PUMARUNNING.com

Usain Bolt will compete in the 400 meters at Jamaica’s National Stadium in Kingston Feb. 13. Last year at this event he won the 400 meters with a time of 45.54. His personal best in the 400 meters of 45.28 set in 2007 is far short of the world record of 43.18, but Bolt says he wants to compete in the event as a means of training for the 100 and 200 meters and improve his endurance.

Seong Bong-ju, a specialist in exercise physiology at Korea Institute of Sports Science, said, “Training methods include the principle of overload. If you can sprint 300 and 400 meters, you can run 100 and 200 meters easier.”

Full story here.

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Not everyone is suited to every kind of running distance. Consider this before you beat yourself up about your inability to accelerate over 100m, or to get to the end of a 10k. How do you know what distance is right for you? You can either try out everything from a sprint to a marathon, or you can try to identify your ideal distance depending on your body shape. Read on to find what type you are.

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Bob, Bolt brands to boost tourism. That’s a lot of Bs in one headline, but Jamaican Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett expects the Usain Bolt and Bob Marley brands to boost 2010 tourist stopover arrivals by six per cent over last year. Full story here.

Jamaica’s track and field stars headed by Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell, Shelly-Ann Fraser, Brigitte Foster-Hylton and Melaine Walker, have joined forces to help their Haitian neighbours. The group will play their part by raffling themselves for a dinner date at Acropolis on Monday, February 22.

For $500 a ticket, seven lucky females could win a dinner date with Powell, Bolt, Michael Frater, Germaine Mason, Jermaine Gonzales, Darrell Brown and maybe Nesta Carter. The group of women athletes to be raffled are Foster-Hylton, Sherone Simpson, Shericka Williams, Walker, Fraser, Kaliese Spencer and Anneisha McLaughlin.

Full story here.

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Every 10 years Track & Field News, “The Bible Of The Sport,” names its Athletes Of The Decade. The No. 1 men’s choice of the Noughties (or Oughts, whatever you’d like!) was Ethiopian distance legend Kenenisa Bekele. See the now-on-sale March issue of T&FN.

While the editors based their choices on overall impact in the decade, they also stressed quality over quantity.

The decade’s top 10 men:

1. Kenenisa Bekele (Ethiopia), distances
2. Virgilijus Alekna (Lithuania), discus
3. Hicham El Guerrouj (Morocco), 1500/mile/5000
4. Usain Bolt (Jamaica), sprints
5. Robert Korzeniowski (Poland), walks
6. Jeremy Wariner (USA), 400
7. Dwight Phillips (USA), long jump
8. Andreas Thorkildsen (Norway), javelin
9. Roman Šebrle (Czech Republic), decathlon
10. Saïf Shaheen (Qatar), steeplechase

Usain Bolt will open his 2010 season at the sixth staging of the Camperdown Classic on February 13 at the national stadium in Kingston.

Dubbed “Showcase of Sprinters”, the sixth edition of the Camperdown High School’s Classic was launched on Tuesday with Bolt in attendance and the main attraction. He will line up in the men’s 400 meter, an event in which he posted 46.35 seconds in his season opener last year.

Jermaine Gonzalez, Ricardo Chambers, Marvin Anderson and Remaldo Rose are among other Racers Track Club athletes who will be competing in the 400 meters alongside Bolt. Source

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Bolt also confirmed he will compete over 100 meters at the New York Diamond League Adidas Grand Prix event in NYC on June 12.

It has still to be revealed whether the race will be his first appearance on the inaugural Diamond League circuit which begins in Doha on May 14 followed by meetings in Shanghai (May 23), Oslo (June 4) and Rome (June 10).

The 23-year-old Jamaican’s appearance in New York will be his first competition in the United States since he set his first world record at the Grand Prix event in 2008.

“New York was the site of my first world record, the track is lightning fast and the fans, well, they sat through an entire thunderstorm in 2008 just to watch the 100m so I know they appreciate speed,” Bolt said. “I am looking forward to returning to the Big Apple in June.” Source

Nominations have been announced for the 2010 Laureus World Sports Awards. Bolt, the world’s fastest man, has been nominated for Sportsman of the Year, the big award, with Ethiopian athlete Kenenisa Bekele, Swiss tennis ace Roger Federer and Korean golfer Ji Yai Shin. Full story here.

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Experience Jamaica at ‘Bolt speed’. A series of television commercials starring sprint sensation Usain Bolt and aimed at boosting Jamaica’s tourism product will begin airing throughout the United States, Canada and Europe on February 8. Bolt appears in the three commercials for Jamaica pro bono. Continue reading.

