If you have done proper training for a race (and of course you have!) there are three main things that will keep you from getting to the finish line:
1) Insufficient fueling and hydration (presumably the cause of muscle fatigue and muscle cramps)
2) Blisters and foot problems
3) GI issues

While injuries are not uncommon in runners, disabling acute injuries that occur during the race mostly tend to be limited to sprinters (we’ve all seen a sprinter start limping mid-race with a pulled hamstring). Acute injuries in endurance races are fairly uncommon and include things such as falls or sprained ankles – and even then these are often not severe enough to prevent you from finishing the race. Chronic injuries can and do flare up during races. So if you have been plagued by injury during your training, this is another thing that may get in the way of you having a good race. If your training has been injury free, your race is likely to be as well.

Here are a few tips to avoid the other three big potholes.

1) Proper fueling and hydration: Your muscles need energy and water to work efficiently. In the two days preceeding the race be sure eat well, with lots of complex carbohydrates in your meals (often referred to as “carbo loading” as you need to load your muscles up with carbohydrates during this period.) At the same time, be sure to drink a lot of water. You know you are well hydrated when your urine is almost clear and you have to pee frequently. Be sure to eat before your race as well (usually 2-3 hours before is a good time frame, more on that in the GI section). Keep drinking fluids up till about 30 minutes before your race. For short races like a 5K, fueling and hydration during the race are not as critical, but the longer the race becomes the more important it is to eat and drink while you are racing. A good rule of thumb is to drink about a liter of fluid each hour. If your race is longer than three hours, such as a marathon, it is a good idea to eat at least 100 calories an hour as well.

2) Avoiding blisters and other foot pains: Make sure you have a pair of shoes that fit well. Be sure your race day shoes are well worn-in. Do NOT think that new shoes will be springy and help you run faster! Ideally, you would have run in your shoes for about a month before wearing them to a race, but at the minimum aim for two weeks. On the same note, don’t test out new socks on race day. Make sure all of your toenails are cut short and don’t have any sharp corners. Make sure your socks are dry at the start of the race (if it is a rainy day, you may need to change your socks right before the race starts). Remember that your feet will expand when you run, so you don’t want to tie your shoes too tight. However, you don’t want your shoes too be so loose that your foot slides around – this creates extra friction and increases the chance of getting blisters. If you know you have problems with blisters, take preventative measures: moisture wicking socks, blister prevention powders and creams (like Body Glide), mole skin, etc.

3) Preventing GI problems: GI problems can pretty much be divided into two categories: upper GI problems and lower GI problems. To boil it down further upper GI problems are mainly stomach cramps and vomiting, lower GI problems come down to lower abdominal cramps and diarrhea. It doesn’t sound like fun, does it? But a few simple precautions should keep you from having these problems.

First eat your last pre-race meal 2-3 hours before the start of the race to give you time to digest your food. Unless you know you have an iron stomach it is a good idea to only eat easilty digestible foods (think BRAT diet: Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, Toast). Meat, eggs and milk are harder to digest and can leave you gassy – so best to avoid these before a race! Being well hydrated helps prevent cramps. Don’t drink anything with a high sugar concentration unless you dilute it with water (like fruit juices and soda). Don’t experiment with new foods and gels on race day. Don’t over consume during a race. studies have shown most people can only absorb 240-280 calories per hour while running. So don’t think chowing a Big Mac at mile 13 of a marathon will give you lots of extra energy. It will only weigh you down!

When it comes to lower GI issues, it is best to be “running on empty.” Pre-race jitters usually do a pretty good job of taking care of this! Even so, make sure you hit the port-a-potty one last time 10-15 minutes before your race. Everybody else is trying to do the same thing at that point, so you may need to get in line 20-25 minutes ahead of time. Many performance gels and beverages contain caffeine. Caffeine can boost performance, but it also stimulates the GI tract. Be sure to test your tolerance to caffeine in a training run if you are thinking of using caffeine during your race.

But most importantly: HAVE FUN! The race is a time to celebrate running with lots of other running enthusiasts. Enjoy the day and be proud of what you have accomplished!

See you at the finish line!

On Monday, as I talked about correcting my course, Greenman had an interesting comment:

When a plan goes wrong in the Army, the brass debriefs the participants, calls in some outside experts (that’s me), and produces a “Lessons Learned” report, which informs the next plan. What does your “Lessons Learned” report say, JD?

I’ve thought a lot about this over the past couple days. (And, to an extent, over the past couple months.) Here are five things I’ve learned from my adventures in fitness this year:

Set realistic goals
It’s okay to have big goals, but it’s important to also maintain realistic expectations.

