More than half of all runners will overdo it at least once in their running career.

Written by: Jeff Gaudette

Overtraining. It’s a word that strikes fear into the hearts of runners everywhere. Researchers estimate that 61% of all serious runners will go through a period of overtraining at least once in their running career. That’s not an encouraging statistic when you’re pushing the limits to reach your goals.

What makes overtraining scary is that runners have very few tangible ways to identify and measure whether they are overtraining. Overtraining isn’t so black & white like a stress fracture or so painfully obvious as when you run out of energy during a long run–there is no pain associated with overtraining and there are few clear signs. Researchers can measure advanced physiological factors such as catecholamine excretion and neuromuscular patterns to determine if a runner is overtraining, but us runners on the road have little conclusive evidence to determine if we’re just tired from training or going over the edge. While the signs and symptoms of overtraining aren’t overt, it is possible to identify which activities present the greatest danger to overtraining, recognize subtle signs that suggest you’re approaching the precipice, and discuss how to come back if you believe you are overtrained.

More from Competitor.com: How To Break Out Of Your Running Rut

]]> http://running.competitor.com/2011/10/training/overtraining-why-it-happens-how-to-spot-it-how-to-dig-yourself-out_39479/feed 2 http://running.competitor.com/2011/08/nutrition/exhausted-take-a-second-look-at-your-blood-tests_34245 http://running.competitor.com/2011/08/nutrition/exhausted-take-a-second-look-at-your-blood-tests_34245#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:03:18 +0000 Super Administrator http://triathlon.competitor.com/2011/08/features/exhausted-take-a-second-look-at-your-blood-tests_35822 It’s worth finding a doctor who understands the intricacies of cholesterol, thyroid hormones and iron.

Written by: Bob Augello

This article originally appeared in the 2011 July/August issue of Inside Triathlon.

“It was like going from being blind to getting my vision back.”

This is how Paul Thomas, an elite runner, duathlete, triathlete and cyclist for most of his life, described finding a health practitioner who knew how to evaluate the lab results of an athlete, whose body has different requirements than those of normal folks.

As an endurance athlete you have to pay close attention to what your body is telling you. Photo: Nils Nilsen

Thomas went looking for this professional because of the “deep hole” he had dug for himself “by training for and racing an Ironman in just four months.” During the Ironman, Thomas was unable to get his heart rate above 122 on the bike, no matter how hard he tried. Afterward, he was constantly tired. Knowing something was wrong, he visited his general practitioner, who ordered lab tests including a comprehensive metabolic panel (total cholesterol, protein and electrolytes), glucose and CBC panel (complete blood count). But Thomas’ creatinine, sodium, phosphorous, thyroid-stimulating hormone, iron, pH, aspartate aminotransferase (an enzyme) and other markers all came back within normal ranges. Nothing was too high or low.

But Thomas knew something definitely wasn’t “normal,” so he began searching for someone who could help. Finally, he connected with Jerry Moylan, a chiropractor in San Diego who not only has more than 20 years of experience working with athletes, including Canadian triathlete and Olympian Carol Montgomery, but is an avid athlete himself and three-time Ironman finisher. Moylan explained to Thomas that the “normal” reference ranges that most health practitioners use to evaluate lab results are intended to assist in identifying and diagnosing disease states and do little to help one reach an “optimal” state of health.

]]> http://running.competitor.com/2011/08/nutrition/exhausted-take-a-second-look-at-your-blood-tests_34245/feed 8 http://running.competitor.com/2011/07/nutrition/performance-in-a-pill-are-brain-ergogenics-beneficial_31667 http://running.competitor.com/2011/07/nutrition/performance-in-a-pill-are-brain-ergogenics-beneficial_31667#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:45:50 +0000 Super Administrator http://running.competitor.com/?p=31667 And could they be the next big thing in endurance sports?

Written by: Shawn Talbott, Ph.D

Endurance exercise makes us tired – that’s not exactly a newsflash – but methods to “reduce fatigue” or “prolong endurance” have become the Holy Grail of sports nutrition.

Undoubtedly, you’ve seen numerous “improve endurance” products in the form of energy bars, carb beverages, and related that provide calories to help maintain glucose, reduce lactic acid accumulation, and restore glycogen levels and thus help to delay “peripheral” fatigue (caused when your muscles fatigue).

However, a new category of endurance nutrition products are entering the market intended to improve “mental energy” and help to delay “central fatigue” (which occurs when the brain basically says, “No more, we’re done”). These new types of products can be broadly grouped into a category that we refer to as “Brain Ergogenics” – to suggest an overall effect of enhancing the brain’s capacity for high-performance work output.

