written a novel about an astronaut and a biography of Edmund Hillary, always focusing on the intersection of ordinary people with mythic moments in history. Though never elaborate, his writing has a range and versatility beyond most of these books (only Glanville can match it). Above all, it often takes us inside the runners’ heads without distracting from the mythic import of the moment and the scene. “He felt his muscles at full compression, and his mouth was open, sucking in air. Two hundred yards to go, and that figure was still fifteen yards clear, beginning to move without any slackening of pace into the bright light which began on the bend and continued to the tape down that avenue of sound.” The story avoids the usual heroic victory, too, as the first sub-3:50 goes not to the hero but prophetically to a shock finish by a powerful young New Zealander whose initials are J.W.

6. James McNeish’s Lovelock (Auckland, 1986) is a skilled, highly professional biofiction on the life and inner perplexities of Jack Lovelock, the New Zealander who won the 1,500 meters at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 in world record time. Often seen as one of the most perfect tactical victories in track history, it was described by Lovelock himself in his journal as “an artistic creation.” McNeish set out to probe the mystery and define the myth of the intensely private man who achieved such public brilliance. He draws extensively on Lovelock’s journals, as well as research into his life in New Zealand, England, and postwar America, and adroitly cobbles in other documentary material like some classic 1930s sports writing by E. A. Montague and others, and Harold Abrahams’s famous “Come on, Jack!” commentary for BBC radio. The background is deftly and vividly done, particularly 1930s Oxford, the hype of the “Mile of the Century” races in America, and the sinister scenes of Nazi Berlin (though these are overheated in places). Lovelock’s death by an accidental fall under a New York subway train at age 39 makes an infallibly poignant ending, even though McNeish weakens it by untenably suggesting suicide. But his research into Lovelock’s married life and medical career in London and New York is turned into telling narrative. His version of Lovelock’s confused inner consciousness (as he presents it) is compelling. Anyone who knows the journals and the facts will have doubts, but it works well as fiction. By cunningly blurring the distinction between documentary and invented material, McNeish has made a runner’s life into a strong psychological as well as sporting drama.

5. Tom McNab’s Flanagan’s Run (London & New York, 1982) is an energetic and engrossing tale of an imagined coast-to-coast footrace across America in 1931. McNab makes fascinating use of a compendious knowledge of running history, as well as the social background of that fraught period. So an artisan Glasgow Scot races alongside an American ex-pug steelworker unionist, an English lord socially displaced by his father’s trade origins, an

ardent team of blond Nazi Germans seeking a propaganda victory, and innumerable illprepared hopefuls desperate to elude the Depression. An ex-showgirl adds love interest and leads the women’s running cause. Period flavor is enhanced by encounters along the way with celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks, Al Capone, J. Edgar Hoover, and a thinly disguised Avery Brundage. It has genuine insight into the psychology and the practicalities of ultrarunning, the runners : ever torn between their dauntless courage

__ and their fallible tendons. It’s so good on the McNAB running, in fact, that it would have been a Cosas hole : better novel if less anxious to spice itself up for the general reader with interludes of boxing; man-against-horse racing; Chicago gangsters; and the contrived marathon, which makes a less than convincing climax. The same trade-off limits the characters. They are OK and credible, but any depth is sacrificed to packing the action with more incident and invention. But it romps across the continent with as much resourceful gusto as its own irrepressible Flanagan.

4. Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner (New York, 1974) is running’s best love story. The passionate gay love between an outwardly militaristic college track coach and his star athlete is interwoven with Billy’s rise to the Olympic 10,000-meters title, with some vivid and fully human insights into gay culture and lifestyle, and with the whole complex of phobias and exclusion tactics provoked by successful gays in sports at that era. Many of these running novels make their main characters marginalized outsiders overcoming a hostile establishment, but this one brings in the whole dimension of a 1970s activist movement on behalf of the gays and its conformist opposition. Its idealism is very early ’70s, but it has a political and moral reach beyond most other books here. The running tends also to be idealized, as there is never any real sense of how hard training and racing are at this elite level; but the race sequences are succinctly dramatic, and there are fine lyrical descriptions of training runs through the hills and woods. Any flower-power pastoralism, however, is countered by some utterly authentic running locations. Painful scenes in the “outing” of the gays come at the weekly New York track writers’ lunch in an Italian restaurant and over steamy tea and sandwiches after a rainy RRCA 15K cross-country at Van Cortlandt Park. The narrative of athletes on the no-expenses fringe of international class traveling cheap from track meet

Roger Robinson RUNNING IN LITERATURE 121

to track meet around Europe is also certainly true to that era. Don’t read this one if you’re averse to sexually forthright love scenes, especially gay ones, or prefer to keep any illusions about movie audiences in parts of Greenwich Village. But for giving runners a real and significant emotional life and a place in a developing, morally conscious society, with running always an important part of their lives, this is one of the best.

3. Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” (novella in a short-story collection of the same title, London, 1959) is a small masterpiece of confessional, stream of consciousness fiction. It is difficult to rank here because more than half its 50 pages are about the 17-year-old narrator’s miserable and emotionally crippling home life and his consequent relish for petty crime. Yet in perhaps 20 pages of free-floating thoughts about his early morning training runs and the final cross-country race, it says more about the experience and inner meaning of running than almost any other book. Through running the narrator finds a full and complex identity that has been denied by a dysfunctional family and a society that addresses him only impersonally as “Smith.” He discovers and develops his running talent while serving time for burglary at a Borstal (boys’ reformatory home); but when the governor wants “Smith” to win the national cup for their team, he stops short of the line while well ahead and waits for the next runner to pass him and take the title. Thus Smith and his story defy every expectation of society, sport, and the heroic literature of running (every other book on this list) in one eloquent, outrageous, deeply disturbing gesture of negation. To understand the complex force of the ending, you have to know what his running means to him, and here Sillitoe’s writing is many layered and poignant. Running makes Smith feel free of the crowded pressures of society (the 300 other boys still asleep in the dormitory) and free of the squalid misery of home. Running makes him feel like “the first man ever to be dropped into the world,” giving him contact with the earth yet utter detachment, “turning at lane or footpath corners without knowing ’’m turning, leaping brooks without knowing they’re there.” It lets him think and yet be free of thought. In running he can relive the horror of watching his father die of throat cancer—‘now that I see my bloody dad behind each grass-blade in my barmy runner-brain I’m not so sure I like to think” —and work out his anger and revenge, and “curse the Borstal-builders and their athletics—flappityflap, slop-slop, crunchslap—crunchslap—crunchslap.” Through running he defies them all and forges his own new being for himself, “a long-distance runner, crossing country all on my own no matter how bad it feels.” All this is so complex and deeply felt that as he waits at the end of the race for his rival to struggle past him he is not gloating but weeping—‘‘something bloody-well made me cry”—for the grief, the loss of freedom, and “out of gladness that I’d got them beat at last.” The deepest irony is that the governor told him society

wants him to be “honest,” and Smith as runner finds and expresses honesty beyond society’s comprehension. “I knew what the loneliness of the longdistance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me.” Every runner has known something of that profound honesty. You don’t have to be a burglar to appreciate that Sillitoe gave running literature more than its most perfect title.

2. Brian Glanville’s The Olympian (London & New York, 1969) tells a story that is basically simple and familiar, almost archetypal. A suburban London club quarter-miler of no distinction as a runner and little attraction as a person is recognized as a potential world-class miler by a near-weirdo coach and transformed into an Olympic 1,500-meter contender. That outline of mere physical endeavor is enriched, however, with such invention of narration and intelligence of comment that it becomes resonant with emotional, moral, spiritual, and aesthetic significance. Literature has been doing this for war and love for centuries but has barely begun on the task of doing it for sport—our sport, anyway. Hence this series. As the narrative itself says early on about ordinary runners at a local track meet, they “have style, for the most part, only in movement.” A novel cannot actually show that movement, only describe it; but through language and narrated action it can give verbal form to the significance within the runners’ “suburban gaucheness,” the inner depths of courage or combativeness that very occasionally lets the luckiest of them “turn into lions and roar in the arena.” So Glanville charts Ike’s progress and problems not through a single lens but through shifting multiple perspectives. Sometimes we are inside Ike’s head, sharing his limited verbal responses to running, racing, and life—and often we come to understand more than he does. Sometimes an astute and much more articulate observer analyzes what we are shown and comments on its significance. News reports in authentic tabloid journalese (once a women’s magazine) emphasize the topicality of events, or the technique of film script denotes detailed visual effects that frame tight authentic dialogue. Many of a runner’s experiences are given verbal form, from crude caveman competitiveness (“he’ II fade on the second and third—then use Burke and bang again at the bell’”’) to the tumbling complexities of a guilty sleepless night. No book better catches the physical feeling and emotional trauma of sudden injury: “the agony of a man abandoned by his closest friend” (his leg). It’s good on power-mad officials, shamateurism, the mixed camaraderie and hostility of the international elite, the sexual electricity of a Games village, the disloyalties that disappointment can provoke, and much more. It risks a central character whose conduct is far from admirable, yet keeps us with him—just. Not quite all the way, however. When it asserts, “The athlete passes through

