Category: Uncategorized

Since I wrote about sugar last week, I thought it would only make sense to talk about salt next.

This one is the opposite of my issue with sugar – I don’t really salt my food and I’m not particularly fond of salty snacks. On the plus side, I live in the US, so everything comes already loaded with sodium, so chances of me needing more are on the low side.

On the other hand, I also manage to be a ‘salty sweater’. Whenever I hear that term, I get a mental image of myself wearing a sweater made of salt. You’re welcome for that ridiculous mental image 😜.

What are dangers of excess salt intake?

I think that by now, most of us are familiar with dangers of eating too much salty stuff in the long run: high blood pressure and heart disease. But that’s not all.

In one-off situations, you are more likely to retain excess water, leading to bloating and higher blood pressure. Oh, and let’s not forget about being thirsty like crazy. Your body wants to keep certain ratio of sodium to water and if you’ve consumed too much salt, it will demand that you fix it by drinking water.

Apparently if you keep going, you can overdose on salt! Yes, it would take insane amounts. But why try it? And some people have increased risk due to factors such as heart disease. Please stay safe and if in doubt, ask a doctor…

If you’d like to read more on the issue, I found this article to be quite informative.

What if I don’t eat enough salt?

Since we all have heard a lot about risks of consuming too much salt, many people restrict its intake drastically. But this is not entirely healthy, either. Here are some unintended harmful side effects:

• May increase insulin resistance
• Apparently study results vary in how much it helps with heart disease (go with what your doctor says!)
• Increased risk of death from heart failure
• May raise your bad cholesterol and triglycerides levels
• Increased risk of heart attack and stroke for people with diabetes
• Hyponatremia

Consideration for endurance athletes

As frequently is the case, endurance athletes are a completely different animal and need a special consideration. Since you swim/ bike/ run a lot, you have more salt to replenish as you sweat it all out. I have talked about it a bit in this past post about hydration. The fact is that you are likely to need a bit more than ‘recommended amount’ for people leading sedentary life style, although you need to make sure you don’t overindulge.

Things to factor in:

• How much you are training – longer distances will require more salt
• How hot and humid is it – both hot and humidity increase your need for electrolytes
• How long have you been training in heat – the better you are adjusted to working out in heat, the less salt you will lose.

Always pay attention to your body. You don’t want to risk excess levels of sodium in your body or deficiency thereof – neither will help you with your performance.

Take care and hopefully, we will be back to ‘good old days’ of training and competing in person soon!

Ask yourself if what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.

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I already discussed issue of carbs in the diet of an endurance athlete, but what about sugar? I admit it openly: I am totally addicted to sugar. But I also know it’s not that good for me. So, in a truly-me fashion, I decided to look into how bad all that chocolate and cookies are for me.

Types of sugar

Sugars are basically sweet-tasting carbs. The most common ones you are likely to encounter are glucose, fructose, lactose (anybody lactose-intolerant out there? Did you realize you were allergic to a type of sugar?) and sucrose.

They are not all made equal, but when they break down, one of the things you will get is glucose. Which is what your muscle uses. And that’s a lot easier on you than burning fat for energy. On the other hand, your body has to produce insulin to regulate sugar levels. Both too much and too little can be harmful. If you tend to overindulge in sweets, your pancreas may stop being able to work its insulin-producing magic, leading to diabetes.

During an endurance race or workout

This is a complex issue and I have discussed it in detail in my post about fueling during an endurance race. The bottom line to this is: sugar is a great source of fast energy, but it’s not enough to keep you going for the extremely long races (think ironman triathlon or an ultra). It can lead to gastric distress (what a nice way of putting it, when reality is rather gross 😉). But still, that is where you will go first for extra fuel.

Sugar outside exercise

I actually had to ask Diana (my coach, aka goddess of all things fitness-related) for her opinion on sugar. My research made me want to abandon this topic all together, as there are clearly to camps (the pro-carb people and the keto people).

Here is one thing all of them agreed on: in blood tests, endurance athletes show results similar to pre-diabetics. Say what??? But diabetes is an illness of obese, lazy people, right??? Yes, it also got my attention. The fat-burning crowd threw these studies around a lot. I thought this article had interesting details regarding science behind the issue without being overly dry and impossible to understand for a ‘mere mortal’.

Here is the thing I learned from further reading: endurance athletes may look like pre-diabetics, but they very rarely actually develop diabetes. It’s possible that their insulin and blood sugar levels are an adaptation to long periods of exercise.

