Running for Your Life: Food as Fuel

Subway Moment, midafternoon, Wed., Nov. 16:
A foxy looking twentysomething commuter pops up, exiting an arriving D Train on the D/R platform, Atlantic-Pacific station. As I leave the R Train for the D, I'm carrying my sidebag, Moleskin and pen, my black Buddy Holly’s perched on my nose in a way I’m thinking has a public intellectual panache. We pass each other to, I swear, a little electric charge, I’m thinking as I take what I’m sure was only a second before the woman’s seat, the form-fitting plastic still warm.

Next to me is a glossy magazine face down. Smiling, I turn it over. It’s AARP Magazine, with Antonio Banderas on the cover: Lead story: “New Ways to Beat Diabetes.”

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Most of my running life I’ve been bad. Or at least inattentive. If nothing else over the past near two years since I’ve taken up the idea that I’m a marathoner, I’ve come to see that what I’d long felt was a reward for being a runner was that I didn’t have to watch what I ate. You name it: hamburgers, pizza, second helpings of birthday cake, Girl Guide (in Canada, Girl Scouts in America) cookies by the handful, trans fat-loaded potato chips, Cokes, french fries. I’m one of those runners who has trouble keeping pounds on, let alone gaining weight. So for thirty-plus years that’s what I did.

Which has certainly played a role in my bad cholesterol being borderline high. So, yeah, I’ve made an adjustment in my diet to address those readings, and they’ve gone down to more manageable levels. Now I watch my DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) blood composition levels, and that is all.

No, I’ve learned that in concert with an increased level of intense exercise that comes with marathon training that my body has needs that I’m only now getting around to fulfilling. The outcome? Not just improved performance on the road. But more energy. In the past few months, I’ve been noticing that I’m making do with less sleep, my mind is more active, more what I feel my body and mind were like twenty years ago. This is not just something that is in my imagination either. Doctors are only now beginning to talk about real versus calendar age. Back in parents’ day the expression was: You’re Only as Young as You Feel. Now, it’s more like: You Can Be Younger Than You Are.

At the risk of being seen as a food obsessive, consider this: With the possible exception of water, the most researched drink in history is Gatorade. And surprise, surprise the resulting studies extol the value of Gatorade for its excellent necessity at replenishing bodily fluids after strenuous exercise.

Dehydration, according to the bulk of running literature, is seen as the stalking horse to collapse, breakdown and serious injury. But “The Runner’s Body” http://bit.ly/rEwSRN, the high readable, myth-blasting book by exercise scientists Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas, with journalist Matt Fitzgerald, challenges that tenet, saying hyponatremia, or overdrinking, especially during marathons and ultramarathons, has proven to be a much more serious threat to runners’ health.

Yet, despite that, a majority of race material continues to drone away that to maximize performance, maximize drink intake. Fuhgeddabout whether you are thirsty. The authors make the reasonable point that we should follow a corporatized slogan – Obey Your Thirst .¤.¤.

But runners will tell you that they are not comfortable with that direction. That on a run they drink, not driven by thirst, but by the station-to-station availability during a race, or with carefully calibrated water-delivery systems – bottles strapped to a runner’s belt, say, or routes planned that include regular-interval drinking fountains.

This is where Thurber comes in. My redbone coonhound running partner. During our six-miler, Thurb will pad up to the doggie drinking fountain and in his way, attuned to his needs, he will drink from the fountain pretty much the same amount of water every time. About thirty seconds of drinking if I were to time it. When he’s finished he turns his head away, looks up to me as if to say, well, drink up, fella, and let’s get back on the road. Time’s a-wasting.

Philosophically, that’s what I’m talking about. Seeing and responding to the pure present. In the way that dogs do. Embracing the simple.

As I cut out unhealthy choices from my diet while keeping up my intense training program, I find that I don’t crave junk food like I used to. It’s not a schoolmarm message. Like favor whole grains over processed because whole grains promote weight loss and reduce the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes (See Subway Moment, above). As in, advocating that you taste-up brown rice so that you don’t have to choke it down. Whole grain pastas? Seriously?

No, my guess is that something happened to my body chemistry in these past two years of training. It’s not that I’m depriving myself of a sugary or salty snack, or a Diet Coke during those energy collapses I used to suffer from in the midafternoon, or that extra glass of wine at night. Rather, as I consume these treats, it’s as if my body is taking over mid-conversation. Need and want are one; I don’t need it and thus I decant the wine, return the ice cream to the freezer after only a single scoop, fasten a clip to the bag of potato chips.

It doesn’t mean that I won’t have an occasional hamburger and fries, but when I do my body responds differently to them. It doesn’t give me the sybaritic pleasures it did in the past. Who knows, the way things are going, perhaps by next year I’ll zero interest in food that isn’t efficiently transformed into fuel.

Remember, you’re only as young as you are. I know I’m not reversing the age process. This isn’t science fiction. But I am slowing it down to a Senior Olympian trot.

Next: Running for Your Life: It’s Cold Out There