Running to Think

Hi folks,
I hope you enjoyed the holidays with your dear ones, moments to cherish fully. I wish you the best for the years that come. May this year be filled with love, family, health and ofcourse physical activity!

I spent my holiday abroad. Francesco and I planned to go to his hometown Molfetta, in Southern Italy. I got in contact with his culture, his family, their habits, and their food. Food so delicious that I literally lost my character and determination to say no, once in a while. Do you want to know how this ended up? With a weight gain, of course.



A brief analysis of the aforementioned gain is reported below.

1. Eating more - caloric intake counting is math. No magics. 
2. Eating different types of food, more fried stuff, more cheese, pizza, pasta, etc.
3. Skipping breakfast due to the fact that I had enough from the day before - which basically slows down one's metabolism
4. Drink some more alcohol than I usually do (or well, don't)
5. No gym at my disposal to burn some calories 

I address these 5 points as responsible of my weight gain. Of course, my determination to change my condition as soon as possible is back. Here is my plan for the next two weeks.
Feel free to adopt my strategy to improve your condition after holiday.

1. Drink a lot of cold water
2. Eat 5 times a day (every 2 -3 hours), of course in smaller amounts
3. Eat carbs only for breakfast and lunch
4. Prepare healthy juices and smoothies with no added sugar
5. Eat more proteins
6. Avoid snacks such as chocolate, candies, ice cream, cookies and the like
7. Hit the gym 4-5 times a week to perform some interval as cardio and weight lifting in order to sculpt the body

This will help us to find the normal weight again. A bit more motivation and dedication are needed especially at the beginning. Don't give up because it will worth! Just be patient for next 14 days.

In addition, here is a delicious, light and easy-to-make recipe that can contribute to your weight loss.

 Time to make: 5 min preparation + 12 min boiling the wheat = 17 min

 Ingredients:

1. Roquette
2. 100g Roquefort cheese
3. 75g of wheat (type Ebly)
4. 1/2 green apple
5. 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
6. salt/pepper

Hi friends,
today I want you to introduce a fantastic sport to you. It's called CrossFit. Crossfit has been founded by Greg Glassman and Lauren Jenai back in 2000. It is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes, worldwide. Promoted as both a physical exercise philosophy and a competitive fitness sport, CrossFit workouts incorporate elements from high-intensity interval training, olympic weightlifting, plyometrics, powerlifting, gymnastics, calisthenics, strongman and other exercises.

Why you should give CrossFit a chance?

I did several sports in my life such as dancing and tennis, running and fitness. With CrossFit I could find all I am familiar with: group mentality, competition, cardio, strength. Moreover, I can do it where ever and whenever I want. The fun part of CrossFit is that all workouts are short and very intensive. You can find the Workout Of the Day, WOD, on the official website. You can also find videos, explanations of movements, articles, competitions and much  much more. 
I got in touch with it several months ago. The fitness I work at recently started a training room, called the box, in the jargon of CrossFit. It took me one workout to be part of it. 
I basically loved it! As a Crossfit fan, I have assisted to a competition in Nivelles (Walloon Brabant) organised by the Belgium fitness league. It was quite inspiring and motivating.

Here is a video which summarised the WOD. Don't get discouraged. These girls are athletes and practice hours and hours per week. 

Let me give you one tip: never load too much weight at first. But try to do every movement with the correct technique. Only when you feel you master it, don't hesitate to push it up. 

World champions CrossFit 2014 

With the hope to inspire you I feel like throwing yet another observations: it is not a guy-only sport. Girls can kick asses too, believe me!
Maybe i see you around for a WOD ;)

Love,
Caroline

Hi my measuring freaks,
if there is anyone who does not like to measure her or his own progress, please raise your hand. Thing is that you get a boost when you have the feeling to be close to your target. And that, my friends, can happen only if you can measure it.

The easiest  and most well know method is measuring your weight with a scale. The cheap ones that you find in supermarkets are in my opinion not very accurate. Once you get a decent one there is a way to define your ideal weight by measuring your height and use the formula for BMI (body mass index) = weight / height². A healthy BMI should be in the range 18-25 but of course this number should be taken with care because it doesn't take into account body composition. Namely, a fat person can have the same BMI than a body builder.