Something we all need to keep in mind though: every person’s body works a bit differently and no answers are perfect for everybody. Also, binge eating sugary stuff and washing it down with soda is not a recipe for success. Be reasonable with your diet. But the good news is that it looks like you don’t have to completely deny yourself that sweet treat after dinner!

I thought about quitting, but then I noticed who was watching.

Lux Quotes

What is taper?

Sometimes, I feel like taper is a downhill at the end of training. Simply put, it is decreasing intensity and/ or volume of training just before the race. Depending on the sport and distance involved, it lasts between 4 and 28 days. Obviously, the duration increases with the length of the competition. Higher impact sports also call for more taper time.

I tried to figure out what’s the shortest race you should taper for. Believe it or not, this guy said you should do it even for 5k and 10k! Well, if you mean that you probably shouldn’t do anything extra hard, I guess I can sort of see it…

What are the benefits?

When you train, you tear your body down and exhaust yourself. Taper is time to fully recover from all that hard work. By the time you are 2-4 weeks out from the competition, you have done pretty much everything you can to get in shape. Now it’s time to allow your body to heal up and get ready for the big day. It also helps avoid any last-minute injuries, which can put a real damper on your performance.

How much faster you can go? I have seen a wide range of answers, influenced by type of taper and variety of other factors. Many just stick with 3%, but I have seen it listed as up to 22%. The lower limit may not sound like much, but if you’re trying hard to qualify for Boston, these few seconds may make all the difference!

Something I found not to be mentioned enough: after all this training, taking a bit off will allow your mental state to recover. You will want to run and ride and swim again! I have heard numerous runners a couple of weeks away from a marathon saying that they want all this training to just be over. Taking a few easy weeks will help with the mental fatigue!

Last but not least: it’s also time to do the carb loading (read up on that here). If you put a very high mileage all the time, it’s difficult for your body to store up the glycogen in your muscle – you keep burning it! But after a week of a high-carb diet without excessive exercise? Yes, please! We will keep this energy waiting for you!

Quick warning

As most avid runners and cyclists will tell you, not getting your run/ride can put you in a foul mood. Please don’t hurt others around you… You may need to take your mental health (and happiness of others) into account when tapering. I heard some have ‘taper tantrums’. We don’t need athletes to turn into bratty toddlers! Over the years, hopefully you will develop some coping mechanisms. Just remember not to overdo it! Spending 6 hours on that construction project instead of going on a run is not proper taper.

How to go about it?

Decreasing volume

Your training has two basic components to it: volume and intensity. Let’s start with decreasing volume, since there is a consensus on it: you should shorten your workouts and not do them every day. Like every other day seems like a good compromise.

Decreasing intensity

This part brought a bit less clarity. Some said you should do intervals training, do many of your workouts at race pace or just the opposite: just jog a bit without rushing anywhere. Honestly, it left me completely confused. I did develop my own best advice here: don’t put in workouts that will leave you completely beat. So if you’re going to do a marathon, a 5k at your race pace isn’t that bad. And if you haven’t been doing much interval training, don’t do it! And definitely not for like every workout. You will just create new source of fatigue this way. That’s opposite of helpful. Plus you’re risking developing an injury.

I hope this sheds some light on the issue of taper. Now go get out there and keep training!

Run. Because zombies will eat the untrained ones first!

Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide

Lactate threshold is one of those mystery terms thrown at sport newbies and it sometimes feels like it’s used to confuse us. Even I have done it in the past, like when I talked about becoming a faster runner. I think it’s about time to discuss what it is and how to use it in training.

What is lactate threshold?

According to Wikipedia, lactate threshold is when during physical activity, your body creates more lactic acid than it can break it down. Your body reaches this point around 85% of maximum heart rate or 75% of maximum oxygen intake. Obviously, there is a more accurate, scientific way out there. I am going to assume though that majority of people in here are amateurs without access to the fancy stuff.

Lactic acid (or lactate) is produced by your muscle in anaerobic exercise. And why would lactic acid accumulation be bad? Well, that’s what gives you that burning feeling in your muscle during a workout. Accumulate enough of it and it will lead to weakness and nausea (I guess this is where throwing up after a particularly intense run/ ride comes from?).

Lactate is actually not all bad – it’s recycled by your body into more energy. But you have to give your body a chance to get to it! It’s associated with some waste byproducts though and those do have to be cleaned out of your system. Not that it makes much of a difference at the end of the day, does it?

How does it impact my performance?

