I’ve purposively not touched the Lance Armstrong story because it is so tragic on so many levels. While there has always been a lot of ‘smoke’ (allegations), there never has been the amount of evidence that was released a week ago by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA – link to the report). If you are at all interested in this story, I would encourage you to read USADA’s report. If you had any reasonable doubt about Armstrong’s actions, this document will remove those doubts.

For many of us in Aggieland, fall really starts tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 8) with the start of A&M football. Tomorrow’s game is historic in many ways – most them having been commented on over the past 14 months since A&M decided to move to the SEC. But it continues to fascinate me that football, in so many ways, is an integral part of our lives. (Remember, I wrote the blog about why we get so upset when our team loses – I seem to be fixated on this topic, eh?) Football is used as a placemar...

A shrinking majority of us remember the phrase “Live or Memorex?” from an audio tape commercial where when used, the sound from these tapes was touted as being as good as live…(here’s one of the more famous of those commercials).  More and more, given all of the instant sources of information we have access to, we are facing the same decision that we did back in the 70’s with our audio tape: do you look for ‘live results’ or wait for ‘the tape’? This decision really has come to a point ...

Most everyone knows the Olympics are starting today and try as I might, I always get sucked in by the Olympics.  Every time the Olympics come around, I make a resolution that I’m not going to spend all my time watching the Olympics.  Now you might imagine that in my business that would be difficult to do, but I try really hard to hold on to that resolution.  I tell myself that I’m not really interested in many of the sports or that I’m cynical about the doping at...

As someone who studies human performance, from time to time I have people ask why scientists will test animals to understand human performance.  In most cases, it is because to continue to understand why humans can do what they do (and how we can train them to do ‘it’ better), we have to use models that allow us to do things that we can’t do in humans.  For example, my lab has a long-running set of experiments where we are looking at humans’ drive to be active.  Much of this drive probably o...

In doing research for this week’s Huffines Institute podcast with Sports Illustrated’s David Epstein (check out the podcast - it is on the hot stories for the coming Olympic Games), I ran across a story that David recently wrote about Ben Helfgott, a former British Olympic weightlifter (yes, it is tough when your research actually includes reading Sports Illustrated!).  David’s story is an incredibly moving story that is less about sports and more about the ...

The Bryan/College Station area has its share of Circuses that come to town on a yearly basis.  Just in the last few months we’ve had several here ranging from the traditional animal-based Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus, to the high-flying Cirque du Soleil Dralion.  While we watch in awe, we often forget that both the animal and human performers in these shows are also athletes and that their performances are quite demanding both physically and mentally.  

My wife and I recently watched a documentary called “Forks Over Knives”.  The point of the film was that if you ate a plant-based diet (yep, no dairy or meat), you would lose weight, fix all your metabolic disorders, and probably would wind-up looking better to boot!  On the surface, it would seem that the film was well grounded in facts – the four primary characters in the film were Doctors (three M.D.s and one PhD), while the one contrarian quoted was a professional with only a ‘Masters de...

As Director of the Huffines Institute, I have ultimate responsibility for everything that goes up on the Institute’s website. While we have several staff members that in reality make the final judgment in many cases, the proverbial ‘buck’ stops at my desk regarding the content of our site. Thus, we had extensive debates over whether or not we should run this week’s podcast “Usurpers” that deals with gene doping, cross country racing, and the drive to win. While you can find pieces on t...

I’ve written here before about some of the championship demands of the modern-day marathon. For example, to just qualify for the US Olympic Marathon team, you would have had to run the 26.2 miles averaging 12.2 mph (that’s a mile every 4 minutes and 55 seconds). Sports Illustrated’s David Epstein – who visited College Station recently – has a new piece in the 4/16/12 edition of SI about the 2008 Olympic Marathon champion Sammy Wanjiru, who was found dead several months ago. I would highly...