Below you can find a BMI chart, provided you would like to know if you are in the green zone:

Table 1: BMI chart

More accurate scales for medical usage such as those that you can find in pharmacies like wellnescentra and fitnesscentra can do a great job. One brand I suggest is Tanita.
It uses BIA (Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis) technology, which sends a safe, low-level electrical signal from footplate and hand electrodes through the body. BIA is quickly calculated and it is also non-invasive. This is considered one of the most reliable ways to measure body composition, even clinically comparable to DEXA (dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry) and hydrostatic (underwater) weighing. These methods usually return your weight, fat percentage, fat mass, fat free mass, total body water, muscle mass, bone mass to provide a very complete profile of your body. 

Those scales are also quite expensive, one more reason to keep reading.
If you can have access to one of those scales in your city or gym, fine. Otherwise you can use other cheaper techniques which go under the term of kinathropometry.

Kinanthropometry is an emerging scientific specialization concerned with the application of measurement to appraise human size, shape, proportion, composition, maturation and gross function. It is a basic discipline for problem-solving in matters related to growth, exercise, performance and of course nutrition.


The measuring tools you need are:
1) a scale
2) a calibre (to measure skinfolds)
3) a measuring tape

Figure 2: Calibre

Figure 3: Skinfolds to measure

You got all, now what? What should you measure, where, how and what formula should you use?

Let's get busy.

Biometry

They are a lot of things you can measure such as height, weight, the circumference of the upper arm, waist, hip, calf, thigh and some other stuff but those are not really important. The skinfolds can be measured with a calibre.
In Figure 3 you can see the correct places that you should measure. Measure each twice or more to make sure you did it well, then take the average of those measurements.

Body Density (BD)

The measures at hand will allow you to calculate your fat percentage. There are 3 different formulae to do that. I will explain the two ones that I consider as the most accurate. These formulae adapt quite well according to your age, gender and the amount of skinfolds you measured.

1) Jackson- Pollock (3 site skinfold formula)

2) Durnin - Womersley (age 20-29)

Fat Percentage

October means fall, trees losing their leaves, the sky getting greyish (a bit more here in Belgium) and people getting more lazy. Not us.
October for us has just one meaning: running more and getting ready for the winter season, in one word, actually two, half-marathon of Bruxelles. Due to the race-of-the-year, scheduled on October 25th, I decided to run it at a gentle pace and be Caroline's bodyguard in the first part. I ran with her for the first 5 km at the pace of 5':09" per km, a pretty fast one for her. I had no reason to mentally push her as I saw she was enjoying the run, measuring herself in the first three hilly tunnels at the beginning of the race and projecting her condition on the long distance of 21.1 km.
At km 5, I got her approval to go, crashed my lips on hers as a mere sign of good luck, and gave free rein to my legs, which were waiting for the signal. Unchained, they galloped me towards the finish line, which was only 16 km far. I passed a number of runners and put myself (and my backpack) in front of 3500 people in about 12 km.
I enjoyed it, a lot. No pain, no stress, no rush, at the moderate pace of 4':05" per km.

I hereby thank Bernard for the beautiful image and post-production.

The best came in the last 3 km when I decided to taste the delicious flavour of strain and increase the pace to 3':29" per km. A joy you can appreciate in this picture of me almost approaching the finish line.
I had no bib number with me. We need none in the forest. Caroline did. Therefore she could get her diploma and the official race time of 1h:55':54".
Not bad at all as her first time.

Dear runners,
a lot happened since my last trips to Finland and Vienna. Buying a house that I don't really need has probably been the stupidest thing I've ever done so far in my life. Even more stupid when I realised that being a gipsy is indeed my attitude, at least for the time being.
Thank God, sad things never come alone. The grateful smile of Caroline is one of the most fulfilling experiences I have day by day.

