Spring soon–(sort of)

It’s March, and if we can’t have pics of flowers in bloom or green sports fields then we’ll settle for a cute chick.

The calendar says March, but looking outside tells me something different.  I think we’re doing better with our snow here and now than Sochi ever did for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

The high school and university student athletes in central Ohio, where I am writing this blog post, are trying to train for their spring sports–track and field, lacrosse, baseball; but they are definitely doing most of it indoors still.  We are all wondering if the snow will still be around when competitions begin by the end of the month. Imagine a steeplechase pit full of ice–now that’s an incentive to work on your steepling form you distance runners!

There are signs of Spring, of course.  One of my household chickens was squawking the other morning, and on investigation we discovered the first egg of the new year.  It had been four months since that last happened!!!

Moving from the backyard to the sports world: the NCAA college basketball world is heating up with pre-March Madness craziness.  Can Kentucky complete a perfect season, something not done in DI men’s basketball since Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers did so in 1976? We’ll soon find out.

And then, there is the March issue of the journal, which will have hit your respective iPads, inboxes (via eTOC) or mailboxes by now.  The promise of spring is surely within those covers:  we have the research and case abstracts from the upcoming American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) annual meeting, to take place in balmy Florida mid-April. Dip into those abstracts and feel the warmth of the subtropical sun!

There are several very interesting pieces of original research in the new CJSM, including one on risk factors for acute mountain sickness authored by a group from Taiwan, one which I have previously profiled here on the blog.  There are links on the main page as well to our ever growing library of podcasts.  If you missed our most recent interview with Chris Nowinski of the Sports Legacy Institute, it’s never too late:  all the podcasts are archived and can be obtained in multiple ways, including iTunes.

There will be many blog posts coming profiling all the contents of the issue.

As the Northern Hemisphere turns more, day by day, toward the warmth of the sun, we know that Spring will inevitably arrive.  In the mean time, for all of you still under Winter’s domination and beyond:  enjoy the wide world of sports medicine with us–in the journal, here on the blog, on Twitter, and in our podcasts.