Lately I have been looking at new diets and training regimes while all the time ignoring my Stella 2016 season where I ran so many PB’s and achieved times I thought beyond me. Since my injury I have been mulling over all different types of training programs aimed at the older runner because I assumed what I was doing was wrong. Was my calf injury caused by over training or just old age catching up with me? Either way I needed to change the way I trained as old age wasn’t going away anytime soon and over training was a definite possibility.

Initially I turned to Joe Friel and read ‘Fast after Fifty”. ( http://joefriel.typepad.com/blog/ ) as the title  resonated with me after turning 50 myself in February this year. His points was then mimicked by the book I’m currently reading written by Mark Sisson, ( http://www.marksdailyapple.com/blog/ ) another triathlete over 50 who has changed his diet and training due to the onset of father time. His book Primal Endurance is a virtual carbon copy of what Joe is preaching. Add in Phil Maffetone  ( https://philmaffetone.com/ ) and it seems everything I’m doing, and have been doing, is wrong. All three of these authors are advocating the same high fat, low carb diet (HFLC) and also a cross-fit type exercise regime which , apparently, is better suited to the older athlete.  Even Tim Noakes has changed his tune and moved to the HFLC diet. He is determined to take on type 2 Diabetes which he puts down to the carb rich diet we have been recommend and encouraged to eat , and have been for the last 50 years. ( https://www.thenoakesfoundation.org/ ) . Noakes feels so strongly he had been taken to court , where we won, and also set up his foundation. This from the running god and author of the running bible “The Lore of Running”.  All four of these guys cannot be wrong surely. Years and years of experience at the highest level combined with the best authorities on the subject all coming to the same conclusion.

I get what the guys are saying but in the back of my mind is always my 2016 session where I basically started to run twice a day , every day, albeit normally at a lot slower pace. I also raced nearly every other weekend so regularly put myself in the anaerobic zone. My diet was the stereotypical runners diet, very carb focused with smatterings of pancakes and muffins. This worked and produced great results at 49, better than I had ever achieved.  So what I was doing was all wrong according to the HFLC diet advocates but it worked. In my corner is most of the running world but the same could be said of all the “the earth is flat” believers from the Middle Ages. sometime the Status Quo is wrong. Is this the case with the HFLC diet ?

Taking this one step further will we look back in 10-20 years and ask how we could possibly eat junk food as part of the average persons daily food intake ? Will McDonalds be akin to smoking in the seventies, once embraced and then when the truth came to light vilified ? Are a runners best friend , carbohydrates, the scourge of the performance enhancement and holding us back by providing poor fuel and adding weight to our running frames for no return. It gets worse of course with the next inline in the HFLC most wanted radar, sugar. Of course sugar offers little or no nutritional   benefit but boy it can taste good, especially when disguised as a Yelo muffin or Clancy’s pancake. This is of course the ‘fly in the ointment’, the ‘elephant in the room’,  giving up carbs and sugar is not just against everything we have been taught over the years , it goes against our taste buds. Who really can honestly say they don’t like a good donut or three ? Dark Chocolate Digestives, brownies, ice cream , the list is a long one and all are justified with the old adage ‘I’ve just ran xxx, I’ve earned this‘.

This will be the last post on nutrition for a while because truth be told I haven’t really answered the question of what diet to follow. I have said this before many times, ‘just eat good food’, be it carbohydrates or a diet rich in fat and no sugar. What works for you works for you. I feel the most important part is you need to be happy with what you are doing and achieving the goals and targets you set yourself.  If you’re ticking all the boxes what does it matter if you enjoy the odd ‘treat‘ , you only live once (I’m assuming?) so you need to be happy. The only caveat of course is you also need to be healthy so don’t take this post as an excuse to drive to your nearest deli and order 24 donuts. Short term you may be happy ( after you recover from the sugar high headache!) but long term your health may suffer. With all the good will in the world people you still need a balanced diet if you want to be a successful and happy runner, and this is always the end goal.

After the obligatory long run on Sunday me and the posse sat down at Clancy’s Café in sunny City Beach to mull over the weekly events. Due to a suicidal café manager they have stopped serving the best pancakes in Perth and instead offer waffles. This has not gone down well with the boys but needless to say we all ordered the waffles anyhow, after a slight protest which was of course ignored.  ( In Perth the customer is always wrong apparently. ?) As we all wolfed down our coffee’s imagine our surprise when the waiter came over with a quiche for the table. There was much laughter among the lads at the thought of one of the boys eating quiche but then Jon put up his hand and took the offending article from the waiters grasp. After a period of stunned silence the banter began in earnest. It started with the obvious comments about Quiche being invented by women so they could enjoy bacon and eggs and not feel guilty, where as there is nothing a man enjoys more than a bacon and egg sandwich smeared all over this face. We then moved into the old Wife’s tales about Quiche affecting a mans sexuality. True to his ‘Banting diet’ regime Jon even ate the quiche but left the pastry, as I tucked into my waffle I wondered if Jon was enjoying his quiche as much as I was certainly enjoying my waffles, with extra maple syrup.

After my post earlier in the week regarding diet, and Jon ordering quiche, the conversation again turned to weight, diet and running performance. The table agreed as a whole that the most important thing is to get to your racing weight and how you get there isn’t important as such. If Jon wanted to eat quiche and test his masculinity then that was his choice. The rest of us ‘real men’ chowed down on our waffles confident our sexuality was not being compromised.  Of course the quiche was probably helping Jon’s cause where as you would be hard justified to argue the case for waffles (with extra maple syrup) and weight loss to be perfect partners. I made a conscience effort to put in an extra hour on the Elliptigo in the afternoon to counter the waffles , a small price to pay me thinks.

I have attached the 10 golden rules of Banting below but, of course, have issues with a few of these. The first four are , at a push, do-able but the problem starts at number 5. Imagine skipping a meal, it just seems to alien to me (and all runners really. ). As runners we are normally always hungry as we exercise , the old adage calories out, calories in. The more calories we lose the more we need to refill, common sense surely ?  Thus skipping meals is something that never happens. Breakfast, lunch and dinner is a bare minimum. This lead me to number 6, to quote John McEnroe ‘You cannot be serious!’….No snacking ! Runners love to snack as we’re always hungry and truth be told we enjoy snacking.

