The South Downs Way Relay - Fuelled by FAT

The South Downs Way Relay is a great event. Starting at 6 in the morning sixty teams of 6 runners from all over the south east race their way from Eastbourne to Winchester as fast as they can, with a baton in their hand and a mini-bus trying to keep up between checkpoints at out of the way farms and on windy hill-tops. 

The key to success in this event is knowing the route for each of your 3 legs. A simple mistake can lose vital minutes or ruin the day for a team of 6 runners and their driver. And you need both speed and endurance.

My club Arena 80 have a good record in the relay, particularly in the Vets and B team categories; the  B team typically cover the 96 miles in about 12 and a half  hours and I have some nice medals from the occasions I have been 3rd and 2nd with the Bs and 1st with the Vets.

I have been wondering for a long time how the day might change as a result of using the low carb high fat diet. Food choices can be difficult, as you need to refuel but there is not much time between legs to digest and recover. Lots of energy drink is drunk and gel packets and banana skins litter the checkpoints and vans.  I recall being exhausted, bloated and sore before my final legs and the fear of cramps, injury and team failure was high. After my recent successes on the diet I hoped that things might be rather different this year.

Medal winning team from 2008

For the last two years I have missed out due to injury; last year it was right at the last minute and we were lucky to get a late substitute. And so this year I decided not to volunteer as I didn’t want to let the guys down again; rather I would offer myself as that last-minute substitute if I were needed.

It turns out that I was fit. And with a week to go I got the call-up for the B team. I was elated. Luckily I know the whole route of the SDW having cycled it a few times and run much of it; a quick check of the map and I confirmed that I knew all of the 3 legs that I had been given.

Normally these days I don’t consider food when running. But it would be a long day and so as well as my normal egg and bacon breakfast I prepared a tuna, egg and veg salad, some nuts, canned mackerel and a small bottle of my new energy drink, Olive Oil; and a couple of bottles of water of course.

The day started well with the whole team fit and exited. It was cold the start on Beachy Head with a strong south-westerly wind that would be blowing in our faces all day long, but as Simon headed off along the Seven Sisters and Dorian made his way up to Bo Peep Hill we soon got warmed up by the stop-start driving, jumping in and out of the van and the excitment of change-overs, navigation, questions & answers and near misses on country lanes.

Leg 4

In order to prevent congestion the teams start of in waves 30 minutes apart and we were in the second-last wave with several of the fast A teams starting with us or behind us. My first leg was 7.5 miles from Itford Farm to the A27. I am normally nervous and thirsty at the start of my first leg and it takes a while to get into racing. 

This year was different, I felt relaxed and ready and I quickly settled into a fast pace. There was a quick Hailsham runner 2 minutes ahead of me and I fancied catching him. The wind was hard work at times but the long uphill on ‘The Yellow Brick Road’ went well, apart from the fact that I was not catching the guy in front. No hurry though, there is plenty of time for things to change and so I just stuck to my planned rhythm  and the time flew by. There is a long downhill at 6 miles and I took it at pace, accidentally breaking my Strava mile PB in the process; and before I knew it the leg was over and I was back in the van. Not very tired, not very sore and crucially, not thirsty despite it being a warm day.

  Dorian descending to the River Adur

My legs (4,11 and 18) were more spaced out than I am used to and this allowed me to relax a little. I was confident about maintaining a high pace for all 3 legs having placed 3^rd vet in a challenging half marathon at Petworth the previous Saturday. 

The rest of the team we all running well and I spend a couple of hours supporting as we passed by my local hills at Ditchling and Clayton and headed westwards. I decided to be the team photographer for the day although somehow I forget to take a picture of the steam roller that pulled out on us and held us up for 5 minutes in Storington!

The Vets are catching up!

Over the next few legs our Vets and A teams started to catch us up and they would appear in their vans at the changeovers sooner and sooner after us before the point when their runners appeared. 

At two changeovers all three teams arrived within a couple of minutes of each other and it looked like Arena 80 had taken over the place. I scoffed half of my tuna and egg mix because I knew I would need it later, not because I felt hungry. The water had been frozen over-night and was lovely in small sips as it melted.

