Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

There are various dietary supplements that are purported to enhance exercise performance by reducing lactic acid levels in the blood during exercise. Most such claims are based on outdated beliefs about the effects of lactic acid on exercise performance.

First of all, the muscles do not produce lactic acid during exercise. They produce a very similar substance called lactate. Until recently, it was believed that lactate produced by the muscles during exercise caused fatigue by making the muscles too acidic to function properly. However, it has been discovered that lactate does not contribute to rising muscle acidity during intense exercise. What’s more, increased muscle acidity is now known to be only a minor factor contributing to muscle fatigue.

This does not mean that all supplements affecting lactate metabolism and muscle acidity during exercise are non-performance-enhancing. While lactate is not among the acids that contribute to muscle fatigue, and while muscular acidosis is only a minor factor contributing to exercise fatigue, it’s still a factor, and there are supplements known to enhance exercise performance by slowing the decline in muscle pH balance that is normally seen during intense exercise. Let’s take a look at them.

Beta-alanine

Beta-alanine is a non-essential amino acid. In the body it is combined with another amino acid, histidine, to form a compound called carnosine, which buffers acids produced by the muscles during exercise. Studies on the effects of beta-alanine supplementation on exercise performance have produced mixed results, but some have shown increases in anaerobic capacity (or fatigue resistance at very high intensities). The beta-alanine dosage level that has been proven effective in studies is 3-6 grams daily. Most experts say 1 to 4 grams daily is plenty.

Sodium Bicarbonate

Best known as baking soda, sodium bicarbonate is also the most abundant acid buffer in muscle tissue. Sodium bicarbonate ingestion has been shown to improve performance in single-bout, high-intensity events, and in repeated sprint workouts, probably due to an increase in buffering capacity. Recommended dosage is 0.2-0.4 gram per kilogram of bodyweight before exercise. Possible side effects include nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, so be sure to try sodium bicarbonate preloading in training before you try it in a race.

Sodium Citrate

Sodium citrate is a salt associated with critic acid.  It occurs naturally in a variety of foods, including many fruits.  It is also an intermediate product of aerobic metabolism in the human body. When consumed in food or produced in the body, sodium citrate quickly degrades into sodium bicarbonate. The most reliable results seem to follow when about 0.5 gram of sodium citrate per kilogram of body weight is dissolved into a liter of flavored water (it’s unpalatable in plain water) and consumed about 90 minutes before racing.

Sodium Phosphate

Sodium phosphate is mainly responsible for regulating acid-base balance in body tissues.  It is also a major component of a compound that helps release oxygen from red blood cells. Scientists believe that, like sodium citrate, sodium phosphate plays a role in preventing muscular acidosis during very intense exercise.  The sodium phosphate loading protocol that proved effective in boosting time trial performance in cyclists in one study was 1 gram taken four times per day for six days prior to racing.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Dear Matt,

I am a woman, 41 years of age, and have been fairly active with walking, hiking, strength training and dance workouts. I started running last year but stopped after three or four months and did continue with other forms of workouts. I want to do a half marathon as one of my lifetime goals. How much time is enough for training? What kind of training plan do you think is good? I am able to manage running for 3 or 4 miles but it does not come easy. I am wondering if trying to train for a half-marathon at this age is too much. Please advise.

Mona

A.

Dear Mona,

Ironically, just a couple of days ago Joan Benoit Samuelson announced that, at age 53, she would attempt to meet the women’s U.S. Olympic trials marathon qualification standard of 2:47—at age 53—in the upcoming Chicago Marathon. It’s a tall order, but she ran a 2:49:09 on the much tougher New York City Marathon course last year.

My point is, if Joan Benoit Samuelson can run sub-2:50 marathons in her 50s, you can finish your first half marathon at age 41. Are you kidding me? Forty-one? That’s not very old. Not only can you take up long-distance running at that age, but you can do it pretty much the same way a college student would—that is, without making many training modifications to account for age. Kathryn Martin started running in her late 30s and went on to set numerous national age-group records, running times that most 25-year-old male runners couldn’t touch.

Yes, Joanie and Martin are genetic freaks with exceptional in-born running talent, but they are not immortal. They age at the same rate as the rest of us, so even though they are much faster than us, they are living proof of what’s possible for older runners, and even older beginning runners like yourself.

The fact that you have been active and are already able to run a few miles gives you a big advantage. This allows you to skip over the cautious, early-adaptation phase (walking, low-intensity calisthenics) that would be required if you were coming straight off the couch. That being said, I still recommend that you take a conservative, patient approach to building the fitness you will need to complete your first half marathon, because it is new territory for you.

