Beets!

A new twist on an old rhyme from our childhood:

Beets, Beets; The magical fruit;

The more you eat, the faster you scoot.

The faster you scoot, the better you feel,

So eat your beats at every meal!

I don’t really like beets. I think they taste like dirt. But I am willing to eat them before a run for the performance benefits. There is real science involved here, and my personal experience is that it works! Maybe it’s just a case of “thinking I can,” but I’ll take every little bit of help I can get. Read below for a summary of the science, with footnotes and everything. Follow the footnoted links if you’re really into scientific and mathematical explanations of running physiology.

Beets are a great source of inorganic nitrate. Some of the nitrate ends up in your saliva, when friendly bacteria convert it to nitrite. Elsewhere in the body, the nitrite is converted to nitric oxide, which does... well... a whole bunch of things related to blood flow, muscle contraction, neurotransmission, and so on.¹

Eleven recreationally fit men and women were studied in a trial performed in 2010. The purpose of this study was to determine whether whole beetroot consumption improves endurance exercise performance. Participants underwent two 5k treadmill time trials in random sequence, once after consuming 200g of baked beetroot and once after consuming a cranberry relish placebo. Velocity during the 5k run tended to be faster after beetroot consumption. During the last 1.1 miles of the 5k run, velocity was 5% faster in the beetroot trial. No differences in exercise heart rate were observed between trials; however, at 1.8k into the 5k run, rating of perceived exertion was lower with beetroot.²

In another study, 10 healthy men ingested 3 different amounts of beetroot juice and were challenged with both moderate-intensity and severe-intensity cycle exercise tests. The higher amounts of beetroot juice (up to 10 oz) were found to reduce the steady-state oxygen uptake during moderate-intensity exercise by up to 3%, (i.e. it was easier to bike faster) whereas time-to-task failure was extended by up to 14%.³

Thus, consumption of whole beets can improve running performance in healthy adults. The maximum effect is felt 2 to 3 hours after ingestion, with everything back to normal after 12 hours.

Bonus: beets were also found to lower blood pressure by up to “10-over-4”.

Eat a couple of beets two hours before your next race or training run, and see for yourself!

Footnotes:

1.       http://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/beet-juice-how-much-and-when

2.       http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212267211019484

3.       https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23640589

4.       http://www.precisionnutrition.com/beets-and-beetroots

Until next time,

The Plant-Based Plodder

Random Thought #1: No Speedwork = Weight Gain

I decided today to add a new feature: when a random thought hits me, I'm going to write it down.

The first Random Thought occurred to me today as I had my daily weigh-in. I've been weighing myself each morning since I started marathon training back in December 2016 for a race in April 2017. As my training progressed, my weight took a wiggly path downwards to a place where I had lost 12 pounds (156 -> 144). Since the race, I've noticed that my weight has been slowly inching upward.

Now, I'M NOT A DOCTOR, but today I had the Random Thought that maybe my slow weight gain is due to the lack of speed work. Even though I'm still running about 30 miles per week, I have not been doing any speedwork - intervals or tempo runs - since the race. I've been just enjoying running for a while, with no training plan other than how far to run on a given day. I think the lack of intensity in my current training is driving my slow weight gain.

I'm going to do some experimenting. I'll let you know what happens.

Running With the Bull

Running With the Bull

At the beginning of June I had the opportunity to spend a weekend in Vegan Eden, that is, Farm Sanctuary. Nestled in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York, the rolling green pastures of Farm Sanctuary’s 175-acre New York shelter are home to more than 500 rescued farm animals. Farm Sanctuary rescues, rehabilitates, and provides lifelong care for hundreds of animals who have been saved from stockyards, factory farms, and slaughterhouses. Rescued residents are given the care and love they need to recover from abuse and neglect. All of the animals enjoy nourishing food, clean barns, and green pastures each and every day. When you visit Farm Sanctuary, you’ll see frolicking calves who once knew only pain and suffering in veal crates. You’ll see pigs slumbering in soft straw rather than filthy, crowded stockyard pens. You’ll see animals experiencing joy and freedom for the first time in their lives.

