Talkin Outa My Ass

It’s true. Last week, I pushed my running mileage up about five miles for the week as a whole, along with my bicycle training. That should have worked out like this:

MON: Running – 1/4 mi. intervals (total 5 miles of running)
TUES: Bicycling – Strength of Hill Training intervals on indoor trainer
WEDS: Running – 30 min. Tempo Run
THUR: Bicycling – 40 min time trial training
FRI: Running – 6-10 miles, aerobic intensity
SAT: Bicycling – 70-140 min. aerobic intensity

This was my schedule for the previous two weeks, and I thought it was a pretty good one, although my running mileage had been a little lower on the previous two Mondays and Wednesdays.

So, what actually happened was that I felt some pain at the outside of my knee that wasn’t really all that bad on Wednesday, so I didn’t do my bicycling on Thursday, and took the day to recover instead. I iced the leg, and took some ibuprofen, and everything felt good as new. So, I decided to go ahead with my Friday run, which is done at a low intensity, so I didn’t think it would be very threatening to the leg. I was wrong.

About 3 miles into an 8.7 mile run on Friday, the pain was first felt, and gradually increased until it was quite noticable. Still, I could run, and it had happened on Wednesday, and I had gotten over it easily enough, so I kept running. After the run, I stretched a little bit, in place, then went to walk into the house, and felt such a stabbing pain in my left leg, at the outside of the knee, that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to walk. So, I hobbled into the house and got some ice on the leg, and alternated that with a little bit of moist heat, and the egg eventually loosened up. I was walking fairly pain free by Saturday, but I could ‘feel’ the leg, still. So, I didn’t do my bicycling on Saturday, and decided I would take several days off before trying some light jogging again.

It’s now Monday, and despite what I thought was steady improvement over the weekend, I ‘notice’ my leg a little more today than over the weekend. So, I went back to the ice, and am sticking with the ibuprofen, and have decided I won’t try to go any running until the leg is no longer tender when I apply pressure.

After some research, I believe it’s my iliotibial band that is the problem. The tendon extends from the ilium, in the hip, on the outside of the leg, along the length of the femur, to the lower tip of the femur, and helps keep your leg laterally stable. If running on canted surfaces (I do), in old shoes (I do), and if you pronate (my left foot does somewhat), this type of injury tends to occur, as the band become strained or irritated.

So, it’s true that the iliotibial band does not play Rock ‘n Roll, but as my brother in law said, the music it does play can give you the blues.

On Thanksgiving Day, I ran the Loveland Turkey Trot 5K race. The temperatures were in the mid-30’s, but it was sunny and calm. A nice day, as roughly 1300 people set off. It was a good day to run, and I managed to shave nearly a minute off the time on my first 5K race. It’s not necessarily fair to compare two races, because of variation in terrain and slight variations in course length, but I’m pretty sure I did better because my time of 24:19 was 52 seconds faster than the 25:11 time of my first 5K.

Finishing better is good motivation to keep training and trying to improve my time, I think. I’ve decided to try three days of running and three days on the bike each week for awhile to see what happens with my 5K times for now.

I ran my first organized 5K race last Saturday. I didn’t do too badly, either. I completed the race in 25:11 (an 8:07 min/mile pace). I came in 26th overall, out 184 entrants, but many entrants were actually walking he course, because the event was one of the more laid back types called a run/walk.

I gathered these were good types of events to start with, because placing well might help keep up the motivation to train. I actually think that’s useful. I’m glad to know I came in 4th in my age group in my first race. It sounds like I did well. That certainly encourages me to keep training. After all, if I enter another race like this one, that means I might have only 4 people to beat to be the best among my peers. Not bad.

I also chose to run the 5K race, even though there was a 10K run simultaneously. I had been training with runs about 10K in length for a week or two before the event, so I knew I could probably complete either. However, having never raced like this, I was afraid that the race day excitement might cause me to go out a little faster than I should, and I didn’t want to risk running out of fuel before the end of a 10K, when I was pretty confident I could complete the 5K even if I started out too fast.