Brain Ergogenics has the potential to be the “next big thing” in endurance performance. We have already gotten pretty close to optimizing the approach to extending endurance through “peripheral” mechanisms, which includes factors occurring outside the brain, in the muscles, blood vessels, etc –  such as glycogen levels, oxygen delivery, maintenance of blood glucose, electrolytes for hydration and cramping, etc. However,  we have only scratched the surface in terms of extending endurance through “central” mechanisms (brain-centered).

One way to think about obstacles to endurance performance is that you “stop” (or slow down) moving forward due to either peripheral fatigue (you bonk or hit the wall or succumb to the “burn” of lactate accumulation) or due to central fatigue (your brain says “enough”) – and both factors can be “pushed back” in various ways to enable us to keep going.

Kierann Smith runs at Nationals. Courtesy of Greyson Christoforo.

Stanford Medical School student, triathlon team member and Impala Racing Team member, Kierann Smith, was on pace to race her best race ever when she passed out at mile five of the run at USAT Collegiate Nationals on April 9. This is her story.

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, April 9, 2011.  USA Triathlon’s Collegiate Nationals.  I’m having the race of my life.  I’ve just swum and biked harder than I ever thought I could.  Except for one little glitch involving a dropped chain that got stuck and took two minutes to fix, I’m flying.  My mental focus has reached a new level.  Nothing is going to get in my way, not the 90 degree heat and 90% humidity, not the Cal girl in front of me, not the fire in my feet that is spreading up my legs.

My goal is to run a sub-39 minute 10K, and I’ve run 6:15 per mile for the first 4 miles, right on target.  I am thinking about the crew video I watch for pre-race inspiration, “Inches,” and feel truly like I am going after each and every inch.  I am thinking about my teammates out there with me, Marissa, Sara, Ellen, K-Bell, and Lisa.  I see the 5 mile mark up ahead, this where I usually start to let loose, because I was a miler in college and I always tell myself I can always run a mile.

I barely notice the first time I lurch to the left.  I keep running.  Another lurch to the left.  All I think is, “Oh gosh, that girl I just passed is going to think there’s something wrong with me.”  Never did it cross my mind that there might actually be something very wrong with me.  I don’t know how many lurches ensued, but I vaguely remember bystanders saying things like, “Are you okay?” and “Whoa!” before somehow I’m down on the ground in a pile of woodchips under the hot sun.

I struggle to get back up.  Someone whose face I can’t see comes to my aid.  I tell them I tripped, I need to get back up and finish.  Strong hands push down on my shoulders, and I can’t get up.  “Here drink some Gatorade,” which I attempt to refuse because I just want to get up and finish.  I can’t stand the thought of any of the girls I’ve passed passing me back.  I can’t stand the thought of leaving my team a girl short.

All I remember of the next period of time is being put on a stretcher…then nothing…then being in the med tent and briefly seeing the faces of my fiancé and coach, then they disappear and six guys are working frantically over me.  One is putting an IV in my left arm.  Another tells me he is going to roll me on my side because he needs to measure my core body temp…if you know what that means.

“She’s at 106,” he announces.  Someone is doing something to my ankle (I never figure out what).  Another guy starts pouring buckets of ice water over my torso, bags of ice are placed over my extremities, and I realize I’m lying on a stretcher over a huge ice bath.  I start puking red Gatorade all over the place.  I am asking for my fiancé.  They say they don’t know where he went.  A few moments later I realize my race shorts are pulled halfway down and they keep checking my core body temp (“She’s still 106.”), and I tell them I actually don’t want my fiancé anymore.

They ask me the date.  I think hard.  April…9^th…20..11.  I only remember because the only thought that is still in my brain is this is nationals…the date has been locked on my training calendar for months…and I am not going to get to finish.  I have never been so miserable.  I want to die.  I start praying the rosary on my knuckles because it is the only thing that distracts me and I want so badly to pretend this isn’t happening to me, on so many levels.

At some point the physician comes to check on me.  Apparently we’ve talked before because I told him I went to Harvard for undergrad and he said he’d forgive me for that (he had gone to Dartmouth).  Then we find out he had dated a friend of my mom’s back in Minnesota.  I am starting to like the guy until, when I confide in him that I feel utterly stupid about what has happened, he replies, “Hey, if it weren’t for people like you, I wouldn’t have a job.”

I know he was just trying to make light of the situation, but from my perspective there was nothing lighthearted about it, and he made me feel as if he wanted this to happen to me.