What amazes me about this experience (my second time here) is that farm animals exhibit many of the same emotions that we humans expect only from cats and dogs.  I sat in the barn surrounded by sheep, and they came to me wanting to be petted. While I was paying attention to one, another forced her head under my elbow in a demonstrated need of affection. Later on, another one climbed into my lap.

Why am I talking about this experience in a running blog, you might ask? First of all, it’s a vegan running blog (check the name again). Second, the most amazing experience came during an evening visit to the cow pasture. Bear with me here, it’s worth it, I swear. When I and my group of five other humans showed up at the pasture fence, a lively young bull named Valentino saw us and came running over to the fence from about 100 yards away. Valentino was rescued in 2015. He was only about a day old, one of many newborn calves brought to New Holland Auction in Pennsylvania that day. Since he was a male born into the dairy industry, he was destined to be sold for veal. But, small and hobbled by leg deformities, he was considered “defective” and thus unmarketable and would likely have been left to a slow death. He ended up in Cornell University Hospital for Animals, where he arrived with vagus indigestion syndrome and pneumonia in addition to his leg deformities.

So, here’s a two-year-old-bull, born hobbled by deformities, running over to us at the fence. But wait, it gets better. After we said hello to Valentino, we continued our walk around the pasture. Another of my group is a runner, and to encourage him to come with us, she did an exaggerated slow-motion run. Much to our surprise, Valentino leaped a few times like a stereotypical bucking bronco and then RAN WITH HER along the fence! Was this a fluke? When we were ending our visit, I decided to try again. This time I did the exaggerated slow-motion run, and to our delight, Valentino repeated his response. He and I ran together for about twenty yards or so until we came upon a matronly cow who looked at both of us unapprovingly and then literally butted heads with Valentino. Valentino did win the race, but it wasn’t really fair - he has twice as many legs as I do.

Thus, a bond was formed on Saturday June 3 2017. Valentino is the fourth different Family of mammals with which I have run (that I know of), those being: human, canine, capreoline (it’s a deer, look it up!), and now bovine. With many more to come, I hope.

Until next time,

The Plant-Based Plodder

A Simple Progression Run

Another Bonus Post to end the week that contains National Global Running Day. Don’t get used to it. This is also my first training-specific post, so enjoy it.

What’s a Progression Run? That is a run where, instead of running at a steady pace the entire time, you progressively increase your speed at certain intervals during the run so you end up running faster at the end than when you started. Why do a Progression Run? Without going into physiological details, it will help your mind and body learn to run faster more comfortably.

Getting Started

You need some way of measuring your pace in real-time. Personally, I use a gps watch which I have set to mark a lap at each half mile. You could do this without a gps watch by running a known distance such as a track or neighborhood loop. In this case you need to run by the feel of the effort instead of by pace. But that’s ok.

The Plan

This is a really simple plan. Start running at a nice, slow, comfortable pace. The first lap could count as your warmup. When you finish your first lap, run a little faster for the next lap. It doesn’t really matter how much faster; even a 1-second-faster pace is “faster”. I like to make it at least 5-10 seconds faster to leave some wiggle room in case I lose concentration and accidentally slow down. When you finish the second lap, run a little faster than that for the next lap. Repeat. Repeat again. Run each lap a little faster than the previous lap. Leave room at the end for a final slow comfortable lap and then some cool-down walking. It’s important for a couple of reasons: 1) you need to cool down after a hard run – don’t just stop running! 2) Note how much faster your “slow comfortable” pace is at the end than it was at the beginning!

The reason I decided to post about Progression Runs today is because I did a Progression Run yesterday.