I was encouraged by the result, and feel like I did pretty well considering the more hilly terrain of the course than my typical training routes, and having only really run about 59 miles in 3 months in training. Of course, I biked a lot more than that, and I’m sure my running benefits from that as well.

Let’s put this in perspective, though. The top finisher was a 14 year old male who ran the race in 20 minutes. For a 5K, that’s pretty slow. 5K races are usually won with times ranging from 15 -17 and some odd minutes – and usually by males in their late teens or 20’s.

With all this in mind, I’ve decided to try and focus on getting my 5K time below 20 minutes. This seems like a realistic goal to me, and I have a 2-pronged strategy. First, I will increase the number of miles I run each week at an aerobic pace. I’ll shoot for around 15 miles. Second, I’ll devote one running workout per week to interval training at a 6 minute mile pace (1:20 seconds for 1/4 mile, followed by 1/4 mile slow, then repeat a few times). I think if I can manage to hit that pace for about 8-9 intervals, I should be able to run a 5K in around 20 minutes or less. As an alternative to the 1/4 mile intervals, I might run a series of hill repeats.

I’ll also continue training on my bike, because an ultimate goal beyond simply doing well in foot races, is to complete at least a sprint length triathlon. But before I get that far, I’ll obviously need to start some swimming, and I have no idea how I will fit that in.

So called professionals in the health and nutrition industry espouse the idea that we are all have different needs with regard to diet and exercise and often sell their services as “custom” or “individualized” or something similar.  The idea is that they can learn enough from talking to your or through some rudimentary ‘gross’ assessments to identify the nuances of your physiology and cate a fitness or nutritional regime that is best suited to your individual needs.  Sounds great, so loads of people buy into this logic and spend lot so money–usually with results that are mixed, at best.  I happen to think the idea that we all require a unique and individualized approach to become fit and healthy is overplayed.

Sure, we are all different (in height, weight, what we eat, etc..), but seriously, our physiologies are basically all the same.  By emphasizing the differences, personal trainers and self-styled nutrition experts have simply found that they can make a buck by appeal to uniqueness and individuality in our society, which values these qualities above most other things and often to the point of absurdity.  They do us a terrible disservice, although I’m sure many of them have bought the hype themselves and think they are doing the right thing.

They’re approach, their very logic, often even provides an ready excuse for many people to give up on trying to be healthy.  If progress isn’t fast enough, there are a stream of reasons offered for it.  It’s your thyroid!  Oh, that’s an adrenal problem!  Oh, maybe your pituitary is acting up!  You’re depressed!  For each of these things, there is a proprietary herbal supplement that will supposedly help (which your expert happens to be an authorized dealer for).  I you try one and it doesn’t seem to work, they move on to the next.  I cannot tell you how many times people I know have told me they are have been taking this wonderful new supplement for depression or their thyroid problem, and how it is so great and effective, and yet it’s as if they don’t realize they still complain incessantly about the same symptoms they started with.  If you point this out, they are simply sure it’s “not as bad,”  or that “they weren’t taking enough,” or something like that.  People have a tremendous capacity for self-deception.

When the problem is weight or fitness related, you often hear people attribute this to their “low metabolism,” or attribute “high metabolism” to some thin, fit person.  Never mind that the this person hasn’t had a soda in 15 years, never eats fast food, eats only whole grain products and values a small tasty meal at a good restaurant over an all-you-can-eat buffet loaded with processed starches and saturated fats.  It’s got to be the metabolism, right?

Well, the good news is that they’re partly right, but not in the way they are thinking.  Here’s the big news flash…  There really isn’t such a thing as a high metabolism or low metabolism in normal people.  It takes the same amount of energy for people the same height and weight to do the same activity, whether that activity is just staying alive, or whether it’s digging a ditch by hand.  The exception might be some kind of metabolic or endocrine disorder that affects your baseline metabolism, causing your body (at idle) to burn more energy or perhaps causing you to be less active, or lethargic.  In either case, if you have these problems, it is typically obvious nearly from birth.

