Time out

I’m forced to take some time out from training – which in retrospect could be a good thing...

Injury is often our body’s way of telling us that we are doing too much and haven’t been listening for the signs that our body is screaming at us. I have been constantly trying to fit everything in and neglecting some areas which were important to my “self” and overall well being.  Finally this has all culminated in a lower back injury which has opened me up to all the stress, anger, fear, resentment and other emotions that I had allowed to bottle up and manifest over the last year. Nothing feels more primal than pain and fear...

Pain was the release and hopefully the start of my healing process and as my wife stated yesterday the break will give me a chance to rebuild myself along the pathways that I preach to others who are looking at starting their own personal health/fitness journeys. Damn my wife really knows what to say sometimes (actually more often than not she is my voice of reason and generally brings to light what I know is the right and true path).

Anyway, as this experiment was about tracking nutritional ketosis and athletic performance with the change in circumstances and a necessary break from training I’ll rethink how I’m planning on collecting data to track how changes in blood ketones and/or blood sugar effects me in different ways.

So looking at new ways to aid in my learning about my nutritional ketosis experiment I’ll need to collect other data.

Quantified Self

According to the Quantified Self 101 the following lessons are important in the self-experimentation process:

1. doing something is better than doing nothing, the best way to learn is to do
2. to start something keep it simple and manageable to provide an insight
3. don’t be afraid of failure. Mistakes often result in great discoveries and knowledge.
4. use the social network to engage and seek help from others

Guiding Principles of QS

The three guiding principles that need to be addressed:

1. What did you do?
2. How did you do it?
3. What did you learn?

It is recommended that the simplest way to get started is to focus on the last principle and think about "What you hope to learn from this?".

As my initial question was "How does nutritional ketosis affect my athletic performance?", I will now simply ask the question "How does nutritional ketosis affect me?". Quite a broad question I know but for now I'll keep it at that and track what I can simply - weight, resting heart rate, mood, sleep, energy, food intake, blood ketones, etc.

More to come...

Day 2: Early start

After discovering that my wife's bike had been stolen from the bus stop where I had chained it up for my ride home last night meant that today was going to be an early start. 4:30am EARLY!

After some bad news yesterday which impacted on the family resulted in a sleepless night. Getting back to sleep after getting up at 2:00am for my two year old was no problem. Waking two and half hours later was. But I needed to get to work early and with my bike still at work that meant I needed to run the 12km to the nearest bus stop. Usually easier said than done but after riding and running yesterday and with glycogen-depleted muscles yet to adapt to the changes in nutrition I have recently made I was dragging my feet.

Day 2:
Ketone reading - 0.4 (+0.2)
Weight = 79.6kg (-0.4)

Exercise:
0515: Run 12km (Garmin died so no time recorded but around 55mins)
Run to bus stop. Nothing pretty but motored along in low gear. Thinking that I was sweating more than normal (perhaps diet related?)

1900: Run 10km
Ran home trying to take it easy in the dark. Tripped in a pot hole which is easy to do after all the rain we have had and the damage to the roads. Hip took most of the impact.

Diet:
On waking: black coffee
Breakfast: Cheddar cheese and danish salami (~100g of each), 3 brazil nuts
Mid-morning: black coffee with cream, macadamia nuts
Lunch: half chicken, babel cheese (2)
Afternoon: black coffee, cream, cup of stock (sodium)
Dinner: steak, salad with blue cheese, handful of almonds
Late: raspberries with full cream, 1Tbs coconut oil

Keto Day 1: Motivation and Purpose

Finding motivation and a sense of purpose is often difficult when faced with so many choices.

What I have found is that one of the key ways to help resolve my motivation and sense of purpose is to share my story and help people on theirs.

Wherever I go people are always interested in what, why and how I do things either with exercise or with diet. I find that I really enjoy giving out information and telling my story that it helps to give me the focus I need to remain on my own path.

One problem I find though is that sometimes I get so focused on helping and supporting other people that I fail to dedicate enough time for myself.

I’m lucky to have found a few people who are dedicated (perhaps obsessive is a better description) who I can bounce a few ideas off and are willing to experiment with their diet and training to challenge their beliefs and function outside of the box.

Case in point. I lent out my low carb endurance book to a work colleague who is a cyclist and within three days he had read the book, bought himself a ketone monitor and arrived at work with a bunch of questions about blood ketone readings, training and what sorts of foods he should be eating to get himself into nutritional ketosis. Talk about dedication! He even showed me his tracking spreadsheets complete with graphs.