I used half-mile laps. I was running on flat local roads and sidewalks. Here are my lap paces, as an example:

9:16, 8:51, 8:45, 8:36, 8:30, 8:19, 8:10, 7:59, 7:25, 8:26 (then a half-lap walking at 15:53).

I haven’t done a Progression Run in a while, so my initial slow lap was a recalibration of sorts.  I started about 20 seconds slower than my marathon pace and my fastest lap was 5 seconds slower than my 5k pace.  For each successive lap, my pace increased by 25, 6, 9, 6, 11, 9, 11, and 34 seconds. Note how my ending slow comfortable pace was 50 seconds faster than my initial slow comfortable pace! Yet it really did feel just as slow and comfortable as my starting pace. That’s an example of one difference that being warmed up can make!

One final note of significance is my final mile averaging 7:42. This is significant because about ten years ago, my son wanted me to help him run a mile at a pace under 8:00 in order to earn a physical fitness award at school. He only had a few weeks to train. I was running regularly then, he was not. We did it (seven-fifty-something), but it was a very hard effort back then for me to run a mile at that speed. Now, I’m ten years OLDER, and I just ran the final mile of 4.5 at a pace faster than that. And it wasn’t a killer!

The moral of this story is that training works, even for geezers!

Now, get out there and try a Progression Run! Let me know how you did.

Until next time,
The Plant-Based Plodder

Global Running Day

Global Running Day

National Running Day

Normally I don’t post twice a week (“Normally? What is “normal”? Before this, I’ve posted exactly three times in the two-week history of this blog!) But today is a very special day. So you get an extra post this week. Happy Global Running Day!

Today, Wednesday June 7, 2017 is Global Running Day. Global Running Day is a day that celebrates the sport of running. It is held annually on the first Wednesday of June.[1] Participants of all ages and abilities pledge to take part in some type of running activity by submitting their names through the Global Running Day website, https://globalrunningday.org/.

This year is in fact the 2nd Annual Global Running Day. Before 2016, Global Running Day was known as National Running Day. Taking the name change into account, 2017 is the 9th annual National/Global Running Day.

Here are some fun running facts to celebrate Global Running Day:

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor! The following paragraphs simply describe my own personal experience with asthma. You can attempt to adopt such habits if you wish, but you do so at your own risk.

FACT #1
How many people enjoy warning you, “All that running is going to ruin your knees?” Or, maybe you have some of those sarcastic, self-righteous friends that tell you, “I want to run, but I actually like my knees.” Well, here’s a fun fact for you to tell them the next time you hear that annoying knee cliché: Running is actually GOOD for your knees!  In a report published about a year ago, an eight-year study of 2,637 participants in the Osteoarthritis Initiative resulted in the opposite of what researchers expected, forcing them to conclude: “A history of leisure running is not associated with increased odds of prevalent knee pain, ROA (Radiographic evidence Of Arthritis), or SOA (Symptoms of Arthritis). In fact, for knee pain, there was a dose-dependent inverse association with runners.” This means that the people who ran more had less knee pain. Additionally, the participants who were still running had less knee pain than those who had quit running, who in turn had less pain than those who had never run. So I keep running to keep my knees healthy. (reference: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acr.22939/abstract)

FACT #2
I was “that kid” in elementary school who had a note from the doctor saying I couldn’t run and play at recess because I had asthma. Sadly, the treatments they had for asthma “back in the day” were not very effective at long-term control. Science has progressed a great deal. But sometime in the last 20 years when my allergist told me that my asthma was destined to become COPD as I got older, something clicked inside me. I said to myself, “Oh, no it won’t!” That reminds me of this billboard:

To make a long story short, that same allergist now tells me that my Peak Flow Test indicates that I have the lungs of a person 10-15 years younger than I actually am. (Or five inches taller than I actually am; Peak Flow norms are based on averages for your height and age. I'll take "younger").  So, I keep running in part to keep my lungs healthy.

