We are especially pleased to welcome Dr. Claude Bouchard from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center with us today in the podcast.  Dr. Bouchard is one of the most prominent Exercise Physiologists in the world with over 1000 scientific publications - and an h-factor over 90 (which is a measure of scientific impact - 90 is an amazing score!).  Dr. Bouchard has been forerunner in working to discover the genetic regulation of both obesity and exercise capacity.

Today's podcast is the third of our Olympic themed podcasts.  One of the great Exercise Physiologists joins us today - Dr. Ed Coyle from the University of Texas.  Dr. Coyle is with us in advance of the London Olympic Marathon to talk about whether a human will ever run a sub-2 hour marathon.  Dr. Coyle also talks about his past work with Lance Armstrong measuring his exercise capacities.  This is a fun conversation with one of the best physiologists of our time.

The London Olympics is just around the corner and of course, and with all of the performances and stories that will happen there, David Epstein from Sports Illustrated is with us today to give us a heads-up as to what he thinks will be the intriguing stories of these Olympics.  Mr. Epstein has been with us for previous podcasts (video here, here, here, and here!) and I appreciate his '30,000 foot' view of sports and the interesting stories in sports medicine.

We are pleased to have Mr. Kevin Bastin, Director of Athletic Training Services for the Ironman Sports Medicine Institute at Memorial Hermann Hospital with us in the podcast.  We chat about athletic training and rehabilitation of elite athletes and recreational athletes.  It's a fun conversation!

How are schools working to keep kids active in the face of the elimination of physical education classes? Join Health and PE Specialist Matt Belles from the 17th largest school district in the country as we chat about this issue.

Dr. Walt Thompson from Georgia State University joins us today and talks about the American Fitness Index and why you should know about this index.  Also, we talk about how to keep kids active after school and what Walt is doing to work on that.  Dr. Thompson is a rare scientist that works in the lab and still does quite a bit in the community to put in practice his findings.

IndyCar driver Charlie Kimball joins us to talk about the special sports medicine needs of an IndyCar driver as well as his special physiological needs.  Charlie is the first elite racing driver to race with Type 1 Diabetes and it is incredibly interesting to hear how his team (and IndyCar) handles his condition.  Charlie is by far and away, he's the fastest athlete we've talked to!

We've got something different for you this week.  Our friends over at EscapePod.org are allowing us to broadcast one of their episodes - "Fuel" by Matthew Rotundo - that deals with the future of athletic performance enhancement.  This is a great episode to generate conversation about the future of performance and what we will allow as a society.  So, give it a listen and we hope you enjoy this special episode.

Dr. Charlie Shea, expert in figuring out how we move and coordinate our movements, joins us today in the podcast.  We have fun talking about sport, music, and everyday movement and how our brain coordinates all of that movement. 

It's our 50th Podcast Celebration!  We're lucky to have as a special guest Dr. Larry Kenney, Professor from the Noll Laboratory at Penn State University.  Dr. Kenney is an eminent Exercise Scientist that has spent most of his career looking at why aging hinders our ability to handle heat.  Join us for this fun, entertaining conversation.