japan running news

by Brett Larner The 4th-place finish by Volha Mazuronak of Belarus at last weekend's London Marathon turned heads around the world.  Her time of 2:23:54 may become a national record pending the annulment of times run by Belarussian Alexsandra Duliba following January's announcement of Duliba's suspension on biological passport violations.  New York Road Runners professional athlete consultant David Monti was quick to point out Mazuronak's splits , a 1:13:19 first half, 1:10:35 second half and 7:08 for the final 2.195 km split from 40 km to the finish, the fastest closing split in the London women's field and on a par with or better than the 6th through 10th-place men there.  Mara Yamauchi , the second-fastest British woman ever in the marathon, wrote an analysis noting the similarity between Mazuronak's splits and those in a 2012 JRN analysis of performances by Eastern European women represented by Russian Andrey Baranov and his Spartanik agency. B...

by Brett Larner Back during my time at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, at the urging of Dr. David Bodznick I attended a lecture by the great Harvard University neurobiologist Dr. Edward Kravitz on social interaction and competitive behavior between lobsters, and its underlying biochemistry.  "Aggression is a nearly universal feature of the behavior of social animals," Dr. Kravitz said .  He explained how lobsters have a complex social hierarchy based on individual interactions, how when two lobsters meet for the first time they go through a ritualistic series of increasingly aggressive fight behaviors to establish a winner and a loser.  Once that dichotomy is established it doesn't change.  The winner remembers that it is a winner, the loser that it is a loser, they don't forget that relationship, and those roles affect their future chances of winning and losing against other lobsters.  "Memory of status lasts longer in losers of fights than ...