His mother has been his ultra-running role model all along.

Only 15 years old, Nishad Singh is hoping to complete his first 100-mile race. Photo: Mercury News

Just 15 years old, Nishad Singh of Saratoga, California plans to put his endurance to the test by completing his first 100-mile ultra. Singh will be armed with blister packs, GUs, and salt tablets.

According to his coach, if Singh completes the feat, he will be only the second person younger than 16 in the United States to run 100 miles.

Singh says ultras are a natural fit for him. Due to asthma, he’s never been able to run at sustained speeds. ”I got demoralized when I tried to run fast,” he said. “But running for a long distance is a different kind of goal.”

The 15-year-old runner has been motivated to do ultras by his mother, Anu, who began racing distances greater than 26.2 miles with a running club several years ago. She completed her first 100-miler in South Dakota in 2009. Singh begged his mother to come along during that race. He ended up helping her during her “lowest point”, which was from miles 50 to 75.

For More: Mercury News

This piece first appeared in the May issue of Competitor Magazine.

A study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in November found beetroot juice increased endurance during high intensity running by 15 percent.

Beets aren’t a magical veggie—they contain inorganic nitrates, a compound known to lower blood pressure by dilating blood vessels. Nitrates are also found in other green, leafy vegetables, but to replicate the benefits described in the study, an athlete would have to consume an impossibly large amount of them, said Brian Shea, a New Jersey-based nutritionist who has worked with Ironman Champions Simon Lessing, Jordan Rapp and Heather Gollnick. Nine men drank half a liter of beetroot juice per day for six days to achieve the result found in the study.

“I never want athletes to use supplements like this as a crutch to cover up a lack of training, rest and proper nutrition,” said Shea. “Something like beetroot juice would be like icing on the cake, but a lot of people don’t have any cake yet. Wait until you have a nice cake, or training base, then we’ll worry about decorating it.”

****

About The Author

Erin Beresini is a senior editor at Competitor Magazine.

Written by: Cielestia Calbay

When the Atlanta Falcons drafted Tim Dwight in 1998, they called him the “Kamikaze Kid” because of his lightning speed.

Dwight, a three-time Big Ten champion in the 100-meter dash, 4×400 and 4×100-meter relays while at the University of Iowa, is transferring that electricity off the field and into endurance events as he tackles the Ford Ironman Coeur D’Alene on June 26.

“At these races, everyone comes together, whether they’re seriously competing or just having a good time,” said the 35-year-old.

He has a triathlete background and made his debut at the Iowa Games Triathlon in 2008 where he finished 121st out of 298 finishers.

He says he’s addicted to multisport events and will continue to compete, despite his least favorite part: swimming.

Check out Dwight in our “I’m a Competitor” profile in the June issue of Competitor and on www.competitor-digital.com

[sig:CielestiaCalbay]

Run to the East Trailer from Run to the East on Vimeo.

A new film about young Native American distance runners is now making the rounds at film festivals across the country. (See trailer, above.) Run to the East tells the stories of three high school seniors living on New Mexico’s Navajo reservation in an effort to answer one question: Can these young adults use distance running to beat the odds and earn a scholarship to a prestigious college?

The odds they face are the rampant drug use, alcoholism, violence, diabetes and substandard education that plague the reservation. Running can help change the young adults’ futures. As the film’s website says, “Endurance running has long been a key spiritual element of Native American cultures—one through which individuals can demonstrate strength and resilience.”

The 87-minute documentary is playing on Friday at 6:45 p.m. and on Saturday at 9:30 a.m. at the Indie Spirit Film Festival in Colorado Springs. Tickets to the festival are available here.

I’ll keep you updated on when the film will be more easily available to view.

Read the original New York Times article that inspired the film.

Visit the film’s website.

I’m so happy they removed the crotch busters along the bike path! It’s so smooth now!
Friggin frigity flipper flap, that was a crotch buster!

Crotch busters are most commonly observed where two forms of pavement are not properly aligned, as when asphalt meets concrete, or change shape differently according to the temperature. Or when tree roots push pavement up.

Photo courtesy of bareknuckleyellow on Flickr.

DA ride (dee-a ryed) n. A bike ride so full of relentless climbs and descents that your arse literally begins to disappear, or disappears altogether. (The latter consequence usually occurs after riding back-to-back DA rides or several DA rides over consecutive weeks.) Sometimes mistaken for “no butt” syndrome, a DA may be avoided by properly replenishing the body’s nutritional stores during and after a DA ride so the body does not feed upon its own bum. Women tend to fear the DA symptom more than men.

