My first week of training

I have completed my first full week of training for the marathon - and it's only now beginning to sink in how much I've taken on. 

My plan was to alternate easy and hard days, and on the whole that came off well this week.  My hard days got progressively harder during the week.  My easy days, on the other hand, got progressively easier, to the point of doing nothing at all on the last one.  I must have some inner karmic impulse that is trying to balance things.

That's not a tan - my face turns
crimson when I exercise

All told I ran (and walked) 17.5 miles.  Not much, for anyone who is a regular runner, but it's a start.  Rome wasn't built in a day, and I won't be turned into a marathon runner in just a week.

I did learn a few interesting things:

• I have to eat when I finish a run - otherwise I feel like I'm coming down with the flu!
• It's not the end of the world if I don't stretch;
• I really need to strengthen my abdominal muscles - they make a huge difference to the amount of oxygen I can take in, but then get sore very fast;
• Walking hurts my legs more than running.

All of you runners will be telling me this is obvious stuff, but there's nothing like learning by doing.

I've also come to love and hate Richard's micoach.  This is a gadget that measures your pace and heartbeat as you run, and can give you readings of these, as well as elapsed time.  I normally use it on "free" mode - I keep track of my own running plans - but you can programme it to coach you to speed up, slow down, walk, etc over pre-planned intervals.  It clips to your clothes, so that's one less thing that needs a pocket.

Sounds good, doesn't it?  Unfortunately, it has two serious failings.  The lesser one is that it doesn't measure your heartbeat until you are exercising reasonably vigorously - enough to raise your breathing rate noticeably.  In other words, you don't get a view of your resting or walking heart rate.

The truly appalling thing about it, though, is that you can't download the data!  Those who know me well will appreciate how much I hate this.  The micoach produces interesting graphs which you can alter as much as Adidas has assumed you will want to.  Unfortunately, there is no facility for transferring it to your computer where you can have a proper go at analysis.

There is one final lesson I've learned from training this week: it's a really good thing that I have a six month run-up to the marathon.  I'm going to need it.  Running hard makes me ill, walking four miles makes my legs sore.  I have a considerable way to go before I can even walk the marathon in one day, never mind run it.

Eat and run?

Ever since my son was born, I've had problems with food.  I don't mean bulimia or anything like that.  What happened is that something in my digestive system changed, and the result was that if I eat wheat or milk (plus a few other odd things like quinoa and garlic), I suffer afterwards - weird symptoms from indigestion and bloating to depressed immune system.  It was several years of continual illness before I worked out what was wrong.

So I am very particular about what I eat.  But to add to these difficulties, I recently read about ongoing research into Alzheimer's Disease, which suggests that it is actually a form of diabetes - now occasionally referred to as "Type 3".  The current theory is that a diet high in fat and sugar can destroy the ability of insulin to work its magic in the brain - where, as it turns out, it is important in laying down memories.  The scientific ideas are a little too complex to go into here, but the short version is that consuming a lot of high-GI or fatty foods is potentially disastrous for your brain.

Unfortunately, those are just the things that runners are told they should consume during training and before a race.  You get these "gels" that deliver a lot of sugar in a rush, as well as sugar-filled sports drinks, protein bars that contain lots of sugar and starch (not to mention wheat and/or milk which I can't eat), and all these things are supposed to help you fill your muscles with glycogen (rapid energy supplies) so you can run efficiently.  Endurance runners are also supposed to eat a lot of carbohydrate-rich foods like bread and pasta for an extended period before their race.

I just can't help but have my doubts.   First of all, I am no lean runner - I'm overweight (BMI 23), carrying a lot of flab around my belly where it's said to do the most harm - why can't my body use that for fuel?  Also, Alzheimer's Disease runs in my family, and I'm not keen to do something potentially harmful to my brain in the long run, even if the running does my heart and circulation good.  I don't consider brain damage an acceptable trade-off for a healthy heart.

So I've had to go to the research in hopes of some sign that there are other points of view.  PubMed makes abstracts of most medical research available to the public for free.  Although you don't generally get the full article, the service at least gives you the conclusions - it's a start.  And so I was delighted to discover  "Glyceamic index, glycaeamic load, andexercise performance" in Sports Medicine, an Australian journal.  Although the conclusions are very verbose and disorganised, they boil down to this - the jury is still out, and more research is needed.  In particular, it's not wholly clear what the trade-off is between a normal diet for an extended period, and high-GI consumption immediately before and during the race.  There are also questions about how all this relates to post-run recovery. 

My conclusion: I don't have to follow the advice on carb loading, but it would be advisable to experiment and see what works for me.  No one knows best, but experiments will at least let me test out different strategies and draw conclusions for this sample size of one.  Conveniently, this is the conclusion of a review article collecting results of a variety of articles on this topic.  We're encouraged to "let practical issues and individual experience dictate the use of HGI or LGI meals and supplements before, during, and after exercise."  Marvellous - though of course that leaves me the difficulty of figuring out what I can actually eat....