Unfortunately  things now take a big turn for the worst as we look at rule number 7. No sugar, which means no sugar I assume, I had to reread it a few times to make sure I wasn’t missing something?  Oh dear, Mr. Banting just lost about 90% of the population with this ‘bad boy’ rule. No sugar means no waffles, muffins, pancakes, do I need to go on ? This for me is a show stopper but we’ll continue on,  rule 8 is another hard one to stomach (excuse the pun) as they’re taking out bread, pancakes, waffles again. (Banting really wasn’t a pancake fan was he?) Rule 9  is another tough one because there goes banana’s, our staple go to food after most runs.  Banting does redeem himself with rule 10 as eggs are a runners friends but in the Banting diet they become your number one food source. This must have serious consequences for the people around you on a daily basis as eggs can certainly cause some unpleasant smells to be offered to the world, if you know what I mean. (I’m sure Quiche does not have this unpleasant side affect and any aroma would smell of ‘elderberry’s’ ?)

So that about sums it up for me. It ain’t going to happen. I’ll get to my racing weight with extra hard work and it’s a price I’m willing to pay. So as Jon sits at home eating his quiche reading ‘Good Housekeeping Monthly’ I’ll be out on the pavement putting in the extra hard yards needed to justify the pancakes, waffles and ‘all things nice’ I’m about to devour and I wouldn’t have it any other way……

10 golden rules of Banting

1. Remember: this is not a high protein diet. It’s a high fat, medium protein, low carb way of eating

2. Choose real foods that look like what they are, and cook them from scratch

3. Fat is not the enemy. Enjoy it!

4. Eat only when you are hungry; eat until you are satisfied – then stop

5. Don’t eat when you’re not hungry. You won’t die if you occasionally skip a meal you don’t feel like eating.

6. Stop snacking. You won’t need to – it’s just a habit.

7. No sugar. It’s an addiction, and it’s probably best to go cold turkey. But if you need to make it a transition, substitute with Stevia, Zylitol or Erythritol – NOT artificial sweeteners.

8. No grains of any kind

9. No (or very, very little) fruit. Think of it as a sweet rather than a health snack.

10. Embrace eggs. They’re healthy, satisfying and very good for you.

So to sum up this post there are diets out there for all people but to me a diet should be defined as a ‘temporary’ change of eating habits that is long term unsustainable. I see it so many times at work where people go on the ‘liteneasy’ diet where the food is delivered to them daily and costs a kings ransom. They do lose weight but look miserable every time lunchtime comes around as I tuck into my smorgasbord of meat, rice and pudding (runners love pudding!) while they are faced with something that looks like it was prepared for a small child who has an allergy for anything that tasted good and loves tuna. Eventually they come off the diet and the weight returns like an old friend as they sneak to the comfort foods that made them smile and they enjoyed eating. This of course is the fundamental flaw in diets, you are changing peoples eating habits by giving them food they don’t really enjoy eating or quantities that are not satisfying. What a diet should do is couple the diet changes with a change in attitude towards nutrition. Once you enjoy eating the food offered it is no longer a diet but a lifestyle change, which is sustainable.

It looks like Jon has embraced quiche and thus he is enjoying the Banting diet and does not see it now as a constraining factor in his daily diet choice. Thus he is at or near his racing weight and running the best I have seen him run in many years. This is a double positive, a new diet that he is enjoying and a performance spike. Of course this is the sacrifice Jon is prepared to make but now he is at his racing weight he can control his urges and maybe treat himself to a ‘macho‘ waffle and maple syrup in the near future. Maybe next week there’ll be more than one quiche making its way our table, we’ll see.

What William Banting did in the late 1800’s was basically describe a High Fat , Low Carb (HFLC) diet.   My friend Jon had taken on this diet and lost a considerable amount of weight and also improved his running, breaking sub3 for the first time in years in the recent Bunbury marathon. Truth be told I think a large portion of Jon’s weight loss was his ability to walk past the fridge in the evenings rather than scavenge like a starving hyena , which is the normal runners actions late in the evening, searching for one final sugar hit.  The only fly in the ointment is the guru of all things running and he who must be obeyed, Matt Fitzgerald, is not a HFLC fan. I have attached an article written by Erin Beresini quoting Fitzgerald and his views.

I think the best thing is to research the subject yourself and decide whether a HFLC diet is for you. To really gain the full benefit of this diet you’d also need to train aerobically (a posh word for slow!) for a few months to teach your body to burn fat. I personally reckon you’d have no choice but to train aerobically while starting this diet as you’d be without a runners best friend, Mr. Carbohydrates and his side kick sugar.

I’m curious myself to try out the HFLC diet but it would mean me forgoing my Yelo muffin  ( http://www.yelocornerstore.com.au/ ) and coffee and personally I’m not ready to give these up, even if I can improve my performance and even general health. We’re on this planet only once and we give up so much for our running I refuse to lose one of the few pleasure in my life. Myself I’m a believer in putting in massive weekly distance , without worrying too much about pace, eating as healthy as possible with the odd ‘treat’ and enjoying my running without a regimented training programs that must be adhered to. I run because I love running and I eat because I also love eating, restricting myself with a ‘diet’ (because that it basically what you are doing) does not sit well with me. It’s hard enough finding enough time in the day to run while juggling family, work, puppies, Elliptigo time sleep and other ‘stuff’; adding in food as well just becomes too hard. !

Do I believe a HFLC diet will work and do what it says, yep I do; will I change, no. Sorry people but this runner is sticking with the Status Quo and to quote my Dietitian professional running friend David Bryant when I questioned him on this subject he responded ‘Just eat good food’.  ( I took ‘good food’ to mean pancakes, muffins (from Yelo) etc..?)

Currently in my running group there is a split on the HFLC diet. Jon has embraced the diet and shut the fridge door while Mark C. has gone down the Matt Fitzgerald path and gorged on carbohydrates and sugar. Both are currently enjoying success with their chosen paths but I suspect Mark C. is enjoying himself a lot more. We’ll see this Sunday when Mark will chow down on waffles while Jon will lose himself in his scramble eggs, I know which one I’ll be ordering.

So digest (excuse the pun) the two articles below and then scurry off and research away, as with all things in the 21st Century it’s all on Google…..

William Banting was a British undertaker who was very obese and desperately wanted to lose weight. In the year 1862 he paid a visit to his doctor, William Harvey, who proposed a radical eating plan that was high in fat but included very few carbohydrates. By following this eating plan Banting experienced such remarkable weight loss that he wrote an open letter to the public, the “Letter on Corpulence”, which became widely distributed. As more people started following this eating plan to lose weight, the term “banting” or to “bant” became popularized.

Banting merely discovered what human beings were designed to eat: what early humans ate 200,000 years ago. Respected biologists, geneticists, paleoanthropologists and theorists believe that human genes have hardly changed since human beings began their journey on earth. If you could put the entire human history into one day, we have only been eating cereals and grains for five minutes and sugar for five seconds, a very short amount of time in our existence. After the success experienced by William Banting on this low-carb, high-fat eating plan, the “banting” diet became the standard treatment for weight loss in all major European and North American medical schools. But in 1959 it was excluded from all the major medical and nutritional textbooks.