OMG, Melissa, I’m going to have to buy Booty Pop jeans after this ride!

DA qualified rides, for example: The Heartbreak Double Century (202 miles with 15,500 feet elevation gain) or the Mulholland Challenge (116 miles with 13,375 feet of climbing).

@eberesini

That is some assalt you’ve got going on there, Bubba!
Your assalt was so blinding, I almost crashed behind you.
That assalt kind of looks like your sister.

Not to be confused with assault, a crime commonly observed when cyclists and drivers are both having bad days.

@eberesini

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

In exercise science laboratories, the Wingate test is often used to assess various dimensions of fitness. It’s a simple, unpleasant test consisting in 30 seconds of all-out pedaling at a fixed resistance level on a stationary bike. Power output is recorded in five-second intervals throughout the protocol.

As you might imagine, Wingate test subjects almost always achieve their peak power output in the first five seconds of the test. After that, power begins to decline as the subject fatigues. The power output level in the first five seconds of a Wingate test is therefore a good assessment of maximum power output capacity in the legs. Trained strength and power athletes typically put up the best numbers in this part of the test.

The average power output for the full 30-second span of the test is a decent measure of a person’s anaerobic capacity—that is, a person’s capacity to sustain very high levels of work output. Anaerobic capacity is largely a function of anaerobic glycolytic metabolism, which is the use of carbohydrate to fuel muscle contractions without the aid of oxygen. As you might expect, athletes who engage in a lot of anaerobic efforts in their training and competition tend to put up the best numbers in this aspect of the Wingate test. Think hockey players and boxers.

The Wingate test can also be used in a somewhat oblique way to assess aerobic capacity. As I mentioned above, in the typical Wingate test, peak power is attained in the first five seconds of the test and then power declines through the remainder of the test. However, there is a high degree of inter-individual variation in the rate of power loss. Trained endurance athletes tend to lose significantly less power than other types of subjects. That’s because a Wingate test is not a purely anaerobic challenge. Endurance athletes are able to call on their well-developed aerobic systems to help out their failing anaerobic systems as the test wears on.

Here’s an interesting fact: On average, trained endurance athletes record lower peak power outputs in a Wingate test than completely untrained, sedentary couch potatoes. Put another way, if you performed a Wingate test in a state of peak 10K race fitness, then stopped running cold turkey for eight weeks, and then did another Wingate test, you would more than likely record a better peak power number in the second test.

Endurance training does a lot of great things, but it saps power.

But is that a good thing or a bad thing? The answer is complicated. It certainly is not necessarily a bad thing. In a study performed a number of years ago, researchers took measurements of various characteristics of the muscle fibers of collegiate cross country runners over the course of a season. They found that the maximum force production capacity of individual muscle fibers decreased. But the cross-sectional area of individual fibers decreased even more. In other words, the muscle fibers basically shrunk. In fact, they shrunk enough so that the ratio of maximum force production to cross-sectional area of the muscle fibers actually increased. Loosely put, the runners got weaker, but they also got smaller, such that their “strength-to-size” ratio improved. And oh, by the way, so did their running performance.

Endurance training works like this: It curtails an athlete’s top-end speed, but it increases the percentage of top-end speed that he or she can sustain over race distances even more.

Does endurance training necessarily curtail top-end speed, though? I don’t think this question is quite answerable as framed, but I can say this: Plenty of research has shown that endurance performance improves when athletes make some training efforts to preserve their top-end speed.

These efforts must not go too far, however. A long time ago I read an article about how endurance athletes train all wrong, which was written by a well-known expert on…weightlifting. He argued that endurance athletes should try not merely to preserve but to increase their maximum speed. His logic went like this: If your 10K speed is 50 percent of your maximum speed, and your maximum speed is 18 mph, then you can run a 10K at 9 mph (or in 41:20). But if you increase your maximum speed to 20 mph, then 50 percent of your maximum speed becomes 10 mph. Now you can run a 10K in 37:12.

Except it doesn’t work like that. The problem with this weightlifting expert’s argument is that the training required to increase your maximum sprint speed will reduce—sharply, in most cases—the percentage of maximum speed that can be sustained over long durations. So the runner who begins with a maximum speed of 18 mph and the ability to sustain 50 percent of that speed over 10K, and who then increases his or her maximum speed to 20 mph, is now able to sustain only 40 percent of his or her maximum speed over 10K and goes from a 41:20 10K runner to a 46:30 10K runner.

