Eighteen highly-trained runners ran two half marathons in mild environmental conditions, 3 wk apart, consuming either 426 +/- 227 mL of a flavored placebo drink (PLACEBO) or an equivalent volume of water (386 +/- 185 mL) and a commercial gel (GEL) supplying 1.1 +/- 0.2 g/kg body mass (BM) carbohydrate (CHO). Voluntary consumption of this fluid was associated with a mean BM change of approximately 2.4%. Runners performed better in their second race by 0.9% or 40 s (P = 0.03). Three runners complained of gastrointestinal discomfort in GEL trial, which produced a clear impairment of half-marathon performance by 2.4% or 105 s (P=0.03). The effect of GEL on performance was trivial: time was improvedby 0.3% or 14 s compared with PLACEBO (P = 0.52). Consuming the gel was associated with a 2.4% slower time through the 2 x 200 m feed zone; adding a trivial approximately 2 s to race time. Although benefits to half marathon performance were not detected, the theoretical improvement during 1-h exercise with CHO intake merits further investigation.
Heart transplantation is now routinely offered as a treatment for end-stage heart failure, and the "gift-of-life" metaphor has become pervasive in this context, forming the foundation on which transplantation discourses rest. In this article, we question organ-as-gift understandings of transplantation. One can also legitimately think of the transplanted organ as a donation, with distinct implications in terms of the transplantation experience for the recipient. We explored the transplantation experience of 13 heart recipients in Australia. We conducted semistructured interviews, and our interpretative phenomenological analysis of the data resulted in three themes: deservingness, nuances of gratitude, and giving forward. Our results indicate that differences between organ-as-gift and organ-as-donation understandings of transplantation are more than merely semantic. Organ-as-donation understandings raise the issue of deservingness, with recipients' assessments of their worthiness influencing their posttransplant experience of gratitude and, ultimately, the meaning(s) gleaned from their transplant experiences.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.