Training Log: Two Weeks to SACTOWN 10 Miles

 Hey, I survived Oakland Half Marathon! Better than survived it!

Running last week was pretty boring as I was mostly just trying to recover from the race, so maybe it's a good time to mention how *weird* that race/recovery process was compared to my memory of past half marathons. Like I said in my race report, I didn't feel like I ran the race all that hard -- for the first seven miles I was running in total comfort, and I didn't really try to run hard until the last 5K. That said, I ran hard enough at the end that I was VERY happy to be done, but I also felt pretty normal pretty quickly after (ie, no wandering around in a daze/looking for a place to throw up) and drove home feeling peppy and spry.

That evening and the next couple days, though? Oh ho ho! A different story!

Book Review: "Run Fast Eat Slow"

Like many other runners I know (particularly those who are obsessed with food), I recently caved & purchased Shalane Flanagan's new cookbook, Run Fast Eat Slow, co-authored with her former cross-country teammate & now professional chef, Elyse Kopecky.

I have a whole other post sitting in the drafts about how my eating/cooking habits have changed in the last three months, but long story short I've gone from eating out/getting takeout 5-7 nights a week & almost never cooking to cooking (or eating leftovers) most nights, eating out maybe once a week, & getting takeout only when the cooking is truly unfeasible.

Things I have cooked in my actual kitchen this summer:

Homemade chili verde pork with heirloom tomatoes, red cabbage, avocado, & cilantro

Grilled tuna with piperinata & tapenade

Chicken & sausage jambalaya

Grilled salmon with a soy-ginger glaze

I've really enjoyed going back to regular cooking from scratch and it's made a huge difference in my quality of life lately. There are a lot of days in the week, though, so now I'm always on the lookout for tasty, healthy recipes to try. Run Fast Eat Slow, then, was kind of a no-brainer.

It isn't really fair to call this post a book review since I've only skimmed most of it, selecting a few of the recipes to read word-for-word and only actually made maybe 3-4 so far. However, the ones I have tried have been fantastic, so I felt inspired to put a little plug out there.

First, I am obsessed with this kale & quinoa recovery salad. We try to have a salad with dinner every night as much as possible, but a lot of times that means I end up making the same old basic thing over and over again & I was interested to try something new.

And OMG, I was not disappointed. Seriously, I think I could eat this salad every night of my life. Basically it's kale, quinoa, red bells, red onion, jalapeno, black beans, cilantro, green olives, feta (or cotija) cheese, avocado, EVOO, & lime juice. It's practically a meal all on its own! Now, it is not a quick salad as there is quite a lot of chopping involved, but the first time I made it I did all the chopping on the weekend & then quickly assembled it the next night.

Pre-chopped veggies

Bad light in our kitchen...Sorry. :(

We did not love the prescribed quinoa-to-veggies ratio & probably only included about half the quinoa, but the nice thing is that you can adjust that to taste. Also if I'm having it as a side with something else that's already got plenty of carbs, I just skip the quinoa altogether & it's still absolutely delicious.

Literally eating this as I type.

Our other favorite is the "Marathon Lasagna," which is like most other lasagna recipes except it swaps the usual ground beef or sausage for ground turkey and adds in egg, sweet potatoes, and spinach. So good! A lot of times I don't love ground turkey because it comes across as sweet to me, but the seasoning you do with it beforehand makes a big difference. Don was also a big fan & encouraged me to make it more often.

Baking the sweet potatoes

Egg-ricotta slurry

Seasoning the turkey

Final assemblage

ENTIRE BAG OF SPINACH YAAAASSSS

Final product (in bad light, sorry)

Again, this is not a *quick* recipe (I think it took about 3 hours start to finish, though some of it you could prep in advance), but it makes a giant pan-full that you can go back to for a week or more. (I imagine it would also freeze just fine as well.) The story is that this is what Shalane traditionally eats the night before the Boston Marathon, though I think it's probably too rich & acidic & dairy-filled for me to try that. (You could probably easily make it vegetarian by just leaving out the meat or replacing with your vegetable protein of choice.)

My favorite thing about this book is how the focus is on nutrition, not on weight loss or calorie-counting. In fact, there is no calorie information included at all, but the dish descriptions do go into the various nutrients in the ingredients and why they're beneficial for athletes. (Which....is why about a third of the recipes involve beets. I'll be skipping those.) There are no calls for low-fat/non-fat cheese or artificial sweeteners; in fact, there is a decided emphasis on eating plenty of healthy fats (including full-fat dairy). Basically the central message of the book is to try to cook with a variety of fresh, whole, nutrient-rich foods as much as possible and avoid processed things whenever you can. (Shalane credits this approach with finally stabilizing her weight & allowing her to stop counting calories and end a 15-year battle with amenorrhea.)

(Seriously, the lasagna is NOT diet foot. But it's packed with nutrients and sooooo tasty! It's been great for post-speed or tempo run with a big salad.)

Looking forward to trying more recipes in the future!

Oakland Half Marathon predictions & goals....

Honestly, my only real goal at ORF this weekend is to do my best and run as fast as I can and make peace with the fact that, barring some kind of miracle, it will be far from my best 13.1 ever.

But, I do like to have ballpark expectations so that I know how hard to push myself, so this is me sort of thinking out loud about that.

Using my December 5K & February 10K times, I used a few different online race prediction calculators & came up with numbers ranging from 1:41:30 to 1:43:00, which, frankly, seems WAY fast to me. But, that might just be because I've always been faster at the 5K/10K distances than longer ones. (Exhibit A: My 2012 5K PR of 20:44 predicted marathon & half marathon times of ~3:18 & ~1:35 respectively, and though I ran PRs at nearly every distance that year, I never came close to either of those.) But it does make me feel like maybe sub-1:45 (~8:00 pace) is not an unreasonable goal.

In general, the wild cards at this race tend to be 1) GPS reliability and 2) the weather. Everyone knows hat although the course is certified, we all tend to clock anywhere from 13.25 to 13.6, just because of all the buildings & that one tunnel in mile 3 (I think), and because the race starts at 9:10 in late March, there's always the possibility of a warmish race.

In a way, the GPS issue doesn't *really* matter. You run your effort level, whatever you've got that day, and it is what it is. Mentally, you just have to know that you're probably not going as fast as your watch thinks you are. So I will probably only use my watch to get a general idea of what pace I think I can hold in the first few miles, shooting for say 7:55ish, and if my body gives me a big giant NOPE, well, that's whatever it is. Such is life. (But, I am going to try to run hard and if nothing else try to spend some quality time suffering & generally working on my mental toughness.) My other thought re: GPS is that I will probably turn the auto lap off (since I already know it will be unreliable) & just try to hit lap as I pass the mile markers. (I've tried this a couple of times in the past--sometimes it works out, & sometimes I just don't have the bandwidth because I'm too busy, well, suffering.)

Weather-wise, things look pretty decent so far: Partly cloudy-to-overcast, not above 60F until 11am (when I should be done), and little or no wind. There's a 56% chance of rain currently, but give me rain over sun any race day. (Besides, it's not like I haven't had plenty of practice.) Still, you never know 'round these parts so mentally I'm trying to prepare myself for anything. (Warm weather, even a little warm, always seems to be my undoing.)

Lastly, there is the fueling question. It's been a while since I did this with any level of planning, so here's what I've got:

Pre-race: Accel gel w/ protein -> 18g CHO
Mile 2.6: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO
Mile 4: Accel gel w/ protein -> 18g CHO
Mile 4.3: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO
Mile 5.3: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO
Mile 6.7: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO

***1 hour mark = 56g CHO***

Mile 8: Accel gel w/ protein -> 18g CHO
Mile 8.6: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO
Mile 9.9: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO
Mile 10.2: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO
Mile 12: Accel gel w/ protein -> 18g CHO
Mile 12.2: cup gatorade -> ~5g CHO

***Total = 112g --> ~64g CHO/hour***

(Those water stops looks sort of oddly spaced to me, but that's more or less what's on the map so I'm going with it.)

The background here is that I used to have no carbs during a half, then later about 6 oz of sports drink (so ~20g CHO) over the course of the race, and then I learned some freaking science & found out that 30g per hour is the lowest amount of CHO that makes any difference whatsoever in a race & really more seems to be better up to the point that it makes you sick at your stomach (a point that varies for different people). In the past I've done fine with 60g/hour, so that's what I've tried to race at the last few times I've bothered to actually make a plan. Matt Fitzgerald has a good explanation of all this in his book The New Rules of Marathon & Half-Marathon Nutrition.

Oh, and one more goal is to ABSOLUTELY refuel at Bellanico's afterward with this:

Country French toast with whipped mascarpone, strawberries,
huckleberries, & maple syrup. THIS IS HAPPENING, PEOPLE.

SRM WEEK 14 OF 20: Long Runs: New & *Sooo* Improved

This week marked my first "big" long run of my SRM training cycle--ie, a distance that starts with a "2". Because of having the 10-mile race in there, my long run schedule made kind of a big jump, going 16-17-Race-16-21.

I've gotten a lot better at mentally facing most of my long runs, but things that start with "2"s are just a whole other beast. I had it all worked out, though. A running friend and her adorable family are sadly (weep!) leaving the Bay Area for Oregon, and as a kind of last hurrah a bunch of us had planned to hang out at the DSE Six-Hour Endurance Challenge in the Marina Sunday morning. (No but seriously. Some people *actually* run for six hours.)