As dire as my own situation feels, when I regain a few threads of consciousness, I become even more traumatized by what was going on around me.  The girl next to me hasn’t moved or made a sound since I awoke.  They keep announcing her temperature is also 106.  She still isn’t responding by the time my temp is down to 103.7, which they deem sufficient to send me to the unobserved part of the med tent to let my IV finish running.

I am still barely aware of what is going on at this point, I don’t realize they’ve picked me up and moved me on the stretcher, just all of the sudden I feel like I am falling backwards as they dump me on the cot.  My fiancé Jason is back along with my coach Bruce.  Both have these amazingly sweet concerned looks on their faces.  Jason asks if it’s okay to pull up my pants.  I can’t get any more flushed than I already am but I am not even aware enough to feel embarrassed anyway.

At some point, the girl on the cot next to me starts screaming and flailing her arms and legs.  She breaks her cot.  Several people come to attend to her and start carrying her into the other part of the tent.  They drop her right in front of my cot because she is writhing around so much.  Half a dozen other people come to attend to her and they cart her off to another room.  I wake up more fully to the war zone that is surrounding me.  Some cots have 3-4 girls on them, all in various states of hyperthermia.  My fiancé tells me there is a line of girls on stretchers waiting to get into the acute side, and I am lucky I went down when I did.  He says he overheard the dispatcher saying, “We’ve got three down on the course still without aid.”

I am further pained thinking of my fellow competitors suffering.  I remember thinking on the run, “Everyone out here feels this bad because we are all in the same conditions.”  I also remember thinking that I couldn’t possibly stop to walk as I passed some absolutely amazing girls who had done just that.

A moment after my IV finishes, an EMT rushes in, asks me if I am able to drink water on my own, I’m not sure but he seems convinced enough.  He whips out my IV and runs away.  Another person comes in and asks if I can walk.  “Dude,” I think, “I can’t even sit up!” He makes some comment about what they have to do if I can’t walk and it doesn’t sound desirable so I struggle to my feet.  That satisfies them enough to send me outside, they need the space they say.

I go outside and sit on a cot in the shade.  My mentation is still fuzzy.  I see my other coach Gina, thank goodness, because she knows exactly how I feel.  She knows immediately how heartbroken I am on top of feeling physically awful, and she focuses on the former because she knows there is nothing to be done at this point about the latter.  She tells me story after story about world champions who have done the same thing.  She tells me she is proud of me for pushing myself to my absolute limit.  “You are going to learn SO much from this,” she says with just the right amount of confidence.  “Just stay positive.”

——

In the ensuing days, I have wracked my brain for anything I could’ve done differently.  I had known it would be hot in Tuscaloosa, so I had been drinking bottles of water and CarboPro for days leading up to the race.  I was well-rested.  I had visualized every bit of my race.  Maybe it was the visualization that was my undoing.  I was so mentally focused that I shut off any feedback from my body.  I wasn’t wearing a heart rate monitor, which may have given me some external feedback to make up for my lack of the internal.

One thing is for sure, I should’ve started the run more cautiously in that heat, but I don’t even remember processing how hot it was by the time I got to the run.  I wanted the finish line so badly, it was all I could think about on the run, and I wanted to pass as many people as possible to get there.  What I failed to process was that several of the girls I passed were great runners and better swimmers and cyclists than me, people I had never passed at other races.  My vanity overshadowed my humanity.  I thought I was somehow superhuman compared to these other women, as though they were subject to the heat while I was not.  That isn’t how I actually processed it at the time, but that is how I acted.  I’ve learned this lesson many times before but with less severe consequences.

There is little consolation when one doesn’t finish a race, especially a big one like nationals.  A big blow was when I found out that I had sustained marked muscle damage and even some liver damage.  Knowing what my mind is capable of doing to my body, I am now a little distrustful of myself.  My body is taking revenge.

Four days out and I still hardly have the energy to buy groceries or even walk around for more than a few minutes.  Even worse, my best method of dealing with stress is forbidden for at least a week.  Not only am I in agony from the event, I face a week or more of no workouts.

There is no quick fix to this, mentally or physically.  I’m going to have to slowly learn to trust myself again.  My body is going to have to learn to safely push itself again.  For years I have been working to overcome all mental barriers, but now I’ve gone too far.  I need to center myself and keep seeking for that perfect spot where mind and matter meet, that is where I’ll be able to leave it all out on the course without leaving myself out on the course.

“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” -Ecclesiastes

–Kierann Smith

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

There is always a risk of burnout when you train hard for an extended period of time in preparation for a big event. We can define this type of burnout as a loss of motivation to train and a loss of enjoyment in training. Burnout usually occurs when one’s training is not going well. It is a psychological problem precipitated by a physiological one.

