A merry Christmas to everyone!

The year is rapidly winding down with Christmas approaching, and with the festivities planned for next week, today may well be the last day that many of our regular readers are in their offices. If you're anything like me, you're only there in body, your mind is already looking ahead to the holiday break, however long or short it might be!

But before a lot of you left and stopped reading for a while (we hope it's only a while!) we thought we'd take this opportunity to thank all of our regulars, our subscribers, our visitors and especially the people who've contributed to making "The Science of Sport" so stimulating for US to write through their great comments.

We are extremely flattered whenever anyone is positive about the work and thanks us for the articles, but you should know that it's as stimulating and interesting for us to bring sports sciences across in a more entertaining, news-relevant manner, so we should in fact be thanking you!

We're proud to have such a discerning and informed following - some of the comments we receive would not be out of place in a scientific discussion at a conference (actually, some of the scientists at those conferences might find themselves out of place discussing concepts with some of you!). I would list some names and give specific references, but I know I'll leave people out, so let's leave it at ALL of you!

A special nod of appreciation, incidentally, go to one zig600@yahoo.com - you couldn't have know this, but you were the first person to ever sign up to receive our daily posts via email (you can do this at the top left corner of the site, incidentally)! And then to the next 368 people who've done the same, (welcome (Annethea, you are the newest 'member'!), thank you for inviting us into your inboxes!

What does the remainder of 2007 hold in store?

Things slow down to a crawl over this part of the year, especially here in SA where it's our summer break - most people have been off for a week and probably only return to work in early January, so we're going to save our series for 2008 - altitude, lactate, fatigue, and whatever else is thrown up!

Until then, we will look back on the year that was, and give some of our more entertaining analyses of sports events from the year past. We'll also look ahead to 2008, a Nostradamus exercise of predicting the future as a bit of fun!

2008 being an Olympic Year, with all attention geared towards Beijing, there will be some fantastic news for us to write on, as well as some hopefully interesting series!

With that, then, we would like to wish all our readers a very safe, happy, and rewarding Christmas and New Year. If you are travelling, do so safely, keep training, and we hope 2008 is a prosperous year for all.

Best wishes
Ross
Jonathan