I think there’s a happy medium. Distance runners stand to perform best in races if they do more sprint training than distance runners typically do but not so much that speed gains come at the expense of endurance gains. Besides, you don’t really want to lose a Wingate test to a couch potato, do you?

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Written by: Mario Fraioli

Regardless of our individual ability levels, we runners all share in one fundamental goal: to improve. And in order to do so, we know it’s important to work on three key elements to one degree or another, namely speed, stamina and strength. Where the issue often arises, however, is in finding the time to cover all of these bases during the course of a given week of training. How is it possible to effectively complete one workout without taking away from another? The solution to this problem is as simple as wrapping the three essential training elements into one workout once a week. It’s a little doozy I like to call The Short Circuit.

This workout requires a small amount of logistical work, so before you get going I recommend scouting out a nearby track, an open area at a local park, or quiet stretch of uninterrupted road in close proximity to a grass field for some of the ancillary exercises involved. For you gym rats who are tied to your treadmill, an indoor setup will suffice for this session, too.

So without further ado, here’s how the Short Circuit session breaks down:

Warmup

• Jog for 10-15 minutes; follow with dynamic stretching exercises (explained here) and four to six 20-second strides at 5K effort.

Short Circuit (One Set)

• Begin with 10 standard pushups and immediately follow with a 30-second sprint at 90% of max effort. Note: Focus on maintaining good form throughout these two exercises.
• Take a 30-second standing/walking recovery, then assume a front plank position for 30 seconds (see explanation/diagram of exercise here).
• Follow front plank with with 1 minute of easy jogging, then immediately transition into 1 minute of running at 5K race effort.
• Take a 30-second standing/walking recovery, then perform 10 reverse dips on a chair or bench.
• Immediately follow dips with a 30-second sprint at 90% of max effort. Your arms will be tired, but use them!
• Jog easily for 1 minute, then assume a plank position on the right side for 30 seconds. Repeat exercise for 30 seconds on the left side.
• Immediately after completing the side planks, run 5 minutes at an effort that falls between 10K and half marathon race pace.
• Take a 1-minute walking/jogging recovery after your 5-minute effort.
• Perform mountain climbers (see explanation/diagram of exercise here) for 30 seconds and follow immediately with burpees (watch demonstration here) for 30 seconds.
• Finish with 1 minute of fast, but relaxed running at 5K race pace. If you want to simulate kicking at the end of a race, try sprinting the final 15 to 20 seconds. Wiped? You should be!

Cooldown

• Jog for 10-15 minutes; follow with gentle static stretching exercises (explained here) and a recovery shake or snack.

This is NOT an easy workout so be sure to recover accordingly! If you haven’t been doing any intense speed workouts or strengthening exercises this session will likely leave you sore for a few days, so adjust the number of sets and effort level given your age, experience and training goals.

If you know what you need to do to become a better runner but aren’t sure how you’re going to fit it all in, then make this once-a-week workout a part of your regular routine!

[sig:MarioFraioli]

[sig:SeanMcKeon]

Fuel-starved endurance athletes are notorious convenience eaters, scarfing pre-packaged products and expensive prepared foods that offer a quick fix for their ravenous appetites. But these food products and supplements leave athletes under-nourished, delaying recovery and preventing their highest performance.

The Athlete's Plate: Real Food for High Performance by Adam Kelinson ($24.95)

For endurance athletes, there is no substitute for real food. The Athlete’s Plate: Real Food for High Performance debunks the myth that busy athletes lack the time to fuel with real food. Professional chef and endurance athlete Adam Kelinson guides athletes from grocery store to kitchen, offering time-saving shopping and cooking strategies that make preparing delicious, nutritious meals a pleasure. The Athlete’s Plate is now available in bookstores, endurance sports shops, and online.

Kelinson demonstrates how buying local, seasonal foods will save time and money. He explains how organic whole foods provide more nutrients than conventionally grown food and how a minimalist approach to cooking is more convenient and nutritious than laborious gourmet recipes.

The Athlete’s Plate provides 85 delicious, quick-prep recipes to fuel the active lifestyle. Kelinson’s worry-free dishes include smoothies and juices; power snacks; appetizing soups, salads and dressings; carb-filled pastas, polenta, and noodle bowls; lean protein dishes featuring seafoods, poultry, pork, and savory vegetarian preparations; and satisfying desserts.