This was going to be perfect! I would leave the house at 7, giving myself an hour to run the 5ish miles to the Marina, then run up to 10-11ish miles with friends (not to mention all the aid station support!), then run the 5 miles back home. Not only would company and course support help the miles fly by, but this plan would also mean I'd be done with my run before noon. (See: Things that never happen, ever.)

Alas, I was stuck awake Saturday night with a wicked bout of insomnia, and when 4am rolled around and I was still wide awake, I knew there was no way I was getting up in two hours for 21 miles of running. Just, no.

So, loops through Golden Gate Park alone in the heat of the day it was. Lovely.

Now, I hope it goes without saying that 3+ hours of running is never particularly pleasant (at least not for us mere mortals), but I can say that this one was no worse than my recent 16-17 milers and perhaps the least miserable of any 20+ run I've ever done. This was also my longest training run since 2012, and finishing it with no injury scares/concerning pain anywhere and not feeling like death was pretty heartening.

It was hot for SF (upper 70s & full sun), so my pace was a bit slower than normal, but it didn't feel slow--I felt pretty comfortable and in a good rhythm just about the whole way. I was meant to run miles 16-19 at goal marathon pace & then finish with two easy ones, and I think the heat did mess with that plan a bit, though. Running 8:00 miles felt much harder than usual, and towards the end of the second one I started to feel lightheaded, which is generally not something that happens to me while running. (After a hard race, yes! But not during.) I was drinking a lot of water (obviously) but during those faster miles I could feel it starting to slosh around in my stomach, another thing that just doesn't tend to happen to me.

Something I learned from my sessions with the nutritionist is that this usually indicates that you need more salt. Because the body needs a very specific water/salt balance to work properly, it can't just absorb all the water or salt you put in it. You can actually be dehydrated, but if you're also low on salt, your body won't absorb the water--it'll just slosh around in your stomach.

He said that he has seen this problem countless times with athletes who feel like crap during/after hard workouts, particularly if they're sweating a lot. They will be obsessed with hydration but also obsessed with "clean" eating, which almost always means they aren't getting enough salt to actually retain all the water they drink. Peeing clear doesn't necessarily mean you're hydrated.

(BTW, that is the reason you might need salt in hot weather workouts, not preventing cramps. Repeat low sodium/electrolytes does not cause muscle cramps.)

We've done a good bit of data collection on my water intake, salt intake, & sweat rates at different distances & intensity levels, & apparently the balance is pretty good most of the time without my having to do too much about it, because I virtually never have any of those problems. I don't tend to get sloshy stomach or bad dehydration symptoms, and I've always been able to do pretty long, intense workouts on nothing but water with no problem. But I think probably the fact that it was so hot & sunny during this run and that I was out there for a good bit longer than normal with nothing but water (and two gels during the fast miles) meant I lost more sodium than usual & just reached a point where I couldn't retain the water anymore, even though I needed it.

Because of this and the fact that marathon pace felt just *so* hard at that point, I only did three fast miles. I'm pretty sure sure I could have finished the fourth, but was just feeling too lightheaded & nauseous to feel 100% safe trying. (In a race situation I totally would have kept going.) So instead it was three easy miles to the end, definitely with more pauses than were strictly necessary in order to enjoy bits of shade here & there.

During the run I had been mentally doing the math re: how many carb calories I would need to eat before bed and came up with ~830, which, I gotta say, is a pretty daunting number considering you can't just inhale a pizza or two & call it good. Here's how it went down:

• Immediately after the run: Granola bar, glass of milk, & a beer. (I keep meaning to ask about whether the carbs in beer are a legit source of refueling or not but haven't yet managed to remember. Real talk, though, after 3+ hours & 21 miles in the sun, I have no fucks to give about this. A cold beer is being had. Also we are just not even talking about the alcohol, because 5% ABV beer counts as alcoholic only in the most literal sense.)
• An hour or so later: Chips & guacamole, several slices of bread with chevre, 2 margaritas, & 3 carrots (since we learned from Sports Nutrition Part 3 that you can't just pound a bunch of carbs & expect them to do much other than turn into fat)
• Two hours later: Flank steak tacos, grilled veggies, salad, corn on the cob, plus an additional giant heap of flank steak (I like to think this was because my body was gearing up to crank out a whole shitload of new red blood cells which was causing me to crave iron. But probably it was just really really good.)
• Four hours later: Pita bread with hummus & baba ganoush, two big bowls of chicken stock loaded up with garlic salt, & two more glasses of water.

Which comes to a grand total of I have no freaking clue but at least I didn't go to bed hungry/thirsty. Hopefully, I ended up somewhere in the right neighborhood.

I definitely want to write a longer post on this at some point, but I just want to say that the difference in how I feel day-to-day and especially after longer/harder workouts since I started putting all the nutrition stuff into practice is just HUGE. In the past, a 10-12 mile track workout or a 3+ hour run in the heat (on almost no fuel!) would have left me a complete zombie for the rest of the day. Not now, though. In fact, in spite of the fact that my overall mileage has been up as has the sheer number of tougher workouts, marathon training has never felt so easy. (Obviously, the hard workouts still feel hard. But I don't feel utterly wiped out at the end of every week, which is new.)

~*~*~SRM WEEK 14 OF 20~*~*~

Grand Total: 44 miles

* 19.5 easy
* 3.5 speed
* 21 long

Monday: Karate. For some reason I had Monday off, which I spent mostly cleaning my house & running errands.

Tuesday: a.m. strength / p.m. 3 warm up, 7 x 600m @ 5K pace w/ 200m recoveries, .5 cool down = 7 total. Chill speed work at Kezar with SF Track Club.

Wednesday: karate

Thursday: 8 easy

Friday: 8 easy. No 2nd workout scheduled this week, I'm assuming because of the big long run jump.

Saturday: Rest

Sunday: 21 long

Sports Nutrition 4: What I Learned About (Re-)Fueling

(Say it with me now: I am not a nutritionist or dietician or really any kind of expert at this stuff, and all of this is based on what ONE sports nutritionist explained to me about MY particular situation and needs. I'm happy to entertain questions if people have them--just know that I may not know the answer, and if I try to guess based on what I *think* I understand, I may get it wrong. But, I hope this helps provide some insight about sports nutrition to people who are interested!)

If you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I am a complete and total data/numbers geek. I taught high school math for 8 years & now do research/analysis work in math & science education in my day job. Quantitative modeling = totally my jam.

So when Dr. C. & I came to the point of discussing when/how/how much to refuel after exercise, we kind of had this moment where he was basically like, "Do you actually want to know how the sausage is made, or do you just want me to, like, tell you what to do?," I was like, "ALL THE TECHNICAL DETAILS, PLZTHNX," and we went from there.

(I guess what I'm saying is, if you are allergic to numbers & calculations, hang in there--It's really not that bad & I promise I will summarize at the end.)

I Saw a Sports Nutrition & Mind = Blown

Sports Nutrition Part 2: Tweaking My Breakfast Situation

Sports Nutrition Part 3: Tweaking Lunch & Breakfast

I mentioned some of this in the breakfast post regarding refueling from my morning strength workouts. The thing is, people--even athletes--have all kind of messed up, completely inaccurate mental models about what and when and how they should eat after a workout. Things I have believed or heard from others at various points in my life include:

• "If you're trying to drop weight, it's better not to eat after a workout because you don't want to cancel out any of the calories you just burned."
• "If you just burned 800 calories, you're fine as long as you don't eat more than 800 calories."
• "You don't want to replace ALL the calories you burned, so if you burned 800, you should only eat like 400."
• "I just burned 800 calories which means I can eat 400 calories' worth of ice cream & it'll be the same as if I burned 400 calories & ate nothing!"
• "It's important to refuel but be sure to use 'good' carbs like fruits, vegetables, etc., not 'bad' ones like bread/sugar/etc., which will just make you fat because they process too quickly & spike your blood sugar."

I am not going to go through & debunk all that, because hopefully, after I've shared what I learned from Dr. C., you will completely understand why none of those statements have any basis in reality.

To Refuel or Not To Refuel?
We started by listing out my weekly workouts in broad categories (from most to least exhausting: long run, speed workouts, tempo/threshold runs, karate, short easy runs, and strength workouts). Then, based on my description of each, he estimated how many calories I was burning per hour and what percent of it was carbs versus fats, then used that to calculate (about) how many carb calories I burn in each type of workout. (Higher effort = higher percentage of energy coming from carbs. See this post for the details regarding why.)

(In Dr. C's spirit of keeping things simple, there's a lot of rounding to nice, easy numbers.)

	Long Run	Speed Work	Tempo/Threshold	Karate	Easy Run	Strength
Calories per Hour	600	700	650	300	600	300
Duration	2-3.5 hours	1-1.5 hours	1-1.5 hours	1.5 hours	1-1.5 hours	45 minutes
Total Cals Burned	1200-2000	700-1000	650-1000	300-450	600-900	220
%Carbs	65%	80%	70%	80%	65%	80%
Total Carb Cals Burned	780-1300	560-800	450-700	250-350	400-580	170

Those carbs come first from blood sugar (glucose) and then from glycogen stores (first from muscles and then your liver). This means that after the workout, your blood sugar has dropped, which triggers your body to start cannibalizing muscle tissue in order to bring it back up to normal. (Breaking down muscle tissue releases amino acids which the liver can convert to glucose.) If you are an athlete, losing muscle tissue = bad news.