My first recommendation is that you exercise at least six times a week every week. Everyone should, whether one is training for a half marathon or just hoping to avoid becoming obese and to live past 60. So if you’re not exercising daily already, make that your first step. Begin by adding very short, gentle workouts on the days when you’re not normally exercising. Give your body a chance to learn to recover from exercise stress in 24 hours, which it will. Then you can start making your “new” workouts longer and more intense.

You need not run more often than three times a week to prepare for a successful half marathon, and in fact you probably should not run more often than four times a week. Obviously, you need to run with fairly high frequency to stimulate the specific fitness adaptations that will enable you to run 13.1 miles, but running is hard on the body. The more often you run, the more likely you are to still be sore from the last run when you start your next one, which could lead to a downward spiral ending in injury. Many experienced runners can run twice a day every day without getting injured, but that’s not you, so I say run four times per week.

On your non-running workout days you can do some form of non-impact cardiovascular exercise, such as bicycling, or some form of strength training, such as yoga, or both. I urge all 40-plus runners especially to fit in some strength training, as it is the closest thing to a fountain of youth in the realm of exercise. A little goes a long way, too. Just three well-designed 15-minute sessions per week will pay big dividends in the form of improved strength, running economy, and injury resistance.

As for how much time to allow, the answer is enough time to gradually build the distance of your longest run of the week from 3 or 4 miles to 10 or 11 miles. Twelve weeks should be plenty. Choose one day of the week on which to do your long run and increase the distance slightly from week to week, drawing back every third or fourth week to recover and consolidate your endurance gains. Here’s an example of how you might do it:

Week 1: 4 miles

Week 2: 4.5 miles

Week 3: 5 miles

Week 4: 4 miles

Week 5: 6 miles

Week 6: 7 miles

Week 7: 5.5 miles

Week 8: 8 miles

Week 9: 9.5 miles

Week 10: 7.5 miles

Week 11: 11 miles

Week 12: Half Marathon

If you want to be extra-cautious, you can extend this build-up a few more weeks, but again, 12 weeks should be plenty.

There’s no need to do anything fancy in the other three weekly runs. They should gradually become a little longer as your training progresses, but you need not ever exceed 6 miles in any of them. Throwing some higher-intensity work into some of them will give you a little more fitness than keeping the pace always moderate, but it won’t make such a huge difference that I’d call it mandatory.

I hope you find this information helpful. Let us know how your first half marathon goes!

Matt

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

It is largely taken for granted in endurance sports that anything an athlete can do to increase his or her capacity to burn fat during races is worth doing. The idea is that fat is effectively an unlimited energy source for exercise, whereas carbohydrate is limited and therefore limiting—use it up and you’re done for the day. So it makes sense for athletes training for longer races in which carbohydrate depletion is possible to conscientiously train in ways that promise to maximize fat-burning (hence carbohydrate-sparing) capacity.

How is this done? A traditional way to train to maximize fat-burning capacity is emphasizing moderate intensity in the training process, as peak fat burning occurs within the comfort zone of 65 to 75 percent of maximum heart rate. The more you train in this zone, the more powerful your muscles’ fat-burning machinery becomes. A newer method of increasing fat-burning capacity, which complements the traditional way, is withholding carbohydrate during long, moderate-intensity workouts. That is, instead of taking a sports drink along for your long run, you take only water. The body always burns carbs preferentially when they are made available during workouts. Withholding carbs therefore forces the muscles to rely more on fat for fuel than they would if a sports drink or energy gels were consumed, and presumably this enhances the workout’s beneficial effect on the athlete’s general fat-burning capacity.

However, a new scientific review authored by Louise Burke at the Australian Institute of Sport casts cold water on this practice and the related practice of training twice a day without replenishing carbohydrate stores between workouts, so that the second is performed in a carbohydrate-depleted state. Burke writes, “Despite increasing the muscle adaptive response and reducing the reliance on carbohydrate utilization during exercise, there is no clear evidence that these strategies enhance exercise performance.” In other words, even though these methods have the desired effect on the targeted mechanism, this effect does not produce the desired final outcome of increased performance.

This conclusion suggests that increasing fat-burning capacity is not as important as many endurance athletes, coaches, and experts believe it is. No one can deny that it’s very important, but it seems to be not so important that athletes should orient the entire training process around it.

My take on the matter is that here we have another example of the common mistake of training physiology instead of training performance. This mistake always consists, in one way or another, of choosing some physiological adaptation, whether it’s increasing fat-burning capacity of increasing anaerobic threshold or something else, as the singular be-all and end-all of training. The problem with doing so is that the physiology of exercise is incredibly complex, such that no individual adaptation can be singled out as most important.

Looking “under the hood” at the physiological changes that underlie improvements in endurance performance can be interesting, but all too often it becomes a distraction from what really matters, which is improved performance—a classic example of missing the forest for the trees. The simplest and most reliable way to attain the goal of optimal race performance is to leave the hood down and focus on training for that goal. This entails paying attention to distance, time, and pace instead of things like heart rate, blood lactate level, and rate of respiratory exchange ration.