The importance of the link between enjoyment and success in training is underappreciated. Most runners recognize that they enjoy training most when their fitness is improving and enjoy it least when their fitness is stagnating. But whereas runners typically focus on training for improvement and simply trust that they will enjoy their training if they train properly, new research on the role of the brain in exercise suggests that we may be better off doing the opposite: prioritizing enjoyment and trusting that the more fun we have in training, the fitter we will become.

The latest scientific support for the idea that the more you enjoy training, the better will be the results you get from it, comes from a paper authored by Bertrand Baron, an exercise physiologist at Université de la Reunion in France. Baron’s paper is about the role of emotions on pacing strategies and performance in endurance sports events. Citing past research, Baron observes that experienced athletes are better able to pace themselves in races so that they finish in the shortest time possible given their abilities, instead of starting too fast and crashing or starting too slow and finishing with something left in the tank. Pacing is done by feel, and it is learned through training and racing experiences as athletes discover how they should feel—how easy or hard it should be to continue  running at a certain pace—at any given point in a task that they seek to complete in minimal time.

The ultimate purpose of these feelings (or emotions), says Baron, is to discourage athletes from trying to override the fatigue process, which could put their health at risk. This process begins when the muscles run low on fuel, or lose power, or approach some other limit and send warning signals to the brain, whose job is to shut the muscles down before serious damage occurs. This happens on a subconscious level. But at the same time, the brain also generates conscious feeling of suffering, which again serve to discourage the athlete from trying to consciously override the fatigue process.

Of course, athletes can choose to ignore the “slow down” message delivered by feelings of suffering during workouts and races, but only to a limited extent. For example, if you start to feel lousy halfway through a marathon, you could, instead of slowing down, break into a full sprint. However, within 20 or 30 seconds you would slow way down involuntarily as your subconscious brain took over to protect your body from serious harm. Nevertheless, some athletes are able to tolerate more suffering than others before slowing down, and each athlete is able to tolerate more suffering in some circumstances than others. And the more suffering one is able to tolerate, the better one can perform.

Baron contends that motivation is the major factor that increases the maximum tolerable degree of suffering during exercise and thereby maximizes performance. And there is a well-known relationship between motivation and enjoyment in training. When an athlete enjoys workouts and fully embraces the training process, he or she is willing to work harder. For this reason, Baron believes that training should be planned not only to stimulate physiological adaptations, as is usually done, but also to keep the athlete looking forward to workouts and feeling rewarded by them.

Naturally, to get the best results from training you have to do some hard workouts you dread and some workouts that address your weaknesses, which are seldom enjoyable. But in planning your training you should not be ruled by a sense of strict obligation to do only what is necessary to improve your fitness. You should also feel free to choose training patterns that you prefer, to act on hunches and even to be spontaneous sometimes. There is more than one right way to build a high level of racing fitness. And the new research we’ve just reviewed suggests that, among the collection of effective options, the best way may be that which you’ll have the most fun pursuing. Doing what feels right in your training will steer you around burnout by keeping your motivation level high, and by keeping your motivation level high it will enable you to train, and ultimately race, harder.

[sig:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, Racing Weight Quick Start Guide: A 4-Week Weight-Loss Plan for Endurance Athletes.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

Training is a game of stress and adaptation. Workouts stress your body by challenging the limits of its speed and endurance. If you apply the right amounts of stress with the right frequency, your body will change in response to this stress—adapting in ways that make it better able to handle the same stress when repeated.  For example, when you perform a long workout that depletes your muscle glycogen fuel stores, genes that control your muscles’ glycogen storing capacity are stimulated, resulting in the hoarding of greater glycogen stores for the next workout.  As a result, your endurance increases.

Subjecting your body to too much exercise stress, however, will cause negative adaptations in your body.  For example, every workout breaks down a certain amount of muscle tissue, triggering an inflammation response that subsequently repairs the damage.  Given enough time, this process will not only heal the damage but change your muscles in ways that make them more resistant to damage in future workouts.  But if you do another hard workout that causes more muscle damage before the damage caused by the previous workout has been fixed, it will begin to accumulate and the resulting inflammation might get out of control.  If you persist in this manner, your muscles will become sorer and weaker and your performance will nosedive.

This process of negative adaptation to training stress is called overtraining.  The primary sign of overtraining is an unexpected decline in workout performance.  Other signs and symptoms include persistent fatigue, muscle soreness and loss of motivation for training.  The cure for overtraining is relative rest—that is, reducing your training load until you begin to feel and perform better.