Also, some people who would like to lose weight mistakenly think, "If I don't eat post-workout, then I'll have that much larger of a calorie deficit, so my body will burn off more fat!" No. Your body cannot replenish blood sugar from fat. If you don't give your body carbs immediately after a workout, it has no choice but to cannibalize existing muscle. And since more muscle = more fat burning, this is really just shooting yourself in the foot. So that's the first reason that you *definitely* want to give your body some carbs right after your workout.

The second reason is that you need that glycogen replaced to fuel your future workouts (as well as life in general). If you don't replace it and just eat normally, the way you would if you hadn't done the workout, your muscles and liver will be underfed & carb-starved, making future workouts & other activities that much tougher (making it less likely that you'll get the full benefit of the workout). This is the second reason why you definitely want to eat carbs post-workout!

When To Refuel:
If you recall from the earlier posts, our bodies can generally turn carbs into glycogen (good) at a rate of about 1 gram per minute. Give your body carbs faster than that, and anything beyond that 1 g/mt just gets stored as fat you don't need instead of fueling muscles that do need it.

BUT, during exercise, our body's ability to process carbs & convert them to glycogen increases. It stays elevated for brief period after the workout ends, then quickly drops off (dropping by half every ten minutes, reaching baseline again after about half an hour). So, the best thing to do in terms of refueling your muscles and liver as effectively as possible is to take advantage of those first golden ten minutes post workout to refuel.

What To Refuel With:
Ten minutes is not a lot of time, which means you want to be rather choosy about what you eat. For example, in the past I had sometimes been refueling with fruit or a fruit/yogurt smoothie. The trouble with this is that a) fruit is just not that calorie dense and b) its carbs are only half glucose, which (long story short) means it's going to take the other half (sucrose) a lot longer to get to your muscles because of the way your body processes it. The result was that my liver & muscles were chronically under-fueled.

So. For the purposes of post-workout refueling, you want something a) calorie-dense that is b) mostly carbs and c) mostly glucose, for example, bread or crackers (the whiter the better) or a grain-based granola bar (little or no nuts/dried fruit). It could even, said Dr. C., be your favorite pastry! Sure, there may be a little sucrose & fat in there, but not enough to make much of a difference. Plus, the joy of having a favorite treat post-workout rather than, say, 2 slices of bread might make you more likely to have it consistently within that golden ten-minute window, which is the more important part. Apparently this is what he personally does. (I have personally been enjoying a slice of yellow cake with chocolate frosting this past week after my runs, leftover from Don's birthday. Don is not a fan of this new strategy of mine & thinks I need to get my own cake.)

Screw kale. THIS is literally the world's most perfect food.

I know this will challenge many people's existing beliefs of what qualifies as "healthy" eating and refueling. There is a lot of propaganda about how simple carbs/simple sugars/refined grains/etc. are "bad" and we should be "eating clean" and fueling with "good" carbs like fruits & vegetables. Many of us have internalized that propaganda so deeply that it's incredibly difficult to think about things in any other way. However, like most propaganda, those types of claims oversimplify the facts in the service of a snappy one-liner that looks good on a Pinterest board.

When you look at the science, it becomes clear that those are overgeneralizations. The fact is that no foods are always, categorically good or bad for you in every situation (barring medical conditions, obviously); it turns out that what is best for you to eat depends on the purpose you need that food to serve. (But again....that doesn't make *nearly* as pithy a sound bite as "EAT CLEAN TRAIN MEAN GET LEAN!!") When it comes to refueling, the purpose is to get a lot of glucose from your mouth to your muscles as soon as possible. A handful of crackers (or a piece of cake!) will serve that purpose. An apple will not.

How Much To Refuel:
This is where I think it differs a little from person-to-person. While I definitely don't believe I'm overweight by any stretch of the imagination, I do know that I raced better when I was a few body fat percent points lower, so Dr. C. has me shooting to replenish about 2/3 of the carbs I use during my workouts. If I were already at my perfect performance weight and wanted to stay at my exact body fat percent, then we'd probably instead be shooting to replenish all of it (since we'd be trying to protect that perfect amount of body fat & not risk falling below it).

So:

	Long Run	Speed Work	Tempo/Threshold	Karate	Easy Run	Strength
Calories per Hour	600	700	650	300	600	300
Duration	2-3.5 hours	1-1.5 hours	1-1.5 hours	1.5 hours	1-1.5 hours	45 minutes
Total Cals Burned	1200-2000	700-1000	650-1000	300-450	600-900	220
%Carbs	65%	80%	70%	80%	65%	80%
Total Carb Cals Burned	780-1300	560-800	450-700	250-350	400-580	170
Replace	500-850	350-500	300-450	150-200	250-400	100

(Again, rounding to nice numbers to keep things simple, generally downward since I'm above my best performance weight.)

No But Seriously, When:
If you look at the numbers that are here, and you think about that whole golden ten-minute goal, you may notice that there's a distinct problem in some cases. Have a little 100 calorie granola bar post-strength work? Fine. A handful of crackers and a nice slice of cake after a tempo run? Great.

But 850 calories' worth of bread/cake/granola bars in 10 minutes after a long run? If this seems insane to you, it's probably because you're a reasonably healthy, non-bingey eater.

I mean I certainly can't wolf down the better part of a loaf of bread in ten minutes, especially right after a long run. (Although, to be fair, I have known people who have no problem whatever devouring the entire kitchen the second they get back from a long run, soooo there's also that.) And even if I could, even with my body's elevated ability to process carbs into glycogen post-workout, 850 calories in 10 minutes is *still* going to be more than it can deal with & result in carbs I need for refueling going to unneeded fat instead.

So yes, start with the usual ~200 calories of fast-digesting carbs in those first ten minutes. Then, have an extra serving or two of carbs with your next meal (usually dinner for me), remembering to do 2x volume in crunchy veggies so you actually get those carbs. Finally, if you're still not there, add another small snack sometime later in the day (remembering that your carb-processing abilities will be back at baseline, so 100-150 calories' worth is about all your body will be able to do anything with unless you pull the crunchy vegetable trick).

Because he's all about the simplicity, Dr. C. made this handy chart for me:

	Long Run	Speed Work	Tempo/Threshold	Karate	Easy Run	Strength
First 10 Minutes	200	200	200	150-200	200	100
Add to Next Meal	300-400	150-300	100-150	N/A	50-200	N/A
Additional Snack	0-125	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
2nd Snack (or add to next meal)	0-125	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Total Carb Cals Replenished	500-850	350-500	300-450	150-200	250-400	100

(Note: "Add to next meal" means **in addition** to the normal ~50-100 cals or so of starches you'd have even if you'd done no exercise that day.)

So you can see that it's long run refueling that requires maybe the most thought and attention. The refueling is easier if you do the long run earlier in the day, because you can spread out the carb calories appropriately in order to ensure they get stored as glycogen and not fat. (From a refueling standpoint, you can see that it's significantly easier if you do the run before lunch, because then you have two meals left in the day where you can add good chunks of carb & veggies; I almost always do my long run after lunch, so if I do a particularly long run, I need to do two snacks spread evenly between dinner & bed. This is why doing long runs particularly late in the day is problematic in terms of making sure you get fully refueled.)

Another question I had for him, "What if I have my 200 carb calories snack right after, but I'm still reeeeaaallly rungry?" Answer: Either have your next meal right then (with the requisite veggies), or have another carbolicious snack, BUT that one has to be with 2x crunchy veggies. Basically he was like, sure, you can wolf down 8 granola bars if you want; just realize that without a bunch of fiber to slow digestion, most of those calories will get stored as fat.

For me, the next critical step was getting in my head what 100 calories of carb looks like, because there is no way I'm reading nutrition panels every time I need to eat something. So here are some specific examples he gave me, based on stuff I like to eat:

• 100 calories: 1 slice bread (half sandwich); 10 Triscuits; 1/4 cup granola; 1/2 larger granola bar or 1 smaller one [the ones I get are I think ~120 calories]
• 200 calories: 2 slices bread (a sandwich); 20 Triscuits; 1/2 cup granola; 1-2 granola bars, depending on size
• 300 calories: slightly over 1 cup (cooked) of rice, potato, yam, pasta, couscous, quinoa, etc; 3 slices bread (remember to add 2x the volume in veggies to slow digestion)
• 400 calories: see above, plus 1/3 cup extra (again, remembering to add the right amount of veggies)

So there you go. Refueling!

Next up: Okay, this is all very nice in theory, but how is it working out for me in real life?

Sports Nutrition Part 3: Tweaking Lunch & Dinner

(Again, I really hope it goes without saying that I am not a nutritionist or dietician or really any kind of expert at this stuff, and all of this is based on what ONE sports nutritionist explained to me about MY particular situation and needs. I'm happy to entertain questions if people have them--just know that I may not know the answer, and if I try to guess based on what I *think* I understand, I may get it wrong. But, I hope this helps provide some insight about sports nutrition to people who are interested!)

