Help Educate Olympians on Benefits of Compression Socks

I stumbled across some photos of the 2012 London Olympics and noticed something shocking. None of them were wearing any compression gear!

Uninformed Olympians

Anyone who's done a triathlon or half marathon knows compression totally works to make you faster by stopping muscle vibrations, lactic acid build up and preventing injuries not to mention helping you recover faster. Why haven't any of these so called Olympians figured it out yet? I must say I'm surprised as they always seem to be looking for the edge over their competition. Some even take drugs! Compression socks are totally legal.

Fit ladies totally rocking the compression
socks (credit: www.bitchyrunners.com)

So what I've done is formulated a three point plan that we can all participate in to reach out to Olympians so they're all clued in before Rio Olympics in 2016.

1. Send them to Race Expos

Elite athletes sometimes have to go to press conferences, skip registration and train before the event so they might be missing out on the pre-race expos they have at their events. There are tons of companies that make awesome compression gear. Many of them go to the Expos and all of them have experts at the booths that can help you formulate a recovery plan. They are just there to help and educate you. Oh and you can buy the socks right there on the spot so make sure they know to bring their credit card. Convenient, huh? Some of the consultants I've spoken to even run themselves.

2. Tell them about Meb Keflezighi

Meb, if you don't know, wins nearly every Rock n' Roll Half Marathon he enters. He's an American so he probably has better education and access to resources than some of the runners from East Africa and Sudan and such.  Some of those countries can't even afford roofs on their schools.

Meb looking tired before he
 knew about compression

Meb knows about compression. Like all of us who wear them, he has totally PRed in them. His PR is 2:09.08 which is seven seconds faster than when he wasn't wearing them. Seven seconds might not sound much to regular runners like us but it's MASSIVE for an Olympian.

Awesome testimonials from real runners.

He probably wouldn't like this but if you run across one of his African competitors tell them about compression socks and that Meb wears them. If they don't believe you tell them to get a Competitor magazine. He's in every issue wearing them. Competitor magazine is free too so they shouldn't hassle you for money either if they are from one of the poorer countries.

3. Get them into Social Media

Facebook Fan pages and mommy runner blogs are great sources of information for everything running and endurance. Try and friend an Olympian and send them some links of good running sites so they can educate themselves on what we already know. They can read the comments themselves and see how stoked people are on their compression socks.

I've also made this ready-made tweet for you to raise awareness:

Help Us Educate Olympians on Benefits of Compression! http://bit.ly/141MaB7 @tricoachmartin #runchat #runnerds