FACT #3
Last story… Many years ago I went to the doctor to discuss my bloodwork. My cholesterol was close to 300, and the doctor reached for his prescription pad. I said “Wait! I want to try reducing it with diet and exercise.) At that point, my now ex-doctor literally rolled his eyes at me and told me that I had three months, but insisted it was not going to work. I was to come back in three months for a retest. Well, I went to visit My Friend the Internet and started doing some research. Then I started doing everything that was supposed to be good for lowering cholesterol, and I stopped doing everything that was supposed to be bad for cholesterol. Three months later, my number had dropped to 226. The doctor asked me “What the hell did you do?” I said “I’m not tellin’ ya” and I left, never to see him again. After a number of years as a vegan, that number is now right around the magic 200 mark. So, I keep running in part to keep my blood healthy.

BONUS FACT:
I find that stuff starts hurting when I am too sedentary. Running makes stuff stop hurting.

So, now it's time to get away from your computer and go out and run for Global Running Day. But first, visit https://globalrunningday.org/ and pledge your miles. THEN go run! Then come back here and comment how many miles you ran. If you’d like to tell us why YOU run, you can do that too.

Until next time,

The Plant-Based Plodder

Switching to Vegan

Switching to Vegan

I love running. When I’m not running, I love to talk about running. One problem is finding people who want to listen to me talk about running. You would think that I would be able to talk about running with my fellow runners, but they also want to talk about running, not listen. There’s a saying: “How can you tell if someone has run a marathon?” The answer? “Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.” Interestingly, the same can be said of vegans: “How can you tell if someone is vegan?” “Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.” Coincidence? I think not.

I am passionate about two things that people tend to get very passionate about. I was a runner first. A long story for another day is that I ran my first half marathon because of a broken leg (like I said, it’s a long story.) I trained hard, and for five years, continued to bring my time down. But that elusive 2:00:00 half-marathon barrier refused to be broken. I did make it to 2:00:45. Yes, that’s missing my goal by 45 seconds. But to me, that is still… missing.  I wondered what else I could do. I couldn’t possibly train any harder. That’s when I read an article in Runner’s World magazine about Scott Jurek. That article made reference to Scott’s memoir, Eat & Run, published in 2012. (SEE http://www.scottjurek.com/).

Scott is a vegan ultramarathoner. That means that 26.2188 miles is not far enough for him to run at one time, he feels driven to exceed that distance. And he is very good at it. He, too, was searching for more performance when he switched to a vegan lifestyle. A passionate advocate for vegetarianism, he follows a 100% plant-based diet, which he credits for his endurance, recovery and consistent twenty year racing career. In Eat & Run, Scott opens up about his life and career — as an elite athlete and a vegan — and inspires runners at every level.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a nutritionist! The following paragraphs simply describe my own personal experience with plant-based eating. You can attempt to adopt such a diet if you wish, but you do so at your own risk.

For me, I noticed a few changes. Maybe it’s a placebo effect, but if it works, I’ll take it. The first thing I noticed is that about ten pounds just fell off of me. I hadn’t changed any exercise habits yet, so I attribute this to cutting out the meat.

I also noticed that I could run sooner after eating; as a carnivore I had to wait at least two hours, now I could – pun intended – Eat and Run! (Seriously, I just now thought of that pun!) I also noticed that after a run, fewer body parts were hurting. It seems as though I now recover more quickly and am able to run longer distances more often. On the medical side, after a few years I eventually noticed that my hereditarily-high total cholesterol number finally came down to that magical limit of “200”.

After five years of trying, I did smash my half-marathon PR multiple times. The most recent smashing was a few weeks ago I set my latest HM PR of 1:47:24 at the Delaware marathon Running Festival. That came only three weeks after nabbing a new marathon PR of 3:57:15. I’m still looking for that elusive BQ, though. 3:40 seems so far away. Plan B is to hang in there until I turn 60 and my BQ time increases to 3:55.

Thanks for letting me talk about running.

Until next time,

The Plant-Based Plodder