In 1977 the US government published the Dietary Goals for the United States, a set of guidelines that advocated a diet high in carbs and low in fat, exactly the opposite of the diet we have been following for much of our existence. It was decreed that we should eat six to eleven portions of grains per day and that sugar was absolutely fine to add to everything. This diet was subsequently adopted across most of the Western world and a plethora of low fat-food products hit the shelves. This has had a disastrous effect on our health. Since the early 1980’s the incidence of obesity and diabetes has risen rapidly. Can we really call this a coincidence?

There is a common misconception that eating fat, especially saturated fat, is bad for you and that it is a primary cause of high blood pressure, heart disease and obesity. This is simply not true and was based on a flawed study by Ancel Keys in 1953. The truth is that a diet high in carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates and sugar are the cause of obesity, diabetes as well as other chronic illnesses. Vegetable (seed) oils and their derivatives such as margarine are also a contributing factor to heart disease, although manufacturers tell us the exact opposite.

This might come as a surprise, but of the three macronutrients in our diet (protein, fat and carbohydrates), only carbohydrates are non-essential for human life. We cannot function properly for more than a few days without eating fat; without an adequate protein intake we develop protein-calorie malnutrition within a few months. But avoiding carbohydrate has no short- or long-term effects on humans, other than the (usually beneficial) effect of weight loss, especially in those who are the most overweight. While we need a constant supply of glucose, it can be produced by the liver from fat and protein and doesn’t need to be ingested as carbohydrate in our diets.

The usual refrain of anyone looking at banting for the first time is “but what about my cholesterol?” There is much evidence to support the fact that cholesterol is not the culprit in heart disease. A bit like a policeman being at the scene of the crime being blamed for the crime – cholesterol will only adhere to a ‘leaking’ artery wall which is damaged by inflammation – to protect you. By living on carbs and sugar those arteries remain inflamed. Sugar is the most inflammatory thing you can put into your mouth, and will continue to rob you of perfect health. Grains are turned into sugar by the body. So a high carbohydrate diet will always foster inflammation in the body, not only in the arteries but the brain, liver, digestive tract and joints leading to many of the chronic diseases we see today which are supposedly ‘incurable’. Many people report relief from all the above in a relatively short time after adopting the Banting lifestyle.

Below is the article quoting Matt Fitzgerald, who is the running guru. Matt is not a fan of the HFLC diet but Tim Noakes is a big advocate , and as we all now Tim Noakes was the original running guru. Maffetone is also a big fan of the HFLC diet and training at an aerobic pace restricting your pace by heart rate. ( https://philmaffetone.com/ )

Before Dr. Robert Atkins launched his low-carb diet in 1972, there was Banting, the fat British undertaker who designed coffins for England’s elite in the 1800s. According to Men’s Health, the guy needed to drop a few kilos, so his doc put him on a high-fat-low-carb (HFLC) diet and, presto change-o, he lived to 82 and was buried in a skinny man’s coffin.

It may seem silly to talk about Banting now, but he’s back from the dead, courtesy of a controversial sports scientist who has been vehemently championing the Brit’s diet for the past few years. Professor Tim Noakes, from the Sports Science Institute of South Africa at the University of Cape Town, even published a book of Banting recipes that sold out not long after hitting shelves earlier this year. There’s just one problem with the diet: It’ll make you slower.

Matt Fitzgerald, author of the new book Diet Cults, has some sobering words for athletes who try to train on fat. “Decades of research indicate that high-carb diets are optimal for endurance and that ingesting carbohydrates during endurance exercise enhances endurance,” Fitzgerald says.

Sports nutrition scientist and European Journal of Sport Science editor in chief Asker Jeukendrup, for example, recently published a paper outlining carb needs during exercise to enhance endurance, suggesting athletes take in small amounts of carbs during training sessions lasting an hour, 60 grams of carbs per hour for exercise lasting two to three hours, and 90 grams per hour for exercise lasting longer than that—regardless of body weight or training status.

Noakes’ diet, on the other hand, advocates eating as little as 25 to 50 grams of carbs per day. While upping your healthy fat intake to around 40 percent of your total daily calories is fine, Noakes promotes a diet that’s 80 percent fat and only 10 percent carbs. Most endurance athletes, Fitzgerald says, should not be cutting carbs.

It’s not just science that shows carbs make athletes better. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence as well. Eating carbs “is almost a universal practice among the world’s best endurance athletes,” Fitzgerald says. “The typical Kenyan diet is 78 percent carbs, and they destroy the rest of the world in distance running.”

Clearly, there’s a lot going on behind Kenyan running prowess, but the carbs can’t be discounted. “If you care about your performance as an endurance athlete, the safe way to go is a high-carb diet,” Fitzgerald says. “If you go on the high-fat bandwagon, it’s a crapshoot.”

Proponents of HFLC claim the Banting diet is the key to weight loss and improved health and encourages the body to burn fat for fuel. But studies comparing HFLC to nonrestrictive diets found that, over time, people lost no more weight “banting” than they did otherwise. Celeste Naude, a researcher from the Center for Evidence-Based Health Care at Stellenbosch University, told the Mail and Guardian that “the dietary pattern and food choices promoted with a low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet are not well aligned with healthy dietary patterns and food choices known to, along with a healthy lifestyle, reduce the risk of diseases like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancers.”

Why the fervor? Fitzgerald says the desire to follow a restrictive diet is fulfilling mental, rather than physical, needs. He calls the phenomenon “sour grapes syndrome,” after Aesop’s fable about the fox who couldn’t reach some hanging grapes. Rather than admit he couldn’t jump high enough to get them, the fox decided they must be sour anyway. As Fitzgerald writes on his website, the victims of sour grapes syndrome:

…are endurance athletes who cannot cope psychologically with being slower than they would like to be and who resolve this cognitive dissonance by replacing the goal of doing their sport well with that of doing it “right.” The syndrome is being spread by various movements that promote alternative methods that are contrary to those practiced by the most successful athlete … By latching onto [HFLC], athletes can claim a kind of victory over superior competitors.

At some point, Fitzgerald writes, when a movement grows large enough, “it begins to win converts among athletes who are not, in fact, wracked with jealousy of faster athletes but who simply don’t know any better.” To enlighten those athletes, he cites a study recently published in the journal Nutrients in which researchers compared HFLC athletes with those eating a balanced diet. While HFLC made athletes leaner, it also caused them to lose power due to “impairment of the muscles’ ability to burn carbs.”

The athletes had, essentially, trained their bodies to use fat for fuel and decrease reliance on carbs. The result, Fitzgerald writes, is a reduced tolerance for high-intensity training and impaired “performance in all races except perhaps ultra-endurance events such as 100 km trail runs.” If you want to go fast, your body needs carbs for fuel. Training on a Banting diet makes your body less efficient at doing so, ultimately hobbling most athletes on race day.