For example, if your goal is to run a three-hour marathon, your job is to build the endurance you need to run 26.2 miles and to become comfortable and efficient in running 6:52 miles. By relying on conventional, proven marathon training methods, your own trial and error, and a dash of common sense, you can do this job very effectively without knowing the first thing about how your training affects your physiology.

A well-designed and -executed marathon training plan will increase an athlete’s fat-burning capacity significantly without including any out-of-the-way efforts aimed at this particular effect. But guess what? It will probably increase the athlete’s carbohydrate-burning capacity even more. And that’s a good thing, because the typical runner capable of running a three-hour marathon will get in the neighborhood of 75 percent of his or her muscle energy from carbohydrate during the race, no matter how much he or she has trained for increased fat-burning capacity. Our muscles simply cannot burn fat fast enough to make it a major energy contributor at faster speeds.

I’m not suggesting that there’s no place in training for carbohydrate-deprived training sessions. It’s good to challenge your body in a variety of ways in the training process, and this is one relevant way to add variety. Just be sure you don’t pack your training so full of such workouts that you crowd out other sources of variety on the basis of an inflated sense of the importance of fat burning.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

There’s plenty of information available to runners about what to drink during and immediately after workouts. A lot less attention is paid to setting guidelines for what to drink during the rest of the day. So, what should you drink—and not drink?

I don’t believe in creating dietary taboos—lists of foods you should never consume. And I see no more reason to ban specific beverages than particular foods. However, some drinks are clearly better choices than others. The healthiest and most exercise-supportive options may be consumed liberally while the least healthy should have a very small place in your diet, if any.

Following is a list of 10 popular drink choices listed in descending order of how much you should consume.

Water – While there are no prohibited beverages there is one must-have beverage, and that is, of course, water. While you can get the water you need from other beverages and from fruits and vegetables, the best source is plain water.

Tea – Tea provides water for hydration plus healthy antioxidants and caffeine, which has proven benefits ranging from improved mood state to enhanced exercise performance. Regular tea drinkerss have a significantly lower risk of heart disease than the general population, thanks to the polyphenols in tea.

Fruit Juice – Fruit juice is controversial. Some argue that even 100% fruit juices are bad because they are high in sugar. Others argue that fruit juices are good because they are natural and full of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. I lean toward siding with the defenders of fruit juice. There is no evidence that 100% fruit juice is associated with weight gain. But because fruit juice provides a lot of calories without a lot of satiety, it’s best to drink it in moderation—say, two glasses a day or less.

Milk – Milk consumption has declined drastically in the past 30 years as soft drink consumption has increased. The rise in obesity has paralleled this shift. The fact that as a nation we were leanest when we drank the most milk is pretty good evidence that milk need not make you fat. And it’s a good source of protein, calcium and other good stuff. Milk is very calorically dense, so I wouldn’t recommend having it with every meal, but almost no one even wants to anymore. As long as you limit your milk consumption to one or two cups a day and limit the amount of saturated fat in the rest of your diet, it doesn’t matter much whether you drink skim, low fat, reduced fat, or whole milk (which is high in saturated fat).

Coffee – Google the phrase “coffee study” and you will be presented with many links to stories about studies demonstrating health benefits of drinking coffee, from lower risk of type 2 diabetes to increased longevity. Coffee is good for you. Still, those who drink it in very large amounts often become dependent and cannot maintain alertness and productivity without it, so “moderation” is the watchword. Consider three cups a day an upper limit.

Wine, beer, etc. – Wine is often praised for the healthfulness of its antioxidants, but its alcohol is also good for you. That’s why studies have shown that regular moderate alcohol consumption provides health benefits such as reduced heart disease risk regardless of the type of alcohol consumed. All those positives turn into negatives, though, when alcohol is consumed in excess, even occasionally, so keep it to a drink or two (wine, beer, whatever) a day.

Diet Soft Drinks – Sugar-free or “diet” soft drinks are better than regular soft drinks because they have no sugar and no calories. However, they are worse than the beverages that are higher up on this list because they contain artificial ingredients whose potential long-term health effects are unknown and because diet soft drink consumers are just as likely to be overweight as regular soft drink consumers.

Sports Drinks – The sugars and high-glycemic carbs in sports drinks are just what your body needs for maximum performance in workouts and races. They are not what your body needs at any other time of day. When not required for immediate use by the muscles, those sugars and carbs will be quickly converted to fat and stored in adipose tissue. Keep your sports drink consumption to a minimum outside of workouts.

Soft Drinks – Soft drinks are high in sugar that, as mentioned above, is readily converted to body fat when consumed at times of inactivity. Carbonated sports drinks also contain phosphates that leech calcium from bones. For these reasons they should have a very small place in your diet.

