WORLD
Why winter endurance athletes compete in so many races
Baku, February 21 (AZERTAC). Cross-country skiers often collapse due to exhaustion at each race's end, only to come back a day or two later and compete again at seemingly superhuman levels. Speed skaters racing on the traditional large oval maintain a painful crouch at speeds greater than 30 mph in race after race throughout the games. How do they do it? And why don't elite runners run in as many distance events at the Summer Olympics?
Sports scientists say that the endurance sports of the winter games are more like bicycling or swimming than running. There just isn't as much pounding on the joints or the muscles, for example. Therefore, athletes can recover faster, and compete in more and longer races in the Winter Olympics than in the summer games.
Winter athletes have the benefit of gliding on their skis and skates. Track athletes may run more preliminary heats in some of their events, and with each stride, a runner's foot strikes the track with great force.
"When they land there's a tremendous amount of pounding," said Robert Chapman, an exercise physiologist at Indiana University, in Bloomington. "Cross-country skiing is going to be different, speed skating is going to be different, because there's not as much pounding on the muscles. In theory they would be able to recover…a little bit quicker to be able to come back and do the multiple events."
Not only that, but skiers seem more versatile than competitors in many of the summer sports.
Speed skaters can be similarly versatile. One reason for this is that the length of the races is much less varied than in running. While world-class men sprint the 100-meter dash in fewer than 10 seconds, and the 200-meter in fewer than 20, the shortest speed-skating race, the 500-meter, takes substantially longer. The winning times in Sochi were more than 34 seconds for the men, and more than 37 seconds for the women. The longest speed-skating races are 5,000 meters for the women, and 10,000 meters for the men, which take about seven and 13 minutes, respectively.
The energy systems used to power athletes' muscles over those distances and durations will be roughly the same, said Chapman. "In running it's going to be a lot different.