The next time you’re thinking about cutting carbs, check your motives. If you’re doing it to look lean or run 62 miles or more at once, HFLC may work for you. But if you want to perform optimally at nearly any other endeavor, don’t ditch your bagels.

The Thursday before a marathon is when traditionally you start to gorge on carbohydrates to carbo-load for the big day on Sunday.  I use the old tried and tested 10g of carbohydrates for every kilogram of weight. For me that is 700g of carbohydrates for three days. It is a challenge and one I reckon 75% of all runners fail to meet it. They’ll make an effort of course but either not hit the required amount of carbs or fail to hydrate properly. One thing I guarantee is you will feel ‘bloated’ and ‘heavy’ after a good carbo-load but this is mainly liquid and on the day the benefit out weighs weight issues.

Is there a better way than a 3 day food feast though ? As runners it normally goes against the grain by eating so much and exercising so little. (I’m assuming you are tapering by now ?) The guilty feeling as you eat a muffin for a third day on the trot (I must admit to never having this feeling but I’ve been told some runners do , funny that ?) and stagger around with 2-3 litres of water sloshing about in your belly.

I’ve read that you can ignore the carbo-loading if you take carbs on the day in the form of Gu’s or shotz, or this at least negates the whole process. I’m not convinced but even Matt Fitzgerald has been quoted buying into this theory. Matt wrote an interesting article below on different methods of carbo-loading but I’m not ready to give up my muffin feeding frenzy just yet, so Matt,  in this case,  I’m staying traditional.!

The practice of carbo-loading dates back to the late 1960s. The first carbo-loading protocol was developed by a Swedish physiologist named Gunvar Ahlborg after he discovered a positive relationship between the amount of glycogen (carbs stored in the muscles and liver) in the body and endurance performance. Scientists and runners had already known for some time that eating a high-carbohydrate diet in the days preceding a long race enhances performance, but no one knew exactly why until Ahlborg’s team zeroed in on the glycogen connection.

Subsequently, Ahlborg discovered that the muscles and liver are able to store above-normal amounts of glycogen when high levels of carbohydrate consumption are preceded by severe glycogen depletion. The most obvious way to deplete the muscles of glycogen is to eat extremely small amounts of carbohydrate. A second way is to engage in exhaustive exercise. The stress of severe glycogen depletion triggers an adaptive response by which the body reduces the amount of dietary carbohydrate that it converts to fat and stores, and increases the amount of carbohydrate that it stores in the liver and muscles as glycogen. Ahlborg referred to this phenomenon as glycogen supercompensation.

Armed with this knowledge, he was able to create a more sophisticated carbo-loading protocol than the primitive existing method, which was, more or less, eating a big bowl of spaghetti.

Ahlborg came up with a seven-day carbo-loading plan in which an exhaustive bout of exercise was followed by three or four days of extremely low carbohydrate intake (10 percent of total calories) and then three or four days of extremely high carbohydrate intake (90 percent of total calories). Trained athletes who used this protocol in an experiment were able to nearly double their glycogen stores and exhibited significantly greater endurance in exercise lasting longer than 90 minutes.

After these results were published, endurance athletes across the globe began to use Ahlborg’s carbo-loading plan prior to events anticipated to last 90 minutes or longer. While it worked admirably, it had its share of drawbacks. First of all, many athletes weren’t keen on performing an exhaustive workout just a week before a big race, as the plan required.

Second, maintaining a 10 percent carbohydrate diet for three or four days carried some nasty consequences including lethargy, cravings, irritability, lack of concentration, and increased susceptibility to illness. Many runners and other athletes found it just wasn’t worth it.

Fortunately, later research showed that you can increase glycogen storage significantly without first depleting it. A newer carbo-loading protocol based on this research calls for athletes to eat a normal diet of 55 to 60 percent carbohydrate until three days before racing, and then switch to a 70 percent carbohydrate diet for the final three days, plus race morning.

As for exercise, this tamer carbo-loading method suggests one last longer workout (but not an exhaustive workout) done a week from race day followed by increasingly shorter workouts throughout race week. It’s simple, it’s non-excruciating, and it works. Admittedly, some scientists and athletes still swear that the Ahlborg protocol is more effective, but if it is, the difference is slight and probably not worth the suffering and inherent risks.

Note that you should increase your carbohydrate intake not by increasing your total caloric intake, but rather by reducing fat and protein intake in an amount that equals or slightly exceeds the amount of carbohydrate you add. Combining less training with more total calories could result in last-minute weight gain that will only slow you down. Be aware, too, that for every gram of carbohydrate the body stores, it also stores 3 to 5 grams of water, which leads many athletes to feel bloated by the end of a three-day loading period. The water weight will be long gone by the time you finish your race, however.

A friendlier carbo-loading strategy was devised in 2002 by scientists at the University of Western Australia. It combines depletion and loading and condenses them into a one-day time frame. The creators of this innovative protocol recognized that a single, short workout performed at extremely high intensity creates a powerful demand for glycogen storage in both the slow-twitch and fast-twitch fibers of the muscles.

The researchers hypothesized that following such a workout with heavy carbohydrate intake could result in a high level of glycogen supercompensation without a lot of fuss. In an experiment, the researchers asked athletes to perform a short-duration, high-intensity workout consisting of two and a half minutes at 130 percent of VO2max (about one-mile race pace) followed by a 30-second sprint. During the next 24 hours, the athletes consumed 12 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of lean muscle mass. This resulted in a 90 percent increase in muscle glycogen storage.

Runners have cause to be very pleased by these findings. Doing just a few minutes of high-intensity exercise the day before a competition will not sabotage tomorrow’s performance, yet it will suffice to stimulate the desirable carbohydrate “sponging” effect that was sought in the original Ahlborg protocol. This allows the athlete to maintain a normal diet right up until the day before competition and then load in the final 24 hours.

The Western Australia carbo-loading strategy works best if preceded by a proper taper — that is, by several days of reduced training whose purpose is to render your body rested, regenerated, and race-ready. In fact, several days of reduced training combined with your normal diet will substantially increase your glycogen storage level even before the final day’s workout and carbohydrate binge. When you exercise vigorously almost every day, your body never gets a chance to fully replenish its glycogen stores before the next workout reduces them again. Only after 48 hours of very light training or complete rest are your glycogen levels fully compensated. Then the Western Australia carbo-loading regimen can be used to achieve glycogen supercompensation.