So originally I said this part would be about lunch/snacking, but honestly I think it probably just makes more sense to talk about the whole rest of the day because there were fewer changes to that stuff than to pre-lunch eating & the biggest change was the same for both.

I Saw a Sports Nutrition & Mind = Blown

Sports Nutrition 2: Tweaking My Breakfast Situation

Relevant bits from the first two posts include the facts that my body needs 2.5 g protein and 2.5 g CHO (carbohydrate) every hour just to stay alive and not feel hungry, and that when we eat carbs under normal circumstances (ie, not first thing in the morning or right after exercise), our bodies can only convert the carbs we eat into glycogen (muscle or liver storage, where we want it) at a rate of about 1 gram per minute.

Re: breakfast, my assignment was to have a glass of water (16ish oz), a little milk (4-6 oz), and a piece of fruit when I get up at 6, a granola bar (~100 calories from CHO) after finishing strength work around 7:45, and a slice of bread with sunflower seed butter & chia seeds and another glass of milk when I get to work around 8:30. (I can split the water up into half when I get up & half over the course of my drive to the gym, because my stomach was struggling with the volume.) In theory, this was supposed to meet all my nutritional needs at the right times, and if we got it right, I wouldn't be hungry again until lunch. (Though, if I found myself getting hungry, my instructions were to eat & report back so we could adjust, not stick to the plan and be hungry as hunger = low blood sugar = muscles tissue eating itself).

On to the rest of the day!

BEFORE:

At work, my lunch is almost always the same--a can of chicken breast, half a can of black beans, half a can of diced tomatoes (I get the spicy ones with green chilis for extra flavor), and half an avocado. Mix it together in a bowl & microwave for a few minutes, & it's basically like eating burrito innards (and I luuuuvs me some burrito). Sometimes, though, if I haven't done my grocery shopping or run out of my normal lunch supplies at work, I'll end up going out to the local deli for a chicken or turkey sandwich. Then I usually have a snack right before I leave work so that I'm not heading out the door for a run or karate & suddenly starving. I also drink loose-leaf tea out of a press pot pretty much all day.

On karate days, dinner is almost always whatever we can get at 9:30 at night--pizza, burritos, Indian food, Thai food, Chinese food, burgers, shawarma, etc.--or maybe leftovers. On non-karate days, we might have leftovers, or go out to/get takeout from one of the 51,467 restaurants within walking distance of our house, or if we don't have evening plans and I'm feeling enthusiastic & not exhausted, I might cook something (usually chicken or fish with vegetables/salad and a starch). Honestly, I prefer to cook, but our weeks tend to be difficult to plan ahead, so it just depends on what we have or if I have the energy to walk the half-mile and back to our local market. (Boo hoo hoo. My life is sooooo hard. Not. This paragraph is practically dripping with food privilege & I hope we all know it. I just hate shopping & sometimes get sort of tired & lazy after a run.)

THE PROBLEMS:

Thankfully, my usual lunch got the Dr. C seal of approval. There is plenty of protein from the chicken and beans, healthy fats from the avocado, plenty of carbs from the tomatoes and beans, and because beans are so fiber-rich, they will slow down the digestion of all those carbs so that I get a steady stream in that safe ~1 g/mt range over the course of the afternoon (meaning the CHO will get stored in my muscles & liver as glycogen, rather than as unneeded fat).

Re: sandwiches, I'd always figured that since I got wheat bread with spinach and sprouts and avocado (in addition to meat & cheese), this was a perfectly fine lunch for an athlete. Dr. C. said that it wasn't bad necessarily, but if the goal is to optimize for endurance performance, it could be improved. The issue is the carb content--not the amount, but the fact that bread digests quickly (whole grains only slow it down by ~10%, which is negligible), and a whole deli sandwich worth will very quickly take the rate your body is getting glucose well above the 1 g/mt safe zone and cause a bunch of it to get stored as fat rather than muscle/liver glycogen.

I mentioned before that I was sort of cringing at the thought of what he would say about my dinner habits, but maybe not for the reasons you think. Contrary to how it might sound, even our quick post-karate dinners are not all THAT terribly unhealthy. When we get pizza, we get the Mediterranean Chicken (grilled chicken, artichokes, red peppers, olives, and roasted garlic). When we get burritos, we get stewed or grilled chicken or pork with black beans and avocado on a whole wheat tortilla (no cheese, sour cream, etc.). Shawarmas are roasted chicken with eggplant, hummus, and cucumber yogurt sauce. Overwhelmingly, we tend to eat lean-ish meat and aren't too much with the less healthy condiments.

This post needs more pictures:

Chili verde chicken burrito with black beans & avocado on a whole wheat tortilla

Deep Dish Mediterranean Chicken Pizza

Chicken shawerma with extra eggplant

My main concern was that I was overdoing the carbs at dinner, particularly white flour-based carbs, at least more often than not. I was bracing for him to say, "Less white grains, less flour all around, actually, oh and also you should cook at home more because DUH, everyone knows that's better."

But this is not what happened. One of Dr. C.'s main tenets seems to be that people gonna eat what they love and it is the exceedingly rare human being who can change their eating habits that dramatically for more than a brief period of time. And change your cooking habits? Forget about it. Not most people. Not in the long term.

("Will power is utter bullshit," he said. Okay, I am paraphrasing, but that was the basic gist: People do not change their eating habits with will power, and anyone who says differently is selling something. The stuff is finite, and by evening it's more or less gone anyway.)

The problem with most of my dinners, he said, was NOT too much white flour naan and white flour pizza crust and white rice and white flat bread and whatever. The problem was--say it with me, now--the rate at which those particular carbs digest relative to how fast my body can process them at that point. Immediately after exercise? Not really a problem. 45 minutes to an hour later, though, and you get only some of it getting sent to your muscles & liver (which need those carbs) while the rest gets stored as fat you probably don't need.

Also, I wasn't particularly drinking water with dinner, which can be problematic since your body needs it for digestion, particularly if your meal is higher in salt (ie, pizza, burrito, Chinese food, etc.). Luckily my tea counts as the water I need for digestion during the day. (Dr. C. says you need about 1 liter of water per day per 1,000 calories, plus whatever you drink during exercise. More than that won't hurt you, but also doesn't accomplish anything. Clear pee doesn't make you extra-virtuous; really it just means you're wasting water.)

THE FIX:

Thankfully, there was only really one significant change here, which applies to both my deli sandwich and my dinner habits, and it does NOT involve cutting down on my white flour/bread consumption. Again, my body needs those carbs! My muscles work hard and they need to be fed, and my liver is about to spend 8-12 hours single-handedly supporting my entire body almost solely on glycogen (read: stored carbs). But eating an entire naan and a serving of rice does me no good if half of it gets stored as unnecessary fat. So what to do?

The issue is that we have to slow down the digestion of all those carbs to within that 1 gram per minute "safe" zone, and the easiest way to do that is to take whatever volume of bread/noodles/pizza crust/rice/etc. I'm going to eat, and have double that in crunchy vegetables (or 3-4x if it's greens, since a lot of the volume in salad or whatever is empty space). He made a point of saying that 2-4x the bread volume is more than people think, and I have found that to be true. Even when I'd normally cook at home & have salad and/or veggies with my protein & starch, I probably was not eating that much.

Now, you may often hear people say, "Oh, eat a bunch of vegetables with your dinner and it'll make you full because of all the fiber and water content, so you'll eat less and feel fuller." According to Dr. C, this might happen, but just feeling full is NOT the primarily mechanism by which this practice helps people become leaner and metabolically healthier.

What happens is this: Because crunchy vegetables contain a lot of plant fiber and digest slowly as a result, having them before or with all the fast-digesting carbs will slow down everything. That way, instead of getting a bunch of CHO all at once, your body gets a slow, steady stream over the course of many hours, which means 1) more CHO sent to muscles & liver as fuel (glycogen), 2) less CHO stored as unnecessary fat, & 3) a longer period of time before you start to feel hungry again. Doing this at dinner also keeps blood sugar more stable over night.

There are some added bonuses here as well, some obvious & some maybe less obvious:

• Crunchy vegetables and greens contain a lot of nutrition you can't get from the other food groups, and most of us already don't eat enough of them.
• Because plant leaves don't want things to eat them, they contain mild toxins (phytonutrients) that kill off many bacteria, fungi, etc., which is another part of how vegetables boost our immune systems & generally make us healthier.
• That whole free radicals thing. (It's science-y and complicated, but if you're interested you can read more about it here. Also some notes about why athletes in particular should care maybe more than non-athletes.)

So that was the biggest take-away for me in terms of how I can use my lunch & dinner to better support my running goals.

There were a few other smaller notes about my lunch/dinner/snacking situation, like:

• My pre-run snack of Triscuits & yogurt/cereal & milk/fruit & milk/etc. were all fine as long as I pay attention not to eat more than I need. (Again, the carb issue, because although I do actually enjoy vegetables, I really don't want to have to eat a giant salad before running.) He said to make sure to always have protein (milk or yogurt, for example) with the carbs.
• Drink another ~16 ounces or so of water with dinner. I'm getting around 2,000 calories a day, give or take, so ~16 ounces in the morning + a liter of tea over the course of the day + ~16 ounces night (plus whatever I drink during exercise) basically covers it.

