Category Archives: Fitness

If you don’t put yourself out there, you have zero chance

I was watching the Vuelta yesterday and enjoying Ben King finishing and thinking about the effort level when I watched his collapse after the finish line.

Chad Haga retweeted this tweet

which got me to read the piece Ben King wrote.

One of his favorite quotes was “direction, not intention, determines destination” (Andy Stanley). 

From his article I take the JA philosophy of ” If you don’t put yourself out there, you have zero chance. ” as well as ” Live in the moment but keep moving forward.”

It matters to me as my training has been affected a lot this year and I do realize that speed and capacity changes every year now, in ways I can’t expect.  So I need to focus on the fact that some of this are highs and lows and to make the most of every day!

How to Eat Optimally For Cycling as You Grow Older

There was a recent article in CyclingWeekly (UK) that outline a few essential points on aging and exercise

Essential points

  • You may require fewer calories as you get older
  • You’ll need more protein to offset age-related muscle loss and ‘anabolic resistance’
  • Consuming omega-3 fats and vitamin D becomes more important
  • Thirst becomes a less reliable indicator of your fluid needs

While the article had a lot of information and links to other articles I had read, the key points were:

Do: eat 30-40g protein at each meal. Get this from a medium-sized (125g) chicken or turkey breast, a (150g) fish fillet, one small tin (120g) tuna, four large eggs, or 400ml whey protein shake.

Do: fill up on low-calorie, high-volume foods like vegetables and fruits to maximise your diet’s nutritional density and water and fibre content.

Do: estimate how much fluid you need to drink during exercise by calculating your sweat rate — the difference between your pre- and post-workout weight. Divide your hourly sweat rate by four to give you a guideline for how much to drink every 15 minutes.

Do: refuel with protein and carbohydrate within 30-60 minutes of completing any long or hard ride. As you grow older, recovery from hard workouts takes longer.

Do: boost vitamin D and omega-3 — aim for one portion of salmon, mackerel or sardines a week, or one tablespoon of flaxseeds, chia seeds or walnuts daily.

Don’t: eat less than 20 per cent of your calories in fat form, otherwise you risk deficient intakes of fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids. Aim for mono and unsaturated fats from oily fish, avocados, nuts, seeds and olive oil.

Don’t: go to bed on empty. Studies at Maastrict University found that muscle protein synthesis was 22 per cent higher in athletes who consumed 40g of casein protein after a resistance workout and before sleep.

Don’t: go overboard with supplements. High doses of vitamins C and E may actually reduce beneficial adaptations to training.

You can read more by looking at the full article, I just saved the points I am trying to work with now.

How Will Aging Affect My Times

From a recent article on the NYTimes

The aging effect is inevitable, and now runners can even track what to expect. It is as if there was a time clock for aging, and unlike nonrunners — who have only things like wrinkles and gray hair to go by — runners have an exact schedule that will predict how their performance will decline.

That schedule is on the website of Ray Fair, a professor in the economics department at Yale, who was inspired to find the patterns of slowdowns when his own running performance began to decline. The result is a table. You can put in your best time ever for an event, say a 10-kilometer race, and how old you were when you ran it. The table then shows how fast you could have run it when you were younger and how fast you should be able to run it now and as you grow even older.