Energy Drinks – Energy drinks are just soft drinks by another name and should be eschewed for the same reasons.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

The training diary is a runner’s tradition that has been around for many decades. It goes at least as far back as Alfred Shrubb, a legendary English runner born in 1878 who kept detailed notes about his workouts, and even published a book that shared his training methods.

The impulse to keep a training log is a natural one for runners. Running 20, 30, or 40 or more miles per week, month after month, is a significant accomplishment, but it’s not like building a house—we can’t see and touch our accomplishments as runners. If you’re like me you probably can’t even remember most of the runs you’ve ever done. By keeping a training diary, we make our running achievements more concrete and less ephemeral.

Pride is only one motivation to keep a training diary, however. There are certainly others. The simple effort to keep a training diary increases our mental and emotional investment in the sport in ways that may positively affect our performance. And, of course, the information that is recorded in a training diary can be practically useful.

There are five specific ways in which keeping a training diary will help you become a better runner and find more satisfaction in your running.

Training analysis. A training diary helps you determine how well you’re training is working. It does so by enabling you to connect cause and effect, where the cause is your workouts and the effect is your changing fitness level. By looking back over the information in your training diary you can determine whether you need to run more mileage or less, whether you need more speed work or less, and so forth. There is always a way to train more effectively than you are doing today. Keeping a training diary makes it easier to find ways to train better.

Self-knowledge. Each runner is unique. Therefore no two runners can get their best results by training in exactly the same way. One of your most important duties as a runner is to learn about your running self so you can use this self-knowledge to refine your training recipe. Your training diary provides a wealth of information through which to develop such self-knowledge.

Motivation and accountability. Training can be a real grind. It takes a long time and a lot of hard work to build peak fitness for an important race. It is difficult to consistently maintain a high level of motivation throughout this process. But the price you pay for losing your motivation can be severe. Your training diary can help you avoid motivational dips by reinforcing your investment in your goals. It’s a source of accountability to the standards you have set for yourself as a runner. When you look back over all the training you have done, you can’t help but think, “I can’t stop now. Look at how much work I’ve done already!  I owe it to myself to keep my momentum going until the very end.”

Troubleshooting. Things inevitably go wrong in the training process. You develop injuries, you experience flat weeks, you have bad races, and so forth. Figuring out the cause of each setback will help you reduce the number of future setbacks you experience. Your training diary holds much of the information you need to successfully troubleshoot your setbacks. For example, in looking over your training diary during a period of injury you might discover that you tend to get injured anytime you increase your weekly running mileage above a certain rate. Armed with this information, you can hold yourself below this rate in the future and minimize your injuries.

Confidence building. Every runner experiences doubts about his or her ability to achieve race goals. The runners who most often achieve their goals are those who muster the confidence to shout down these natural voices of doubt. Your training diary can be a great source of confidence.  It is a rich record of how much hard work you’ve accomplished and how much progress you’ve made. It is the nearest thing you have to proof that you can achieve your goals before you actually achieve them. Whenever you hear those voices of doubt within you, pick up your training diary and remind yourself of how much cause you have to believe that you will achieve your goals.

How to Do It

Keeping a training diary is easy and it doesn’t take a lot of time. There are just a few basic types of information you need to record. These include the distance, duration, and format of your workout. So a training diary entry could be as simple as, “5 miles (45:59)”. When you do workouts with changes in pace, your diary entries will be a little more complex, because you’ll want to record times for each segment. For example, “1-mile warm-up (8:07), 4 x 100m strides, 10 x 300m (57, 57, 59, 56, 58, 57, 57, 57, 58, 58) w/ 300m recoveries, 1-mile cool-down (8:49).” The only other essential information is a weekly mileage total recorded at the end of each week.

If you wish, you may also record a variety of other types of information in your training diary that could be useful. These include:

Aches and pains – Noting sore spots in your diary may help you identify causes of injuries and avoid them by making your limits clear.

Heart rate – If you use a heart rate monitor in workouts, record this information in your diary. Changes in your heart rate at different paces reflect changes in fitness and fluctuations in fatigue levels.

Morning heart rate – A gradual trend toward lower morning heart rates indicates improving fitness. A spike in morning heart rate indicates fatigue.

Shoes – Noting which shoes you wear in each run will enable you to track the mileage on them and replace them on a sensible schedule (the average pair of trainers is good for about 500 miles).

Sleep – Some runners like to record the amount and/or quality of their previous night’s sleep in their diary, as it does affect running performance.

Subjective feelings – How you feel during your runs is a very important indicator of how well your training is working and your current fatigue level. Very simple notes such as “Felt great!” or “Sluggish” can help you determine what’s working and what’s not working in your training and make necessary changes.