When I decided to get out of debt, I told myself I wanted to pay off $35,000 in five years. That was a big goal, but I believed I could do it. Turns out I beat my goal by almost two years. But if I’d decided I wanted to pay all my debt off in just twelve months, I would have been setting myself up for failure. I wouldn’t have come close to achieving my goal.

Similarly, it’s fine for me to want to run a marathon, and to lose 50 pounds, and to bike across Oregon, but it’s unrealistic to believe I can go from couch potato to doing all of these things in just nine months.

Establish priorities
It’s important to prioritize. By knowing which goals mean the most, and which goals lead naturally to other goals, you can decide what to accomplish first. In my case, I was trying to do too much at once. My attention was scattered. And, as many readers have noted, I was putting the proverbial cart before the proverbial horse.

Now I realize there’s a natural progression to what I want to accomplish.

First, I need to develop good eating habits and build a base of fitness from which I can pursue my other goals. For the next twelve weeks, I intend to follow the Body for Life program to completion. (I cut it short last spring when my attention shifted to other goals.) This should help me learn the behaviors I need to continue improving my health and fitness. It should, in theory, also help me lose weight, another goal along the way.

Having achieved a basic level of strength and fitness, I can spend a few months preparing to run, and then once again tackle marathon training next April, but much better prepared than I was in 2008.

Remember the basics
In his comment on Monday, Greenman suggested I have a sort of emergency backup plan for when things go wrong. “There were no tools in your toolbox for dealing with major interruptions,” he wrote. “There still aren’t. Your plan strikes me as being somewhat inflexible.” He has an excellent point (and one he’s been trying to make for months). The only plan I have now is to keep the fundamentals in mind at all times.

During times of stress, it’s especially important to be mindful of the basics. As with any skill, once you begin exercising (or eating right), it can become second nature. That’s both good and bad. It makes things easier under normal conditions, but it also means we become less mindful about our behavior. We’re doing it out of habit rather than choice. Stress can derail us, and suddenly we find ourselves following our old habits rather than the new.

If you sense yourself losing control, don’t panic — simply force yourself to be more conscious about your choices. If, like me, you have particular books or articles you find inspiring, go back and re-read them. Remind yourself of the core tenets of your program.

Plan to succeed
When I began exercising in March, I planned my exercise sessions. Every night, I would sit down at the kitchen table and review my last couple workouts. Based on my notes, I would then construct a plan for the next morning. This was great. It gave me that outside structure that I crave. (I know this was actually internal structure, but it felt like external structure because it came from Past J.D. and not Present J.D. Yes, I know I’m strange.)

Similarly, my marathon training worked well because I had a plan and I followed it. It was only once I began to deviate from the plan that things got hairy, leading me to injury.

This week, as I’ve returned to the gym (and yes, I’ve gone all four mornings so far), I’ve made a point of planning my workouts the night before. There’s something about these sessions that put me in the proper frame of mind. In fact, I like them so much that I’m going to try something similar with food.

What if on Thursday I was to prepare my meals for Friday? If I have trouble making the right choices in the moment, maybe I can make them in advance. Maybe I can plan to succeed rather than leaving it to chance. (And the whims of my belly.)

Share your progress, but share judiciously
There’s no question that sharing your progress with your friends, family, and folks on the internet can help keep you motivated. But it can also have a negative effect. Share your goals and your overall progress, but unless you need specific advice, keep the details to yourself.

I’m an open person. For the past ten years, my life has pretty much been an open book, available for anyone on the web to comment on and criticize. Constructive criticism can keep me motivated. It can help me spot problems I’m not even aware of. But too much criticism, or the wrong kind of criticism, can actually thwart my aims.

For the next 11-1/2 weeks, as I work through Body for Life, I’ll still share bits and pieces of how things are going, but I’m going to employ a stronger filter than usual. It’s important to me right now that I finish this on my own terms, doing the best I can as who I am right now. I don’t want to get distracted by comments that lead me to self-doubt.

Conclusion
So, there you have them: the five things I feel I’ve learned about fitness over the past six months. They may not be the five things you’d hoped I learned, but they’re the lessons I’ve learned nonetheless.

I want to make it clear that I’m not really disappointed with my progress. I’m down 15 pounds for the year, I’ve run a couple hundred miles, and I’m stronger than I’ve ever been in my life. (My workouts at the gym are basically picking up from where I left off a couple months ago, much to my surprise — I think the ongoing pushups program and stretching regimen helped me to maintain some muscle.)

