Thursday, February 2, 2012

Step Ahead Podcast Guest and a few Salty Facts

A few weeks ago I was invited by Chris Luckhardt and Carol Levesque to be their first guest on the Step Ahead podcast. It was a great experience and to my surprise I managed to contain my nervousness and not screw up too many English words. Overall it looked like I was on drugs as I was giggling uncontrollably, but to tell you the truth, I was really excited and happy to talk about running (which makes me happy to begin with). There is video too!!

Most memorable brain slips : "neutral" vs "natural", "forfeit" (do you even say that for a marathon race?), "running" vs "run" (not quite sure when to use which), "well..." (at some point in time it seemed that I was starting all sentences with it), getting my Adidas shoes models backwards (the most recent being the adiSTAR Ride 3 and the older one, most comfortable, the Supernova Glide 2).

Last but not least, you may have wondered : "running better because of the salt"?? What in hell is she talking about? Did she really say that? Well... (hehe) I dunno. I was thinking that maybe the salt in the air was helping increase performance as there must be a highest concentration of it along the ocean. After all, salt is good for runners, right? I remember when I was a kid, growing up in Romania, I visited this salt mine that was a few hundred meters underground and that had a running track. Many of the Romanian athletes were going there to train because of... the salt? The naturally purified air? I have to find proof that works, if it's not more than an old belief. But given the large number of world records established by Romanian athletes when I was a kid, maybe there is some truth to that. Or steroids. Nah, that can't be it. Where is my Romanian pride, dammit?

There you go, found an article about the salt mine Salina Veche (Unirea) in Wikipedia:
After 1970, the mine becomes a touristic objective, offering exceptional natural conditions as a result of its microclimate rich in aerosols, which proved its well known efficiency in treating the respiratory diseases. The air-conditioning of the mine is natural, with a constant temperature during the whole year of 12 °C, an atmospheric pressure of 730 mmHg and a humidity with an average of 10% lower than the surface average.

[...] Some of the mine chambers were transformed in sport courts where athletes perform their trainings.

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