Weather – If the weather (e.g. extreme heat) affects your performance in a run on a given day, you may wish to note that.

Weight – If you’re trying or hoping to lose weight as you train, it’s a good idea to monitor this variable so you know how different training patterns affect it.

Readymade Diaries

Many runners keep their training diaries in regular journal notebooks and day planners. But there is a variety of readymade training diaries on the market that are formatted especially for use by runners. Of course, my personal favorite is the one I created, The Runner’s Diary.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

A number of past studies have explored the effects of music on mood during and after exercise and on exercise performance. Their aggregate results support a general findings that music of the right tempo elevates exercisers’ mood state and increases the sustainable intensity and maximum duration of exercise.

Traditional models of exercise performance cannot explain the second finding because they exclude conscious perceptions as a possible influence on exercise performance. However, recent research by the likes of Samuele Marcora has demonstrated that conscious perceptions are in fact a major influence on exercise performance. A variety of agents, including caffeine ingestion, menthol tongue lozenges, and carbohydrate mouth rinses have been shown to boost exercise performance simply by making exercise feel easier.

Might music work in the same way? Perhaps so, but it remains to be proven.

In the meantime, two new studies deepen our understanding of the effects of music on exercise in other ways. Scientists at the Sport University of Cologne in Germany have observed that various physiological systems operate at a frequency of 3 Hz during running. Movements along the longitudinal axis occur at this frequency, and at the same time the heart contracts at this frequency and even cortical electrical activity exhibits a frequency of 3 Hz.

So, then: Do runners prefer to listen to music with a frequency of 3 Hz when running? The German researchers tested the hypothesis that runners would indeed, and found a very close match between the frequency of the music that a group of runners found most pleasurable to run with and the frequency of their vertical oscillation and brain electrical activity during running. The authors of the published study concluded, “Results of this study give reason to speculate that a strong relationship exists between intrinsic and extrinsic oscillation patterns during exercise. A frequency of approximately 3 Hz seems to be dominant in different physiological systems and seems to be rated as pleasurable when choosing the appropriate music for exercising. This is in line with previous research showing that an adequate choice of music during exercise enhances performance output and mood.”

That’s pretty trippy. It essentially means that we are able to consciously perceive when our bodies are vibrating in harmony with their environment during running and that, when this happens, we feel better. But does it also make us run better?

The results of a second new study suggest that the effect of the right music on running performance might depend on whether one is an experienced runner or not. Researchers at the University of Rome gathered together 13 trained runners and 13 active runners and asked them to run to exhaustion at a fixed intensity while listening to music and, on a separate occasion, in silence. They found that music significantly increased time to exhaustion for non-runners, but not for runners. They also found that, while running in silence significantly reduced anxiety levels in both groups, the addition of music reduced anxiety even more in the non-runners while having no effect on runners.

These results make sense to me. Runners are runners largely because they enjoy running. Non-runners are non-runners because they don’t. Also, running experience cultivates a taste for the sensation of running (whether one has a preexisting taste for the activity or not) and a tolerance for the sensation of endurance fatigue. So it’s not too surprising that the trained runners in this study already enjoyed running so much and were so mentally tough that music could provide no further boost to mood or endurance.

The results of this Italian study are consistent with the results of a 1995 study by researchers at the University of North Carolina, which found that uptempo music enhanced performance in non-runners and lowered performance in trained runners. And yet, although I am a runner of nearly 30 years’ experience, I get a huge charge out of passing bands on a Rock ‘n’ Roll event course and I feel there’s got to be something to that.

Further study is required.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Tim Nelson at the 2010 Aramco Houston Half Marathon. Photo: Victah Sailer @ PhotoRun

One of America’s most underappreciated runners will attempt to make a statement in Sunday’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Philadelphia Half Marathon.

Interview by: Matt Fitzgerald

Only ten Americans have ever run faster over 10,000 meters than Tim Nelson, who set a personal best of 27:31.56 at Stanford University earlier this year. Yet Nelson is less well-known than many of the runners who are close behind him on the U.S. all-time list for that event (Alan Webb, Bob Kennedy, etc.). Nelson himself is not too worried about not getting as much recognition as he deserves. He’s just focused on running even faster, knowing that if he does, the recognition will come.

A 2007 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Nelson, 26, now trains with the Nike team under coach Jerry Schumacher in Portland, Ore. Sunday he will race the Rock ‘n’ Roll Philadelphia Half Marathon in hopes of lowering the PR of 1:02:11 he set for that distance in his first attempt at it in Houston in January. Like his teammates Simon Bairu and Shalane Flanagan, Nelson is using the race as a tune-up for the New York City on November 4.

We caught up with Nelson by phone as he enjoyed a reduced-mileage recovery week in anticipation of the coming competition.