Note that the above-mentioned signs and symptoms do not always indicate overtraining.  There’s a grey area on the edge of overtraining known as “overreaching” that can be beneficial when properly controlled.  Overreaching is a brief period (one to two weeks) at the height of the training process when your training workload applies more stress than your body can fully adapt to, so that your fatigue level steadily increases and your workout performance stagnates.  But before the process gets out of hand, you reduce your training load, enabling your body to fully recover from and adapt to the training stress of the preceding week to two weeks.  A big boost in fitness usually follows.

When persistent fatigue and declining performance occur unexpectedly and reach a severe level, that’s another matter.  That’s overtraining—something you want to avoid at all costs, because it can take a while to recover from.  Here are four tactics that you can use to avoid the downward spiral of overtraining.

Train progressively.  The surest way to avoid overtraining is not to train very hard.  But that’s also the surest way to not get very fit.  To build peak fitness without overtraining, you need to train progressively, or increase your training load at a gradual rate that stays within your body’s adaptive limits.  As a general rule, you should increase your weekly training volume by no more than 10 percent each week.  So if you train 10 hours this week, train no more than 11 hours next week.

It is also important that you avoid increasing the amount of high-intensity training (lactate threshold intensity and above) that you do each week.  When you introduce a new type of high-intensity workout into your training, make it manageable, and then gradually increase the challenge level each time you do the same type of workout.  For example, the greatest amount of lactate threshold-intensity work you’ll want to do in a single session is 40 minutes.  But if you have not done threshold-intensity training recently, your first such workout should feature only 15 minutes or so at that intensity level.  Advance to 18 minutes in your next threshold workout, and then 20, and so forth.

Use the hard-easy rule.  The next workout you do after any challenging workout should be relatively easy, so it doesn’t interfere with your recovery from the stress imposed. Designate three workouts per week (two high-intensity sessions and one long endurance session) as hard workouts.  The rest should be easy to moderate.  Here’s an example:

Plan recovery weeks.  Although your training should be progressive, it should not be progressive in the sense of continuously increasing in the amount of stress it imposes.  Instead, interrupt your training progression periodically with brief periods of reduced training to give your body a chance to fully absorb and recover from your recent hard training and prepare for even harder training in the following weeks.

I recommend that you plan every third or fourth week as a recovery week.  Reduce your training volume by roughly 20 percent in these weeks.

Listen to your body.  Even when your training is well planned, if it’s also challenging enough to push you toward a true fitness peak there will come some times when you feel unexpectedly run-down.  When this happens, heed the warning your body is giving you and take a day off, or at least replace your next hard workout with an easier one.  Many runners find it difficult to pull back and recover in response to unexpected moments of accumulating fatigue, but it is usually the best choice.  If you exercise restraint and pull back today, you will probably feel strong again tomorrow or the next day.  But if you stubbornly persist in training hard despite your body’s warnings, you may enter the downward spiral of overtraining and find that it takes weeks to climb back.

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, Racing Weight Quick Start Guide: A 4-Week Weight-Loss Plan for Endurance Athletes.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

It happens sooner or later every July. I’ll be watching television coverage of the Tour de France on Versus and either Paul Sherwin or Phil Liggett will make some reference to “massive lactic acid buildup” causing a particular cyclist to bonk. In these moments I doubt that the masses will ever get the memo that everything they were once taught about lactic acid is wrong.

The old line on lactic acid is that 1) it is a byproduct of anaerobic muscle metabolism at high exercise intensities, 2) it causes fatigue by making the muscles more acidic, 3) it cannot be used directly by the muscles as fuel, and 4) it causes post-workout muscle soreness. The new line on lactic acid is that 1) the muscles don’t produce it at all, but instead produce its close cousin, lactate, 2) lactate is not a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism but an intermediate product of aerobic metabolism, 3) about 75 percent of the lactate produced by the muscles is used aerobically within them as fuel, 4) lactate does not cause fatigue by making the muscles more acidic but actually prevents fatigue in a manner I’ll explain in the next few paragraphs, and 5) lactate has no relationship to muscle soreness whatsoever.

A new study out of Aarhus University in Denmark provides evidence for point #4. Before I discuss it, though, let me first say this: muscles work kind of like batteries. They run on electricity and, like batteries, they are most powerful when they are highly polarized. When you start exercise, there is a large disparity in the strength of the positive electrical charge between the interior of the muscle cell and the extracellular space outside it. This allows electrical signals sent to the muscle cell from the brain through nerves to pass through the cell membrane easily and induce strong contractions. But as high-intensity exercise continues, potassium ions steadily leak out of the muscle cell into the extracellular space, causing a depolarizing effect. As the charge difference between the inside and outside of the muscle cell decreases, electrical currents have a harder time getting in and muscle contractions become weaker.