So that's about it for lunch and dinner. Again, the point is not "EVERYONE SHOULD EAT THIS WAY!" or even "ALL RUNNERS SHOULD EAT THIS WAY!" It's just about how you may be able to tweak things a little to get the most out of your nutrition IF you want to and IF optimizing your performance for a particular time period or event is particularly interesting to you.

Next time, I'll discuss what we talked about re: fueling/re-fueling.

I Saw a Sports Nutrition & Mind = Blown

Sports Nutrition Part 2: Tweaking My Breakfast Situation

Sports Nutrition Part 4: What I Learned About (Re-)Fueling

Sports Nutrition Part 2: Tweaking My Breakfast Situation

(I really hope it goes without saying that I am not a nutritionist or dietician or really any kind of expert at this stuff, and all of this is based on what ONE sports nutritionist explained to me about MY particular situation and needs. I'm happy to entertain questions if people have them--just know that I may not know the answer, and if I try to guess based on what I *think* I understand, I may get it wrong. But, I hope this helps provide some insight about sports nutrition to people who are interested!)

This is the follow-up post to this one (wherein I visit a sports nutritionist), so you might want to be sure & read that one first or this one won't make much sense.

Before my meeting with Dr. C, he had me fill out a giant questionnaire about what & when I eat on a typical day & why, what foods I like best/don't like or don't eat, etc. After some education on the science (see the previous post), we got to work looking at my typical day & making some changes.

As I mentioned in the last post, my major takeaway from the first meeting was that aside from getting all your vitamins & minerals, eating well as an athlete in particular is mostly about managing your blood chemistry. I felt like there were three different parts to this:

1) Get enough protein. I don't know if there is variation based on size, activity level, etc., but my plan says I need 10 calories (2.5g) protein every hour in order to protect my existing muscle tissue. Otherwise, the body releases cortisol to break down muscle tissue in order to provide missing protein to the rest of the body.

2) Get enough carbs. Again, I don't know what the variability is from person to person, but I need 10 calories (also 2.5g) CHO every hour in order to keep my blood sugar in the right place. Low blood sugar also triggers cortisol to break down muscle tissue, this time for amino acids which the liver can break down into glucose (blood sugar).

3) Not TOO many carbs, and not too quickly. This is the bit I mentioned before about the rate at which the body can take glucose out of blood and transform it into glycogen to store in our muscles and liver (where we want it). 1 gram per minute or less, if you recall, and basically all of it is getting stored as glycogen. Faster than that, though, and the rest just gets stored as unneeded fat, because your body just can't keep up. (Yes, it would be GREAT if it could go back to that fat later & be like, "Okay, all caught up, turn back into carbs now, plzthnx!," but that's just not how it works. Which is why you can eat the right number of carbs and STILL end up with under-fueled muscles & extra unneeded fat.)

So, here's how we applied those three principles to my breakfast situation.

BEFORE:

My old morning eating habits depended on whether I was going to the gym for strength work before work or not. If so, I would get up at 6 and have a big glass of milk with a big scoop of protein powder. Because, y'know, muscle stuff, so protein. But it's not like strength work is THAT intense, so it didn't seem like I needed a ton of carbs. This was usually enough to stave off the hunger pangs until I got to work around 8-8:30 & had real breakfast (PB & J).

If I wasn't going to the gym, then I'd usually get up at 7 & not bother eating until the PB & J at work, mainly because I'm rarely starving when I first wake up & mostly just saw preparing & eating food at home in the morning as a waste of time. (The later I leave, the longer my 30 mile commute takes. Thanks, Bay Area traffic.) I didn't eat anything after strength work, because again, it just didn't seem intense enough to require refueling.

THE PROBLEMS:

1) Not drinking water first thing in the morning is apparently problematic. This is because your body basically dehydrates itself during the night while processing food/waste & stops when it inevitably runs out. Having a glass in the morning refills the tanks & gets all the digestion processes going again so they can finish up. (You know you've had enough if you have to pee again within an hour or two of getting up.)

2) My glass of milk & protein powder was all wrong for a pre-workout, first-thing-in-the-morning mini-meal. First, it contained no significant carbs. Since blood sugar is super low when we first wake up and cortisol is rising (part of what wakes you up), your body immediately goes to work tearing down muscle for glucose unless you give it something else. So basically, on gym days I was giving my body 2.5 hours on average of cannibalizing itself before eating any significant carbs (ironically, at the same time that I was trying to trying to build more muscle). Second, since milk already has a lot of protein, tripling it with protein powder basically meant I was getting ~3x as much as I needed, and since it was all liquid protein, just peeing out the extra. This wasn't harmful, just wasteful.

3) Even though strength work isn't all that intense of a workout, it still burns enough carbs to drop my blood sugar, which, again, means that by not eating some carbs immediately afterward, I was basically forcing my body to eat itself for 45 MORE minutes. Not exactly the goal after a strength-building session! Also, even though I don't burn tons & tons of carbs with these workouts, I still need to replace them while my body is processing glucose really quickly and *can* potentially replace them all, as opposed to 45 minutes later when it will only be able to process glucose slowly.

4) By 45 minutes post-gym, my glucose-processing abilities have returned to the super-slow 1g/mt baseline, which means that a good chunk of my super carb-heavy PB&J was getting stored as fat even though I'd been low blood sugar for 2.5 hours and just drained a bunch of carbs from my muscles with exercise. (Oh, also, it turns out that peanut butter is just not really enough protein in the quantities people typically eat it to really count. Thankfully I usually eat high-protein bread, so I was at least okay on that front.)

Obviously, some major changes were in order.

AFTER:

1) A big glass of water first thing in the morning. Easy!

2) A piece of fruit (an apple, banana, 10 strawberries, etc.) & a few ounces of milk after the water, regardless of if it's a gym day. 100 calories of CHO from the fruit shuts down the low blood sugar alarms & milk provides the protein protection. Almost zero prep, so all I have to do is remember to buy milk & fruit once a week.

3) A small granola bar RIGHT after finishing at the gym, the goal being ~120ish calories of CHO. I actually found the math involved in calculating how much to eat after different workouts really interesting (but then, mathematician/numbers geek). For example, during a typical strength workout (based on my describing to him what I do), he estimated that I'm using about 300 calories per hour, with 80% coming from carbs & 20% from fat. So a 45:00 strength workout uses ~225 calories, 180 of which come from carbs. Because I am above my best performance weight, we're shooting for replenishing ~2/3 of that rather than all. (If you're, say, Ryan Hall with 4% body fat, you probably shoot for replacing all of it.)

Sure, the math may seem a bit onerous, but the beauty of it is that you figure it out once & then you're good forever. Basically I just bought a box of reasonably non-processed granola bars that were about the right amounts of CHO & emptied it into my gym bag. BOOM. Not bad at all.

4) Re: the PB & J, I had to do something about that anyway once I found out about my nut allergy. I took Layla's suggestion & gave sunflower seed butter a try, which has been a great replacement! Now, instead of a PB & J, I have one slice of bread (~100 calories CHO) with sunflower seed butter & chia seeds (for Omega 3's), plus some fruit & a glass of milk with optional protein powder. (I've been adding the powder since it's easy and there's no real down side.)

Apparently this was before I bought the chia seeds.

I have never had chia seeds before but I am LOVING them. They're super easy to add to yogurt, oatmeal, smoothies, etc. & add just a little extra texture.

It's worth mentioning that I didn't have to give up the entire PB&J sandwich. But, it's so carb-heavy that continuing to eat it would mean I'd have to add a bunch of roughage in the form of crunchy vegetables in order to slow down the digestion of the carbs to the 1g/mt my body can handle at that point. Since you need 2-4x the volume of CHO in crunchy vegetables to pull this off, though (Ryan Hall apparently does a stack of pancakes with giant plate of celery), I decided to opt for one slice & no jam. And since I've been eating first thing in the morning and also a little right after the gym as well (plus adding the fruit & the protein from the milk/powder), this has been working out pretty well.

***(Quick note about omega 3's. I used to take the fish oil capsules but HATE them because they smell/taste like fish, plus fish burps. Dr. C says this means they are probably oxidized, a common problem with the gel tabs. The liquid stuff is more reliable, and if the omega 3 in it is still good, should not smell or taste like fish. I am opposed to fish oil in general, though, so he said I can instead just add chia seeds to stuff, maybe a tablespoon or so a day. BUT, they must be kept in the freezer; otherwise the omega 3's will oxidize in a few weeks/months. There is a ton of additional info about this on the internet if you look at reliable sources.)***

SO, that's breakfast! What I love about it is that it's all either built on top of my existing routine, or involves very little extra effort, which means I'm more likely to stick with it.

Next time, I'll tell you about lunch and/or snacking.

I Saw a Sports Nutrition & Mind = Blown

Sports Nutrition Part 3: Tweaking Lunch & Breakfast

Sports Nutrition Part 4: What I Learned About (Re-)Fueling

I saw a sports nutritionist and my mind = blown.

I went to see a sports nutritionist! This post is about that. There will probably be at least a few more here & there, because HOLY INFORMATION OVERLOAD, BATMAN.

Now, you maybe thinking, "Angela. Seriously. The basics of decent eating for runners are not complicated. You are a recreational runner who rarely breaks 50 miles a week, and are so far from achieving anything even *remotely* remarkable it can't even be joked about. What even is the point?"