An even newer carbo-loading protocol calls for athletes to eat a normal diet of 55 to 60 percent carbohydrate until three days before racing, and then switch to a 70 percent carbohydrate diet for the final three days, plus race morning. As for exercise, this friendliest carbo-loading method suggests one last longer workout (but not an exhaustive workout) done a week from race day followed by increasingly shorter workouts throughout race week.

Having said all of this, I would like to note finally that carbo-loading in general has been shown to enhance race performance only when athletes consume little or no carbohydrate during the race itself. If you do use a sports drink or sports gels to fuel your race effort — as you should — prior carbo-loading probably will have no effect. But it doesn’t hurt to do it anyway, as insurance.

With the ADU ( http://australiadayultra.com/ ) only a few days away I am in the runners limbo that is ‘tapering and carboloading’ at the same time. This period, the last few days before an ultra, is the most testing for any runner. A runner is nervous enough about the upcoming challenge without adding in eating more (carboloading) than they normally would coupled with running less, (tapering) two things alien to most runners. Add in the constant fear of injury and worse, picking up a cold or flu, and this make runners very unhappy people to be around. My Wife and kids know to avoid me the weekend of a marathon and are unsure why I’m grumpy so early in the week. (They haven’t worked out the ADU starts at midnight Friday so I’m a few days early for my ‘grumpy Dad’  phase.)

As this is my first 100k I have taken the approach of still running daily but dropping the second run each day this week. This is tapering enough in my view as the runs all week have been pedestrian at best and I have run on the heart rate rather than pace. I even ran less than 100k last week albeit I did run a 5k race at the end of the week and managed to sneak in 95k total for the period. I take the approach that the legs will recover in 5 days after a 5k race so should be firing on all cylinders tomorrow, just in time for the Friday start. I have already discussed my tapering views for an ultra arguing that if you treat it as a very long run you don’t need to taper that much, just make sure you’re fresh for the start. The proof will be in the pudding on this one unfortunately. (Talking of pudding, must be time for another muffin ?)

Food wise I have been carboloading since yesterday going back to my ‘old faithful’ diet which has served me well the last 58 marathons (including 17 ultra-marathons) . Basically lots of honey on toast, orange juice, pasta or rice and the odd muffin for good luck. Repeat this for 3 days prior to the event and you’re done. I’ve written a post on carboloading on the blog before and if you search on the subject you’ll find it. Written by the nutrition and exercise guru Matt Fitzgerald the article discusses whether you need to carboload if you are going to eats carbohydrates while racing. Obviously in an ultra, over the 8 hour plus racing time, you are going to have to ingest some serious carbs so am I wasting my time carboloading ? Is it really an excuse to eat more Yelo muffins.? Probably, as I have booked in a 10k easy run tomorrow morning with a few friends to celebrate carboloading, the one time you can eat a Yelo muffin ( http://yelocornerstore.com.au/ ) and not feel guilty. (Truth be told I never actually feel guilty eating Yelo muffins but must be seen to advocate a healthy diet, most of the time.)

Final piece in the ultra jigsaw will be the mental attitude which I must admit to be struggling with at the moment. Two reasons really, first the race starts at midnight and is a 3 hour drive to the start. Current plan is to work all day Friday then go home to grab some food and then drive to the start to arrive an hour before. This would be 11pm. Spend an hour preparing myself and then start at midnight with no sleep hoping I can get to the end of the race before sleep depravation kicks in. Even typing this I can see a plan thwart with danger. Of course the biggest issue is the ‘no sleep’ before the start and obviously during the race. (Unless I can learn to sleep-run in the next few days, which is highly unlikely.) I had planned to drive down on Friday with No.2 Daughter and grab a few hours’ sleep before the race but she had a better offer apparently. I may need to offer her some incentives to come down with me as this would be the better solution. Another issue will be running for 5 hours in the dark before the sunrise and then of course you’re faced with the heat problems. Funnily enough the more I type on this post the more I ask myself what have I let myself in for !

Pacing is another piece of the jigsaw I need to get right. (This jigsaw is getting bigger, and harder, by the minute) . The game plan is to set a target pace early on and stick to it for 100k. How difficult can that be? Seriously, reading up on the way to run an ultra it seems all ultra-runners slow down towards the end (funny that, can’t think why?) but it is the ultra-runner who slows the least that eventually triumphs. After typing this post I’m now more in the ‘I just want to finish and not die’ mode rather than worrying about podium placing. Because this distance is new to me it really is set the pace early and hang on for as long as possible, hopefully somewhere around 99k I’ll have to dig deep. (Rather than the 70k mark which I feel is more realistic.)

Enough of looking at all the issues associated with the ADU, let’s concentrate on the good things to look forward to. It’ll be fun running for so long (I assume?) and achieving a running milestone with good friends. The experience will make me a stronger runner no matter the outcome and as with all ultra’s you will learn something about yourself along the way. The event itself is special with a great bunch of runners joined together in their own personal challenges. The comradery in an ultra is like nothing else in the running world, it really is a ‘one for all and all for one’ attitude that you do not find in any other distance. Best part though is last year when I finished the 50k I treated myself to pancakes, bacon, banana, maple syrup and ice cream which I can assure you will be the carrot dangling in front of me at around 70k when I’m physically spent and need that mental toughness to get me to the finish line. It’s amazing what pancakes can get a runner to do and as I’m running a 100k race this year maybe I can order two portions, is that wrong ?

Mindful that I haven’t posted much on nutrition lately. Mainly because I do not claim to be a nutritionist and can only really post interesting articles by professionals. This article seems quite relevant as I start to think about the 100k ultra I’m running in a few weeks.

I’m going to skip breakfast tomorrow before my long run with the weekend posse. I’ll let you know how it all goes.

Note: As promised I did skip breakfast and ran 21k with the BK posse on an empty stomach. Felt surprisingly spritely and finished strong. Albeit as we only ran 21k I’m not sure I was going to start burning fat for a few kilometres but small steps.

Of course, being Christmas Eve, we were never not going to have our long run (21k is quite long?) coffee and pancakes.

About the author
Amy Tribolini currently works as both a Registered Dietitian and Nutrition Professor. She lives, trains, and competes as an ultra runner out of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Amy specializes in fueling endurance athletes, athletic performance, and plant-based diets. Amy holds both a Bachelors Degree in Dietetics and a Masters Degree in Human Nutritional Science from the University of Wisconsin.

You might like to read these other articles on the topic of fat burning:
Plant based carbohydrate recipes for fat burning strategies
Nutrition for stripping fat and building lean muscle mass for race readiness
How to lose fat ultra running

Runners – All you need to know about ketosis and fat adaptation

Many runners have been convinced that they need carbohydrates to fuel for their endurance conquests, but a new question has been circulating in the ultra running community: “Can a high fat diet also be a high performance diet?”

