Giacomo Vacca

You’ve surely heard at least once in your life somebody saying “Calm down: it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon”. People use this phrase to try and slow things down, but it misses the point. The first misconception is that a marathon is something you do slowly. A marathon is fast; it’s just as fast as possible for that athlete in that moment. Most people couldn’t hold an elite marathoner’s pace for even 100 meters. It’s a marathon, but it’s not slow. It’s easy to make a point that running a marathon is tough, not just for the distance but for the speed you try to keep. What’s maybe harder to see is that a marathon is much easier than many life challenges. You can simply prepare for a marathon. You get to the starting line with months or years of preparation. You tried progressively longer and tougher sessions, simulating the marathon effort. That’s a privilege. Many hurdles you’ll face in life will just appear in front of you while you were thinking of something else. A marathon has a fi...

 I'm a passionate runner, and always considered cycling as something fun, e.g. mountain-biking, but difficult to practice regularly. There's a lot of overhead in cycling, like the preparation, bike maintenance, dealing with city traffic, etc. Anyway about eight months ago I bought a road bike and felt in love with it. Soon after that I discovered Zwift and that gave an additional dimension to the sport: practice whenever you want from home, with accurate power measurements and a way to socialise with distant people. That was a game changer. In five months I cycled 1600 virtual Km and climbed almost 17 virtual Km. Meanwhile my running performance, instead of degrading, improved, and that surprised me. Anyway what I wanted to write about is a great article I read, "Physiological Differences Between Cycling and Running" . It's a review of articles published in that area. Some conclusions are very interesting. In general it seems sports medicine is still inconclusive...

This blog has been historically focused on technical topics in areas related to Real Time Communications, but I'm taking the liberty to digress a little. I've been reading recently about the dynamics of performance in running. I'm just an amateur runner, and I always train (and race) alone, so I felt the need to make it more interesting than just reading training tables. I've been studying what is it that limits performance. "Train more", unfortunately, not only doesn't always work, but needs to take into account injuries, and overtraining in general. One of the first concepts that struck me is that it's been proven that fatigue, and the consequential slow down, does not mean that the body is unable to continue with that effort. What's behind slowing down is a sort of protective mechanism in our nervous system, which wants to prevent the body to reach exhaustion. Our nervous system is constantly getting feedback signals from the bo...