With this said, I should be here to write about my running experience rather than my personal life, right? Well, running is about my personal life. No off topic.
The last weeks have been partially dedicated, as I said, to working in the house, working in the office and eventually maintaining a good condition by running in the forests and hills around Liege.
Before each running session and especially during many of them, however, I often felt tired, with that feeling of emptiness in the legs, not in the mood at all and kind of bored. Have you ever had such a feeling?
Life was never meant to be easy, as the lyrics of a song say. I do agree. But running with no enthusiasm can be more painful than interval training itself. I was even hoping to find some good pals out there who experienced the same at least once in their life, when, one day, I got enlightened by my own schedule.
Actually there was no schedule!
I was lacking the most important component of a runner's plan: the plan indeed! No target race planned any time soon, no training schedule, no goals to achieve, no weekly mileage to keep up to... Basically, I was just running. I don't know how good or bad that is. Many people just run. Many go out every day, after work or during a break. Some even at lunch time. I was probably becoming like those people. Nothing bad of course. Except that... it was killing me. It was like I was not running at all. That feeling of disappointment brought its consequences also in my diet, with a consistent increase of sugar, chocolate and frangipane cakes. Not to mention ice cream.
I am a runner who needs a plan. I've always had one.
To let things work out again I did it: I decided to run the Bear Trail this year. A 56 km trail with 1200 mt elevation gain near the belgian-dutch border.
I don't have much time to train for it. Four weeks are definitely not enough. But I have the feeling that those weeks will be intense, full and meaningful.

The running philosophy is the best lecture with which I deal on a regular basis. Goals keep me alive and remind me of one important fact: I might fail them, trying is already successful.

Keep running!

I want to believe that everything is fixed with my ankles and I can start running 100% of my schedule, which consists of a gradual increase of milage from 80 to 130 km per week. It's time to take a risk and get prepared for my first ultra marathon in March.

I want to believe that a dream can indeed become true and that I can get to the finish line, on my feet or on my knees. That's something I will find out later.
 
So far, I shouldn't worry.
So far I should listen to what those few positive people around me are suggesting.

Don't worry about a thing. Cos' every little thing gonna be alright. 
Indeed.

I was a child when my father was training for his first marathon. I have the vivid image of him running for a distance I could not begin to comprehend at the time, when everything looked much bigger than it really was. Probably my father too. The joy of finishing a marathon was the only thing that I couldn’t understand and I kept underestimating for so many years. That was until I finally ran my own marathon, and suddenly, everything began to make sense again. After crossing 26 mile mark, my father changed.
He became more poetic whenever he talked about running. I remember that he said once “a marathon is just like life”. I never got the meaning of that quote and again I underestimated it. As of late, I think I found out the meaning of that phrase.
A marathon is like everyday life in the sense that we can appreciate our efforts only at a certain point: Only when we stop running. That memory kept me curious about running and endurance sports to the point that I wanted those words to be meaningful, for me. That was the main reason for which I became a long distance race walker. In Italy that was a big thing at the time. There were so many good schools to learn the not-so-natural technique and strategies to do it faster without breaking the rules and being disqualified. Heal on the ground and blocked knee are the two rules that make race walking one of the most deleterious sporting activities that a kid can get into. I was really good at that. I won a number of regional and interregional championships, I got the first position at the national criterium of race walking in Caorle (Venice), back in 1996.

My future was already planned as a professional race walker when I had to deal with the first injuries. The older I became the longer I trained and the more I was exposed to more or less bad injuries that played against me and shattered my dream of participating in the olympic games of Athens 2004. Distance running was the patch in my career as an athlete. I tried to fill my life with that. That was the only thing I could do.
 My bad physical conditions forced me to stay at home, putting me in a state of depression since no other sport was on my wish list. I hated football, and still do, I had no feelings for tennis and the like and I never wanted to play in teams in general. Running has always been the mirror of my personality, the place where I've always been comfortable, the peaceful path that always made me feel at home. Especially when I was far from my real home and family.
 So many times I've been struggling with the usual difficulties of everyday life. As a guy who's always been abroad, living on his own, no family, no relationships whatsoever, very few friends and too many goals to focus on, I was barely paying attention to the details, forgetting that life can start from the finish line, if only I could stand still on my feet. That's what I found in running.
The ability to survive until it's over, till the finish line. Maybe that's what my father meant with "a marathon is just like life". Maybe, as I will tell him one day, life is a marathon of which we have no clue where the finish line is.

Be Great, Powerful Beyond Measure