July 2023

Hope you are all enjoying summer and spending a lot of it outdoors.

I’ve written in the past about nitric oxide, IMO an underappreciated chemical in the body, and now there’s a new wearable sensor on the scene that claims to measure both nitric oxide and muscle oxygen (SmO2). I’m a bit skeptical, but open-minded, about whether this can be used effectively to guide training or workouts as their website advertises. That said, it’s often very difficult to determine how to use data until it can be collected more easily. So perhaps there’s something here. In any case, I look forward to learning more about this. It’s perhaps worth noting that Olav Bu, the famous Norwegian triathlon coach, uses Moxy muscle ox sensors in his work.

My latest addition to my foot strength training program, this one is fun.

It’s good to see bipartisan support for the CONNECT for Health Act, which expands telehealth support and makes permanent the flexibilities enacted during covid. Progress is slow - the Act was first proposed in 2016, and some elements have been enacted along the way. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) sits under the “telehealth” umbrella, so this is ultimately good news for wearables and other sensors.

For a variety of reasons I’m digging more into youth sports injuries lately, and this paper generally confirms what I’ve suspected from observation. Wealthier kids predominate in the world of highly specialized youth sports, and on the teams that are more serious and load kids up with more (often too much) training. So they end up with more injuries. It’s the rare case where higher family SES increases health risks.

I’m a bit behind on this month’s schedule, so I’ll skip the monthly installment on my training program and pick it up next month.

I spent a weekend at Tahoe for the Western States 100, the grand-daddy of 100 mile trail races. I snapped this month’s photo on the hike to the Escarpment, at mile 3.5 of the race. Racers were treated to a fabulous sunrise and a day of mercifully lower temperatures than usual in the canyons. If you are curious about the race, this film is great as a starting place to learn about it.