More elite runners are emerging with claims that fat burning, ketosis, enables them to run more efficiently than their carb-dependent peers. With all the fad-diet advice flooding the mainstream, it is essential to understand how specific fuels are metabolized in the body and what current research is saying.

When training and competing in ultra marathons, proper fuel can be a huge part of your success.  Whether you are consuming carbohydrates or fat, your body will find a way to convert those fuels into energy so you can endure for long distances.

Carbohydrate is the body’s go-to fuel source. Carbs are quickly and easily converted to glycogen and stored in your cells. When you need energy, your body can rapidly convert glycogen to glucose and release it into your bloodstream to burn. Ketosis occurs when your body is not consuming enough carbohydrates to meet your energy needs, and as an adaptation process, it begins burning fat instead.

There are many proposed benefits of being in ketosis on long runs. Runners state that they don’t experience the dramatic energy spikes and crashes that accompany using high-sugar (high carb) sport supplements, such as gels, bars, and sports drinks. This is due to the fact that fat is a smooth burning fuel, that does not instigate a sugar-insulin cycle. Additionally, even a very lean athlete has around 30,000 calories of fat stored. Compare that to the approximately 2,000 calories of carbohydrate stored in the body. Just by acknowledging the greater storage capacity of fat, you can see why it is a desirable fuel source.

Now, let’s go back to discussing how carbohydrate is more rapidly converted to energy in the body.  This is true, but in part it is true because the body does not have significant practice in converting fat to fuel. For non-athletes, going into ketosis may never occur. Eating carbohydrate-heavy meals, accompanied by low physical activity, keeps the body from ever transitioning to burn fat as a primary fuel source. In this case, if it were ever necessary for the body to burn fat as a primary fuel, it would be an uncomfortable process and the body would likely feel fatigued.

The good news is it doesn’t have to stay this way. An athlete that commonly enters ketosis on long runs has more practice and has thus become more efficient at burning fat. Once athletes become well adapted, they may not feel a significant difference burning fat versus carbohydrate. The main distinction may be that they no longer feel the desperation to replenish their lost sugar stores frequently, during a run.

Attempting to live full-time in ketosis is an extreme lifestyle change and can require cutting out entire food groups, but the lessons learned from ketosis can be applied in a more moderate manner through a method called ‘fat adaptation’. You may not have heard of fat adaptation, but if you’re an ultra runner, your body is likely to be no stranger to it.

If you have ever ran out the door on an empty stomach and decided to do a longer run than planned, your body may have had no choice but to turn fat into fuel.  Since one pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories, the average 150-pound person could run for three hours and burn a mere half a pound of stored fat. Ultra runners can find peace of mind knowing that their bodies already contain the necessary fuel for long runs. I am not advocating for runners to starve themselves for better results, quite the opposite. I am encouraging endurance athletes to fuel with healthy fats and limit sugary, high-carbohydrate supplements as a means to ultimately perform more efficiently on long runs.

What is fat adaptation?

I’ll start by explaining what fat adaptation is not. It is not a low-calorie starvation diet; it is also not like the Atkins diet. Fat adaptation is a ‘state of being’ where the body is comfortable, efficient, and content burning fat as fuel. This method works by understanding food’s macronutrient content: carbohydrate, protein, and fat.

Fat adaptation requires two things: decreased intake of carbohydrate and increased fat consumption.  These dietary changes coupled with the right kind of physical activity can be the magic combination.  Since converting fat to fuel is a slower metabolic process than converting carbohydrate to fuel, especially in the untrained body, practicing this technique with lower-intensity physical activity is where athletes want to start.

How do I become “fat adapted”?

The easiest way to jumpstart fat adaptation is by skipping your morning breakfast and going for a run first thing in the AM. **Gasp** Isn’t this what every nutritionist says not to do? Yes, breakfast is an important meal to fuel your body, especially if you primarily burn carbohydrates as fuel. But, if you are an endurance athlete looking for that edge in long races, this is for you.

When first trying out this technique, your body may hurl hunger cues to your brain, desperately demanding a bagel, orange juice, cereal, or other high carbohydrate foods. If you feel you need to eat before heading out on a run, selecting high fat/low carbohydrate foods can provide satiety without sabotaging your fat adaptation goals.

I like to make coffee in the morning and put a large scoop of coconut oil in it. The bonus with coconut oil is that the fat structure (medium-chain-fatty-acids) increases energy expenditure and ultimately allows your body to burn fat more rapidly. If you are a big breakfast eater, this may seem hard at first because your body is so conditioned to burn carbohydrates as fuel.

Dietary tips to enhance fat adaptation

• You don’t have to remove all carbohydrates for fat-burning to initiate, what is more beneficial is removing grains.
• Continue to eat fruits, vegetables, proteins, and a lot of healthy fats such as: avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil, nuts and seeds.
• Exercising on an empty stomach (or a high-fat snack) in the morning can be the most effective way of entering the fat adaptation zone.

How should I train to aid fat adaptation?

Start with moderate intensity running (approximately 70% effort). While your body is adapting to converting fat as fuel, remember, this is a slower process at first. Be prudent, lay off the high intensity running until your body has more time to adjust. For example: my comfortable running pace is a 9-minute/mile. I know this because I can carry on a conversation, run long distances at this pace, and not feel exhausted when I’m finished. If initially I tried to enhance my fat adaptation while doing 7-minute/miles, I would feel exhausted, struggling, and desperate for sugary, high-carbohydrate snacks when my workout was done. This is because the body requires carbohydrate for high intensity workouts. Whatever your comfort zone is for running, utilize that as your pace while adapting to fat burning.

Just weeks into your training phase for fat adaptation, your body has likely adjusted to burning fat more efficiently. You may notice that you feel less hungry during and after runs. This is due to the stability of your blood sugars. Burning fat does not give you the severe highs and lows in blood sugar, it allows your blood sugar to remain steady despite burning significant calories.

If you want to re-introduce high-intensity training, such as hill repeats and speed workouts, you can re-introduce more carbohydrates into your diet. Carbohydrates are not harmful; they simply turn off or decrease your fat burning for the time being. High-intensity exercise benefits from carbohydrate burning because of how rapidly your metabolic process can convert it to energy. Using the naturally rapid metabolism of carbohydrates coupled with your newly acquired fat burning efficiency, you should be more equipped to handle any pace, distance, or course.

What are the benefits of fat adaptation?

Research is showing that fat-adapted athletes are able to race endurance events with just a fraction of the calories typically consumed. They are achieving these goals with stable blood sugars and minimal crashes in energy. Additionally, they are not suffering the typical gastro-intestinal malaise often caused by sugary, high-carbohydrate sports supplements. Consuming fewer calories, while feeling steadier levels of energy, may allow ultra-runners to reach higher levels of performance.