Competitor.com: How fast do you think you can go Sunday?

Tim Nelson: I haven’t really focused on any sort of pace. I’m just thinking about the competition that we have, just hanging on and trying to be comfortable with whatever happens during the race. So I don’t really have a time goal in mind. I’d like to PR. I’ve heard the course is faster than Houston. Then again, we’re not really training for a half marathon, so it’s a bit tricky, because we’re not really tapering much for the race and we haven’t done a whole lot of half marathon-specific training. A PR would be awesome.

So if you’re focused on competition, are you racing to win, or just trying to be competitive? Is there an initial pace that would be so aggressive that you wouldn’t even bother to follow whoever is setting it?

I just want to be competitive in the race. Probably most of the guys in the race are training for marathons. Some are probably a little further along in their training. We still have another six weeks before New York. Ryan [Hall] has three or four weeks before Chicago. If it works out that I’m there at the end and I’m able to get the win, that would be awesome. But like I said, Philadelphia is not our primary race of the year, so it’s not like a do-or-die situation.

To have your best possible race you need to be fit, but also fresh. How would you rate yourself currently with respect to those two factors?

I’m pretty strong, considering all the miles we put in when we were up in Mammoth Lakes the last six weeks. The altitude training and all that has contributed to feeling really strong. I’m maybe not as sharp for a half marathon as I could be. If we were training just for a half marathon I’m sure I could be a lot sharper. Also we’re just kind of training through the race. So I’m feeling strong but not terribly sharp and not that fresh, but still fresh enough to race and give it an honest effort.

How do you like marathon training?

I like it a lot. In Mammoth it’s hard not to like it, it’s such a beautiful setting to be training in. It’s really challenging on a lot of different levels. There’s the whole technical side, like learning how to take in fluids and calories. And then there’s just dealing with all the volume we’ve had to put in, and doing longer workouts. But I think years of training up to this point has really paved the way, and Jerry’s philosophy is pretty ideal for marathon training because it’s pretty high-volume anyway.

If I didn’t have that groundwork beforehand I probably would not be able to handle it very well. But luckily I’ve been putting in a lot of volume over the last two years to train for the 10,000 and I’m hoping it will also carry over to the marathon.

Do you have a sense yet of whether, as an athlete, you are well suited to the marathon? Do you think it might be the event you were born to run, or is it too early to tell?

I can’t make any predictions. From what I understand it’s an event that really needs to be learned and felt out, so my coach has confidence that I’ll be able to run pretty well. So I think I’ll be able to do pretty well somewhere down the line, if not in New York; maybe in my second or third marathon I’ll see my true potential.

Setting goals for a first marathon is tricky, because if you’re too aggressive you could blow up, but on the other hand, you don’t get many opportunities to run marathons, so you don’t want to waste one by being too conservative. How are you approaching goal-setting for New York?

Well, we just want to be competitive for the race. From what I understand, New York is a good race to be competitive in because there are no rabbits, so it’s just you against your competitors. So I’d just like to hold onto the other competitors in the race as long as I can and see where things go from there.

Is there a possibility that you will run the Olympic trials marathon?

Yeah, a pretty strong possibility. That’s definitely one of my long-term goals, is to be able to run the trials in Houston.

There aren’t many Americans who have run faster than you for 10K, but you haven’t gotten as much recognition as your performance seems to merit. Does that bother you at all?

No, I don’t feel like I deserve too much credit. With the races they’ve been setting up at Stanford these past few years, I think it’s been more ideal than in the past for running fast times at 10,000 meters. There’s a lot of other guys who were in 27:31 shape who didn’t get the opportunity to do it. I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to run in an American record-setting race. But I do feel more confident in my strength because I have run 27:31, and I think that will translate into the marathon.

Speaking of that American record-setting race, do you feel that you have the potential for a Chris Solinsky-style breakthrough in you?

Yeah, I think it’s in me. I’m not going to make any predictions with the marathon and say I’m going to go out there and set an American record or something like that. But I think I have a lot of room for improvement, and I was less than satisfied with my 10,000 time this year. Even on the track I can improve and run 10 seconds faster at least in both the 5K and the 10K. I haven’t given up on the track, and I think that marathon training will make me even stronger on the track.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

Vegetables are good for you. They are chock full of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients (nourishing plant chemicals, many of which function as antioxidants) that benefit our health in all kinds of ways. Among the many studies proving the benefits of high levels of vegetable consumption is a 2007 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, who studied the diets of nearly 17,000 men and women between the ages of 40 and 79 and found that the more vegetables (and fruits) they ate, the healthier they were.

