RunCoachJason.com Coaching, Consulting, & Freelance Writing

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Copyright ©2008 Jason Karp. All rights reserved.

It was not long after participating in my first track meet in junior high that I became interested in human motion. There was something exciting about running faster than the guy in the lane next to you, something intriguing about how to do it. Sport, after all, is engaging. I slowly become interested in the “science” of sports and exercise, in a crude sort of way. After all, as a teenager, it was not as if I was studying lactate threshold or running kinematics. This romantic notion of how the human body’s performance may be improved by perfecting its physiology has led me to places I probably never would have been to otherwise, including a small, rural, college town in Pennsylvania named State College, an Olympic city in Canada, a railroad and limestone town in Indiana, and the high desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

My research interests include:

Altitude physiology and endurance performance
Biomechanics of track and field
Glycogen resynthesis and endurance performance
Nutritional strategies for optimal recovery
Central and peripheral limitations to maximal oxygen consumption
Relationship between breathing and stride rate in distance runners
Cardiovascular physiology of distance runners
Exercise-induced hypoxemia in elite endurance athletes
Effects of training on carbohydrate and fat metabolism
Metabolic causes of muscle fatigue
Training VO2max, lactate threshold, and running economy
Motor unit recruitment
Sex differences in metabolism during exercise
Genetics and athletic performance

Entrainment of Breathing to Locomotion in Highly-Trained Distance Runners

My doctoral dissertation examined the entrainment (coordination) of

the breathing rhythm to stride rate in highly-trained distance runners while running at different percentages of their ventilatory thresholds.

Training Characteristics of U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials

Qualifiers

My recent research examined the training characteristics of the 2004

U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers, with comparisons between

men and women and elite and national-class athletes. This research

was recognized by the local media in Bloomington, Indiana’s Herald-

Times newspaper (8/22/04), and was presented at the American

College of Sports Medicine conference in June, 2005 and the American Society of Exercise Physiologists conference in March, 2006. Click

here for a press release of the study’s results. To download the full

scientific article, Training Characteristics of Qualifiers for the U.S.

Olympic Marathon Trials, published in International Journal of

Sports Physiology and Performance, click here.

Chocolate Milk as a Post-Exercise Recovery Aid

Other recent research compared the ingestion of chocolate milk to

a fluid replacement drink (Gatorade) and a carbohydrate replacement drink (Endurox) between workouts on endurance cycling performance, and was presented at the American College of Sports Medicine conference in June, 2004. For a press release on the study, click

here. To download the full scientific article, Chocolate Milk as a Post-Exercise Recovery Aid, published in International Journal of

Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, click here. Owing to

the popular interest in chocolate milk, this research has also been recognized by the media:

Newspapers:

Herald-Times (Bloomington, IN, 8/1/04 & 12/16/04)

Chicago Tribune (10/31/04)

Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY, 11/25/04)

Indiana Daily Student (Indiana University, 12/7/04)

The News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, IN, 12/14/04)

The Cardinal Tales (Redwood Valley (MN) High School, 12/17/04)

Times Record News (Wichita Falls, TX, 12/18/04)

The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA, 12/19/04)