Leg 11

I am usually stiff and sore from the first leg. Not this year. I felt bouncy and strong and definitely ready for a hard run. The 5.5 miles west from the River Arun starts with a long uphill, I bounced up this. There is a mile or so over rough flinty paths and then another short and sharp hill. Still feeling great I was shocked to be caught by a chap from Burgess Hill Runners who I thought we had already overtaken.  He had forgotten about the second hill and couldn’t pull away from me on it but come the top he was away. OK so he was perhaps 20 years younger than me and looked as tough as old boots but my pride was hurt and I held on as close as I could, breaking my mile PB again on the hill down to the checkpoint. It turned out that the chap was an A team runner and I ought to be pleased to have kept him in sight. Very tired at the end but my recovery was quick; an hour later I was feeling good again with a tin of mackerel and a bottle of olive oil working their magic inside me. 

 Hywel and Julian running strong on legs 9 and 12

I am usually one of the first in the team to finish my 3 legs and I celebrate by cracking open a cold beer to the annoyance of those who still have hours to go before running again and are starting to feel pretty tired after such a long day out.  This year the roles were reversed and there was a strong vote for a pub stop from the early finishers.

We had no idea how we were doing compared to the other B teams. Stubbington Green B had left us on leg 1 and the few teams we had passed had been veterans or ladies. A ladies team with pink shorts were refusing to be caught, so we assumed that we must be well down the B field.  There was added pressure with the real possibility of being timed out at the cut-off at the start of leg 16. Our late statrt meant that it would be a close call. In bad weather this cut-off is strictly enforced but this time the weather was fine, if a little windy still, and despite being 10 minutes late we were let through.

Simon at the finish of the gruelling leg 13.

There are some cruel legs in the latter stages of the race. Leg 13 over Linch Hill, Treyford Hill, Pen Hill, Beacon Hill and Harting Hill is a killer, and the 9-mile leg 17 is hard on its own, never mind at 7pm in the evening when you have already run 10 miles and been awake since 5 in the morning.

Gareth had been fretting all day about the route for leg 17 and we were worried. He had maps and a phone with him just in case but there was a long, nervous wait before he appeared at a road crossing at the 7-mile point; he was flying along and reminding us why he clocked just over 3 hours at the Brighton marathon this year. We only just  got to the checkpoint in time for me to get my shirt on and run.

Gareth hands over the batton at the end of leg 17

Leg 18

I had the coveted leg 18. Not only the glory leg but also a fast 5.5 mile cruise with only about 100 meters of ascent and a long downhill to the finish. 

We had finally started catching other teams on legs 16 and 17 and there were a couple of teams only a few minutes ahead of me as I started the final leg.  It was 8pm and I ought to have been feeling dreadful having been up for 15 hours, but I was bubbling with energy and I set off at a strong pace with a Brighton Phoenix runner in sight ahead of me. After 2 minutes I started to feel a stich coming on. This could spell disaster so I slowed down for a few minutes and luckily it went away as fast it had come - I slowly increased the pace again. I caught the chap ahead and pressed on up the only real hill which leads up to Cheesefoot Head where the team always cheer on the last runner at the crossing of the A272.

The top of the hill came earlier than I expected and as I approached the road I saw a runner from Liss Runners about 400 meters ahead. I sped up again and for the last 2 miles I raced as hard as I could. I ought to have been knackered but I ran the final 2 miles, albeit mostly downhill, in about 12 minutes. I had the finishing field to myself, apart from about the 300 people at the finish line, and it would have been inappropriate not  to sprint to the line. You never know, a few seconds might still make a difference. 

We finished in 12 hours 40 minutes 13 seconds. A bit slower than normal but really rather good when you consider that strong headwind.

A quick change and a cold beer and we started to wonder where we had come. We were all rather downbeat about our chances and so it was a grand surprise to find that we had come second out of the 14 B teams.  This made the long journey home very pleasant indeed. Another fine medal for the shelf.