Besides being packed with vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients, most vegetables also contain lots of fiber and water.  Why is this important? Research has shown that we tend to eat a consistent volume of food each day, regardless of how many calories are contained in it. Water and fiber increase the volume of foods without increasing calories. Vegetables are said to be less “calorically dense” than other foods because their high water and fiber content makes them very filling compared to other foods of equal calories. For example, cooked zucchini contains just 16 calories per 100 grams, whereas cheddar cheese contains 100 calories per 100 grams. Therefore, by replacing any non-vegetable food in your diet (e.g., meats, grains, dairy products) with a vegetable you can cut calories without actually eating less.

The U.S. government recommends that adults consume two and a half to three cups of vegetables (one cup of leafy salad counts as one-half cup of veggies). Seven out of 10 Americans fail to meet this requirement.

Sellers of antioxidant supplements, powdered vegetable extracts and the like will try to convince you that the reason so few of us eat enough vegetables is that eating vegetables is expensive and somehow time-consuming. These claims are ridiculous. We know very well that we don’t eat enough vegetables because we prefer the taste of hamburgers and, relatedly, because traditional breakfast and lunch food choices especially do not include vegetables.

Getting more vegetables in your diet need not be expensive or time consuming—or yucky. All it requires is that you learn and practice simple, tasty ways to break out of common vegetable-avoidance habits. Here are some suggestions:

Load up your breakfast bagel. Like bagels for breakfast? Go ahead and eat them. But eat them sandwich-style with a slice of tomato, some lettuce, onions, sprouts, and/or sautéed eggplant between the two halves.

Eat veggie snack packs. Single-serving packets of celery, carrot, and other vegetable “sticks”, sometimes packaged with low-fat dips, have become popular and widely available lately. They make for convenient and satisfying between-meal snacks. Replacing your current snacks with veggie packs is a very easy way to add veggies to your daily diet.

Supersize your salads. Do you eat salads? Good for you. Now make them bigger. There’s no easier way to increase your vegetable intake. One-and-a-half cups of greens dressed up with some cherry tomatoes and shredded carrots counts as four servings of vegetables, and it’s really not that much to eat.

Add veggies to foods you already eat. You don’t have to follow any strict formula, but as a general guideline, try to increase the size of your vegetable portion within foods by 50-100 percent. For example:

• a stir-fry with more vegetables and less meat and/or rice
• a sandwich wrap (i.e. sandwich ingredients wrapped in a soft tortilla) instead of a regular sandwich with bread (not only do tortillas have fewer calories than sandwich bread, but it’s easier to stuff a wrap with more veggies)
• a burrito with less meat and rice, more beans, and grilled veggies added
• kabobs with less meat and more veggies
• pizza with a thinner crust, slightly less cheese vegetable toppings (e.g. tomatoes and green peppers).
• Soup with more veggies and less meat, noodles, and/or broth

When all else fails, drink vegetable juice. Despite what their makers claim, vegetable juices are not complete substitutes for whole vegetables. If they were, they would crunch between your teeth when you drank them! But they do provide most of the good stuff contained in vegetables and they are healthier than anything else you might drink. Plus, they are very convenient. So if the choice is between vegetable juice and no vegetable at all, by all means, drink the juice.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

Four-hundred-meter intervals, or “quarters” as they are known colloquially, are a staple of training for many high school and college runners, and for many adult road racers, too. It’s easy to understand why. Four hundred meters is exactly one lap around a standard outdoor track. Nice and tidy.

Of course, the neatness of the 400m distance is not the only reason it has become a training staple. Running intervals of this distance is also a great way to get in race shape. A fit runner can complete a solid dozen such intervals in a session at roughly his or her one-mile race pace, with equal-distance jogging recoveries between intervals. This type of workout does a nice job of increasing fatigue resistance and comfort at relatively high speeds.

If the simplicity of the one-lap interval has a downside it’s that it leads runners away from less neat-and-tidy interval lengths that may also be beneficial to them. For example, 300m intervals.

The legendary runner-turned-coach Alberto Salazar is a big fan of 300’s—so much so that all of his runners do them, while 400m intervals appear sparingly in his training programs. Obviously, 300m intervals can be run a little faster than 400m intervals, yet they do not administer quite the same endurance challenge. Salazar prefers them for long-distance runners especially for precisely this reason: they provide a little more of what’s missing in the other types of workouts that fill these athletes’ training logs: long intervals, tempo runs, long runs, and easy runs.

For example, Kara Goucher, one of Salazar’s star runners, does a set of 300’s about once every other week, whether she is training for track races or a marathon. Because this type of workout is not super-specific to either type of racing (by which I mean Kara runs a lot faster in her 300’s than she does in 5K, 10K, and marathon events), it is not approached progressively in the context of the training cycle. In other words, the workout does not become increasingly challenging with the addition of intervals each time Kara does it. Rather, she does the same session almost every time to first develop and then maintain the sustained speed she needs and saves the progressive approach for more race-specific types of workouts.