But, as many of you have noted, at some point I allowed myself to stray from the get fit slowly philosophy. That’s okay, though. I’m not perfect. I’m learning. And as long as I keep a good attitude and continue moving toward my goals, I’m happy.

As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly game-like. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells — whoops, I mean foods — you can still use with your remaining points.

And those 35 extra points you get every week? They’re like a special buff or potion — a last-ditch save when you’re on the ropes.

I’ve never used Weight Watchers, so I can’t comment on its game-like aspects. However, I’ve spent long stretches of my life carefully counting calories, and I can attest that this, too is very game-like. So, too, is exercise. One of the reasons I keep detailed stats on my running and biking is that the stats keep me motivated. I’m able to seem my progress. It’s fun for me to watch my improvement. It really does feel like a game.

Many other people have realized that people can be more motivated toward health and fitness if it’s disguised as “fun”. The one hundred pushup project sort of operates on this principle: make the gradually increasing pushups into a challenge in order to motivate participants. It works.

I believe Nintendo has actually tapped into this with their latest video game console. Kris and I don’t keep our Wii in the media room — we keep it in the exercise room. With the yoga mats, fitness ball, and weights, we have an old television and the Nintendo Wii. Kris uses Wii Fit nearly every day. Last winter, I played hours of Dance Dance Revolution. She and I both like the idea of games that require more than just sitting on the couch. (We have only a single chair in the exercise room — we always stand to play the Wii.)

Making fitness fun can help motivate those who might otherwise lose interest. I do suspect there are dangers in making people think that eating right and exercising must be a game, but at the same time I think any move toward fitness is better than none at all.

Footnote: Dance Dance Revolution II is coming out for Wii in under a month! Time for me to practice my dance moves.

If you’re working on strength training, traveling can be a bit hard, particularly if you are not able to find a gym or your hotel does not offer any lifting facilities. The good news is, there are plenty of ways that you can continue your training, without having to lug your weights around with you. Here are five easy strength training exercises that you can do anywhere.

Get Some Weights
First, you’re going to need to make sure that you have some sort of weight for resistance. This can be a large phone book or even a large book. Most hotel rooms supply a local phone book and if you’re in a metropolitan area, you should be able to find one that is suitable. In a pinch, I’ve even used my laptop which is quite heavy.  

If you can’t find a book or don’t want to risk breaking your laptop, you can look at getting a set of aqua weights.  These are dumbbells designed to be filled with water when you get to destination. While books or aqua weights may not be as heavy as your regular weights, it is better than working with nothing at all.

Three Exercises for a Complete Workout
Once you have your weights it’s time to get started. I like to warm up with a little cardio to get my blood pumping and my muscles ready. Depending on the intensity of your current workouts, the reps you do for each of these exercises should range between one set of 12 each, to two to three sets of 16 reps each. You can fine-tune the reps to suit your particular skill level.

• Staggered Push-up — If you have the phone book, place it on the floor and get in the position for a push up. Place one hand on the book and one hand on the floor. This is a staggered push up. Complete the required repetitions as outlined above. This is a pretty easy exercise to do, especially if you can do 100 pushups. Slow it down to add intensity or add as many reps as you can handle.
• Rear Delt Fly — Place your feet in line with your hips and lean your upper body forward until you are looking down at the floor. Your back should be completely level. Avoid curling up in the middle or rounding your lower back. Pick up the book in one hand (or if you have two phone books you can take one in each hand) and raise your arm to shoulder level. Repeat for the required repetitions. Once again, you can slow it down for greater intensity.
• Tiptoe Squats — Place the book on the floor directly in front of you. Your feet should be placed a little further out from your hips. Squat down and place your hands on the book. Now, go up on your tip toes, while remaining in the squat position. Raise your hips as high as you can without removing your feet from the floor. Repeat as necessary.

These are just three easy little ways to stay in your strength training routine. Get creative with your travel weights and you keep your strength gains on your next trip.

Lazy Man blogs about general health topics.  If you enjoyed this post, you might also wish to read his articles about drinking water to lose weight, reasons to jump rope, and even get some Wii Tennis Tips. Image by e3000.

Our martathon training group met at Portland’s Duniway Park, just below OHSU and the Veteran’s Hospital. We ran up and over the hill, down into Burlingame, across the freeway, and into Tryon Creek State Park. Though we didn’t have any steep climbs, the course was filled with rolling hills.