I can honestly say that I am amazed by the difference in how I felt and how I ran. I am not getting any younger but my energy levels were even and consistently high. I ate the food but only drank about 1 litre of water all day, with no hint of dehydration. My average speed of 8.2 miles per hour was faster than on any of the 4 previous occasions, despite that headwind and despite running 18.5 miles rather than my normal 15.  And the next day I felt alright, when I would normally have been a wreck. 

I think I might be onto something here!

Thanks to my team-mates Julian, Dorian, Gareth, Hywel and Simon and to our ever jovial driver Michael.  

I’ll see you next year.

LCHF and distance running.

As I have mentioned previously one of the reasons I got interested in the LCHF diet is the possibility that it could be beneficial to distance running; this is what gets me interested as I am getting older and the possibility that I could carry on for a few more years at a decent level is exciting.

So I ran my first LCHF marathon back in March and it was all easy enough. I like the food and as you may have read previously I was able to train just as long and as hard as I have done before. The London Marathon and the South Downs Way Relay were to follow and I was hoping to take a close look at fuelling and energy levels when running for more than a couple of hours. But then I picked up a minor injury and have had a couple more since then ( I should add that these were related to skiing and mountain biking, not running). As a result I have not really been able to study this subject in great depth yet.

But it is an interesting subject nonetheless and so here is post number 1 on this subject.

How long can we keep going for?

Mention the word Marathon to a novice runner and a few ideas will come to mind; such as ‘why?’, or ‘26.2 miles!’, or ‘Hitting the wall’. The last of these is the one that strikes fear into the hearts of most runners.

Hitting the wall is simply another description for running out of fuel. Most of us only have the capacity to store enough glycogen to run for about 2 hours.  This is why we generally carb-load before a marathon, to fill the glycogen tank up to the top. Refuelling in good time ensures that we don’t hit the wall and so long as we have done the training we should complete our big run. We learned this back in the eighties and Lucozade and Gatorade have made a heck of a lot of money ever since. Clearly finishing a marathon depends on refuelling, or to put it another way, on consuming sugar.

So how did marathon runners manage to train for and run marathons (often very quickly) before the advent of Gatorade?  Simple, their bodies had adapted to burn fat as well as glycogen. They trained hard and in the absence of carb-gels and carb-drinks their bodies became rather good at switching from carb-burning to fat-burning when the need arose. Most mere-mortals do not train this hard, and if we are on a traditional (and NHS recommended) high-carb diet, we will need to take on fuel on our long training runs and we will rely on fresh fuel (carbs) on Marathon day.

LCHF runners train our bodies to burn mostly fat, with a small proportion of carbs. So, given suitable training we ought to be able to keep running for longer; much longer, without the need to refuel in the same way.

So how far can we go? And how fast can we go?

Dr Peter Attia is an elite athlete who has been testing these questions for some years, recording his performance on both low-carb and high carb diets. http://eatingacademy.com/how-a-low-carb-diet-affected-my-athletic-performance.

 As you can see Peter is pretty serious. He has determined that a suitably trained athlete (himself) can keep going all day long so long as he doesn’t run out of carbs. Clearly the smaller the percentage of carbs being burned the longer we should be able to run for. A key point is that most of us can regard our fat stores as effectively limitless for these purposes.

We all burn fat as well as glycogen. The point at which we switch to burning more glycogen than fat has a profound effect upon how long we can run for before hitting the wall; the earlier the switch the sooner we run out. Dr Attia found that on a high-carb diet this switch occurred at a heart rate of 104, or 33% of his maximum output (or VO2 Max). When in ketosis (on a LCHF diet) the switch came at a heart rate of 162, this being 84% of his VO2 Max. Don’t forget that he is an elite athlete!

The diet brought about more than this simple change (note that his maximum output had lowered), but even though his VO2 Max had decreased by 12% with the change of diet he was now able to use his glycogen stores very much more efficiently.

After tests both cycling and running Dr Attia has figured that when he is working at his ‘all day’ rate he is working at about 60% of his VO2 Max. On a high-carb diet this required 95% of energy to come from carbs. On a LCHF diet with his body in ketosis this required just 22% of energy from carbs (or strictly from glycogen). So buy lowering the requirement for carbs he is able to go for much longer before running out.

