 seconds (sigh), crappy form (sigh), probably managed 1-inch vertical on most of the squat jumps (sigh). The lactic ache in sets 3 and 4 was incredible. I would like to see a video of someone doing this in the prescribed 90 seconds, with good form. I mean, if you're a complete rock star and able to do good jumps for the lunge jumps and the squat jumps, won't the time in the air alone pretty much consume whatever time you socked away from the first two sets? Volunteers?
• 4x4 on The Evil Wheel. I do it from my feet, but rollout to a wall that stops me way short of going to the floor. Gonna start working on these more regularly.
• Tabata pushups. Pretty good for the first couple sets, then lucky to get 5-6 in the each remaining set. Weak.
• Core circuit. I set my Gymboss for 30 seconds work, 15 seconds rest, and did this circuit: [1] Chinnies, [2] Plank, [3] Plank, right side, [4] Plank, left side, [5] Superman, [6] Knee Hugs, [7] Medicine Ball Slams (10 lbs.), [8] Medicine Ball Twist Throws, [9] Flutter Kicks, [10] Plank. Actually did a pretty good job on really cranking during each 30-second work period.

Let me know how it goes!

I recently realized I never followed up on my ankle brace delibrations. It came to my attention when reader N. Trout sent me this e-mail:

Hi, Jim. I stumbled upon your site while doing some research. I have a remarkably similar experience with ankle braces. I'm 38 years old and fairly active. I had chronic ankle sprains up through college, at which time (about 1989) the school's training department gave me the McDavid brace. I've been wearing that ever since and have never fully sprained my ankle ("tweaked" it a few times but never rolled it over completely)...until two nights ago. Coincidently, I had just bought a new McDavid ankle brace for my right ankle and the night I sprained it was the first night I wore the new brace. Maybe it wasn't sufficiently tight and/or broken in, or maybe it was just that I came down just right (or wrong) on someone else's foot and nothing could have prevented the roll and subsequent sprain. I do believe, however, that the brace probably limited the extent of the sprain. Anyways, it has incredibly been 17 years for me as well without a sprain. Some of the other guys I play basketball with swear by the Active Ankle brace but I didn't want to make a change (until two nights ago) because the McDavid had seemed to suit me so well all these years. I did end up going to the doctor yesterday. I figured that maybe there had been some new technological advancements in ankle protection technology over the past 17 years. Sadly, he said not much has changed, but he did recommend Active Ankle.

So, I'm wondering what you ultimately did. Did you make the switch or did you stick with McDavid? What's happened since your last post on this topic (or did I miss an update somewhere on your site?)?

Here's my reply, which will do double-duty as follow-up for this site:

Hi Noel,

Sorry to hear about the ankle! Also sorry about the lack of follow-up, it just didn't end up being all that interesting. The bottom line is that I tried the Active Ankle braces, but didn't like the way they felt, so went back to McDavids. I'm fairly comfortable with this for a few reasons:

[1] I figured one sprain in seventeen years wasn't too bad a record.

[2] I read in one of the studies that no ankle brace solution provides enough support to resist the torque of a bad roll.

[3] Another study suggested increased proprioception and/or assisting in returning the foot to a neutral position is how ankle braces and taping conferred their benefits.

From this I inferred that the Active Ankles would be better at resisting torque but not as good in providing proprioceptive benefits, while the McDavids would provide the converse. No idea if that's true, but it seemed to make sense to me, at least.

Then again, I know guys that swear by the AAs, and say stuff like, "I can't imagine spraining my ankle while wearing this."

Sorry I don't have a more conclusive answer. If you stick with the McDavids, make sure you tighten them up after the first 10 minutes or so. I never realized how slack they get (one of those studies mentioned that tape jobs and lace-ups basically provide no support after the first 10 minutes because of loosening). Of course, I had to stop doing this because the added pressure exacerbated my achilles pain. If it's not one damn thing it's another... :-)

Good luck!

Jim

• I had no idea watermelon was so good for you! I just assumed it was mostly sugar and water. Hip-hip-hooray for good sources of Vitamin A.
• A RossTraining thread: when the going gets tough... "I just cut off my mind." He makes it sound so easy!
• A 2001 Malcolm Gladwell piece: Drugstore Athlete.