Come behind the scenes of Found My Swag the latest video from “Jerk” dance groups the “Bangz” and the “New Boyz”. Also in the video are all of LA’s top Jerk dance crews….presented by PUMA!

you can visit brendan jack here.

Human running speeds top out near 28 mph, if the record-breaking feats of Jamaican speed demon Usain Bolt prove anything. But scientists say that the biological limits of human running could theoretically reach 35 or even 40 mph — assuming that human muscle fibers could contract faster and allow people to pick up their pace.

The new study titled “The biological limits to running speed are imposed from the ground up” appears in the Journal of Applied Physiology. It involves testing runners on a treadmill at top speed while they run forward and backward and hop on one leg.

This provides a new twist on the old school of thought that speed limits depended on how much force a runner could exert against the ground. Past studies showed that sprinters can apply up to 1,000 pounds of force with a single limb during each sprinting step, and so researchers thought that humans simply could not push beyond that point.

Full story from Popular Science here.

Photo by Lisa G. Putman

It’s good to be Bolt! The fastest man on the planet just got a custom built 335 BMW coupé. According to the Jamaica Observer it is valued at over $10 million (Jamaican dollars).

This is a well written and witty story about Bolt’s love of Kerry football by Billy Keane which appeared on the independent.ie Saturday, January 16 2010

“The phone rang at 4.0 in the morning. “Usain Bolt here. I hope I didn’t wake you, but this is most urgent,” said the fastest man in the world. He spoke in a slow, treacly, rum-dripping-on-raisin-ice-cream Jamaican drawl, but you could still sense the urgency in his voice.

“Billy, I need your help. I know you will not let me down. My life is about to change forever.”

Continue reading here.

Found this headline in my inbox. “Bolt, Foster-Hylton apologize for awards tardiness.” Too interesting to be overlooked. So I read the full article in the Jamaica Observer. Something is seriously funny here. Maybe even illuminating. (Great tabloid picture) After you’ve read it, let me know what you think.

Thousands of people are feared dead after the largest earthquake to hit the Caribbean in the last 200 years rocked Haiti on Tuesday, toppling buildings and  burying residents under rubble. World and Olympics champion, Usain Bolt, has called on his Caribbean neighbors to lend their support to Haiti during this time of disaster. Full story.

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Maurice Greene says Bolt can be the ultimate sprinter. “We haven’t seen his true capabilities. He still has a boy’s body (and) I believe once his body starts changing and starts to be a man’s body, about 26, 27 (years old), if he decides he’s going to keep on running, who knows what he’s going to do then,” Greene said. Full story.

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Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man, joined Digicel in hosting the All-Ireland football champions, Kerry, to a day of fun activities at Mystic Mountain in Ocho Rios on Saturday (Jan 9) to end their week-long trip to Jamaica. Full story.

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Usain Bolt is to be featured in a new TV campaign for Jamaica’s “Once You Go, You Know” campaign. Bolt will appear in a series of 30-second TV commercials that will air in key U.S. markets in February and March. The first commercials features Bolt running throughout Jamaica, but doesn’t make much progress because he pauses to take in the view after every few steps. In “Speed,” the second commercial, he runs past a series of landscapes to the song “One Love”. And in the third, called “Pose,” a series of everyday Jamaicans imitate his famous “lightning bolt” pose. Full story.

By Christine Luff on about.com

Falling temperatures and fewer daylight hours don’t mean that your outdoor running routine has to go into hibernation for the winter. Running through the cold weather can help shake those winter blues, improve your energy level, and guarantee that you’ll be in better shape once bathing suit season rolls around. Follow these tips for cold weather running:

Pay Attention to Temperature and Wind Chill
If the wind is strong, it penetrates your clothes and removes the insulating layer of warm air around you. Your movement also creates wind chill because it increases air movement past your body. If the temperature dips below zero or the wind chill is below minus 20, hit the treadmill instead.

Continue reading here

Additional tips include:
Protect Your Hands and Feet
Dress in Layers
Avoid Overdressing
Don’t Forget Your Head
Watch for Frostbite
Check With Your MD
Get Some Shades
Don’t Stay in Wet Clothes
Stay Hydrated

This is our play about play. Its packed with everything good about sport: the friends, the mishaps, the daydreams. Pretty much everything that happens by chance and makes the best memories. It has mediocre acting but is balanced by some really superb group choreography. It also has a great story, which we wrote, threw out, and then improvised.

The Spring/Summer 2010 Collection set every scene from the race track to the bedroom (bowchikabowbow). The apparel, footwear, and accessories are made for performance with their cutting edgiest material technologies and slick constructions. But, as we show in this little project of ours, the collection is also incredibly social: enabling friendships and Fu Manchu mustaches.

This whole production is about everything in between the games we play. It’s the good stuff, without all the drama.