Another aspect of high-carb fuelling is that when exercising for more then 1-2 hours our livers simply can’t process enough carbs per hour to keep the tank topped up. The normal limit is about 50 - 60 grams (or 200-250 calories) per jour.  There are 4 calories per gram of carbs; hence the need to take on carbs early in a run, and keep topping up the tank regularly.  If you leave your refuelling until you feel tired and you are running at a rate that requires about 800-1000 calories per hour then it will quickly be too late for consuming more carbs to be of any help. Here I must give credit to Sarah Rowell. Not only is she the author if the great book “Off Road Running”, where I first learned about trail and fell running and nutrition; but she was also the record holder for the Beachy Head Marathon for 5 years after trouncing all the men in 1986.

How many of us have wondered “what might have been” as we tread that painful last 8 miles towards the finish line with no carbs left but a reserve tank full of fat gagging to be burned? When we decide to run long on carbs, we are all treading an unavoidable path towards that same wall.

Now consider what those last miles might feel like if we were only consuming 25% of our calories (250 grams per hour) from glycogen. We could keep the glycogen tank full as long as we like if we re-fuel appropriately.

Is it any wonder that so many ultra distance runners are using a LCHF diet?

My attempts to replicate this investigation have so far been thwarted by a dumb show-off-dad injury and some bad luck. However I can attest to the fact that running the Hassocks Sport Relief Charity Marathon on LCHF did not leave me feeling even slightly drained or hungry. I ate eggs and bacon before the run and just a couple of cups of soup during the run. But I was not going particularly quickly (I averaged about 6.2 mph on a heart rate of about 130) - nowhere near 60% of my VO2 max.

So I thought I’d call upon the experience of Marina Bullivant. Marina is becoming a bit of a legend around here, having run all 5 Brighton Marathons. After the 4th run she switched to a LCHF diet, lost a stone and a half and then proceeded to beat her PB from 3 years earlier. She has run 3 Marathons so far this year on LCHF, each harder than the last. I asked Marina a few questions about the way she eats and runs:

Q: How long have you been on the LCHF diet?

A: Since June 2013.

Q: Can you estimate how many grams of carbs you eat per day on average?

A: Malcolm, I haven't ever calculated what this might be, or even thought about it!

Q: When you run for over an hour do you use any kind of food for fuel? –

A: I only really fuel for races, and then only half marathon and above.  SDW Relay - sausages, breakfast muffins (eggs, cheese, veg, bacon), cheese, nuts - deviation is Janna's homemade barrabrith (fruit teabread with loads of butter!).  Brighton Marathon I took a couple of the gels they were handing out and wished I hadn't - got stomach pain - stupid thing to do as I never take them normally!  And still got cramp in my calves!  I now take  salt/electrolyte capsules with water on runs over 1.5 hours, no calf cramps so far!

 Q: What is your average mileage per week? Has this increased on the Diet?  

A: I'd have to have a look at my records - it has probably increased since June 2013, as have been running longer races, so training further.  but, as you will see in answer to question below - definitely faster.

A detailed conversation revealed that the average has risen from about 40 to about 50 miles per week.

 Q: What is the longest that you have run for using this regime? –

A: Three Forts Marathon - 27+ miles (May 2014 - my longest ever run). 

Q: After a long run how long does it take to recover before you would run again?  

A: 24 hours!  

Q: Is this recovery rate a change from your recovery rate prior to the diet? 

A: And thinking about it, this was probably not the case before, would say that previously 2-3 days.

Q: What are your 5K and marathon PBs? (here I am looking at the difference between the two paces – what is achievable on LCHF).    

A: 5K  22.32 (June 2014).  Marathon 3:46:36 (April 2014).

I particularly liked Marina’s answer to the second question - she is not counting carbs at all. Not very scientific though, so I quizzed here a bit further and I reckon that she eats about 60  grams of carbs per day, apart from a bit of a blow-out with a roast potato or two with dinner on Sundays which puts her up to about 120 for that one day.

Assuming that Marina is running at close to her VO2 max for a 5K at 8.4 mph, and she runs a marathon at 6.9 mph then her marathon pace is 82% of her VO2 Max.