The Athlete’s Plate reflects Kelinson’s years of experience as a professional chef, endurance athlete, and student of the relationship between nutrition and the environment. The book offers a no-nonsense way to balanced nutrition, incorporating all the nutrients athletes need to fuel and recover for training and racing. Athletes will learn how to make nutrition an enjoyable part of their lifetyle instead of a limiter on their performance.

About Adam Kelinson
Adam Kelinson is a professional chef and the founder of Organic Performance, a nutrition consulting company based in New York. Kelinson is an Ironman triathlete and has written on diet and nutrition for TrailRunner, Inside Triathlon, xtri.com, and dietwatch.com. He has cooked for elite athletes, corporate executives, and celebrities like Prince, Hillary Swank, and Mariska Hargitay. For more information, please visit organicperformance.com.

VeloPress is an endurance sports and fitness publisher with training and history books on cycling, triathlon, running, and diet and nutrition. For more information, please visit Velopress.com.

Cytomax Recovery is an example of a post-run recovery drink.

Written by: Shawn Talbott, PhD

Recovery is the neglected performance enhancer, and proper nutrition is the best recovery enhancer.

Everyone is training hard – but the winners are recovering better. Athletes at the highest levels of competition – Tour de France, Ironman, Olympics – understand that the ability to recover quickly and completely often makes the difference between peak performance and poor performance.

What happens if you recovery poorly? Your body remains in a depleted state, tissue damage continues, immune system activity becomes suppressed, and injury sets in. The first and most obvious way to enhance recovery is by simply replacing what you’ve lost during exercise. Secondly, by preventing the downward spiral of continuing tissue damage and immune suppression, you can coax the body’s physiology out of a “catabolic” state (marked by tissue breakdown) and into an “anabolic” state (characterized by tissue repair and rebuilding). Finally, the athletes who recover more fully from one intense workout to the next can train at a higher level without illness and injury or risk of overtraining. The instructions for high-level endurance performance are not rocket science: 1) Train Hard; 2) Recover Fully; 3) Repeat.

The adaptations to exercise training (stronger muscles, improved endurance, and higher oxygen consumption) occur during the recovery phase of training. Workouts provide the stimulus for change, but it is during the post-exercise period that the actual physiological and biochemical changes take place to help us become faster and stronger for the next effort. Without adequate recovery, not only do we place ourselves at risk for illness and injury, but we also hamper these post-exercise adaptations (and our performance). Why would you punish yourself through a hard set of intervals (setting in motion the stimulus for adaptation), but then effectively “shut down” the physiological and biochemical adaptation phase with inadequate recovery?

Grabbing a banana and a glass of water after your workout is certainly a step in the right direction – but while this might be OK for the occasional fitness jogger, it’s simply not enough for avid endurance enthusiasts who push themselves on a regular basis.

There are three major aspects to optimal post-exercise recovery: (1) Hydration, (2) Glycogen Replacement, and (3) Biochemical Balance (encompassing inflammation and oxidation, repair of tissue damage, and restoration of normal immune function). Attention to any one of these areas will aid post-exercise recovery, but attention to two or three areas will optimize recovery and set you up for better training and performance down the road.

Hydration

The research is quite clear on a couple of important points with regard to hydration during and after exercise. The first is that you will become dehydrated – even with a short workout. Count on it and plan for it. The second is that electrolyte beverages with low sugar concentrations are clearly superior to water in absorption and retention in the body.

Glycogen Replacement

The most important effect of your post-exercise snack is to rapidly stimulate glycogen resynthesis. Almost any combination of carbs and protein will do the job: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a glass of chocolate milk, one of the commercial post-exercise recovery drinks, etcetera. Endurance athletes should shoot for about 300-500 carbohydrate calories consumed as soon as possible following exercise.

Biochemical Balance

The biochemical changes that occur during exercise encompass a wide range of systemic disruptions such as increased inflammation and oxidation, tissue damage (mostly to the skeletal muscles and lungs), and temporary suppression of immune system activity. If not adequately addressed, these biochemical derangements can increase your risk of illness (colds, flu, and other respiratory tract infections), injury (tendonitis, fasciitis, and stress fractures), and overtraining (lethargy, depression, and irritability).

Getting inflammation and oxidation under control is as easy as getting some more antioxidants into your diet. Brightly colored berries (blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries), most fruits juices (orange, grape, and apple), and even dietary supplements that contain flavonoids (antioxidant) and proteolytic enzymes (anti-inflammatory) are an easy approach to combating these biochemical compounds that can delay tissue repair.

