Running to Think

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

In search of motivation

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!

Monday, 8 September 2014

Vegetarianism and athletic performance

Unknown 22:58:00 athletic performance , creatine 0 Comments

Dear friends,

as an active vegetarian who does sports, I've always been asking myself if vegetarianism would have had an impact on athletic performance. Therefore I decided to investigate the matter within my master's thesis titled "The Impact of Vegetarianism on Athletic Performance".
This post is a brief summary of my findings.

The nutrients we should plan to have enough in our diet or supplement are:

  Omega 3: found in canola oil, soya oil, micro algae
  Proteins: cheese, milk, beans, tofu, nuts, grains,..
  Vitamin B12: fortified foods such as soy milk, eggs and cheese
  Zinc: tofu, nuts, broccoli, grains, legumes..
  Iron: fortified grains, legumes, nuts, dried fruit,..
  Carnitine: supplementation
  Creatine: supplementation
  Carnosine: supplementation

Don't be scared, those supplements are not on the doping list!
We all know that an appropriate training schedule, usually designed around the needs and qualities of the athlete and his discipline, finds a great correlation with the final performance. How about nutrition?

What we widely agree on is the well-balanced diet that varies between the five most important food groups. We usually refer to it as the food pyramid.

We also know that the diet of high performance athletes differs from the one of - allow me the term - normal people. This is usually due to eating according to their competitions or even training schedule. Our body needs the proper intake of nutrients in order to keep moisture to constant levels, engage a recovery process in an optimal way and keep daily performance at the highest degree.
What we do not know is what happens when we ban one of the five food groups out of the diet.

With this said, let me give a summary of my findings.

Finding #1

Vegetarian athletes who take L-Carnitine as supplement will increase maximal aerobic power, and promote glycogen sparing in the course of prolonged exercise. Supplementation of L-Carnitine increases also the performance of sub maximal exercise and resistance to fatigue.

Finding #2

Higher levels of carnosine should enhance performance and help keeping the level of pH constant in muscles during exercise. It comes without saying that this might be an advantage for strength and endurance athletes.

Finding #3

CoQ10 is also said to boost energy and speed recovery from exercise.

Finding #4

Finally, creatine supplement has been found to have positive effects on vegetarian athletes. In fact, creatine acts as a performance enhancer offering athletes more power and strength for high intensity workouts. Depletion of creatine within the muscle can lead to reduced muscle power and build-up of lactic acid, resulting in rapid onset of fatigue. Oral creatine supplement not only increases the total creatine content of human skeletal muscle, but also seems to affect muscle hypertrophy (an increase in size of the tissue). Creatine is actually the only one of those four supplements with enough significant research and positive results. Other supplements were mainly tested in vitro, on animals or just with not enough research.

What exactly is Vegetarianism? There are five types of diets, defined as vegetarian. But with different levels of - let's say - strictness. They span from very strict to not that strict.

Vegan: Vegans do not consume any animal product. Of course they do not consume red or white meat, fish nor fowl. They also do not consume eggs and dairy products. They do not use honey or beeswax, gelatine and any other animal product. They typically do not use animal products such as silk, leather and wool, either.

Lacto Vegetarian:

Lacto-vegetarians do not eat red nor white meat, fish, fowl or eggs. However, lacto-vegetarians do consume dairy products such as cheese, milk and yogurt.

Ovo Vegetarian: Ovo-vegetarians do not eat red nor white meat, fish, fowl or dairy products. However, they consume egg products.

Lacto-ovo-vegetarian consume dairy products and egg products. This is the most common type of vegetarian people.

Pescetarian: While technically not a type of vegetarian, these individuals do restrict their meat consumption barely to fish and seafood. Pescetarians do not consume red meat, white meat or fowl. This is considered a “semi-vegetarian” or “flexitarian” diet.

Pollotarian: Much like the pescatarian, this “semi-vegetarian” diet restricts meat consumption to poultry and fowl only. Pollotarians do not consume red meat or fish and seafood

Flexitarian: Theirs is a plant-based diet with occasional meat on the menu. These folks do their best to limit meat intake as much as possible and they have an almost entirely plant-based diet. This is not technically considered a “vegetarian” diet, but we commend the effort!