Research also shows that lactic acid, a compound produced when glucose is broken down and burned as fuel, is decreased in athletes burning primarily fat as fuel. Once built up in the body, lactic acid can produce painful, burning sensations. Fat adaptation and a heavier reliance on fat as fuel during a race, can cut back on lactic acid formation and decrease overall discomfort in the body.

Conclusion

Fat-adaptation can come in extremely handy during long endurance efforts such as ultra marathons.  I like to think of it like a ‘get out of jail free’ card.  If my stomach turns sour or I simply don’t want to take as much time eating during a race, I know that my body is well trained to adapt.  This is because my body has become more self-sufficient using itself as a fuel source.  Just like ultra runners count on their physical training to get them through a hard race, I can count on my body to do what it has practiced: to efficiently burn fat as fuel.

It’s now less than 4 weeks to my first 100k race (http://australiadayultra.com ) and I feel I need to start to think about nutrition. I’m a big believer in the saying ‘an ultra is an eating and drinking competition with running between aid stations’. Basically it’s all about keeping the body hydrated and fuelled at all times. The fitness bit will take care of itself as I’m confident I have the foundation to complete the event. So I need to scour the internet  using google as my co-pilot and try and find the magic diet that will get me to the end of the race at a similar pace to what I started. Running an ultra it’s even more important to get the pacing right because unlike in a marathon where you hit the wall at 32k and then stumble home in an ultra you could be hitting the wall and looking at a 30k run to finish, minimum. That has got to hurt.

I posted an article last week about the human body being capable on running on just about anything and ice cream was mentioned as a possible fuel. (You should have seen Jon’s eyes light up when I mentioned this to him. It was like all his Christmas’s had come at once ! I see trouble ahead for Jon next month. He’ll probably end up spilling the ice cream all over his triathlon top, not a good look for the photos me thinks !) not totally convinced on the ice cream diet for my first 100k so have done some more digging.

I’ve attached two articles below on different approaches to the ultra diet by two greats on the ultra scene. Dean Karnazes and Scott Jurek are two of the best ultra runners on the circuit at the moment. Both have won the Badwater Ultra , considered to be the hardest ultra in the world, and both have different approaches to diet.

Myself I’m still an old fashioned carbohydrate junkie so will probably, in the short term, stick to what I know. Not to say in the near future I won’t be adapting my nutrition and when I do it’ll all be on the blog.

 

A look at the diet of Dean Karnazes, who once ran 50 marathons in 50 days and adheres to a mostly Paleo food intake.

Professional athletes don’t get to the top by accident. It takes superhuman levels of time, dedication, and focus—and that includes paying attention to what they put in their bellies. In this series, GQ takes a look at what pro athletes in different sports eat on a daily basis to perform at their best. Here’s a look at the daily diet of ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes.

---

Running is the easiest sport to get into casually, because all you need are shoes and legs. As a result, there’s a lot of lore and common wisdom about the ideal runner’s diet: Everyone knows that the night before a big run—whether you’ve signed up for a 5k or a full-on marathon—you’re supposed to carbo-load on stuff like diavolo pasta, brown rice, or buckwheat pancakes.

Well… supposed to. “That’s so passé,” says Dean Karnazes.

Karnazes, 52, is an ultramarathoner who ran 350 miles—or a little less than the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco—in 80 hours and 44 minutes; completed 50 regular, 26-mile marathons in 50 days; and wrote Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner. Come September, he’ll be hosting the third annual Navarino Challenge, a marathon in Greece meant to raise awareness of childhood obesity. And in the last 20 years of professionally being someone who runs very, very far, Karnazes has transitioned to a mostly raw diet that upends a lot of conventional wisdom about what runners need to eat to perform.

On a good day I run a marathon before breakfast.

“I used to live on junk food, thinking that since you burn 30- to 40,000 calories on some of these runs, you need to get as many calories as you can no matter how you get them in.” One time, on the solo leg of a 200-mile relay run, in the middle of the night with a cell phone and a credit card, Karnazes ordered a pizza delivered to him and kept running while he ate the whole thing in a big roll.

His running times never suffered from his diet, but his daily energy levels fluctuated wildly, so he started experimenting with different foods to see how they affected his recovery time and how they made him feel. “When you push your body that hard you get a feel for what builds you up and what slows you down.”

That intuitive elimination process led him to a diet that’s pretty close to the Paleo Diet, based on the idea that humans aren’t meant to eat anything they can’t pick from a tree, pull from the ground, or kill themselves. Karnazes’s diet isn’t as bacon-heavy as most Paleo-enthusiasts. Instead it’s heavy on fruits (VERY heavy on fruits), vegetables, cold-water fish, and yogurt. If he has any meat, it’s organic, free-range bison, usually so lightly cooked that it’s practically tartare.

The absence of oatmeal and pre-run waffles may cause skepticism, but the fact that Karnazes’s diet is enough fuel to just get him through his workouts, let alone his monster runs, is a pretty strong argument for its effectiveness. When gearing up for a big run he eats 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day. He starts with a base of 3,200 calories, and then adds 300-500 calories per hour of running.

His only real meals are yogurt at breakfast, sometimes flavored with oregano, often with fruit and nuts, and a very large dinner of salad, vegetables, and fish or bison. Most of his carbohydrates come from fruit, which Karnazes eats throughout the day whenever he’s hungry (“I think the notion of three meals a day is rubbish”). And—surprise!—he’s hungry often.

“On a good day I run a marathon before breakfast,” he says, starting off with nothing more than coffee and flax milk. After the three-and-a-half to four-hour run, he waits over half an hour to eat anything else, letting his body adjust to powering itself just on fat reserves.

The rest of the day is constant motion. Not only are there several modified high intensity Navy SEAL workouts (push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, dips, and burpees) and eight to 12 miles of sprinting up hills and jogging back down, but Karnazes rarely sits. His office space is designed to work at standing-level and he’s rocking on the balls of his feet all the time, never letting his legs rest. He is almost physically incapable of staying still.

Like a hummingbird? I wonder aloud.

“Kind of like a shark,” he says.

Pre-morning run
Coffee with flax milk

Post-morning run
Greek-style yogurt (full fat, no sugar added) with cashews, banana and blackberries

Eaten over the course of the day
Apples
Pears
Oranges

Food and hydration for long runs
Nut butter
Unflavored coconut water

Dinner
Large mixed green salad with avocado, olive oil, ground ginger and turmeric
Raw beets
Cooked sweet potato (the one vegetable eaten cooked)
Wild-caught sashimi grade salmon

Dessert
Greek-style yogurt (full fat, no sugar added), topped with olive oil and Himalayan blue sea salt

This Man Ran the Entire Appalachian Trail in 46 Days. Here’s What He Ate Along the Way

In a sport that already dances on the fringe of society, ultrarunner Scott Jurek is a true rarity. As one of the athletes who helped make ultramarathons—any race longer than 26.2 miles—mainstream (well, more mainstream), Jurek has smoked the competition in some of the world’s most punishing trail and mountain races. Not only did he take home the win at the prestigious Western States 100-miler seven years in a row, he also set a course record in 2005 for the Badwater 135, an epic 135-mile race through Death Valley—and it was 130°. In July, he completed a run across the entire Appalachian Trail, breaking the speed record by over three hours. He finished in 46 days, eight hours, and seven minutes.

