Jun. 28: Here's a New Sport for You: The Row-Bike-Run Triathlon

Sometime about 10 days ago I "invented" a new sport,  at least I think I did. Of course, I knew this was highly unlikely. Everything that's going to be invented has already been invented, right? I figured Google would toss me out like a week-old salad. Only it didn't. Big G produced a number of hits, of course, but none of them proved particularly helpful. I couldn't find any clear evidence that someone else had already invented my sport.

I felt sure that random individuals must have tried it, but I couldn't track down any significant race results. At the very least, it appears that my sport has yet to be standardized and turned into a competitive event. This surprised me: The idea is simple, tough and effective (as a great cross-training workout, or a competitive race.)

Someone suggested that the Concept2 people who make the well-known indoor rowing machine have probably held a few events similar to what I was cogitating. This made sense, because the C.R.A.S.H.-B Sprints, contested on Concept2 equipment, are world famous. Indeed, the Sprints, held every winter in Boston, bill themselves as the "world indoor rowing championships." But I couldn't find my new sport at the Concept2 or C.R.A.S.H.-B web sites.

Okay, enough fiddle-faddle. Here's the sport: It's an indoor row-bike-run triathlon. It's contested on indoor equipment that provides various measures of speed and fitness. You add up your "scores" or times on the three machines, and that determines whether you win or lose.

The variety of possible event formats and lengths is nearly infinite. If someone begins to organize the sport, however, a couple of popular distances or lengths-of-time will emerge as the standards.

A few days after I began thinking about the RBR triathlon, I found a Twitter post reporting one possible approach. In Boston, right around the corner from the Boston Marathon offices, personal trainer Ron Abecassis held an indoor row-bike-run at the Fitcorp Copley facility. He challenged entrants to see if they could break 31 minutes for 1500 meters rowing, 6 miles biking, and 2 miles running. No one came close, with eventual winners Glen Gibbons and Lisa Ritchie clocking 34:03 and 37:27 for the triathlon.

I called Abecassis to learn more. He said that the Fitcorp people had designed this indoor triathlon to motivate its corporate fitness clients to get excited about their workouts. He hadn't heard of anyone else doing a similar event, but the one at Fitcorp's Copley location followed a similar one at another Fitcorp location. In all, about 50 people have completed the indoor triathlon, which appeared to have more appeal for cardio types than for strength-training types, according to Abecassis. Several of the participants were veteran Boston Marathon runners. "It's a tough workout, and everyone was pretty exhausted at the end of their 35 to 45 minutes," Abecassis told me. "But they definitely liked it. They were asking when we were going to do another one." (Abecassis is checking with other Fitcorp trainers to see if anyone else can report race times faster than the ones I listed above. If not, those are the current world records, and you're welcome to take a crack at them.)

When I floated the row-bike-run idea to a few friends last week, one responded with a completely different "format" that I liked a lot. Scott Murr is an exercise physiologist and serious Ironman triathlete at Furman University in Greenville, S.C. He spends a lot of time thinking about workouts and how to fit them together. His suggestion: the RBR should be calorie based. See how long it takes you to burn 100 calories each on a rowing machine, a bike, and a treadmill. I haven't tried this yet, but I think it will probably constitute my first go at an RBR triathlon. I imagine a killer athlete (much stronger and faster than me) could complete this challenge in about 15 minutes, but we won't know for sure until someone tries it.)

As I've already noted: The possible combinations are large. Pick a distance or length-of-time or format that appeals to you, and give it a try. Let us know how it works by writing a Comment in the space below this blog.

Yes, a machine event is going to have problems. Different makes and models of equipment will measure effort with, I'm sure, some degree of variability. It won't be possible to directly compare performances from a dark basement in Minnesota with those at a swank health club in Los Angeles. By why sweat the small stuff at this point? The problems will be overcome by athletes and organizations who want to hold serious competitions.

Until then, it's time to rev up the machines and get cranking. Start with some modest attempts, and be creative with your time and effort. Be sure to try different combinations of time, distance, watts, calories burned, etc. This could be your big chance to etch your name into the world-record books. (You only have to be the first competitor.)

And let me know how it goes. Thanks.

P.S. I've been talking about this subject a lot at home and with friends, and my wife begs to inform everyone that it was her idea. She says she was watching me on my home recumbent bike recently, and said something like "It's too bad you can't put all that effort into some kind of race." I vaguely remember the comment in the same way that I vaguely remember about 90 percent of her comments. This isn't because she's boring and stupid--quite the opposite!--but because, uh, that's the way things go between husband and wife after a while. Isn't it?

