Pre- and Post-Workout Fueling

Hi, Friends & Fellow Runners:

Next to the commitment you bring to whatever training you may be engaged in, nutrition is the most important factor in determining your ongoing  and ultimate success as a runner at any distance.  The simple truth is that you must eat right to run strong.

Your concerns should be not only what you eat but when you eat it.  An hour or two before the start of a run you should make sure you ingest some food rich in carbohydrates, and 30 to 45 minutes after a run you should look for a healthy shot of protein.  Think carbohydrates for energy and protein for recovery.  And remember, the best carbs come from fruits, vegetables and whole-grain breads, cereals, rice and pasta, while good protein sources include dairy products (low-fat milk and yogurt, as well as eggs and cheese); lean beef, chicken and fish.

Prior to your morning runs, consider a breakfast that includes one or another of these choices: steel-cut oatmeal, pancakes, a bagel or brown toast with peanut butter, whole-grain cereal with bananas, or two scoops of All-Greens powder blended with skim milk and real fruit.  And before your evening runs, when time is often short and convenience a concern, consider a snack consisting of either instant oatmeal, two pieces of fruit, an energy bar, three or four fig Newton’s, or a granola bar.  Obviously, the quantity of food you eat should be commensurate with the distance and pace of your intended run.

Once your workout is over, it’s important that you kick-start the process of effectively and quickly repairing muscle tissue and replacing damaged cells.  Here the recovery options include Gatorade Recovery drink, Clif Builder’s Protein Bar, Branched Chain Amino Acid powder, or a protein shake such as Muscle Milk.  On a par with these products is the most prosaic recovery drink of all – plain old chocolate milk.  Eight to 12 ounces of it are what you’d need.  And if you blended in with it a scoop of whey protein powder and a banana, you’d have the equivalent of“chocolate milk on steroids.”  Afterward, the ideal conclusion to the post-run recovery effort would be a meal featuring either eggs, chicken, fish or lean beef.

The importance of protein in muscle repair does not detract from the fact that complex carbohydrates are the foundation of an runner’s diet.  They should become about 60% of the nutrients you consume while in training, up from 50 to 55%, where they probably are now.  Just try to avoid refined grains like the plague.  Here we mean everything from white rice to Wheaties.  And know that perhaps the best you can say about Wonder Bread is that it has more nutritional value than the plastic it comes wrapped in.

Finally, for heaven’s sake, keep yourself properly hydrated at all times.  A rule of thumb is to consume daily a quantity of water that is the equivalent, in ounces, of half your body weight in pounds.  Thus, if you weigh 120 pounds, you should drink 60 ounces of the clear liquid that some people, with poetic license, have called “the champagne of life.”  It sounds like a lot, but as with so much else, it’s one thing your body can quickly get used to.

Coach Stephen

Why I Run

Hi, Fellow Runners:

When a man exceeds his Biblical allotment of three score and ten years, he tends to become ever more introspective, especially around the time of each succeeding birthday.  I celebrated my 78^th year on this planet several months ago and, among other things, gave some deep thought to the question of why I run, why I have run for the past thirty-five years and why I intend to run for at least the next 15.

As it happens, the sport has helped me physically.  That's almost a given.  I am still running marathons and expect to be the oldest person ever to qualify for and finish both the New York and Boston marathons in consecutive years (2012 & 2013).  Above and beyond that, running has also made me mentally stronger and has pointed me in the direction of precepts, values and skills that are extremely important to me.  That’s why I would argue that if you stick with running -- consistently rather than sporadically and for years instead of months -- it will help you become a more caring spouse and parent, a more effective business manager or professional, and generally a better person to be around.   

But let's backtrack for a moment and first consider the physical benefits.  Serious runners eat better than most Canadians.  They work at getting at least seven hours of sleep a night.  They drink less than most, smoke not at all – and they decided a long time ago that a jog in the park was a better way to ease stress than a couple of pills from a Prozac bottle.

It’s habits like these, much more than simply placing one foot in front of another, that  enable runners, among other things, to dramatically reduce excess body fat – which, truth be told, is far more important than simply shedding pounds.  According to author Matt Fitzgerald, in his new book called Racing Weight, an elite distance runner has average body fat equal to 7.3% of total weight if he’s a male, and 12.4% if she’s a female.  The comparable numbers for the general population are at least twice as high -- 19.0% and 23.1%, respectively.

This is an important consideration in a society like ours, where for the first time in history, obesity has become responsible for more deaths than malnutrition.

Then, too, the lifestyle of a runner, not just the number of kilometers she runs, has also put running front and center in the battle against ageing.  A Stanford University study, conducted over a period of 25 years and involving about a thousand people who were in their mid-fifties when it began in 1984, reported that the death rate among the approximately 500 runners in the study was less than half that of the non-runners (15% vs. 35%).  Perhaps even more important, because it speaks so eloquently to the quality of life, was the study’s finding that the onset of disabilities among runners trailed that of non-runners by fully 16 years.  Think about that for a moment: more than a decade and a half of living without a cane, a walker, a wheel chair or that most abominable of contraptions, a motorized scooter.  Awesome!

Only the close-minded would still claim, as many in the medical profession did in the eighties and a few still do today, that running’s impact on the body would create a host of physical problems for older runners, in the form of hip and knee replacements, back surgeries and the like.  The Stanford researchers found no discernible difference in the number of such medical procedures between runners and non-runners during the 25-year period covered by the study.

As significant as the physical benefits of running is the unique place it occupies as a metaphor for life. 

Please appreciate, for starters, that the single most fundamental tenet of exercise physiology is the principle of stress and adaptation.   Hard workouts break down muscle cells and tissue as a prelude to a recovery process during which the body mends itself and grows stronger.   Thus we become better runners only when we push beyond our comfort level and confront the pain involved in such an effort.  So too in life.  We grow as human beings only when we move outside our comfort zone.  If we insist on staying within it, if we are content to lead a limited-risk, limited-reward existence, we will rarely do anything special as we make our way in the world.   

Also, in running we compete only against ourselves.   Each time we race, we look to do better than we did the last time.  It’s as simple as that.  Beating other runners is rarely a consideration.   We simply don’t think in terms of getting ahead at the expense of others.    Our motivation comes from the personal progress that we track from week to week, month to month.  This conscious push from within is rarely found outside of running or other athletic endeavors.  So imagine how exceptional we become when we make it an integral part of the person we are in everything we do.

And finally, veteran runners learn early on to say goodbye to giving up.  We enter a race to finish it.  Barring injury, nothing less is acceptable.  In life, then, running teaches us to finish what we start – to set tough goals and achieve them, then set tougher goals and achieve them as well.  At the end of the day, isn’t that what success is all about?  Is it not true that a life without meaningful goals is a life hardly worth living?

Coach Stephen