Short answer: I'm curious. I find the workings of bodies interesting, particularly as they relate to endurance training. In the past when I've shelled out a little money to learn from experts, I've always come away having learned something new and interesting that I hadn't known before.

Longer answer: I kind of want to try optimizing everything I possibly can as I train for Santa Rosa, just to see how it works out. In the past I've tried to learn what I can from reliable (SCIENTIFIC) sources and eat mostly pretty well in terms of running, but I've never had an expert look at what/how I eat and compare that to my life/training & give me feedback.

Also, in general I don't worry about my weight/body fat percentage--I almost never weigh myself and feel like I am totally normal & healthy--but I also know that I've drifted a good 15 pounds or so from the weight I raced best at in my younger days. If there are things I can change that aren't too onerous or complicated in order to have a better race in August, I'd like to give it a shot at least once and see what happens. And hey, I figured, worst case, s/he tells me a bunch of stuff I either a) already know or b) am unwilling to do, and then I can finally say, "Check. Now I know I'm pretty much doing everything I'm willing to." So, I made an appointment with the nutritionist at the Sports Medicine Institute in Palo Alto.

I chose SMI because they & their personnel have a solid reputation in the Bay Area endurance scene and work with many Stanford athletes as well as a number of professionals. The nutritionist has a PhD in biochemistry from Stanford and spends most of his time teaching nutrition courses at the School of Medicine & athletic department there, as well as at the medical school at UCSF, and apparently has worked with a number of big-name pros including Ryan Hall and Lauren Fleshman. (The point being not the star power, but the fact that dude is actually trained in real science and has many years of experience working with people in my sport & getting results.)

Before the appointment, he had me fill out a giant questionnaire about my training and eating habits, including information about my favorite foods, foods I don't like, anything I can't or choose not to eat, and what I eat most often and why. I tried to be as honest as possible, but I still felt a little embarrassed that under "most common dinners," I listed "pizza, burritos, Indian, Chinese, & Thai."

(Not even joking that if I had my way, it would be pizza for dinner every night. #iamtwelve)

He really stressed the importance of filling out everything as thoroughly and completely as possible and erring on the side of adding more detail rather than less and not worrying about whether something seemed relevant or not; as soon as our three-hour meeting began, it became obvious as to why. He didn't waste a single second and we still needed every minute to get through a) explaining the science to me, b) assessing my entire situation based on what I'd written, and c) putting together a program based on my activities & goals.

You guys. Oh my god.

I thought I understood about food and training and eating not-too-terribly/pretty okay. I mean sure, I knew there were finer points where my understanding wasn't great, but by & large, I felt like I had the big picture.

Lordy. I was disabused of that notion in the first 20 minutes.

I did not have the big picture. What I had were fragments of the big picture, here & there, not always the most important ones, & no understanding of how to fit them together.

To be honest, I kind of went in assuming that the takeaways would be:

• You really have to stop (or at least cut down on) eating x/y/z (where I was pretty sure x, y, & z would be pizza, burritos, & {name of Eastern country} food), and while you're at it,
• You should probably just eat less of everything in general, which is hard & sucks, so good luck with that, also
• Show some damn restraint, woman.

But BEHOLD, Things For Which Dr. C Ain't Got No Time:

• Getting people to stop eating foods they love
• Getting people to eat "healthy" foods they don't like
• Talk of anything even remotely like "will power" or "restraint"

He said that for years he tried promoting the "Dr. C Grocery List" with all the best & most nutritious foods he liked to see people eating, but apparently that just does not work and getting people to dump their entire way of eating and start over from scratch with things they aren't used to eating is super hard and complicated and time consuming which SURPRISE! basically sets people up for failure. "I can't even do it," he said at one point.

So instead, his approach is to start with what you already eat and like and can do easily and make small changes to fix what is for the vast majority of athletes the real underlying issue, and that is managing blood chemistry.

Yes, what you eat is important. And how much you eat matters. But far and away, the thing holding most athletes back in terms of nutrition is the timing.

For example: Our bodies absorb CHO (carbohydrate molecules) into our muscles & liver (where we store it) at a certain rate. (I hope it goes without saying that I am grossly oversimplifying, but stay with me.) As long as your body is getting CHO at that rate, you're fueling your muscles, replenishing CHO you've used up in exercise, & storing it for use in future exercise. If, however, the CHO is coming in faster than that rate, though, your body can't keep up, and the extra will get stored as fat, regardless of what the food was.

I think he said most people's baseline for sending CHO to muscles/liver is around 1 gram per minute at rest, but when you exercise, that rate increases dramatically (which is why you can have basically pure sugar during & immediately after exercise without worrying about it going to fat or messing with your insulin sensitivity). This is also why, as soon as exercise is done, the CHO you've used must be replaced immediately (ie, within ~10 minutes). At that point your body is still processing carbs & sending them to muscle/liver *really* quickly, so you can have, say, 200 calories of bread or crackers or whatever and nearly every bit of it will go to refueling.

Wait 20 minutes to have that same amount of CHO, or 40 minutes, or an hour, and your body's ability to process CHO will have dropped precipitously (by half every 20 minutes, apparently), and suddenly a quarter or a third or half of that CHO can't be processed quickly enough to get sent to your muscles, and instead will get stored as fat. So now you have a) not replaced all your lost carbs and b) gained fat unnecessarily.

Similar things happen with dinner. The problem, he said, is not that I eat pizza and Indian food and what have you most of the time. The problem is not that it's too many carbs or too much white flour or too much grease or any of that. It's that at that point in the evening my body can only absorb 1 g/minute of CHO into my muscles (which need it), and starches digest so fast that my body suddenly finds itself trying to deal with 4g/minute of CHO (or whatever, I'm making numbers up). So now my muscles are getting 25% of the carbs I eat (not enough) and the rest gets stored as (unneeded) fat.

(Also, whole grains are apparently not the answer to this, as they only slow down digestion compared to non-whole grains by about 10%.)

BUT WAIT! It gets better.

As we all know, muscle burns fat. One way to burn more fat is to gain muscle. Alas, many athletes find themselves working very hard to put on muscle and barely breaking even.

This, too, I learned, is often a result of blood chemistry in the form of unstable blood sugar. Blood sugar too low -> cortisol spikes -> cortisol starts breaking down muscle to fuel brain & keep blood sugar from falling further. So sometimes athletes are like, "Must lose fat & gain muscle! Must work out harder and create calorie deficit by eating less!" But what actually happens is that blood sugar drops, cortisol spikes, and now, in addition to having just broken your muscles down with exercise, you're doubly breaking them down by causing your cortisol to panic & cannibalize them a bit to feed your brain. GOOD TIMES!

In all likelihood, he told me, these are the main reasons why I can run 30-50 miles a week, lift weights/strength train 3x a week (ok, not lately, but in general...), spend 3 hours a week doing martial arts, eat the right number of calories from mostly healthy foods, and still be 15 pounds & several body fat percentage points over my (previous) ideal performance weight. It's apparently a very common issue, and (I'm told) actually not that complicated to fix.

The best part? When he said: "You don't have to give up pizza/burritos/{Eastern country} food."

So yeah! That's the ground work. Next time I'll talk about the changes he recommended & how it's been going. :)

Sports Nutrition Part 2: Tweaking My Breakfast Situation

Sports Nutrition Part 3: Tweaking Lunch & Breakfast

Sports Nutrition Part 4: What I Learned About (Re-)Fueling

Allergies, Atopic Syndrome, & Sports Nutrition

Generally I steer away from squawking about my health on the internet because it's not like we really need MORE of that. This rule kind of goes double re: talking too much about food and what I do and don't eat. But, I make exceptions from time to time for things that feel somewhat relevant to running (at least for me), so here I go DOUBLY breaking my own personal blogging rules.

I've had exercise- and allergy-induced asthma basically my whole life, and when I lived in Texas (where I grew up), I also had really bad dust and plant allergies at certain times of year. (Also to animals, though after a few days around a particular set, I seemed to acclimate & be fine.) All of this got a lot better when I moved to Ohio for college, to the point that after a couple of years, I went from taking ALLLL the asthma/allergy drugs/pills/steroids/inhalers to taking essentially none. Some of it's come back *just* a touch since I've been in California these past 10 years, but for the most part as long as I use my inhaler before I run and take a Zyrtec if I know I'm going to be out in nature or around animals, it's basically been fine.

My body likes to keep things interesting, though, and in 2008, I started having throat/upper GI problems, which ranged from mild heartburn to sometimes being unable to swallow food or even water. I saw a doctor for this, who put me on some medicine which helped a lot, and he was all like, "YYYYeah, you should probably have an upper endoscopy & a biopsy to figure out what's up with that." So we tried, and the anesthesiologist couldn't knock me out, and everyone gave up, and I got really busy & moved on with my life.

A year and a half later, I developed an absolutely hideous rash. On my face. Like, nightmarishly, cringe-inducingly bad. All the skin around my eyes became itchy, then red, then turned scaly and started flaking off. Also during this time I had to go out in public sometimes and be around other people, particularly my job teaching public high school to teenagers which was AWESOME. It was disgusting and humiliating and also quite uncomfortable, and the worst part was not knowing when (if?) it was ever going to end.

