The further into the fortnight you get, the fewer people you have living under coach-policed curfews, forced to abstain from the bacchanalia. And once they’re done, watch out: thousands of young people with boundless energy and great legs are suddenly let loose.
Once freed, many athletes simply cannot control themselves. They are slaves to an irresistible physiological force called "tapering" that works like this: many competitors in endurance sports consume as many as 9,000 calories a day at the height of their training cycles. But they swim or run or pedal seven hours a day to burn these off. In order to peak for the Games, however, they reduce their training time to mere minutes in the days preceding their events while keeping the calorie count virtually constant. Thus an athlete is spring-loaded for his or her moment in the sun: lots of rest, lots of energy - boom. The results, particularly within a large, like-minded population, can be electric. "When you have 10,000 people walking around who are amped up on their own glycogen you can almost see the sparks flying off their skin," says BJ Bedford, the American backstroke gold-medallist at Sydney.
story via: dr.menlo
~I was thinking sports training at the international level was obsessive-compulsive behavior at it's most outrageous.
(Who needs to imagine abductions by space aliens when there's human beings putting themselves through the regimes demanded by professional sports?)
Now I see the physical rewards are more immediate, more absorbing and less punishing.
Also via Dr. Menlo Google links to: "sex is good for you"
~But the older you get the more it costs.