After seven miles, four of us turned around while the rest of the group logged an eighth mile. Without our pace leader, we went a little quicker than we should have. By the end of the run, my body ached. My IT band was sore. My calves were sore. My toes were sore.

I drove home, hobbled across the lawn, hobbled up the steps, and hobbled into the bathroom. I popped four ibuprofen (as per doctor’s recommendation) and took an ice bath. When I hopped out fifteen minutes later, my legs had no soreness at all. They’ve been (mostly) pain-free ever since. (They’re tight, and that’s for certain, but there’s very little pain.)

The ice bath is a beautiful thing. Here’s how I do it:

1. I begin drawing a cold bath. I don’t turn on the hot water at all. I simply fill the tube with cold water from the tap.
2. While the tub fills, I put on a sweatshirt. Some of my running buddies wear mittens and a hat, but this seems like overkill. Yes, the sweatshirt is going to get wet.
3. While the tub is still filling, I get in and sit down. It’s cold. I squeal like a baby. I stretch my legs out in front of me and sit upright.
4. With my wife’s help, I add a 20-pound bag of ice. Many people just use their ice cube trays. In reality, you don’t need to add ice at all.
5. I sit in the water for 10-20 minutes. Actually, for the past two weeks, I’ve been using twelve minutes as the Magic Time. (This was recommended by the physical therapist who makes announcements before the training runs.)
6. When the ice bath is finished, I peel off the sweatshirt and take a brief hot shower — just enough to soap off the stink from running.
7. After a quick bite to eat, I do my post-run stretching.

Though the ice bath is uncomfortable at first, my body adjusts after a couple of minutes. (Well, it becomes numb more than anything.)

Though the scientific research indicates ice baths are of dubious benefit to a runner, psychologically they are amazing. And for me, there seems to be a real physical difference. The idea behind them is that the cold engulfs the legs, restricting the blood flow and reducing swelling. This, in turn, reduces pain.

For myself, and for many other runners, this seems to be the case. I plan to continue using them as a valuable part of my marathon training.

Photo by Allspice1.

When it comes to food, exercise, and our obsession with obesity, the French appear to break all of the rules of Western thought. By and large those who live a traditional French lifestyle eat for pleasure and satisfaction, they often smoke, and they drink regularly. Despite a diet proportionally high in things like saturated fats, the French have remarkably low rates of heart disease and obesity. Welcome to the French Paradox.

What the French eat
On a visit to Paris with my wife and 7-month old son (which I’ve written about on Almost Fit), I experienced this firsthand. When you walk the streets of Paris, you are tempted with the most sensual culinary delights imaginable: Delicately handmade pastries, beautiful chocolates, freshly baked bread from ovens that have been used for sometimes hundreds of years, full fat, unpasteurized cheeses, and crepes. And that’s just what you can see in the window displays. When you see overweight people in Paris, they are almost never Parisians; in fact, in my experience it was the easiest way to identify my fellow Americans!

Those who practice a traditional French lifestyle seem to break our most commonly accepted dietary notions. They typically:

• Consume 60% more saturated fats than we do in proportion to our overall intake, primarily through dairy. This includes rich cheeses, real butter, whole milk, and yogurt.
• Do not eat low-fat products or use chemically derived sugar substitutes.
• Eat fresh bread daily that is made from refined white flour.
• Regularly consume both lean and fatty meats including pork, duck, beef, chicken, and a few others (someone hide Mr. Ed), as well as fish.
• Drink alcohol with lunch and dinner, and the alcohol is often unregulated. Meaning, where we have a soda fountain, they may have a cask of wine available for refills.
• Smoke cigarettes. (In fact, in Paris, if you want to show that you are an American, ask for a non-smoking section in a restaurant, but be prepared for an uninterested response.)
• Eat late at night — much later than we do — often eating heavier foods for supper at around 9 or 10, followed by a dessert course.
• Do not go to the gym (The reasoning being why waste your life in such a way, when you could be enjoying it?) or exercise much more than we do.
• Do not obsess about the chemical composition of the foods they eat, and they do not rely on science to tell them what is good or bad. That is what Mother is for.

All things in moderation
With all of this dietary rule-breaking, the French simply should be dying off like flies from heart disease. I mean after all, high fat foods? Simple carbohydrates and sugar-filled deserts? Cigarettes and alcohol? No Stairmaster for three hours a day? According to our experience, our science, and our gigantic devotion to every product and approach we can turn our eyes to, their collective hearts should all be congealed, seized up like French-made Peugeot diesel motors full of hardened, varnished sludge.