On top of all this, Jurek also happens to be an accomplished home cook and vegan—he shared his story and favorite recipes in his book, Eat and Run. The plant-based diet, he says, has contributed to his success as a runner, allowing him faster recovery times and better endurance on the trail. So, with all this in mind, we were curious to chat with Jurek about how he eats on the run (heh, heh), what foods fueled his AT record, and what he likes to cook at home.

What’s your morning routine?
I exercise before eating in the morning, unless I’m doing some huge, six- to eight-hour run. I don’t need coffee or caffeine to wake up, so I’m more of a tea or yerba mate-type person. I do enjoy a good cup of coffee or espresso when I’m out with friends. For breakfast, I’m really into green drinks, so I might do barley grass, or blend greens into my smoothie—something as simple as kale, arugula, or spinach. If I have spirulinaor chlorella on hand, I’ll put those in, too. I make sure to replace the carbohydrates I lost on my run with banana, frozen pineapple, or frozen mango, and then I’ll mix it up with whatever berries I have. I use brown rice and pea protein for my protein powder, and I also incorporate 7 Sources, which is an essential fatty-acid blended oil. Sometimes I’ll throw in coconut or avocado.

One thing that’s misconstrued about a plant-based diet is that it’s all just fruit and nuts. People assume that you can’t get full off a plant-based diet, but it really comes down to the amount of food you eat, and getting enough healthy fats. I’m one of these people that likes to eat. That’s the beauty of a plant-based diet; unless you’re eating junk food, you get to eat a lot.

As an ultrarunner, your caloric needs are different from the average athlete. Can you tell us about that?
When I’m training to come out on top and win races, I’ll need 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day. But someone who’s newer to running—say, training for a marathon or triathlon—might not need that many. The key thing is you have to eat while you’re running; you burn through the glycogen [a form of glucose that is easily processed] as you exercise. Marathoners can squeak by with a gel or two, although I think they’d have better results eating more often. But when they move on to their first ultra—say, a 50K—they spend more time on the trail. More time on the trail means more calories. It really comes down to your brain and nervous system needing those carbohydrates. You have to find the type of food that’s easiest for you to digest, consume 25 grams of carbohydrates every 20 to 30 minutes, then wash it down with plenty of water and electrolytes. It’s based on body weight, though, so larger individuals need more calories per hour than somebody who’s smaller. It’s not a blanket recommendation!

When I race, I’m eating a lot of “sports food” that’s carbohydrate-dense, like gels and energy chews. One of the cool things I worked on with Clif during the last year was something called Organic Energy Food. It’s basically food in a pouch that’s blended to a consistency that’s easy to get down. There are even savory flavors like pizza and sweet potato.

On your longest races, you’re actually eating while running. How does that work?
People are shocked (and competitors are jealous) that I can eat a burrito at seven- or eight-minute-per-mile pace. It does take practice, but getting solid or real food down is so important. It’s about trial and error, though. In Eat and Run, I wrote about how I tried to drink straight olive oil during a training run before my first 100-miler. I hardly knew what I was doing, and I was like, “Well, olive oil’s this amazing food and I’m gonna need a lot of calories, so why wouldn’t I drink that on my run?” I ended up with extreme nausea, basically just puking in the bushes.

You lost a lot of weight during your Appalachian Trail run. How much were you eating?
I was on the trail for 13, 14 hours a day at first—and then, later, it became 16, 18 hours a day. Sometimes 20. I was getting less and less sleep, and my metabolism was just raging. I needed to consume 7,000 calories or more a day. A lot of that—around 3,000—of that was in Clif products. Jenny would supplement that with sandwiches or toast drenched in olive oil. Sometimes she’d get me hash browns or greasy home fries from a local diner. Or, after eating pasta with olive oil and vegan sausage, I would down a whole pint of coconut milk ice cream and it didn’t even make a dent. But my time was so limited, the question I’d have to ask was: “Do I spend more time on the trail or more time sleeping?” [Jurek’s wife and friends drove their van along the trail as he ran, and he slept there after logging his miles.] I know it looks shocking, but it’s the nature of activities like this. People might think, “Oh these crazy runners…” but I missed cooking so much.

I weighed around 173 going into the trail. I’m 6’2” and, as a larger individual, could afford to lose some of that. People were surprised I lost almost 20 pounds, especially when they saw pictures, but unfortunately that’s just what happens. The body is trying to get all the calories it can, and when you’re sleep deprived and put these huge stresses on your body, it goes after every little calorie it can get—even the muscles you’re not using. My body started cannibalizing itself a little bit, but that’s where the recovery comes in.

What was the first thing you cooked at home?
I think it was the Swedish pancakes. Well, the day before we had made a huge salad from the farmers’ market. I hadn’t been to a market all season, so being able to pick all these amazing vegetables, fresh here in Colorado, was so great.

Hikers and locals brought you food along the way, right?
Yes, some did. This one family from Pennsylvania brought us fresh fruit and meat substitutes, and it was amazing because we were having a hard time to find things I could eat at small grocery stores. Somebody delivered me two boxes of cinnamon rolls and caramel rolls from Vegan Treats based out of Pennsylvania. Just amazing. One individual brought me avocado maki and vegan pizza, which I was really craving. He hiked up a crazy technical trail for three miles to deliver these random foods. That was one cool thing about the AT. Even though it’s in a remote location, it’s a really social environment. It’s kind of amazing sharing that experience with people.

You mention in your book that you used food to woo your wife Jenny. How’d you do it?
Jenny was a typical female bachelor. She had basically condiments and frozen veggie burgers; very “cereal-for-dinner” type girl. I’m a big believer that food is the way to a woman’s heart, so it was pretty easy to woo her. Food was so integral to my family—with our garden, and hunting wild game and fishing growing up—and it was fun to share that with Jenny. She had never seen that side of me; she had always just seen me as this quirky ultrarunner.

Any parting words?
So many people think cooking has to be this exquisite, elaborate process, but it’s really about just getting in there. It’s about not being afraid to try things. My mom would say, “If you can read, you can cook.” As an athlete, I pay a lot of attention to how I fuel my body…but it’s also just really fun.