Enhancing the tissue reparative process is also fairly simple. The protein that you may already be consuming with your post-exercise carb-based snack will provide the amino acid building blocks that the body will use to rebuild damaged muscle tissue.

Finally, one of the most overlooked aspects of post-exercise recovery is restoring immune system function. Intense bouts of training and competition can suppress immune function for a full day or more, with a marathon-distance run suppressing immune system activity for about two weeks. Restoring immune function back to normal levels is partially accomplished by consuming antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients, but also by providing specific amino acids (glutamine and the three branched-chain amino acids – valine, leucine, and isoleucine) that immune cells use as a fuel source when fighting infection and repairing tissue damage.

Summary

Most of us have no need to become “Tour de France” adept at post-exercise recovery (so we can ride 100 miles a day for three weeks). However, the majority of us maintain our endurance training as just one part of our complicated lives. Enhancing your ability to recover quickly and fully can help you to enjoy that other “stuff” in your life, while at the same time helping you reach that “next level” in your training and competition.

Shawn Talbott holds a PhD in nutritional biochemistry (Rutgers) and MS in Exercise Science (Massachusetts) and is an avid endurance athlete competing in Ironman triathlons and ultra-marathons.

A popular endurance supplement.

Shawn Talbott highlights seven supplements with proven benefits for endurance athletes.

Written by: Shawn Talbott, PhD

As an endurance athlete, you might be interested in dietary supplements that have proven benefits to enhance oxygen efficiency, improve blood flow, balance hormone profile, and improve stress adaptation.

The Magnificent Seven

There are seven dietary supplements that have been evaluated in research studies of endurance athletes:

• Rhodiola – helps improve oxygen transfer from lungs to red blood cells
• Cordyceps – helps speed transfer of oxygen from red blood cells to mitochondria
• Eurycoma – balances hormones (lower cortisol and higher testosterone)
• Quercetin – improves blood flow by dilating blood vessels
• Arginine – improves blood flow by dilating blood vessels
• Eleuthero – provides resistance to physical stress and increases energy levels
• Ashwagandha – provides resistance to mental stress and induces relaxation

Rhodiola is a Himalayan root used by the Sherpa people to “adapt” to the stress of living and working at high altitudes. Even today, Sherpa climbers chew on rhodiola for an energy and endurance boost when helping mountaineers scale Mt. Everest. One mechanism for rhodiola’s anti-fatigue effects is an enhancement of oxygen efficiency  - with subjects living at high altitude (5,380 meters) showing a beneficial effect of rhodiola supplementation on blood oxygen levels, time to exhaustion, VO2peak, and pulmonary ventilation during endurance exercise.

Cordyceps is a Tibetan mushroom used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for “lung protection” and to balance the “Qi” – the fundamental “energy of life.” In clinical studies, cordyceps feeding results in significant improvements in fatigue, oxygen uptake, and endurance exercise performance.

Eurycoma is a root, often called Malaysian ginseng, that is used as a traditional remedy in Southest Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam) to help individuals “adapt” to the reduced energy and depressed mood that often come with chronic stress and overtraining. Eurycoma contains a group of small peptides that are effective in restoring the balance between the catabolic hormone cortisol and the anabolic hormone testosterone.

Quercetin (an antioxidant) and arginine (an amino acid) have been used effectively to improve blood flow in patients with high blood pressure and heart disease – and have become popular in some endurance supplements, but it is unknown whether or not the small levels typically contained in some supplements would be effective in improving endurance performance.

Eleuthero (Siberian ginseng) and ashwagandha (Indian ginseng) are used in traditional medicine as “adaptogens” to help the body adapt to stressful situations. Eleuthero tends to be more “energizing” while Ashwagandha is regarded as more “relaxing” in its effects.

How to Use Them

Dosage ranges to consider are listed below and are dependent on delivery of effective levels of the active compounds – rather than to the total amount of the herb itself. Pay attention to product labels, which are required to list the percentage of active compounds provided by each herbal extract. For example, one product might provide 1,000mg of a low-potency cordyceps (and a low content of the active adenosine compounds), while another product might deliver a lower total amount of cordyceps, but at a higher potency with a higher level of active adenosine. Focus on the total amount (percentage) of active compounds rather than the absolute amount (milligrams) of each herb to maximize the endurance effects and your performance benefits.

