Jen Kessy, Team USA Beach Volleyball
“Mix up your routine.”
Changing it up in the gym might be the secret to lifelong fitness. Maybe that’s why Jen Kessy, a standout on Team USA Volleyball, has been in the game so long. In fact, research shows it to be true: When 52 people were broken up into three groups—one that varied its workouts, one that did the same thing every time, and one that had no regulations—most of the people who dropped out of the study were from the group that didn’t switch things up, according to a University of Florida at Gainesville study. The group that varied its routines found exercise 20 percent more enjoyable than the other groups. (Want a brand new fitness system that will sculpt every single muscle in your body? more
1. Renaud Lavillenie……… (France)
Making it to a third Olympic Games is certainly special enough.This is even truer when you consider how close this was to being the fourth Olympiad for University of South Dakota graduate Derek Miles.When you toss in the fact that Miles is now less than two months away from his 40th birthday, this story moves into the remarkable category.And, when you take into account that Miles is a pole vaulter, certainly one of the more athletically demanding endeavors in all of sports, the unlikelihood of it all becomes pretty much astronomical.Never mind that Miles is heading to London today just a matter of weeks after an injury seemed certain to keep him out of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in Eugene, Ore.“Two days before we left for the trials I had to stop a jump session,’’ said Miles, who has had lingering problems with the Achilles tendon in his right foot and has recently seen that injury morph into something more serious. “I couldn’t even run down the runway. We got on the plane and we thought this isn’t going to work. It’s not going to happen.’’Fortunately, Miles was heading to Oregon nearly a full week early because he’s now the jumps coach at USD and two of his female pole vaulters, Bethany Buell and Emily Grove, were both competing in the women’s trials several days before the men’s . 
The athletes representing Team USA in London are about as top-notch as they come. They’re quick, have incredible strength and endurance, and they’re dedicated. But they’re also human. These world-class Olympians fatigue. They experience fear and disappointment. And they’re definitely not invincible.Case in point: A week before the 2008 trials for Beijing, Eric Shanteau—Olympian and world champion breaststroker—was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Some people would have given up, but Shanteau competed anyway. That’s not to say it was easy. Being diagnosed with cancer was downright difficult, says the 28-year-old Shanteau, who had never had any kind of surgery before he was hit with the news. So what was going on in his mind that helped him board that flight to Beijing? “It’s not so much what you think about, but more what you don’t think about,” the swimmer says. “You have to block out any negative thoughts, and concentrate on the good things that can come out of your situation.”In Shanteau’s case, the good that came was a realization of his own mental strength. “I learned that I can deal with stressful scenarios,” he says. But a cancer 
Why American-born athletes Donald Sanford and Jillian Schwartz are competing for Israel’s team in London On Saturday morning, Illinois-native Jillian Schwartz and Los Angelino Donald Sanford will put on their uniforms and take the Olympic stage in London where they will compete in the qualifying rounds for pole vault and 400-meter dash, respectively. But the two former U.S. citizens won’t be wearing red, white, and blue. They’ll be competing for Israel, as the only American-born members of the Jewish state’s Olympic team. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of what’s been dubbed “Olympic Citizenship”: athletes switching nationalities in order to compete for a country other than the one they were born in. Pre-Olympic attention this year focused on “plastic Brits”—the 60 athletes (of 542) competing for host team Great Britain who were born elsewhere, the majority of whom only recently secured British passports. According to the Olympic Charter, this practice is acceptable, so long as athletes have lived in the country for which they are competing for at least three years. But many see it as a cynical trend that undermines the integrity of the games. athletes like Schwartz and Sanford, however, the ability to compete for Israel has given them the opportunity to be big fishes in a smaller pond. “People know who I am,” Schwartz explained. “The country is totally supportive of us.” Jillian Schwartz has been running competitively since she was 13, first on her high-school team and then in college. Now 32, she took up pole vaulting while attending Duke University on an athletic scholarship for track and field and never looked back, even marrying a fellow Duke pole vaulter, Seth Benson, in 2008. An economics major, Schwartz set records for both indoor and outdoor pole vaulting and won the school’s first women’s Eastern College Athletic Conference title before graduating in 2001. 