[UPDATE, JULY 29: I set a new world record for the 300-calorie Row-Bike-Run today, clocking in at 24:50. My "splits" per 100 calories were about 8:30 (rowing), 8:45 (cycling), and 6:50 (running). I used a Concept 2, a Lifecycle bike, and a Precor treadmill. My total "transition time" (from row to bike, and bike to run, and fiddling with controls to get machines turned on and up to speed) was about 50 to 60 seconds. It was fun. I'm going to try it again soon, after an upcoming vacation. I'm sure I can get braver (more aggressive) on the row and bike. I hope you'll try it too. Trust me, this is a world record meant to be broken. By you!]

[UPDATE 2: Scott Murr, mentioned above, has now lowered the 300-calorie RBR record to 15:41. I'm now covering Row-Bike-Run news at RowBikeRun.com. Check it out.]

KENSAP Scholarship Program For Rift-Valley Kenyans Produces First Harvard Grad

Friday morning I received an email with photo that made me cry for two hours. The good kind of crying.

A friend, John Manners, had sent me a brief recounting of the recent Harvard graduation he attended. I knew that a special Kenyan student of my acquaintance, Kipyegon Amos Kitur, was slated to graduate from Harvard this June. I didn't know that his mother and father would be able to attend. But there they were in a photo with Kipyegon and John.

The last time I had seen the parents was a little more than four years ago in the far reaches of Kenya's Rift Valley. I couldn't remember the name of the place, but John has since told me it was Chebalungu, in Bomet District. If this doesn't ring a bell, don't feel bad. I'd guess that 99.99 percent of the Earth's inhabitants have never heard of Chebalungu.

That day, Kibochabas and Grace Baibai stood humbly at the side of the road when our van of mostly American-runner-in-Kenya tourists pulled over. (We were there on the first Runner's World Kenya Running Safari, led by John.) A few yards back sat the several ramshackle huts they called home. Beyond the huts: endless scrubland. This is where the family lived, this is where Kipyegon had grown up.

To see this family reunited in Harvard Yard, where I had seen my own son graduate 10 years ago, was more than I could handle. It seemed to me the one-billionth retelling of the American Dream--giving opportunity to those who deserve it--and no less powerful than the original telling.

I had first met Kipyegon the night before seeing where he grew up. He had dinner with our group, and I interviewed him for possible admission to the college (Wesleyan University) I had attended decades earlier. When I got home to the U.S., I wrote him the most glowing letter of recommendation you could possibly imagine. It worked. He was accepted by Wesleyan. Alas, Harvard also recognized his stellar qualities.

Here's what I recall about talking to Kipyegon that first evening. And remember that he had spent his entire 18 years in the Kenyan "sticks," far from the Internet, big libraries, cultural activities, and urban life. Nonetheless, he carried himself with a calm maturity, and spoke enthusiastically about his dreams. He was clearly burning with a passion for knowledge; it lept from his eyes. He told me that in junior high school he had read every book in his school's library, every book someone could place in front of him, every book he could beg or borrow.

[Kipyegon Kitur, 18, in Kenya in 2005. Photo by Mary Austin.]

Kipyegon Kitur is now a Harvard graduate due entirely to an amazing program that John Manners launched just five years ago. John has had help from good sources like Kenyan professor and ex-elite athlete Mike Boit, and distance-running giant Paul Tergat, and especially from a Canadian investor, Charles Field-Marsham, who funds the project. But I know John and I know this program exists only because his energy and brilliance got it started and keeps it going. He has also received important assists from Lornah Kiplagat, and Peter Rono (the 1988 Olympic 1500 meter champ).

The program, called KenSAP (Kenya Scholar Athlete Project), helps deserving Kenyan students to apply to and get accepted by top American universities. These students live entirely in the Rift Valley, far from the resources (somewhat limited, to be sure) of students living in and around Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. A few years ago, many of these Rift Valley students had never heard of the universities now handing them degrees. They can only attend universities that give them a "full ride," since none have any personal or family resources to pay for college. This means they only apply to the most-elite colleges in the country--the ones well-enough endowed to offer all-expenses-covered scholarships to non-Americans. (You can learn more about Kipyegon Kitur in Harvard articles and videos linked from here.)