Now, it so happens that the accumulation of potassium ions and the buildup of lactate during high-intensity exercise are highly synchronized. This suggests that the two processes are somehow linked. Researchers at Aarhus University wanted to figure out how these two processes interacted, so they designed the following experiment.

Leg muscles were removed from rats and place in fluid baths with electrical currents hooked up to them. By measuring the strength of these muscles’ contractions in response to a consistent amount of electrical stimulation, the researchers were able to determine the effects of different things they added to the fluid bath on the fatigue state of the muscles. The two things they added, both separately and together, were potassium ions and lactic acid.

What did they find? They found that extreme acidification alone caused the muscles to lose contractile power—that is, it caused them to fatigue. They found that adding a bunch of potassium ions to the fluid bath also caused fatigue. But when potassium ions and lactic acid were added together, the muscles function just as well as they did when neither substance was added.

What does this tell us? It tells us that, far from causing fatigue in the exercising muscle, lactate production actually prevents fatigue by counteracting the effects of depolarization. To draw an analogy, depolarization is like the drain on your cell phone’s battery that happens while you use it. Lactate production is like plugging your phone into a charger while you use it. It counteracts the drain.

While I have your attention, I’ll tell you briefly about another new study involving potassium ions and lactate. As you know from experience, the harder you run, the harder you breathe. The physiological mechanisms that cause you to breathe harder as you exercise harder are complex and not fully understood. Researchers at the University of North Carolina recently set up an experiment designed to determine if increased ventilation during exercise was related to the accumulation of either potassium ions or lactate in the blood.

The researchers had a group of triathletes hop on exercise bikes and ride at incrementally increasing intensity until they were exhausted. They did this on two occasions, once with normal muscle glycogen levels and once with low muscle glycogen levels. Since lactate comes from glycogen, the purpose of having the triathletes perform the test with low glycogen levels was to reduce lactate production at higher exercise intensities. Since potassium ion accumulation would be unaffected by reduced glycogen, this protocol allowed the researchers to separate the effects of potassium ions and lactate on breathing.

What did they find? The relationship between potassium ion accumulation and breathing intensity was consistent between the two trials, whereas the relationship between blood lactate levels and ventilation differed. This finding suggests that lactate accumulation is not a major trigger of increased breathing intensity during exercise.

The verdict is in: lactate is not guilty on all counts.

Will this fact make Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin stop blaming “lactic acid” for making cyclists bonk in next July’s Tour de France? Not a chance!

[sgi:MattFitzgerald]

Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

Every runner knows that a great race cannot happen unless a fair amount of hard work and suffering precedes it. But how much suffering is the right amount? Obviously, there is such a thing as too much suffering, just as there is such a thing as too little. Opinions on the proper definition of what we might call the “misery sweet spot” vary. Some coaches and runners believe one should train more or less according to Nietzsche’s dictum, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” In other words, the more you suffer in training without breaking, the better you will race. Others believe that runners should suffer in carefully measured doses and should feel good at most times in the training process.

Even most coaches and runners who have a philosophy of suffering in training hold their beliefs implicitly, however. They do not actually put much thought into the question of how a runner should feel as the training process unfolds, and while they recognize that this emotional-sensory dimension has some importance, they fall far short of believing that runners should train by feel, in the sense of intentionally steering the course of their training in ways that make them feel how they should feel. Instead, they view the emotional-sensory dimension of training as ancillary and focus on the physiological dimension.

Not I. Unlike most of my peers, I believe that runners should train by feel. The reason is that how a runner feels during runs and about his or her running generally at any given time is the most sensitive and reliable indicator of how well the training process is going. The mind and the body are deeply interconnected. Your mind receives a million times more relevant information about how your body is doing than some silly gadget like a heart rate monitor and is able to interpret it much more clearly and immediately. If you feel really strong during a hard tempo run, then you are fit and your body is responding well to your training. Period. It doesn’t matter what number your heart rate monitor spits out.

Quite simply, I believe that runners should plan their training with the intent of producing certain feelings as their top priority, and that runners should adjust their training as necessary along the way to maximize desired feelings and minimize undesirable feelings. So then, how should you feel during the training process? I recognize that some runners achieve great success with a grinding approach to training, where they heap on as much hard work as they can handle and feel kind of lousy most of the time until the very end. When they taper down, however, their legs spring back to life and race like superheroes, I think the best approach for most runners is to try to feel as good as possible at most times.