There is a big difference between Marina and Peter’s all-day rate VO2 Max 80% and 60%. This is likely to be because Peter is an elite athlete with a very high VO2 Max in the first place, whereas Marina just trains for and runs long distances. I think I should have mentioned that this is not rocket science but we can see that Marina is achieving something rather special here; she has lost weight and she is getting more efficient at distance running. Her recovery rate in particular is amazing; she trains the day after running a marathon. Now I never managed to do that!

There is a suggestion that LCHF leads to less inflammation in the body. This is critical in the case of atherosclerosis (inflammation of the arteries) as it means that we are less likely to develop heart disease on a low carb diet than on a high carbs one. You may recognise this as the subject of my earlier posts (http://lchf4runners.blogspot.co.uk/2014_04_27_archive.html ). But this also has a bearing on the inflammation on our bodies caused during training; if there is less soreness from training then we should recover quicker and can train more. This is what Marina seems to be finding.

This experience is mirrored with another correspondent Simon, a GP on the LCHF diet, who states that

“Since going low-carb I seem to get less muscular aches in my legs the day after a run; but possibly this is just due to the passage of time rather than my diet.”

Simon has seen improvements across the board, not just for endurance running:

“I had thought that my fastest times were behind me. I started reducing carbs 18 months ago and within a matter of 2-3 months was running faster. I have lived the LCHF lifestyle for over a year now and have never run as fast.

Last month I set a lifetime best over 5K and have improved my time over 10K by nearly 2 minutes. My passion is fell running and have seen my times tumble compared with races a year or two before and not by small amounts - 11 mins off a 14 miler in Pendle and 32 mins off the Three Peaks Mountain Marathon. These are races I have done several times before so I have a good idea of what I am capable of running.”

This all suggests that LCHF may indeed assist recovery and perhaps even improve performance. My own memories of the Three Peaks Fell Race centre largely around climbing Ingleborough splattered with sticky pink energy drink.

I was also hoping to write about the South Downs Way Relay on LCHF. This 6-person team event covers the 98 miles of the SDW in somewhere between 11 and 14 hours with each team member running 3 legs at close to threshold speed.

                                                                         (The Arena 80 Vets team from 2008)

This race presents particular challenges with regard to fuel – you have to get plenty of fuel down in order to keep going all day, but not so much that you might get a stich from running too soon after eating. Many runners find it hard to get food down at all after a hard run and that compounds the problem.

I have run the event three times for my club Arena 80 and we have come third, second and first in the fiercely contested vets category. On each occasion I have gulped down a pasta, tuna and veg salad the moment I finished each of the first two legs and drunk energy fuel liberally. Luckily I can eat just about anything anywhere (the cook ran out of popcorn and bacon when I was climbing Kilimanjaro), but I still felt worried about energy all day long. Other runners were clearly having bigger problems and the changeover stations were strewn with messy corpses and discarded energy gel packets.

I missed out on the relay due to injury this year, but Marina was invited to join a ladies team from Hurstpierpoint. And so she was able to road-test the LCHF diet. In short it was a doddle. While several of her team-mates suffered from stomach cramps and lack of energy Marina ate some egg&cheese muffins, cheese, nuts and some fruit tea-bread washed down with a good amount of water & salt tablets. That’s all. She reports feeling satiated and strong all day long.

Now as I said earlier Marina is superbly adapted to distance running, but as a first-timer in this gruelling event she did appear to shine.

The key lesson here for LCHF runners is that if we want to run all day long then we can do, but we still need to eat a few carbs to keep the tank full. Marina had some bread. I might eat some flapjack or drink a malco-pop; but we do not need to worry about hitting the wall if we are fuelled by fat.