Via Waxy links, from the who-on-earth-thought-this-was-a-good-idea department, AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data. They pulled it, but it's too late. The data is in the wild. Here's a search engine and some profile musing. User #711931's log is justifiably referred to as "epic". Finally, Cynical-C notes that the NY Times uncovered AOL searcher #4417749. Perhaps, if I were the tattooing sort (and the AOL searching sort), I'd get my AOL search number on a barcode on the back of my neck. Amazing.

I found Day 1 and Day 2 of the "Day in the Life of Sonnon" videos via this RossTraining thread. They won't have you (nor me) rushing out to buy clubbells, but I really like the exercise progressions he demonstrates on the rings (one in each video). Very creative. I'd like to see Day 3.

A couple Friday diversions: past and present YouTube highlight reels: Larry Bird and Dwyane Wade.

Be sure to read the final update at the end of this post! The script now lives at AutoHotkey.

I've really been enjoying AutoHotkey, a tool that lets you execute macros, text expansion, custom keyboard shortcuts, etc. My favorite feature is the text expansion, where it watches what you type and when it recognizes an abbreviation you've defined it will expand it automatically, no matter which application you're typing in. So "ttyl" could be automatically expanded to "talk to you later" in an e-mail, instant message, Word document, browser forms, etc. Very handy.

Anyway, you've probably noticed Word has an "AutoCorrect" feature where it corrects common misspellings on the fly. For example, "teh" gets instantly corrected to "the". I was thinking it would be great to use AutoHotkey to get that same functionality in any application. I had slowly been adding my own most common typos to an AutoHotkey script, and it worked great, but then I thought it would be nice to have a more comprehensive list. Enter Wikipedia, and its lists of common misspellings! I grabbed the machine-readable download, parsed it, commented out the ambiguous entries (see comments in the script), added in my own personal gotchas, and loaded it. Cross-application AutoCorrect! Here's a zip file containing the script if you want to give it a try:

• wikipedia_autocorrect.zip See UPDATE 5 below for the script's new home.

You'll need AutoHotkey installed, of course. And note the "Hotstring" feature this technique uses is only available on Windows NT/2000/XP or higher.

UPDATE: Adam at Lifehacker linked this up, thanks! He notes I could have compiled this for non-AutoHotkey users. I probably should have, but didn't because I just assumed folks would want to add their own common misspellings. But if you just want to run it without installing AutoHotkey, Adam has made a compiled version available via his post. Very cool.

UPDATE 2: I updated this script to include Tara Gibb's enhancement (see below) and a few more of my own common misspellings. The enhancement lets you highlight a misspelling and hit WIN+H to easily add the correction to the script (so it's self-updating). A nice way to flesh the script out with your own spelling foibles (another reason to not run the compiled version provided at Lifehacker, as this feature won't work there).

UPDATE 3: Quite excitingly, Chris Mallett, the author of AutoHotkey, found this script and linked it up! He also made a couple improvements, which are now reflected in the script available above. I tossed in a few more of my personal common misspellings while I was at it.

UPDATE 4: Reader Shane submitted a pile of Word AutoCorrect words for inclusion, so I folded those in (after removing duplicates). Thanks Shane! While I was at it I also folded in a bunch more of my personal misspellings. In all, there's probably around 700 more entries in the latest version.

UPDATE 5: Chris Mallet and the AutoHotkey community have taken this script under their wing. Specifically, Dewi Morgan has made some terrific improvements, cleaned up the code, and added many more words. I think that version should be considered the definitive version, and is available from the AutoHotkey site. Very cool!

Never one to mince words, a bit from De Vany's Eating the Evolutionary Fitness Way post:

Seventh, you are compromising your long-run health and accelerating the rate at which you age. You are also turning your body into a sugar burner and in the long-run this will lead to a decline in your lean muscle mass. Your career will suffer. You will not have the energy to sustain a long and productive career. You will be sick more often. You will be tired and bored with life. And you will eventually become obese, ill and earn less income.

His follow-up, It's Not Paleo is also interesting.