Now, having read this you might now be thinking, “Well, the best way to feel good in training is to not train very hard—and that’s not going to result in a great race!” Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Feeling good in running is about feeling fit. The fitter you are, the better you will feel generally. And the only way to get fit is to work hard and, yes, suffer. Paradoxical though it may seem, suffering is essential to feeling good in training as a runner.

The joy of feeling fit is different from other pleasures, like the pleasure of lounging on the couch in front of a good movie. The joy of feeling fit is the pleasure of hard work. If you’re like me, the most enjoyable runs you experience are not easy runs but very challenging ones that happen to fall on days when your body feels up to the challenge. In running, you can experience pleasure and suffering simultaneously. In fact, there is probably no better indicator of successful training than enjoying one’s hardest workouts—that is, maximizing both pleasure and pain in the same sessions.

There are two enemies of feeling good in training. The first, as I’ve already suggested, is lack of fitness. If you train too lightly to stimulate steady improvement in your fitness, you will not enjoy your training as much as you would if you worked harder, suffered more, and grew stronger for your pains. The second enemy of feeling good in training is fatigue. The more fatigue you carry into a workout, the lousier you will feel, regardless of your fitness level. Therefore, maximizing your enjoyment in training requires that you minimize fatigue.

Of course, fatigue and increased fitness both issue from the same source: hard work. You cannot get the benefit of hard work and increased fitness without the cost of fatigue. However, there are a million different ways to apportion hard work in training, and each yields its own unique balance of fitness and fatigue. Some yield more fatigue than fitness, others more fitness than fatigue. The best way to train is in a way which maximizes the fitness/fatigue ratio in the output of your hard work.

And how is this done? The most effective way to optimize the fitness/fatigue balance is to pay careful and consistent attention to how you feel and steer the course of your training in the direction of feeling as good as possible as often as possible. Again, feeling good is the most sensitive and reliable sign that your fitness is improving and that your fatigue level is within manageable limits. When you don’t feel good, you must determine whether it’s because of lack of fitness or excessive fatigue. Lack of fitness is corrected by more hard work. Excessive fatigue is corrected by more rest.

In addition to adjusting your training appropriately as you go, you can also maximize your enjoyment in training by planning it appropriately. It’s beyond the scope of this article to get into that, however. To learn more about the planning aspect of my feel-good training philosophy, check out my latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

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Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

The Journal of Adolescent Health recently published a study that may be alarming to endurance athletes. Israeli researchers reported finding high levels of anemia (or low red blood cell count) and iron deficiency (a common cause of low red blood cell counts) in young male military recruits. Levels of anemia and low iron were already above normal, at 18 percent and 15 percent, respectively, at the start of training, and increased to 50 percent and 27 percent after six months of training.

The Reuters news agency picked up the story and distributed it under the headline, “Intense Exercise May Lower Your Blood Count.”

If this is true, it is cause for concern, as anemia not only causes troublesome symptoms such as weakness and fatigue, but it also sabotages exercise performance. But is it really true? The idea that intense exercise may, as a normal outcome, reduce the body’s capacity to perform intense exercise seems rather absurd. Chances are that in your experience, intense exercise increases your fitness instead of causing symptoms of anemia. Yet this new Israeli study is not alone in finding high rates of anemia among athletes.

The fact of the matter is that the connection between exercise and iron deficiency anemia, if there is one, is mysterious. Medical scientists do not have it figured out. As a recent review by Australian researchers stated, “Commonly, athletes are diagnosed as iron deficient, however, contrasting evidence exists as to the severity of deficiency and the effect on performance.”

One source of confusion is the fact that there are many ways to measure anemia. The two general categories of measurement, alluded to above, are red blood cell count and iron status. In the past it was believed that anemia was rampant among athletes because they often exhibit low blood hemoglobin concentrations. But an important 1992 study by South African researchers dismissed this phenomenon as a harmless “pseudo-anemia” caused by the expansion in blood volume that results from exercise training—a beneficial adaptation that increases the body’s thermoregulatory capacity and its capacity to transport oxygen to the working muscles.

The balance of evidence does indicate that iron deficiency is more common in endurance athletes than in the general population; however, it seems that only in a small minority of cases do iron-deficient endurance athletes exhibit symptoms of anemia. A 1996 study by Turkish researchers found no link between changes in iron status and performance in a group of female athletes. This may indicate that iron deficiency in endurance athletes does not always have the same meaning in athletes as it does in non-athletes, much as low hemoglobin often means different things in the two populations.