The program isn't designed for fast-running Kenyans, it's designed for fast-thinking Kenyans. I had harbored fantasies that Kipyegon would matriculate at Harvard, join the cross-country team, and set both the NCAA and his Harvard classes on fire. That didn't happen. He did a little running, but it's not his forte. His greatest talents are his brains and his discipline, and he put them to a good test at Harvard, graduating with a degree in chemistry.

All KenSAP students, now more than four dozen in total, realize they are attending college for the opportunity to learn as much as possible and advance their lives. In Evans Kosgei's first year at Lehigh University, he didn't run a step. It was more important to immerse himself in the computer-science courses he was taking. Apparently, he did a good job: He received "A's" in all his classes. In his second year at Lehigh, just completed, Kosgei joined a couple of teams, and got his 8-K cross-country time down to 25:18 and his 10,000 track time down to 31:19. After two years at Lehigh, his GPA stands at 3.97, and he has already been named a Lehigh "Arthur Ashe sports scholar."

Running isn't the main thing at KenSAP; it's a distant second to academics. But KenSAP and Hamilton College runner Peter Kosgei has excelled at both. Kosgei just won his eighth and ninth NCAA Div. III championship races, and he's got another 3 semesters of eligibility.

It's a bad year to be graduating from college, but Kipyegon Kitur has landed himself a nice banking job at the Royal Bank of Canada in Greenwich, CT. A few years from now, he says, he'd like to continue his education, get an advanced degree or two, and maybe help build a pharmaceutical company in Africa. I imagine his parents are back in the fields of Chebalungu, Bomet, Kenya, not quite believing what they have just seen of the gleaming USA.

Even harder to believe: that their son has come so far and been so successful.

Everything You Need to Know about Running Injuries

A little more than a week ago, while I was on vacation, New York Times health writer, cyclist and runner Gina Kolata wrote a great column, both personal and journalistic, about running injuries. When I started reading the column, I was a little worried. My concern? That Kolata might have fallen for one of the self-professed experts who claim to know how to prevent or cure running injuries.

Fortunately, she didn't. She's too much of a pro for that. In a well-balanced piece, Kolata seemed to conclude, with help from a handful of knowledgeable sources, that every running injury is more or less unique. In other words, there are no universal cures--not orthotics, not stretching, not massage, not chiropractic, not glucosamine, not fish oil, not strengthening and not physical therapy. The last two are often better than the others, in my opinion, but that doesn't make them anything close to universal solutions.

The only universal is running injuries themselves.

I like to say that the first intelligent runner hasn't been born yet. And I'm not holding my breath. By this I mean that we are destined to repeat the mistakes of those who have gone before us. One by one, fueled by our enthusiasm for running farther and faster and the relatively rapid progress that can be made down this path, we all increase our running until one of two things happens. Either we break the world record for the marathon, or we get injured. In my experience, the latter is the more frequent.

All of us have read articles reporting that something like 50 to 70 percent of runners get injured in a given year. There are three important things you should know about this loose but scary-sounding statistic.

First, it means we all get injured eventually. Like, 100 percent of us.

Second, it's no big deal, since 100 percent of us also recover from our running injuries. Okay, some recover better than others, but, c'mon, a sore heel is rarely fatal.

Lastly, the 50-to-70-percent-per-year thing is completely meaningless, because there's no control group. So far as I know, there's little information about the number of non-runners who go to the doctor every year to complain about toe, foot, leg, knee, hip or back pain. But I'm sure it's a lot.

Consider this: There's some (modest) evidence that more non-runners than runners suffer from knee arthritis and the like. The obesity and inactivity epidemics among non-runners cause a lot of lower-body complaints. Don't underestimate the toll. Medical studies are just beginning to try to define it.

So what should you do about running injuries? Here's the only advice I can give you: Stay constantly alert (ie, "Listen to your body"), because an injury is headed your way. The most effective way to get recover is to take time off from running, and the sooner and more completely you rest, the better. All other responses, including cross-training and the various therapies I dismissed above, are reasonable enough. The Runner's World website has a large and thorough section on Injury Prevention. Check it out.

But don't expect miracles. Sure, they happen, but not often enough that any one doctor, approach or supplement is going to work every time.

Over the years, I've gotten a little better at dealing with my occasional injuries. I don't panic the way I sometimes used to, though there's one thing I still hate about running injuries: They never go away when I want them to. They go away when they damn well feel like it.