Still more crazy is that so many people seem to want so badly for their weight, fitness, and health problems to be caused by some “illness” that they too readily buy the snake oil.  It’s it very appealing when you are unhealthy and find physical activity to be uncomfortable and difficult, to imagine that it’s not because of the choices you make every day, but because you are doomed to this by some genetic condition.  It’s nice to imagine that it’s not your fault!  It’s not the three cream puffs you ate this morning, before you took a nap and watched TV for the rest of the day, after all.  Everyone else does that too, right?  And they’re not all overweight!  I’ve seen it again and again.

Even when people finally do decide that their problem is simply a lack of diet and exercise, they are more likely to simply try exercise without changing their diet, than the other way around.  That’s too bad, because I believe it’s far more effective to work the other way round.

For sedentary adults (depending on height), the human body needs 1800-2500 or so calories/day from a nutritious diet to maintain sound health and an ideal weight.  Let’s say you’ve used your kitchen scale to measure your fast food diet and determined that you’re eating 3300 calories/day.  Well, that’s maybe 1000 too many calories.  If you want to get healthy, you have two options at this point, and in my view, they are not exclusive…  Improve your diet and increase your activity level.

I promise you this:  You can make a real change in your lifestyle with just a little bit of work.  You’re willing to work on so many other things, so why not improving your health?  Once your health is improved, you’ll feel better while doing everything else you love to do.

Here’s what I think people should do (based on my experience, and training in metabolism and physiology as a biologist):

1. Get a kitchen scale, and measure food quantities as you eat them (don’t change quantities yet, just measure what you actually eat).  Do this for a week or two.  The only rule is that nothing goes into your mouth until you weigh it.  There are very good online resources you can use to estimate caloric contents of food that have no labels.  It’s important to do this over time, because we want to get an idea of our average intake.  How much are you eating, and what kinds of things are you eating.  Keep a journal of what you’re eating for a week, and be honest about it.  If you fry an egg for breakfast, include the egg and the tablespoon of oil you used to fry it.
2. After a week or two of tracking what you actually eat under normal conditions, use the kitchen scale to measure out smaller servings than you usually would, and shoot for eating about 1500-1800 calories a day of the foods you normally eat.  Keep track of your weight, and see if you’re not a lb. or two lighter after a week or two of this.
3. Now, start changing what you eat.  Transition to eating whole grains instead of processed grains (whole wheat instead of white bread – replace a portion of the white flour in baked good with whole wheat – switch to a whole wheat pancake recipe, etc…  It’s no that hard).  Begin to switch to foods that have a very high vitamin, mineral, and nutrient content, while also having fewer calories per unit of food weight.  An easy way to do this is to simply eat more vegetables and whole grains, actually – and lean meats, if you are a meat eater.  Keep measuring your food and keep your total daily intake to around 1500-1800 calories.  The more your replace foods in your diet with nutrient dense/calorie poor foods, the more you can reduce your caloric intake without having health effects, but most experts recommend you stay above 70% of your daily requirement.  If you want to get a better idea of your daily requirement, there are some online resources that will help you calculate it with a little information about your activity level, height, weight, and gender.

Notes:  If you do the first three steps diligently, you will (I promise you) begin to lose weight, gradually and in a healthy way.  For some people, it happens more quickly than others, and it may depend on age and sex and other factors.