Iron deficiency and anemia appear to be more common among runners than other endurance athletes, among female runners than male runners, and among high school and college female runners than older female runners. A 2008 study by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that 89 percent of the members of a women’s college cross country team were anemic at one time or another during the season.

Experts have proposed various explanations for the higher rates of iron deficiency and anemia seen in these populations. They include iron loss through sweating, destruction of red blood cells on footstrike in running, and iron depletion associated with tissue inflammation. My personal belief, based on real-world experience rather than research, is that iron deficiency and anemia are most common among young female runners because of low intake of iron-rich foods associated with internal and external pressure to maintain a low body weight. In other words, I speculate that low iron levels are common among young female runners primarily because they take in less iron, not because their bodies lose or destroy more iron. I find it extremely improbable that exercise training would stimulate literally thousands of different physiological adaptations that serve to increase exercise capacity (not to mention general health) with one great exception: accelerated iron depletion resulting in anemia.

Confused? Well, so are the experts. But for all the confusion about the science of anemia, avoiding it is usually pretty easy. First, make sure you’re getting at least 10 mg of iron daily if you are a man or a postmenopausal woman, 15 mg daily if you are a premenopausal woman. Second, as an endurance athlete you should be sure to get your iron status checked at each annual physical exam, or anytime you experience persistent fatigue with no obvious cause. If it is found that you have low iron levels but you lack any symptoms of anemia, iron supplementation may not be necessary—follow your doctor’s recommendation. But if you have low iron and symptoms of anemia, doctor-supervised supplementation may leave you feeling—and performing—like your old self again.

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Check out Matt’s latest book, RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel.

Written by: Matt Fitzgerald

For almost the entire history of the field of exercise science, fatigue was believed to have been caused by “catastrophic” events in the muscles, such as muscle glycogen depletion and lactic acid buildup that caused them to simply stop working right. But a recent trickle-turned-flood of research has demonstrated with increasing certainty that fatigue is in fact caused by a voluntary reduction of brain activation of the muscles. In short, we bonk because we quit.

The most recent proof comes from a study led by Emma Ross, an exercise physiologist at England’s Brighton University who also happens to be a marathoner and Ironman finisher. In this new study, eight experienced runners ran a 20 km time trial on treadmills. Before and after the time trial, researchers measured the maximal voluntary contraction force of the runners’ quadriceps muscles and the maximal force of the same muscles produced through external electrical stimulation. The runners were also asked to pause at the 5 km, 10 km, and 15 km points of the time trial so that the same measurements could be taken.

Maximal voluntary muscle contractions (MVCs) are used to quantify fatigue. The idea is that, when a certain muscle such as the quads is fresh and rested, it will produce a certain amount of force when a subject is asked to contract the muscle as forcefully as possible, but after prolonged exercise, the subject will not be able to match that level of force production. The difference between the magnitude of force production before and after exercise serves as a pretty good measurment of fatigue.

What this measurement does not tell you is the source of the fatigue. The cause of a decrease in MVC could be fatigue within the muscle itself (resulting from something like lactic acid buildup) or it could be caused by the brain’s refusal to contract the muscle as forcefully as it did before exercise. That’s where the other measurement–electrically stimulated maximal muscle contraction force–comes in. The idea here is to bypass the brain by shocking the muscle and seeing how much force it can produce that way. If the MVC decreases after exercise, indicating some kind of fatigue, and the maximal contraction force of the muscle produced through electrical stimulation decrease to a similar degree, then you know that fatigue was caused by a breakdown within the muscles themselves. But if the MVC decreases after exercise and the maximal contraction force of the muscle produced through electrical stimulation decreases only a little or not at all, then you know that fatigue was enforced by the brain.

Guess what happened in this study? MVC held steady until the 15 km point of the time trial and then plummeted, indicating that fatigue began at this point (although the subjects held a steady pace throughout the entire 20 km). But the maximal electrically stimulated contraction force of the quadriceps muscles held steady throughout the full 20 km time trial and beyond. This shows that, although the runners rated themselves as exhausted at the end of the time trial, their muscles were perfectly capable of continuing much longer. Their muscles were not fatigued in the least. The reason they could not in fact continue was that their brains had decided enough was enough and reduced their own electrical stimulation of the working muscles.

The brain-centered nature of exercise fatigue is believed to be an evolutionarily developed protection mechanism that prevents us from exercising ourselves to death.

For More: Exercise & Science in Sports & Exercise

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