P.S - If you'd like to read more, including the answers to the question "How fast can I go?" then have a read of my later posts describing fuelling, pacing and finally a PB in one of the hardest marathons in the UK.
http://lchf4runners.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-beachy-head-marathon.html
http://lchf4runners.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/a-big-lchf-pb-in-beachy-head-marathon.html


Some further reading and inspiration:

http://www.examiner.com/article/more-runners-and-endurance-athletes-adopt-low-carb-paleo-diet

2 times Triathlon world champion Jonas Colting is on LCHF

Tim Olsen, the winner of the 2012 and 2013 Western States 100 is on LCHF

Sami Inkinen, a persistent winner of Ironman races is on LCHF. He also writes about his performance here http://www.fatchancerow.org/. He is currently rowing from San Fransisco to Hawaii to raise awareness of the dangers of sugar.

February and March Diary

February

So, I was pretty chuffed with the ways things were going. I’d lost the weight I wanted to loose and was enjoying eating  healthy meals that make me feel full; I was not snacking on sandwiches between meals like I used to. 

I realised one important thing; you have to be prepared to do a lot of your own cooking. This is nothing new in our household but for many this could be a barrier to the use of LCHF. But there isn't really anything new here as most serious diets suggest that you buy, cook and eat REAL ROOD.

I travel sometimes for work and it can be hard finding the right food in hotels and restaurants. Instead of a restaurant I often buy a buffet selection from Marks and Spencer’s. This allows me to get just what I want, and it fits in well with evening runs and desk working in a hotel room. It also costs less than a restaurant meal.

I had a fun idea. For Sport Relief I decided to repeat my wife’s feat of running up and down the village high street (1 mile) 26 times for Sport Relief. The gang from We Run! Hassocks will be out to support me and our friend Marina, Jane’s partner at Aspire Fitness, who is also on the LCHF diet will run if too. This was exciting. I have never run for charity before as I wouldn’t ask someone to sponsor me to complete a run that they know is not that big a challenge for me.  But this was different; we would just be asking people to hand over the money that they had promised to donate when watching the Sport Relief show the night before. 

So I had plans, targets; I was getting back into serious running. Everything was going perfectly!

I have always been too competitive. I always wanted to be the fastest. And so it is now. I’d been aiming at the Brighton Half Marathon for a first serious test of ‘my new powers’. I had not been expecting too much but I was secretly hoping to get close to 1:30; a few minutes off my best but not bad considering the lack of consistent training. 

I started doing speed reps to up my pace and after a couple of weeks I just had to stick with the fast boys when we were doing a session of 12*300m reps at the track. Now I don’t pretend to be a sprinter, so why on earth I felt the need to do this session at full pace I do not know. I strained my left quad after 10 reps and so had to rethink my plans for the London Marathon; and the Sport Relief Marathon; and our ski holiday. Bad boy! After a week’s rest I ran the Brighton Half anyway, it’s hard not to with it being a big local event that almost everyone at my club Arena 80 runs.  I did not attempt to run fast; I just jogged along and made a few social calls when passing old mates in the crowd. But my leg was much too sore afterwards.

March

After another week of rest I put in a good week of training before going skiing. Now we had always planned to take a week off the diet for the ski holiday. I won’t pretend that that was for any reason other than wanting to indulge ourselves as much as possible. And this we did.  However I also picked up two further injuries that left me hobbling and unable to run at all for another week. Even then I had large bruises in my calf and backside that did not go away for some weeks.

My bad luck did not diminish my interest in the diet. I was reading more on the subject by now and talking the LCHF talk to just about everyone I met. It’s possible I might have bored a few of them.

 

So with one week to go to the Sport Relief Marathon I had done very little distance training. The only thing that was going well was the diet. I was back to fighting weight in no time after the ski holiday and ran three good long sessions in the week before the marathon with no tiredness, just a sore arse. 

The run itself was so much fun that I hardly noticed the time go by. We took 4 hours 15, a modest pace for me but this included shaking buckets and lots of stopping and chatting.  About 20 friends turned out to run with us or pester the villagers who were quite happy to hand over their tenners in abundance. We all wore our We Run! Hassocks T-shirts and Jane organised the collection. My 12 year-old son Cam ran his first half marathon and we raised over £700 and were very pleased with ourselves. I had 2 eggs and 3 slices of bacon for breakfast and 2 cups of soup during the run. 

And suddenly I had achieved one of the main goals of this diet.  I can run marathons on LCHF. What next?

       A Marathon Runner's Breakfast