The truth is that the French typically live three years longer than we do, with only an 8.3% rate of heart disease, and a low occurrence of obesity (though sadly this is increasing as Western ways infiltrate French daily life).

So how do they do it?

According to folks like Dr. Will Clower (The French Don’t Diet Plan), Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food), and Mirielle Guiliano (French Women Don’t Get Fat) — and place me squarely in this camp, by personal experience — it comes down to this: The French simply eat real food in moderation. They eat good food, just less of it. They generally don’t eat the overly-processed, low fat, low carb, hydrogenated chemically substituted well-preserved food-based products that we do. Dr. Clower’s catchphrase: “If it’s not food, don’t eat it.” Michael Pollan? “Eat food. Not Too Much. Mostly plants.”

A little bit of Paris in Portland
How can you implement the French approach? What do the French do that allows them to eat what they want, when they want, and still not gain weight?

Here is a list based primarily on the writings of the three authors cited above. Of course, their books provide much more detail on the scientific (and anecdotal) evidence that supports the effectiveness of these ideas, and provide specific techniques on how to implement them. Here’s a sample of the guidance they provide:

• Identify honestly what you eat, think about it, and make changes very slightly and gradually. Remember that you are changing these dietary habits for the span of a lifetime, so they have to be simple, livable adjustments. From Mireille Guiliano, “The answer to weight gain is never dieting.”
• Eat only real food, not processed food alternatives or “faux foods” or food-like products (particularly high fructose corn syrup).The good news is this means you get to eat butter, bread, and chocolate again.
• Eat for the pleasure of eating, rather than as a means of fuel. Treat your mouth more like a sensory tool and less like a Flux Capacitor.
• Eat at regular times. In France, they maintain a social stigma against between meal snacking. In fact, many of their cars do not have cupholders.
• Eat seasonally, locally, and shop several times a week. And as Michael Pollan says, don’t buy your fuel at the same place your car does.
• Don’t rely solely on “Nutritionism” to tell you what is good for you; use common sense, and eat real foods. If Great-Grandma wouldn’t recognize it, don’t eat it. This is a simplification here; read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan for a much deeper explanation for the dangers of relying on science and industry alone to tell us what we should eat.
• Your dietary emphasis should be on green leafy vegetables, or animals who are fed those vegetables.
• Eat fat! But eat the right kinds, particularly dairy and naturally occurring fats in plants (think avocados not corn oil). In fact, the lack of fat intake may be one of the root causes of many of our health problems like heart disease and diabetes.

• Quantity does not equal quality. Buy the best you can afford, and be willing to spend a little more (although I’ve found that the cost levels out when you’re eating less).
• Train yourself to eat less by enjoying your food more, eating slower, putting less in your mouth per bite, and eating for sensory pleasure. Realize that portion size has grown 3 times what it was 50 years ago!
• Don’t eat mindlessly or be distracted when you’re eating by things like television or the computer.
• Incorporate wine into your diet — in moderation.
• Don’t stuff yourself. Learn the often forgotten feeling of fullness with practice and patience. For example, eat half of what you normally would, and wait for half an hour. If you’re starving, you know it wasn’t enough. If you feel physically good, that is the feeling of being full. Practice identifying that feeling, and it becomes second nature with time.
• Try to get all of your nutritional needs met through whole foods rather than supplements whenever possible. (There is an ongoing, raging controversy as to whether supplements actually have much benefit out of the context of the whole food from which they were derived.)
• Learn to cook, and make time to do it. We often say that we don’t have time to cook, but in reality in the last 15 years most of us have somehow made 2-3 hours time for other things like surfing the Internet. It is ultimately a matter of choosing our health as a priority.
• Make ethical choices in what you eat. Develop a relationship with what you put in your body, how it affects you, and your choices impact the environment. This is an interpolation of the French diet in a sense since it is not a conscious concern of theirs, generally, but in a world of genetically modified foods and questionable shortsighted farming practices, it helps you to identify “real food.”
• Don’t view your weight or your choices as a pass/fail situation. View it as a commitment to improving your life over the long haul.

All of these steps, for me, boil down to this: Eating real food in moderation simply works. It may very well be the solution to the French Paradox.

Jeremy Geiger (a.k.a. Metroknow) writes about his changes in lifestyle to reflect the French approach to eating on his site, AlmostFit.com. So far this year, he has lost 22 lbs by making only minor changes, eating real foods, and exercising only moderately (if at all, in the dark days of the Oregon wintertime). For more information, see his Web site, AlmostFit.com.