1. Ok, now that you’ve lost a bit of weight, you are in a good position to start exercising a bit.   Fitness expert who are worth their salt will generally tell you that you lose weight through diet, and keep it off through exercise.  Of course, both things can help you lose weight, but their point is that improving your diet is a more effective way to lose weight than exercise if you had to choose one or the other.  At this stage, if you’ve kept up your nutrition, and kept down your caloric intake, you may well find that physical activity has already become easier for you.   Your muscles may still have the strength they needed to move around all the extra weight you were carrying a few weeks before, even after you have lost the weight.  You’ll lose that strength if you don’t start exercising – but what you need to do at this point is start doing some kind of aerobic endurance exercise combined with some light strength training.  Take it easy at first, so you don’t injure or strain a muscle or ligament.  Maybe start by walking or bicycling at an easy pace for a half hour maybe three times a week.  Increase the number of workouts and the length of time in your workouts, and if you had reduced your caloric intake more than about 200-300 calories below your baseline (sedentary) requirements to lose the initial weight, you may want to think about raising it a hundred calories or so per day when you start exercising regularly.
2. Increase your workout intensity and the time you spend working out.  Consider using a heart rate monitor and using a heart rate zone system to train.  This will require some learning on your part, but the knowledge you gain in the process will help you stay fit for the rest of your life.  If you let someone else be the expert, you will never even know the minimum you need to avoid making the simplest mistakes that keep people unfit.
3. Keep on keepin’ on.  Consider working out with other people, or joining exercise groups or clubs, or taking up certain physical activities as a hobby, so you can remain active and keep exercise more interesting.  If you like bicycling, maybe join a bicycling group or club.  If you prefer to work out alone, consider entering some 5K or 10K runs, or setting the goal of finishing a Sprint length triathlon (a shorter version of the sport).  Over time, you may find that these events are much easier, and if you’re ambitious, you can try longer events.  Competing with yourself to improve your time in these types of races can be very motivational.  Heck, competing just to reach the milestone of being able to complete one is motivational.  Just be careful not to push too hard and injure yourself.  Even simple injuries can result in major setbacks as you are training for events.  Of course, you may find that you don’t need to be training for an event to be motivated.  If you meditate (like I do), you may find ways to incorporate meditation into your exercise.  Maybe Yoga or Pilates, or Tai Chi, or any of a range of martial arts with forms that are practiced as an active meditation.  There is an infinite variety of options to choose from if you’re finding that running in circles three days a week isn’t enough to keep you interested in staying active.

If you are like most Americans, you may find that you are eating well over 3000 calories in a day regularly before you begin making any changes to your diet.  That’s actually not a problem in itself – that is, if you work out hard for a couple of hours a day, or your job involves vigorous physical exertion throughout the day.  If you’re sedentary at work and at home, your caloric intake is likely several hundred to a over a thousand calories more than your body need to simply maintain itself at your ideal weight.  Quite simply, this is almost always why people are overweight when they are overweight.  The diet and nutrition industry would have us believe that there is nearly always some anomaly at work due to some kind of substance we aren’t getting enough of, but this is most often a load of crap.  A load of crap that many in this industry actually believe, but crap nonetheless.

Also, here’s why exercise alone usually doesn’t work for people (and it’s very simple, really).  Let’s say you are taking in roughly 1000 calories more than you need for a sedentary lifestyle based on step one above.  A 200 lb. person would have to bike 30 miles per day at 15 miles/hr (that’s 2 hours) to burn the 1000 excess calories.  That’s EVERY DAY.   Alternately, the same person could run 7 miles, at 6 miles/hr (10 minute miles), for 1 hr. 10 min.  EVERY DAY.   Actually, this person would have to do twice as much exercise as this and maybe stick to just 3 days/week with rest days between, because doing this kind of work every day would probably result in fatigue and injury.  Starting to see the problem with trying to lose weight by just starting to exercise for most people?

On the other hand, it’s relatively easy (and won’t injure you, I promise), to simply stop taking in 1000 extra calories, and to teach yourself enough about foods and nutrition to make sure you do so while also improving the nutritiousness of your diet.  In fact, it’s relatively easy to drop your caloric intake a little below what you need to maintain your current weight – say drop it down to what you need to maintain your ideal weight, or even a little less (but not too much) with better nutrition, so you can begin to lose weight.  Then, as I suggest, when you’re ready for it, you can gradually work exercise into your routine, so while you continue to lose weight, you can further improve your strength and endurance and begin to sculpt your body.  Indeed, you if you start with your diet, the need to work out with the intensity of a super-athlete to get a good-looking body goes away.  You can get buy with a more modest fitness routine that better fits your schedule.