After going to the doctor like three times only to have her be like, "HM, THAT'S REALLY WEIRD, IT'LL PROBABLY JUST GO AWAY." "OH IT DIDN'T GO AWAY? HERE HAVE SOME BENEDRYL." "WHAT THE BENEDRYL DIDN'T WORK?? THAT IS SO WEIRD." I finally went to an allergist, who, after one phone conversation was like, "I'm pretty sure I know what's wrong with you. Come in & I'll fix it." Dude was like, "You have asthma, bad allergies, eczema [the scaly skin thing], and from the sound of it, eosinophilic esophagitis [the throat thing]. That there's what we call Atopic Syndrome, which basically means every part of you is allergic to everything between here & eternity."

The doc gave me a giant steroid shot which, I kid you not, was so big that it took nearly a full minute to inject. A few days later, the eczema was completely gone. The next week they did two blood allergy panels (one for plants and one for foods), for which the official results just read, "Sweet holy fucksticks."

No but really, the doctor was like, "This test is not conclusive but it looks like you have allergic antibodies to egg white, wheat, corn, soybean, peanut, hazelnut, cashew, walnut, almond, macadamia nut, cat and dog hair, mites, bermuda and johnson grass, timothy, penicillium notatum, cladosporium herharu, aspergillus, alternaria tenuis, white oak, elm, cottonwood tree, white mulberry, smooth alder, mugwort, and pigweed. So maybe avoid those things?"

But to be honest I kind of blew it off because it said I was allergic to all these foods that I've been eating my whole life without having any reaction, and besides my immediate problem was solved which is obviously the only really important thing in life.

Fast forward to a few months ago when I called to get my throat prescription refilled and the doctor's office was like "YOU HAVEN'T BEEN HERE IN FIVE YEARS, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?" So I slunk back in, and finally agreed to get another endoscopy/biopsy, which confirmed the eosinophilic esophagitis/Atopic Syndrome. The treatment, typically, is to stop eating eggs, wheat, dairy, soy, nuts/seeds, and seafood. Forever.

(Did I mention I already can't eat cruciferous vegetables because of my thyroid problem? GUESS IT'S STEAK AND FRUIT FROM NOW ON.)

(Oh, wait. We can't shouldn't eat beef because of the drought, so chicken, I guess. Chicken and fruit.)

So yeah. That business is like a real, legit, medical-treatment diet, not something Gwenyth Paltrow made up because paleo-vego-gluten free was too rich.

My reaction, predictably: Eff. That.

And the doctor was like, "No but really. This is a food allergy & it's really bad for you, & if you're not going to do the diet, you really have to get the skin tests & then stop eating whatever it says you're allergic to."

Cue the allergist. I explained my situation and then they did a round of skin testing, which involves drawing a giant grid on your back & then pricking each little square with one of the allergens they're testing you for. (I think they did 40-50 on me.) It was less uncomfortable than I was afraid it would be, and the good news is that it only takes about 15 minutes before you can see the reactions. Sure enough, my back started to itch in several different places, and I kind of resigned myself to being told it was chicken and fruit from here on out.

But, interestingly enough, the only foods I reacted to were the nuts, particularly peanut and hazelnut. I was elated!

The downside: I eat a peanut butter & jelly sandwich every morning when I get to work, and of course, just refilled my stash last week.

Anyone want any peanut butter?

When I was thinking I might have to retool my entire diet, I made an appointment with a sports nutritionist at the Sports Medicine Institute in Palo Alto (the same place where I go for massages). He's apparently worked with a lot of Stanford athletes and other local recreational and professional endurance athletes, so it seems like he's the right kind of guy to talk to. I'm feeling a lot less panicky about nutrition (now that I know I'm not allergic to every food on earth), but to be honest, as I start to really, actually train for Santa Rosa, I kind of do want an expert set of eyes looking at what and how I eat & see if there are things I can tweak a bit for better results. By & large I feel that my eating habits are pretty decent, but they're certainly not perfect, and I feel like I'm not quite up to doing it on my own (even with the help of Matt Fitzgerald).

So, I'm seeing him next Tuesday. It will be interesting to hear his thoughts (especially about what I should start eating when I get to work now that PB&J is out)!

Race Report: Napa Valley Marathon

(This is the race report about how my race went & my thoughts about it - If you're interested in all the logistical information, you might want to check out this post. :) )

Soooo....I ran this marathon on Sunday, and it was weirdly...fine/good/NBD? In a good way?

(A bit of background in case you're new 'round these parts --

• Three cursed marathons
• Hideous right hip injury
• Deferred NVM entry thanks to stress fracture
• Failed attempt at fourth non-cursed marathon
• Commitment to hella base train
• Take the NVM deferral & use it as a base training check-in)

So this wasn't an all-out PR attempt or anything--just a chance to complete 26 miles at a comfortable pace and give me a chance to see a) what all this base training has done for me and b) what kind of shape my right hip (which is much improved, but still touch-and-go-at-times) is in when it comes to that distance.

Our plan had been to drive to Napa, hit the expo, do some wine tasting, have dinner at Morimoto, then drive to Calistoga & crash. Which still basically is what happened except that a) we needed more sleep Saturday morning than we'd anticipated so got up late, b) someone was blocking our driveway so we had to deal with that, and c) traffic from SF to Napa was utterly horrendous. So we rolled in around 3pm ready to gnaw our own arms off & FINALLY made it to the expo (which was pretty much par for the course in terms of small, boutique-y, wine country races).

(Sidenote: There wasn't really time at this point to do much proper wine tasting, so I give you: Most Bang for Your Buck in Downtown Napa:

• The Vintner's Collective. A bit pricey at 3 tastes for $15, but they have a massive selection, staff who know the wine really well, and everything we had was delicious.
• Smith-Anderson Wine Group. We went here because they were right across the street from VC. Not quite as good, but they had some tasty things, and it was less crowded & slightly cheaper.
• Oxbow Market. Kind of the Ferry Building of Napa. I particularly recommend a visit to Napa Valley Distillery, which I promise has the largest collection of bitters you will ever encounter in your life.)

Napa Valley Distillery's bitters collection at Oxbow Market.

Morimoto was indescribably amazing; borderline uncomfortably full and VERY happy our dinner reservation had not been any later than 6:30, we drove to Calistoga, I did my usual pre-race OCD bib-man ritual, & tried to sleep (which....didn't work out so well. Sigh.)

My memory was that the hotel was about a mile from the start, but Google Maps said .7, and when I jogged over Sunday morning, my Garmin clocked less than .5. So, if you run this race & decide to stay in Calistoga instead of Napa, you could do worse than the Sunburst Hotel. (Be warned, though...while this was a cheaper option, nothing in Calistoga is ever cheap.)

I dropped my bottles into the labeled crates (surprisingly few people seemed to be using them -- maybe 50 or so out of a field of 3,000?), jogged a super easy mile or so to get warmed up, finally shed my jacket, checked my bag, & tucked into a warm pocket of people behind the starting mat.

As expected, the beginning of the race was cold, but maybe because I'd been mentally preparing myself to feel utterly miserably cold, it wasn't horrifically bad. (Mostly, I really, really wished I had gloves.)

I intentionally didn't set any time/pace goals for this race because I wanted it to really, truly feel like there was no pressure, the only caveat being that I didn't really want to be out there on my feet for much over four hours. In the end I didn't go so far as to cover my watch, but I didn't pay much attention to it except to glance at mile splits (mostly out of curiosity; the beauty of not having a time goal is not feeling like you have to do anything in response to splits).

Lately my long runs have mostly been in the 9:30-10:30 range lately, so mentally I'd sort of roughly estimated 10:00 miles for the first hour, 9:30 for the second, 9:00 for the third, & 8:15ish for the fourth, hoping I'd be able to speed up & clock some GMP miles at the end. (Fast finish long runs & all that.)

(I'll be honest, though - originally I'd typed "8:00/mile" for hour four, then changed it to 8:15, remembering how running 10 miles at 8:00 pace at Foster City had been tough, and that was *without* an 18-20 mile long run first.)

Nothing much of note happened in the first handful of miles. Mostly, I spent the first couple feeling uncomfortably cold & desperately wishing I'd worn throw-away gloves, & kept reminding myself that as much as I envied everyone around me in tights and knee socks, the tables would likely turn before too long given the forecast. It was also slightly demoralizing that my watch ticked off mile 1 about .05 miles before the marker, an interval that would only get longer and longer with each one. Sigh.

In mile 3 I happened upon a phantom aid station which totally threw me off for a minute because I didn't process that the first official station wasn't until 4.2. There was no special drinks table & the volunteers handing out water & Gatorade looked at me like I had seven heads when I asked about it. I spent maybe 45 seconds trying to make sense of what was going on, then gave up, took a cup of water, & moved on. It threw me off for a minute or two (mostly because I was afraid I had misunderstood how the bottle situation worked) but I got over it. Gel-wise, I just decided for simplicity's sake to do one every three miles regardless of my pace.

Mile 1: 9:41
Mile 2: 9:31
Mile 3: 9:58 (phantom aid station confusion)

Official aid station #1 appeared around 4.2, exactly where it was supposed to be. The special drinks were on a little table at the far end of the aid station, and since there were only maybe 15 bottles on it at that point, it was super easy to spot mine & grab it. (Clearly the majority of people using the special drinks option were running a lot faster than me, which makes sense.)