Being surrounded by these sorts of people whether in close physical proximity or around the world connected by various social media and email really helps to keep me dedicated and living my life’s purpose.

Day one – nutritional ketosis

Ketone reading – 0.2 (I reckon I was almost bleeding sugar)

Weight – 80.0kg

Diet

Pre-ride: black coffee + 1Tbs coconut oil

Post-ride: 3 eggs (- 1 white removed) + 120g cheese + 3 brazil nuts

Snack: ¼ cup cream + long black

Lunch: Caesar salad (no croutons), Greek salad, salami

Afternoon snack: macadamia nuts, cream, black coffee

Run

Dinner: Spicy Country Chicken with steamed veggies (broccoli, cauliflower), walnuts

Exercise

0600: Ride 42km in 1:28 - felt strong

1800: Run 12km in 0:52 - ran from bus to home. Felt good which I was surprised at considering I'd consumed about 30gm of carbs today.

Keto-adaptation (the evolution of self experimentation)

This is what I'm currently reading and after listening to podcast interviews with Jeff Volek, Stephen Phinney, Peter Attia and Tim Noakes I've decided to experiment with a nutritional ketogenic diet and endurance training.

I've had many discussions with endurance athletes from all nutritional disciplines and it's always ended with "show me an athlete that has success following a low carb approach". I searched around the internet and studied some of the published research and didn't come across much.

Often the diet is associated with training and racing at low intensity levels (60-70% VO2 max) but I'm interested to see if I can apply this nutritional approach to an athlete that is interested in finishing near the top of ultra-distance races.

When I embarked on my 30 day Primal Challenge back in 2008 I questioned whether an athlete could perform while ingesting lower levels of carbohydrates than the typically recommended endurance diet and my results concluded that I could not only run well but I could run at an intensity which gave me my first sub 3 hour marathon and a smashing run over a 90km trail where I set the fastest known time.

Email exchanges and blog posts from Mark's Daily Apple even suggested that we could adapt to a high fat/low carbohydrate diet to achieve additional athletic performance gains. Being a person that likes to do things a little differently to the conventional I've always been interested to see if this was possible. I've decided NOW is the time.

What I hope to get out of this experiment is to see if there are any benefits to athletic performance in being in nutritional ketosis - reduced lactate production, increased recovery, reduced inflammation, increased fat utilisation, etc.

My plan is to journal my progress for at least 30 days starting tomorrow.

I've got myself one of these so I'll be able to track my blood ketone levels.

Just logging

I have been planning on writing up a blog post for months which would provide an update on what's been happening but I'll save that for another day. To force myself to get started I thought I would start with just logging my daily exercise until i've rediscovered the blogging habit.

My running has been up and down since I finished my first and perhaps only Ironman. Since the Ironman I have also changed jobs and moved interstate. The new job takes in almost twice the work hours that I was previously putting in which eats up nearly all available training hours and my fitness has taken a dive.

I've run a few races in my new state which have provided some friendly competition amongst my work colleagues and as a team we even managed to win the male category in the four race corporate running series. My last race was the big state 10km road race and with a strained hamstring sustained two weeks prior I considered not doing it. The free corporate entry and elite start made me decide to just do it for the experience. Finishing in 39 minutes while not what I would have hoped for several months prior I was happy to finish so that I could start work on fixing up my hamstring issues.

Training:

Friday (pm): easy 7.2km in 30:54

Coconut Oil Experiment - Day 2

Started experimenting with adding Coconut Oil to my daily menu. Currently at three tablespoons a day. Wondering how much is too much?

Today for breakfast ate 1 banana, 2 raw eggs + 1T coconut oil which kept me feeling good until late morning. Tonight's salad was topped with another 2T of coconut oil and steak. Tasted good after 2 and 1/2 hours of riding and running.

Feeling leaner already!

2011 Challenge: Becoming Superhuman

Training 200km per week trying to push my fitness to the highest level in order to run an ultramarathon seems like a necessary evil but when injury two weeks from the main event results in a DNS (Did Not Start) it leaves me to wonder what my fitness and life goals are going in to the new year and beyond.



Week after week of high volume run training takes time and a high level of commitment that often leaves a shortfall where other areas of my life are put on hold or attacked with only enough enthusiasm and desire to get them done. The weeks leading up to the big day also become more and more stressful as you doubt everything you have been doing and what needs to be done including training, nutrition, race planning nutrition, sorting out crew teams, accommodation, travel, and the list goes on and on.

Past experience has shown me that injury often results in a change for the greater good which is what I’m hoping for now.