Specifically, Kara typically runs 7 x 300m fast with 300m jogging recoveries between intervals. This is a good, solid workout but hardly a killer. Any runner can do it, although not every runner can complete his or her 300’s in 50 seconds, as Kara does!

If you’ve never done 300’s before, it will take a session or two to get used to them. You’re likely to run them too fast the first time, resulting in inflating interval times as the workout progresses, and you’re almost certain to become more comfortable running 300’s as time passes (that last 100 meters of each seems excruciating initially). A perfectly executed set of 300s is one in which the interval times are consistent from start to finish and the last interval is more or less an all-out effort (meaning you’d be unable to match that time if you ran another 300).

I’ve seen coaches prescribe as many as ten 300’s in a session. There’s nothing to be gained by doing more, whereas you can start with as few as five and get something out of them. Seven 300’s appears to be the magic number for Kara Goucher, and if it’s good enough for her it ought to be enough for the rest of us!

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Dear Experts,

I’m 39 years old (40 in November) and have been running for five years after a long stretch of inactivity during my 20s and early 30s.  I have run off and on since I was about 10, so I consider myself an experienced runner.  I am competing in duathlons and have toyed with the idea of putting that on hold for a year or two to see how much more I could develop my running before the age slowdown starts occurring.  However, I’d like to know if this is reasonable.

I had a breakthrough half marathon this year and ran a 1:21:49, which was a PR by almost two minutes. I know that’s not blazing fast, but I’d like to see what I have left in me and see if I can improve upon that.  I’m currently running five or six times a week totaling 40-45 MPW on average. I think that if I want to get much faster I may need to focus more on running and try and get my mileage around the 50-60 MPW range.  Obviously, this would probably cut into my bike time and may limit my duathlon racing.

I’m finishing up Matt’s book, RUN: The Mid-Body Method of Running by Feel, and think that my running style/approach is that which the book focuses on. I’m just looking for more information on what my next steps are to continue to develop my running further.

Thanks,

John Mickle

A.

Dear John,

I can relate to your situation, as I’m also 39 years old and trying to achieve at least one more lifetime-best performance before it’s too late. So the advice I’m about to give you is based on what I’m doing in my own training in hopes of peaking in middle age.

To begin, yes, it is reasonable, given your circumstances, to believe that you can still improve your half-marathon PR. If you were a 39-year-old hardcore veteran who had already run 16 marathons and logged more 100-mile weeks than he could remember, I’d say you had no chance. But you haven’t come close to doing all you could do in training to stimulate improvement, and by exploiting some of that untapped potential you can more than make up for the effects of age on your performance capacity.

It is clear that you understand there is no way to take your performance to the next level without training harder in some way. Increasing your running mileage is one way to do that, but not the only way, nor necessarily the best way.  You could also keep your running mileage about the same and increase your cross-training, in order to boost your endurance and cardiovascular fitness without increasing your injury risk. You could also keep your running mileage about the same and make your key running workouts harder.

If you are fairly injury resistant, increasing your running mileage is probably worth a try. But don’t expect to perform much better on, say, 60 miles a week of running plus 60 miles a week of cycling than you have on 45 miles a week of running plus 100 miles a week of cycling. That strikes me as a wash. To stimulate another breakthrough you’ll likely need to increase your running without reducing your cycling much, or else combine a shift from cycling to running with other measures.

On that point, I don’t want to assume that you are not accustomed to doing really hard workouts, but in my experience very few runners at our “recreationally competitive” level do really hard workouts on a regular basis. I’m talking about going to the track and blasting 12 quarters at mile race pace, running hill repeats until you’re literally lightheaded, and planning threshold runs that are so tough you actually get butterflies in your stomach before you do them. If you are doing anything less, then this is the single most effective training change you can make toward improving your performance. Increasing mileage is often the lazy, copout way to seek improvement. Making brutally hard workouts a consistent part of one’s routine is far more potent, although tough for many runners to face.

I’d also like to draw your attention to what is lost at our age: power, strength, top-end speed, flexibility, and mobility. Endurance, aerobic power and economy start to slide later. Therefore the best way for a 39-year-old runner to slow the hands of time is to make a big commitment to strength training, plyometrics, sprinting, stretching, and mobility work. This is a major initiative of my latest comeback, and I strongly encourage you to follow my cue.

At age 56, triathlon legend Dave Scott is still fit enough to complete an Ironman in less than nine hours. For reference, the Hawaii Ironman course record for his age group is around 9:45. When I asked Dave how he had managed to hang onto his performance to such an unprecedented degree through the years, he cited his lifelong weightlifting habit as the most important factor. More than anything else you can do as a runner, strength training keeps the muscles young.

I hope these ideas are helpful. As a fellow child of the early ‘70s fleeing Father Time, I’m rooting for you!

Matt