The next few miles passed uneventfully. I ran at a completely relaxed and comfortable pace on the flats and downhills, tried not to push too hard on the occasional short uphill parts, and mentally broke things up into three-mile chunks with my tangy little dollop of motivational sugar at the end of each one.

I also really liked the way the six-ounce Gatorade bottles worked out. They were small enough that they were light and easy to carry, but contained enough liquid that I could make it last a good, long while (sometimes up to two miles). I also liked being able to sip whenever I felt like it, vs. grabbing two cup from a volunteer & frantically trying to guzzle both without choking or pouring it all over myself instead of into my mouth. It also eliminated the aid station panic I get sometimes if I don't carry my own bottle (OH GOD OH GOD HOW LONG TO THE NEXT ONE). I found it to be a VERY civilized way of getting fluids & am already plotting to see if I can convince other races to let me do this in the future.

Mile 4: 9:08
Mile 5: 9:11
Mile 6: 9:14
Mile 7: 9:00
Mile 8: 9:00
Mile 9: 9:02

By hour 2 I was already thankful that I hadn't worn extra layers. The temperature was cool with a light breeze, but no longer cold, and the sun was climbing higher.

Somewhere in there was when I had my first hint of "Oof, this is starting to feel like more than zero effort." I had a brief moment of panic as I flashed back to my recent 20 miler where my legs started feeling mushy at mile 11, but in retrospect, I think this was probably just a matter of paying excruciatingly close attention to every teeny tiny sensation anywhere in my body (like you do in a marathon or other goal race) and blowing that first inkling of "Hey look, there's kind of work involved now!" a bit out of proportion. I let myself stay relaxed and comfortable, though, and it really didn't get any harder than that.

Mile 10: 9:22
Mile 11: 8:57
Mile 12: 9:16
Mile 13: 9:10
Mile 14: 9:11
Mile 15: 8:54

I got a little mental boost when I passed mile marker 16 because I could now count down from 10. It was also the first point at which I let myself consider that I felt really good and pretty strong still, and maybe I could let myself run a little faster and not regret it at mile 23. Don't get me wrong, there was definitely effort involved, but I didn't have even the faintest inkling of fatigue or dead legs or any of that. Still, I didn't want to push too soon, so I made a deal with myself that I had to keep it in the super-easy-relaxed zone until mile 20, and after that I could do whatever I wanted.

Mile 16: 9:11
Mile 17: 8:55
Mile 18: 8:28
Mile 19: 8:40
Mile 20: 8:48

STORY TIME: Back in grad school when I played polo, our team had a string of maybe 30 ponies, which ranged from utterly lethargic (the Volvos) to high-end, well-trained ones on loan from or donated by local pros (the Lamborghinis). Only a few of us were allowed to ride the Lamborghinis because as soon as you got on, you could feel this creature who loves nothing more in life than chasing polo balls practically vibrating underneath you, ready to spring the second you shifted your weight. With these horses, it was not so much a matter of urging them to run as it was a matter of holding them in check, and the second you turned them loose, you'd better hold on.

This was how I felt approaching mile 20. I had three hours and two minutes of comfortable, restrained jaunting behind me, and while that had been pleasant enough (like, more pleasant than any long run ever), I was done with that business. The closer I'd gotten to the 20 mile mark, the more jittery and desperate I felt to just cut loose and tear it up on these last 10K between me & the finish.

Part of me wanted to go back to my original, secret goal of attempting to crank them out at sub-8:00 pace, but I had no idea if that was realistic, and I didn't want to try it & then end up crawling the last two. So instead I just sped up to a pace that was comfortably hard and fun but that I still felt pretty sure I could hold for six more miles. I didn't look at my watch until it ticked off mile 21, and when I saw 7:59 for the split, I knew I had a realistic chance.

It was quite warm & sunny at this point & as I passed scores of runners in black tights and jackets and long sleeve shirts, I felt incredibly grateful for my clothing choices. It never felt miserably hot, but I still appreciated the man standing out front of his house with a garden hose spraying down anyone who asked (and I totally did).

Those last miles were just a blast. I mean yes, they were hard because I was pushing myself, but only because I felt good & really wanted to shoot for doing it at a sub-8:00 pace. The closer I got to the finish, the harder I let myself run, passing people like they were standing still at this point. When I came around the corner towards the finish, I saw that I was running at 5:xx pace according to my watch. (Garmin says I hit 3:39 at some point in there but that really just strikes me as utterly absurd. I mean come on now.)

Mile 21: 7:59
Mile 22: 8:08
Mile 23: 8:01
Mile 24: 7:53
Mile 25: 7:54
Mile 26: 7:44
Mile .2: 1:16 (6:17 pace)

THINGS I DID IMMEDIATELY UPON REACHING THE FINISH LINE:

1) Leap into the air as I crossed the mat:

2) Pose for these:

3) Cry.

Seriously. Generally I am not a cryer, but so much of me was like, Holy shit, what the f#@$ just happened?!?!? Regardless of my pace or how well my race is going goal-wise, I've always been one of those people at mile 21 who's like, "If someone could just kill me now, plzthnx." Every single time, at mile 18-20, I've found myself thinking, "What kind of sick joke is it that I still have nearly AN HOUR to go???" There was even once where I remember thinking, "If I ever find the effing bastard who decided 25 miles wasn't good enough I will goddamn effing murder them in their sleep."

And I think part of me has just internalized those feelings & secretly thought maybe they were inevitable, that maybe it was just part of my genetics, to be someone who can run reasonably fast and strong for 13-15-18 miles and then dissolve into an emotional and/or physical puddle of Jello.

But that didn't happen. Like, not even close. I felt great the whole way. Not passably okay, not just hanging in there until it was over. I felt better than I ever have at mile 20 (even on slower long runs) and enjoyed the heck out of the last 10K. I could have run it faster. I could have gone farther. I haven't even been sore.

And I get it if you're like, "Uh, DUH, Angela, you barely even tried for the first 20 miles." Which yes, I get, but at a 9:08 average pace, those 20 miles were still considerably faster than any long run I've done in the last six months, and way, way easier. But then, on top of that, basically running the same six-mile GMP workout--faster, actually!--that I've been doing almost weekly for months and has still not become reliably easy when I do it not after a 20 mile long run?? It was still so, so far beyond anything I had expected I would be able to do.

Which is why, on the one hand, it felt like a huge, amazing, landmark type deal. I am not genetically programmed to suck at all marathons all the time! And why, on the other hand, the running of the race itself felt like no big deal. I just kind of did it, waited for the abject misery, which never came, and then before I realized it, it was over, and I still actually felt pretty human.

Official: 3:52:35/26.2 miles/8:53 pace
Garmin: 3:52:38/26.39 miles/8:49 pace

I think it can be trouble to try to pinpoint exactly what causes specific races to go really well or badly, because there are just *so* many variables, both from training cycle to training cycle and from day to day. But, I also think it can be useful to do some kind of reflecting about it, so if I had to guess at why I finally had this one awesome-feeling (if not particularly fast) marathon, here's what I've got:

1) SERIOUS BASE TRAINING. I was just reading something recently by Greg McMillan talking about how his younger athletes are often surprised at how well they can run just on half-decent base training, and that's kind of how I felt about this. I was hoping I might be able to negative split, but up until a few weeks ago I was 100% just planning to do this race at maybe slightly-faster-than-long-run pace & finish in the 4:15 range because that's all I realistically thought I had the training for. I solemnly swear to never, ever let my aerobic base training lapse ever again.

2) Longer runs, more rest days. I made this decision on my own because I've just found that a six mile easy run and a ten mile easy run beat me up physically about the same amount, but having more rest days lets me recover faster. So I've been doing about the same mileage as usual but with more rest days. But, I think there was an unintended bonus, which was doing 9-10 mile runs significantly more often than I have in the past, and I think that I've gotten more benefit endurance-wise from running weeks that look like rest/10/rest/8/10/rest/18 than from ones that look like rest/6/4/6/8/4/18.

3) Train low/race high. This, I learned from all the Racing Weight books. Matt Fitzgerald talks about training your body to use more fat & less carbs for fuel on long runs (limited carb storage being the relevant factor when it comes to bonking/hitting the wall) by doing at least some long runs with no fuel or limited fuel. Honestly I've never found that fueling on training runs has been all that critical for me, so one of my "fake training" experiments was basically never taking any types of carbs whatsoever (with one exception, one time) on any runs, even very long ones. And then on race day, I effing mainlined that shit. I learned last summer that I can tolerate 50-60g per hour pretty well, which is exactly what I did for this race, which did not make me sick and very well may have made a big difference in how strong I felt, particularly at the end.

4) Good weather. Not that I can take credit for it, but still. I don't think I would have had the race I did had it been super hot/windy/muggy/pouring rain/etc.

PHEW! That is quite enough for one blog post, wouldn't you say? I'll post something about all the logistics in a day or two. (**Update** - You can find the logistical/nuts & bolts post about NVM here!)

THANK YOU ALL OUT THERE IN BLOG LAND SOOOO MUCH FOR ALL YOUR SUPPORT & WELL WISHES! :D