davideTHU

Peak Performance Analysis of the Track and Field 5000m Event

5000m is one of the most fascinating track and field disciplines to me. At first sight, a 5000m may seem short, especially if seen as running a “5km“. However, it assumes a different meaning when seen from the point of view of covering 12.5 laps on a track running close to the aerobic threshold: a single lap may feel endless. 5000m track race A mix of endurance and speed is required to master…

Train hard and recover harder: why you should take a recovery week

You might believe that the optimal strategy for training for a marathon or other target race is to hit your peak mileage and maintain it for several weeks. By doing this, you’ll make sure to get the most out of your fitness and prepare well for your target race, right? Maybe not. It may have happened that after a period of heavy training load you start to feel exhausted from even the easiest of…

Challenging the memory of RL agents

Reinforcement learning agents are usually trained to maximize their rewards by taking actions in an environment following a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A Markov Decision Process is simply a model that defines the state of an environment by its current state, actions, and rewards, including also its possible future states. MDP process The key point is that agents know information from the…

Exploring Transformer Model for Reinforcement Learning

Transformers in RL MLP is widely used in RL to implement a learnable agent in a certain environment trained according to a specific algorithm. Recent works in NLP have already proved that Transformer can replace and outperform MLP in most tasks leading to expanding its utilization in areas outside of NLP such as Computer Vision. However, in RL the Transformer architecture is still not widely…

A scientific perspective of legs strength training for distance running

It is well known that strength training for distance runners provides a number of benefits that should be taken into consideration by both novel and more experienced runners. Primarily, strength training increases your strength and power, which will have a direct impact on your running performance. It also increases your running economy, which means you’ll be able to run faster with the same…

Speed benchmark einsum vs matmul in XL-Attention

The original Transformer can only attend to a fixed and limited segment of the input to compute its attention. The major drawback of this architecture is that no information can flow across separated segments which prevents the Transformer to model long-term dependencies. Transformer-XL is an enhancement to the vanilla Transformer which enables the latter to store the most recent hidden states in…

GPX Files Distance Modifier: Don’t lose your progress

👉 Has it ever happened that your watch stopped or had ant malfunction during your workout, thus losing part of your activity? Or has it happened that due to bad GPS signal your watch recorded a shorter distance than your actual one? 🤔 👉 Imagine that, after a maximal effort, you have just broken your 10km PB but your watch only recorded 9.8km, thus failing to register your record. How would you…

The manual of the Elite runner: a review of the state-of-the-art training characteristics

In this post, we are going to review and analyze the training habits and training principles of some Elite World-class long-distance runners. Our goal is to understand what makes those athletes reach such high-performance levels by combining scientific literature and practice-based proven results. Most of the content comes from the paper: The Training Characteristics of World-Class Distance…

Studying at Tsinghua University as a foreigner

GPX Files Cleaner: Dropping Unnecessary Pauses

👉 How frequently it happens that your running or cycling activities are interrupted by a red traffic light, the need to drink some water, or simply to wait your partner to reach you? 🤔👉 Even if you pause your watch during your activity, thus not recording any distance, it will still continue to record your total time which will be then showed as your elapsed time in your application such as…

Advantages of running from home to work

Spartan Obstacles: technique is all you need

In this article, we are going to introduce some of the Spartan Race most difficult and tricky obstacles and learn useful techniques to conquer them. Most competitors may think that strength is the key and that strong men are advantaged when going through the obstacles. However, in this article we are going to see that technique is (almost) all you need, and that no matter your level of fitness,…

🎮 Use AI to translate all the dialogs and texts of your RPGMaker automatically. 👊 You worked hard to make your game, now let AI work hard for you. Why should you use it? 👉 RPG games usually consist of many thousands of dialog events and other forms of text displaying valuable information to understand the plot of the game, but also to know the effect and proprieties of various objects present…

Running Performance Calculator: Altitude, Elevation Gain, and Temperature

👉 Have you ever wondered if you ran 10km at 2000m altitude, how fast would you run the same distance at lower altitudes? How would elevation gain and temperature affect your performance? 🤔 👉 The goal of this application is to calculate how your running pace and time would change given different elevation gain, altitude, and temperature. view web app Open on github Features Support for…

Benefits of Contrast Hydrotherapy

Contrast showers, sometimes also known as contrast hydrotherapy, are showers in which our body temperature changes from hot to cold and back again by alternating between hot then cold water. A contrast shower usually consists of three to five complete cycles of hot and cold water. The hot water causes blood vessels to dilate, thereby pushing the blood to the skin’s surface, and cold water causes…

How I got top-5 in an Elite Beast Spartan Race

The ultimate Spartan test; a soul crushing half marathon with 30 obstacles. You’ll rarely find a Beast on flat ground, so your legs will burn with brutal ascents and descents. The Beast is notorious around the world for its difficulty.Beast Spartan Race In this post, I’m going to write about how I prepared my first Elite BEAST Spartan Race and will share my impressions and thoughts about it. It…