One thing you can probably guess right off the bat: if you are building up lactic acid, you can’t maintain this level of activity for too long. So basically the point of training is to move your lactate threshold up, allowing you to maintain higher effort for longer. And that’s the goal of training, isn’t it?

How do I improve it?

Proper training.

Yeah, right 😅. Anybody who’s done research on improving sport performance will tell you that. I think you were looking for something more specific.

In general, just like with working on your VO2 Max, you need to do some intervals. These need to be around or slightly below your lactate threshold and a bit longer than the VO2 Max runs – more like 10 minutes than 30-60 seconds. The more you do it, the more your body gets used to ‘recycling’ increasing amounts of lactate, which means you gradually move your lactate threshold up. And in the end, that means you can run longer and faster.

The size of success is measured by the strength of your desire, the size of your dream, and how you handle disappointment along the way.

Robert Kiyosaki

Weight management in endurance training is a curious issue. I wrote before about nutrition while training, but stayed away from the issue of weight management. It’s time to fix that.

I didn’t give it much thought until a few years ago, a friend of mine decided to run a marathon and complained to me that he keeps gaining weight. And just the other day, I saw a lady mentioning on Twitter that she is looking for a dietician/ nutritionist because she is trying to lose weight while training for Ironman 70.3 and she is struggling because she is constantly hungry. So what gives?

Why do you gain weight when training for a marathon?

This one is surprisingly simple: because you are constantly hungry and you’re stuffing your face.

No, really. This is especially the case if you weren’t basically living at the gym beforehand. Many people struggle with weight gain when they start working out because they overcompensate for perceived effort. There was a small study in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness a while back where they asked normal-weight adults to estimate how many calories they burned, subjects guessed 3-4 times as much as they really did. Makes it easy to gain weight with that margin of error, especially if you workout a lot!

There is another, more flattering, explanation. Maybe you have gained a few pounds, but that’s because you were replacing fat (or absence of body mass) with muscle. You are not headed for the ‘right weight’, but be honest: are you aiming more for a specific number on the scale or appearance?

How to go about weight management?

I hope you are not getting into marathon training just to lose weight. It’s a lousy motivation. I am all for wanting to feel better, be healthier and having goals. Running a marathon is an amazing experience and many people put it on their bucket list. But let’s be honest: thinking ‘this will help me lose those extra pounds’ is a lousy mantra when you’re trying to get through a long run and some a-hole in a car just splashed mud all over you, you’re cold, tired and the only appealing marathon is that show you like on Netflix.

So you still want to lose weight while training for a marathon or a triathlon? Or at least maintain…

Great! Let’s approach this scientifically.

Step 1: hopefully, you have an idea of how much can you eat without gaining weight. If not, there are many tools on the internet that can help you get a general idea.

Step 2: figure out how many calories you are actually burning during your workouts. Sport watches and some other gear can provide you with those numbers. Or you can ask the internet and get general idea. Word of caution: those tend to give you higher numbers than reality, so you probably have fewer calories to work with than you think.

Step 3: plan your meals around that daily allowance. Remember that the smarter choices you make, the better you will feel. A cookie may have plenty of calories, but it’s not a satisfying meal and won’t be keeping you full for long.

Additional considerations

Something I haven’t thought actively about until doing research for this article, but it’s a great point: watch out your NEAT. I will spare you the science-y words, but what it refers to is how much you move around outside your workouts. For example, you may have been going on all-day hikes on weekends before you took up marathon training and now are opting for a nap. You can’t be adding calories for your full long run. You need to subtract what you used to burn on the hike to get your net gain. Many people decrease their activity outside workouts once they start training. You know: ‘I already ran, I’m tired, it’s time to relax’ and it’s many cousins. One definitely has to take it into consideration when planning weight management.

Ideal race weight

Let me start by saying it’s a subjective number. Having said that, it doesn’t mean it’s not a useful tool in figuring out what weight range you should be aiming for. The goal is to have as little weight to carry around without compromising your muscle and stored fuel. I found this website useful in understanding what your weight goal should be, especially since they take into account the size of your frame. I may be short, but I am build heavy. It has nothing to do with being fat – I just have genuinely thick, strong bones. I like it because it means I am not that fragile. On the other hand, I can’t aim for the same weight as a petite ballerina, same height or not.

Basic guiding principle appears to be double your height in inches and it will give you the base for your weight in pounds. Depending on your built, you will need to go up or down by up to 10lbs. I have to admit that this is where they sort of lose me – that’s a huge spread!

Goals should never be easy – they should force you to work, even if they are uncomfortable at the time.

Michael Phelps