• Rhodiola = 150-300mg (standardized to 5-6% rosavins)
• Cordyceps = 100-500mg (standardized to 5-10% adenosine)
• Eurycoma = 25-50mg (standardized to 20-25% eurypepides)
• Quercetin = 100-300mg (pure)
• Arginine = 2,000-3,000mg (pure)
• Eleuthero = 100-200mg (standardized to 0.5-1% eleutherosides)
• Ashwagandha = 10-30mg (standardized to 5-10% withanolides)

Summary

No amount of any herb is going to take you from the couch to the podium without your dedication to proper training and nutrition. However, if you’re already doing what you can in terms of diet and exercise, then adding a daily supplement to enhance the effects of your training might serve as a “biochemical tune-up” for your body and help you reach the next level of performance.

Shawn Talbott holds a MS in exercise science (UMass) and a PhD in nutritional biochemistry (Rutgers) and competes in iron-distance triathlons and ultramarathons.

Cateye Strada Wireless

Sleek, svelte style is the calling card of one of the sexiest bike computers on the market, the Strada. Its tiny design with a bar- or stem-mount bracket delivers big numbers for easy viewing, with data including current, max and average speed, odometer, elapsed ride time,  pace arrow and clock. And do you see the buttons – or rather, the lack thereof? That’s thanks to ClickTec; the entire screen face clicks down, moving you through modes.

The Strada Wireless is available in colors including black, white, and pink – with $1 of sales of the pink version going to the Breast Cancer Fund.
$60 – www.cateye.com.

PowerTap Elite+

Sure, PowerTap has the luxury line, including the over-$2,000 model with ceramic hub bearings or a hub body with carbon fiber in it. But aside from a few grams, what’s the difference?

Proof that the price of power meters has made a massive dive (with us as the beneficiaries), you can get a pro-level power meter for under a grand, delivering exactly the same data and capabilities as the $2,000 version. That includes wireless power and Ant+ Sport capability, meaning you can run your data, as the Garmin-Chipotle team does, through Ant+ Sport-capable computers like the Garmin Edge 705. With accuracy within plus or minus 1.5 percent, there’s not a better tool to measure your bike strength progress – and you can get it at a price that won’t break the bank.
$999 – www.saris.com.

Garmin Forerunner 405

The evolution of the popular Forerunner line sees the immensely data-filled computer boiled down into a smaller, less chunky design. Now present are the amazing GPS-tracked features: including speed, pace and heart rate, as well as workout features like virtual partner training.

What’s more, getting around the Forerunner’s features has taken a new, intuitive twist. The bezel around the screen is touch-sensitive, allowing you to move and scroll through features, even turn on the backlight with simple motion. We love that the rechargeable unit goes into a “sleep” mode after use, meaning you can wear it as a watch when you’re not putting it to work training and racing.
$299 – www.garmin.com.

Yamaha BODiBEAT

Picking tunes for your long run is a tricky task; they have to have the right energy, the right cadence to keep your legs firing and your spirit up. Yamaha’s solution is BODiBEAT, an MP3 player with a built-in heart rate monitor. Load your favorite music and select your preferred beats per minute. With its built-in accelerometer that detects impact, BODiBEAT finds music that matches the tempo of your running or walking footfall. It also offers data feedback, including heart rate, time, distance and pace. And when you’re not training, you can put it in music mode to listen to whatever you want!
$299 – www.bodibeat.com.

Polar RS800CX

With its red button standing out to identify it from any other, Polar is the brand on everyone’s wrists when monitoring heart rate. The gold standard of fitness analysis has been made personally accessible; the Finnish brand continues to drive the market with the debut of the RS800CX, a multisport-specific unit that delivers the heart rate data Polar is known for. Beyond that? Try a built-in interval trainer. Try GPS mapping of your training or race course, downloaded and displayed through Polar Protrainer 5 on Google Earth for 3D analysis of your ride or run. Further, the course is color-coded based on the user’s heart rate zones, allowing correlation between heart rate and effort or terrain.

The RS800CX offers run, bike and multisport-specific sensors, with the latter capable of on-the-fly changeability from bike data (miles per hour) to run data (minutes per mile pace). We’ve been putting this to work, and for all the data it provides (the overlay of heart rate zone over terrain on Google Earth is simply brilliant), it’s fairly low profile. And that red button still sets it apart from all others.
$499 – www.polarusa.com.