So, leading on to where I am now. Time away from running, allowing my body to heal gave me time to reflect upon what I want to achieve with my fitness, nutrition and body composition. I’ve become very one-dimensional and have made sacrifices in areas of physical performance mainly centred around but not limited to strength, flexibility, mobility and desired body composition. Not only is my fitness/physical training in need of a major revamp but also I need to rethink my nutritional philosophy and become a little more rounded.

Since the inception of this blog I’ve gone full circle from primal (meat based) eating where I started with the successful 30 day primal challenge via a year or two as a raw food vegan and now back to… well I’m not entirely sure yet but over the weeks I’m taking some of the slow carb suggestions in Tim Ferriss' book The Four Hour Body and will mix it up with things I have learnt from the Primal Blueprint, Robb Wolf’s Paleo Solution podcast, Paleo Diet for Athletes and other sources.

I reflected back over my diet and training over the last few years and discovered some truth’s. A raw vegan diet provides me with high energy and lower bodyweight but in comparison the paleo diet not only produced the same body weight but I was also noticeably leaner, more muscular and better body composition. I had veins on my stomach, ran a sub 3 hour marathon (a 26 minute PB at the time) and enough endurance to run a course record over 90km without the excessive volume of training that I have been putting in to run ultra events in 2009-2010. I did podium at The North Face 100 in 2009 though as a raw vegan but the year since have also been marked with a number of DNS and DNF’s as I’ve failed to live up to the expectations I had set upon myself after discovering some talent for running the longer distances.

I’ve also had more illnesses over the last few years since going meatless – repetitive sinusitis, flu and even chicken pox to name a few.

I feel like I’ve had my head in the sand trying to convince myself that I could achieve everything I wanted as a plant-food purist but thankfully I’ve awakened from my meatless slumber.

The title heading of this post “Becoming Superhuman” will be my 2011 goal inspired from the book The Four Hour Body. The book is meant to be read as a kind of choose your own adventure where you choose your desired goal – i.e. get faster, leaner, stronger etc and then you choose what chapters to read to take you along that path.

As diet always fascinates me I started with the getting leaner section, before jumping into the ultra endurance chapters and then sunk myself into the Effortless Superhuman chapter. Strangely a lot of what I read in the book came as no surprise but seeing it all laid out together and his style of self-experimentation has excited me to conduct with my own self-experiments to see what the outcomes provide.



First up – Becoming Superhuman

OK some quick tips and modifications I have taken from the book and will modify a little


Slow Carb eating. I’ll follow most of the recommendations from 4HB but I’ll make allowances at times to facilitate my endurance training to include some non-approved foods including fruit. At other times I’ll focus my meals to resemble a more traditional paleo meal approach by excluding legumes and centring the meal around meat and veggies. I also like his thoughts about protein cycling and intermittent fasting which I’m going to try and fit into my weekly schedule.


Binge Day. I’ve never really gone for an assigned binge day (except for a brief stint nearly 20 years ago when I was playing with a Bodyopus inspired Cyclic Ketogenic Diet) but I think it will work well for me as I like to have some non-paleo foods from time to time and this will make it easier to have those food items without ruining things too much. I remember listening to a Ben Greenfield podcast where he recommended a day of higher carbs to replace the muscle glycogen depleted during the week of training. OK either way it sounds good to me!


Ultra Endurance. Tim works with Brian MacKenzie of Crossfit Endurance who advocates limited endurance training to his athletes in order to run 100 mile races. His focus is on strengthening the body and training it to be more fat-fuel efficient and most of his run training recommendations include fast 400 to 800m repeats with a couple of longer runs up to the Half Marathon distance. Here I think he makes some good points but for someone who runs towards the front of the pack I think it is lacking in run volume. While he may get you across the distance with his training methods I believe these is no substitute for ultra specific long runs and course specific sessions including long hills to build other areas of your physiology and more importantly your mental fortitude.


Effortless Superhuman. Getting stronger, lean and faster is definitely something I want and this chapter really stands out in terms of getting the greatest gain with the application of the Minimum Effective Dose (MED) prescription. This chapter along with my wife’s favourite chapter getting Michelle Obama's arms have resulted in the garage being set up as a makeshift gym, the barbells and weights being dusted off and the purchase of my first kettlebell. After completing my third session for the week this morning I think I’m starting to feel Superhuman. Oh and I've already dropped 2kg...


The Four Hour Body is my new go to book and one I would recommend reading for anyone that likes to think outside the box.