Upset Stomachs in the NBA

This is the story of two NBA point guards. Both were drafted the same year, both were contenders for Rookie of the Year (guy on left got it), and both are blaming food and drink for current bodily woes.

Beast

There he is, point guard of the hour #1. Thursday Derek Rose announced that he had stomach ulcers caused from eating too much spicy food. Friday night he played anyway, for 38 minutes and 22 points.

Did he really have stomach ulcers or was he faking it? And if so, were they really caused by spicy food?

He probably wasn’t lying. He’s just a beast. There are three main parts of the intestinal track in which ulcers originate—the esophagus (called an esophageal ulcer), the stomach (a gastric ulcer) and the most common, the duodenum (a duodenal ulcer). The duodenum is the upper part of the small intestine. Most often, a bacteria called helicobacter pylori colonizes the duodenum, over-stimulating the production of gastric acid. Gastric acid is necessary for digestion, but too much of it causes a depletion in the duodenum’s protective mucus layer.

GROSS, RIGHT? Here’s a friendlier image of what's happening:



So, Rose’s ulcer could have been duodenal and caused by the cutie at left. Awww.






HOWEVER, he’s a professional athlete…under a lot of bodily stress…couldn’t NSAIDs (non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs) be partly to blame? Yes. NSAIDs such as asprin or Ibuprophen can inhibit the the stomach’s secretion of its protective mucus lining. The ulcer would be gastral, not duodenal. The likelyhood that NSAIDs were to blame depends on whether Rose has chronic pain.

There’s always a chance it could have been the spicy food. I’m not his doctor.

As for the other bballer: O.J. Mayo (O.J. jokes withheld) was recently suspended for ten games for testing positive for the performing-enhancing drug dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA. Though he was drafted the same year as Rose, Mayo’s career has not launched in the same fashion. This season in particular has been riddled with off-court drama and the loss of his starting position.

The NBA suspension announcement came Thursday (about the same time Rose was in the worst pain); Mayo announced Saturday that the performance-enhancing drug must’ve been in an energy drink he bought at a gas station. Is this possible? And/or likely?

No idea. DHEA exists organically in the human body; it is secreted by the andrenal glands (part of the hormone-information-sharing endocrine system, located above the kidneys) and the brain. Studies have shown that supplementation of DHEA doesn’t have too significant of an impact on performance and sometimes even elevates the levels of estrogen instead of the intended testosterone.

Thus, it is entirely possible that he did just get punked by the energy drink people. God knows those things contain everything under the kitchen sink…



Parties like a rock star. (Especially during his USC years.)

Win/Lose/Tie? You'll Still be Sore.

best sport EVER

WARNING: This article contains information that may trigger muscle contractions in readers who participated in the Phoenix Cactus Classic Field Hockey Tournament this past weekend. Read with caution.

In mid-December, I played a pick-up field hockey game in Fort Collins, Colorado with friends. We played for about an hour and half—a rewarding workout but not overexerting. I wasn’t tired the next day, nor was I nervous about participating in a two-day tournament in Phoenix six weeks later. Field hockey, yay, field hockey, my muscles were telling me.

Fast forward those six weeks to the tournament. I’d tried to keep a base level of fitness in the in-between, running, biking, yogaing and/or swimming with some sort of regularity. I even ran five sprints across a goose poop covered field one day. Regardless, I failed to make it to even one field hockey session, and when game day came my muscles had all but forgotten how to contract and lengthen in field hockey fashion.

Still, I was feeling okay on Saturday. Slight Pain in the right IT band, but nothing big. By evening I felt tired, hungry, easily buzzed off the tournament party keg beer, but not too sore.

Sunday was an onslaught of pain.

I was far from pain’s only victim. One of my teammates walked onto the field with his legs and torso forming a stiff 90 degree angle, another had a dead-eyed look for the rest of the tournament. We all managed to regain the necessary amount of flexibility to play our last game, but there was a lot of “I never used to feel this way”/”Getting old sucks” chatter.

The name of this phenomenon is Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness and it’s far from unique to old people and/or field hockey players (though we do experience DOMS most acutely because field hockey is inarguably the most physically and mentally multi-dimensional sport in existence). There are three types of muscle contractions—those that lengthen muscles (eccentric contractions), those in which the muscles remain static (isometric contractions) and those that shorten muscles (concentric contractions). When you curl a dumbell into your chest, you are shortening your muscles. When you slowly bring the dumbell back down to your side, you are elongating them.

Eccentric exercises are the hardest because the muscles are working against forces. In the previous example, the muscles in your biceps are working against gravity and the weight of the dumbell, so they are decelerating the speed of the dumbell’s movement as they lengthen out to their original position. Eccentric exercises include any sort of muscle movement that requires breaking after a quick acceleration, including swinging and twisting motions, quick sprints and stops, squats, jumps and, eh, oh I just deconstructed the sport of field hockey. Look at that.

DOMS is worst in the 12-48 hours after a new bout of hard physical activity, meaning that if we were to play in a similar tournament this weekend we’d leave feeling pretty normal. Unfortunately for us, the next one isn’t until April.

Until them, keep it eccentric, field hockey gurus.