In my research I included only athletes within the category of lacto-ovo-vegetarian. I tried to find the impact of that particular diet on their athletic performance.

I started by looking at the nutrients that are present in meat, fish and poultry. Therefore, I tried to figure out wether those nutrients are really essential for the human body or not. If so, my question was “where can we find them and can we consider them enough for an athlete to perform at his/her fullest?”

What I can confirm is that the lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet has fewer chances of nutritional deficiencies due to the integration of a variety of plant foods, eggs and dairy products.

As a conclusion, with a well-balanced and varied diet, which should definitely be correctly planned, the lacto-ovo-vegetarian will have no negative but neither significant positive influence on his athletic performance.

No evidence from the performance perspective does not mean that being vegetarian is pointless. Positive findings have been related to overall health of the individual under study.

Epidemiological studies in the US, UK and Germany found that embracing a vegetarian diet has the tendency to lower the risks of heart and vascular disease, diabetes mellitus type 2, some types of cancer (such as colon, stomach, mouth, oesophagus, lung,…), high blood pressure, obesity and some other chronic diseases.

It is possible to be vegetarian and elite athletes at the same time. Think about swimmer Murray Rose, tennis player Billie Jean King, six-times-winner of Ironman competition Dave Scott and many many more.

Love,

Caroline

Sunday, 17 August 2014

Trying again the long distance

Unknown 19:23:00 40 km , long distance 0 Comments

The schedule of the last week has been quite tough. Especially if I think that the left knee is still recovering from an injury and rule #0 says "watch out! don't push too hard".
Some running sessions of 15 km for three consecutive days, some drills and intervals did a great job to exhaust my legs before the long distance session.
As expected my legs today were not exactly responsive. But that was the training indeed: running on numb legs.
The course was not extremely difficult, but a bit technical in the beginning with about 400 mt of elevation gain mainly distributed in the first part. The second part was indeed quite boring due to the road, straight and clear. With cars...
I am still not an expert of Finnish roads and I will probably never be. Definitely not in one more week, the duration of my staying.

One important fact that I should consider in my next training sessions regards the fact that I lose too many salts, finding quite disgusting white spots on the hydration pack and shirt that becomes sand when dry. Today I drunk the whole 2 liters provided by the pack, ate 1 gel and 2 bars on the total distance of 40 km.
The real story goes like this.
At km 39.5 I sucked the straw harder than usual and nothing was coming up.
"Damn it broke!" I thought.
Nothing more wrong than that, Frankie.
I just had drunk it all. No water. Nada. Niente.
This fact is curious and I will need to fix it with Caroline, because the pace and the weather gave me no reason to drink like a camel.

Anyway, as the first long distance session after a period of active recovery, I can consider myself satisfied. Tomorrow, I will check how legs respond to some short drills on the track&field.
Greets from Finland.

Run happy!

Thursday, 14 August 2014

Run, measure, fail. How Garmin Express destroys your data

Unknown 07:37:00 fail , garmin express 0 Comments

Only one month ago, Garmin decided to declare ANT Agent obsolete and forced me (and many other runners) to switch to their new SuperDuper Garmin Express.
The very first issue came when I was uploading my activity on Strava: not possible anymore. A small search on Google told me that indeed there was no viable way for Strava to communicate to Garmin devices. One workaround was to export the activity from Garmin Connect and import it manually in Strava. Time consuming and really annoying.
The worst occurred when the first activity got lost before upload. That was not happening since about two years.
Yesterday the most dramatic one: three activities I completed in Finland, on hilly tracks and one personal record on the distance of 15 km around the lake Jyvasjarvi in 59' got lost too.
I was furious and disappointed at the same time.
Garmin Express is not mature enough to go out as production software. You should know this, Garmin engineers!!
What annoys me the most is that we, poor users, can only suffer Garmin's mistakes. Therefore I suggest that Garmin engineers (or the project managers responsible for such a failure) should pay the price of their own mistakes by running the miles that have been destroyed. At the same pace.

Not possible?
Fine. Pay us back, Mr Garmin!