Drinks. By Joseph Conrad.
Sport drinks are electrolyte replacement beverages popular among athletes to replace water lost during exercise. It is important to drink plenty of fluids during strenuous exercise, especially during hot weather, because the body requires water for efficient cooling and for efficient operation of the kidneys in moving wastes from the blood. Glucose sodium sport drinks provide extra sugar and sodium, which also promote rapid fluid uptake by the small intestine. Some beverages contain glucose polymers (maltodextrins), small fragment of scratch. Glucose polymer beverages may be more effective than glucose drinks in replacing carbohydrates and in increasing blood sugar during endurance events (more than two hours in duration).
They do not slow the passage of liquid through the stomach as a high-glucose concentration does. Simple carbohydrates seem to provide their greatest benefit when exercise exceeds 60 minutes. A potential benefit of consuming glucose replacements during exercise is that fluid intake may increase if the taste is more appealing than plain water. The carbohydrate-electrolyte sport drink should be mixed so that the carbohydrate concentration is less than 10 percent to minimize retention by the stomach. On the other hand, the carbohydrate concentration should be at least 6 percent to improve endurance. When fluid loss is reduced by a cold environment such as in cross-country skiing, fluids with a carbohydrate concentration greater than 10 percent are appropriate. Sport drinks often contain more sugar and salt than are needed for optimal absorption of fluids, and they often contain less potassium than a glass of orange juice. Plain water, which is both easily absorbed and palatable, effectively replaces water lost with strenuous exercise. In general, there does not seem to be any need to replace electrolytes lost through sweating by consuming expensive beverages. Sport drinks appear likely to improve performance only in endurance exercise or day-long events. Diluted fruit juices are usually adequate electrolyte replacements. Fruit juices should be diluted at least twofold from standard preparations to prevent delayed gastric emptying. Electrolytes and carbohydrates are readily replenished by eating a banana, fruit, or crackers with water. Many commercial soft drinks contain caffeine, which acts as a diuretic. Therefore, athletes are advised to limit their intake of such beverages.
Early history of the sport. By Thomas Pynchon.
The history of sport probably extends as far back as the existence of people as purposive sportive and active beings. Sport has been a useful way for people to increase their mastery of nature and the environment. The history of sport can teach us a great deal about social changes and about the nature of sport itself. Sport seems to involve basic human skills being developed and exercised for their own sake, in parallel with being exercised for their usefulness. It also shows how society has changed its beliefs and therefore there are changes in the rules. Of course, as we go further back in history the dwindling evidence makes the theories of the origins and purposes of sport difficult to support. Nonetheless, its importance in human history is undeniable.
Sports that are at least two and a half thousand years old include hurling in Ireland, harpastum (similar to rugby) in Rome, cuju (similar to association football) in China, and polo in Persia. The Mesoamerican ballgame originated over three thousand years ago.
There are artifacts and structures that suggest that the Chinese engaged in sporting activities as early as 2000 BC. Gymnastics appears to have been a popular sport in China's ancient past. Monuments to the Pharaohs indicate that a number of sports, including wrestling, weightlifting, long jump, swimming, rowing, shooting, fishing and athletics, as well as various kinds of ball games, were well-developed and regulated several thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt. Other Egyptian sports included javelin throwing, high jump, and wrestling. Ancient Persian sports such as the traditional Iranian martial art of Zourkhaneh. Among other sports that originated in Persia are polo and jousting.
Sports in the Middle Ages. By Christopher Marlowe.
The sports of medieval times were less well-organized. Fairs and seasonal festivals were occasions for men to lift stones or sacks of grain and for women to run smock races (for a smock, not in one). The favourite sport of the peasantry was folk football, a wild sort of noholds-barred unbounded game that pitted married men against bachelors or one village against another. The violence of the game, which survived in Britain and in France until the late 19th century, was such that Renaissance humanists, such as Sir Thomas Elyot, condemned it as more likely to maim than to benefit the participants.
The nascent bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance amused itself with archery matches, some of which were arranged months in advance and staged with considerable fanfare. When town met town in a challenge of skill, the companies of crossbowmen and longbowmen marched behind the symbols of St. George, St. Sebastian, and other patrons of the sport. It was not unusual for contests in running, jumping, cudgeling, and wrestling to be offered for the lower classes who attended the match as spectators. Grand feasts were part of the program, and drunkenness commonly added to the revelry. In Germanic areas, a Pritschenkoenig was supposed to simultaneously keep order and entertain the crowd with clever verses.
The burghers of medieval towns were welcome to watch the aristocracy at play, but they were not allowed to participate in tournaments or even, in most parts of Europe, to compete in imitative tournaments of their own. Tournaments were the jealously guarded prerogative of the medieval knight and, along with hunting and hawking, his favourite pastime. At the tilt, in which mounted knights with lances tried to unhorse one another, the knight was practicing the art of war, his raison d'être. He displayed his prowess before lords, ladies, and commoners and profited not only from valuable prizes but also from ransoms exacted from the losers. Between the 12th and the 16th centuries, the dangerously wild free-for-all of the early tournament evolved into dramatic presentations of courtly life in which elaborate pageantry and allegorical display quite overshadowed the frequently inept jousts. Some danger remained even amid the display. At one of the last great tournaments, in 1559, Henry II of France was mortally wounded by a lance blow.
Peasant women participated freely in the ball games and footraces of medieval times, and aristocratic ladies hunted and kept falcons, but middle-class women contented themselves with spectatorship. Even so, they were more active than their contemporaries in Heian Japan during the 8th to the 12th century. Encumbered by many-layered robes and sequestered in their homes, the Japanese ladies were unable to do more than peep from behind their screens at the courtiers' mounted archery contests.
Deeper. By Thomas Dekker.
The Latin words «Citius, Altius, Fortius» have been used as the Olympic motto since the Modern Olympics started in 1894. In English, we translate that motto into «Swifter, Higher, Stronger». Now, with the possibility of adding «Extreme Sports», popular competitive events that test the limits of human endurance and talents in ways not thought of in 1894, the current Olympic’s organizers may also have to rethink their motto.
Extreme Free Diving (EFD) is a sport that is growing in participants worldwide and is being discussed as a possible Olympic event. If accepted into the Olympics, EFD could make the Olympic’s organizers think about adding a new Latin term into the motto that we could translate as «Deeper».
Most of us think of deep water diving as the use of snorkels, masks, and fins to help us dive down beneath the surface of the water. Then there is scuba diving. Scuba divers wear wet suits made out of material to protect against the cold; they need oxygen and other equipment that enable them to safely breathe while traveling deep beneath the surface of the sea. For those with the courage and opportunity to attend the required classes and certification process to scuba dive and have actually entered the deep and swum with the fish and coral, scuba diving is an extremely gratifying experience. But is it the ultimate underwater extreme sport for those who like to live on the edge? When scuba diving is compared to Extreme Diving, diving without a tank of oxygen deeper and farther from the surface than anyone had imagined it would be possible to go, scuba diving seems a little less «Extreme». Extreme Free Diving has become very competitive and is exploding in popularity with «extreme» divers wherever athletes live near a sea.
The first official European record for Extreme Free Diving was recorded in 1911 when Greek Yorgos Haggi Statti descended to the depth of 253 feet, almost the length of a football field. He dove without a mask, fins, or an oxygen tank. He just dove.