the Valley of the Shadow of Death, through the pain barrier, and is born again in the holy spirit,” the reader is being subjected to a borrowed resonance. There’s a dimension missing, which perhaps is best called sympathy, such as Sillitoe supremely evokes, or Warren, or McNeish. Though The Olympian has all the skills and subtleties that could make a winner, it finally falls a stride short of the sheer vitality, the throbbing brio of a book that has less range of accomplishment but more imaginative life, more passion, and more truth.

1. Tom McNab’s The Fast Men (London & New York, 1986), like all big-race winners, succeeds because its foundations are as good as its finish. Its success is built on two inspired and original story ideas. First, it is—unlikely as it seems—a story about runners set in the American Wild West. This is not the Hollywood version, though there are fights and violent deaths and Indians and Custer’s cavalry and Marshal Boone, but a historically authentic, raw, pulsating, and unstable society spread thinly over the vast continent, from the early Civil War to after the Little Bighorn. Second, the central characters are not only runners but actors. The rambunctious, inventive, entrepreneurial, combative energy of premodern sport is interwoven with the same qualities in early modern theater so that each becomes a metaphor for the other. Running and acting are performance arts, this acutely intelligent novel demonstrates, both seeming to exist only for an audience that pays the box office or the bookmaker. Both therefore have considerable elements of showmanship, sometimes falseness. Yet both at heart, it even more forcefully shows, are utterly genuine, demanding the highest degree of technical craft and artistic commitment, and rewarding their spectators by revealing the very best in human capability. “When you were at your best, on the boards or on the running-path,” muses Moriarty the distance runner/actor/ manager, “there was a feeling of power, energy flowing through body and mind. You were above the performance—it was performing you.” McNab thus, in giving imaginative life to running, returns it to one of its important origins. In his ramshackle frontier towns of planks and tents, the running course stands where it does in the carved marble stones of Delphi—next to the theater. The spectators at both feel what McNab here calls “this [strange] release, this joy, that men (and, dare I say it, women) gain from the witnessing of sport at its best.”

The novel is deeply informative about both running and theater, impressive in historical detail (though willing to modify it), and even more impressive in its sensitivity to the emotional and personal demands of doing both to a high level at any time in history. It is as good on the actor’s sense of lost rapport with the audience as it is on the athlete’s despair when injured, “feeling the injury buried deep, like a cancer—he felt himself a nothing, incapable of beating a matron of seventy.” Yet these insights and reflections make it no loitering meditation. It’s a story of jostling jampacked incident, crowded with characters, restive and always in motion. Superficially it is an on-the-road novel but has the extra dimension of being thoughtfully shaped and adroitly crafted. The brilliant opening scene, where a young Sioux is found spying in astonishment ona pair of White Eyes, one running uphill intervals, the other doing repetition sprints, is recurred to 200 pages later when runners (one of them the same sprinter) are captured scavenging for gold in the Black Hills a few weeks before Little Bighorn and forced to compete for their lives in the sacrificial Sioux ritual of “the Run of the Arrow.”

This pleasing sense of structure anchors all the book’s immense variety of action. A theatrical tour of England in 1861-1862 goes in parallel with the racing campaign there of Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett. Once we have witnessed the origins of Moriarty in the famine-stricken Scottish Highlands after

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Roger Robinson RUNNING IN LITERATURE ® 125

enclosure and the starving boy’s trek with his farmer-runner father, they never leave our mind, nor his. Through all its nomadic opportunistic travel, the book thoughtfully threads the progress of three marriages and makes its women, all actors, as energetic and active as their men, though also wiser. A few episodes seem included for their short-term effect and so weaken the book—a gunfight that simply fails to ring true, a final sequence that is stagy rather than dramatic, a sexy-squaw scene lifted from the movie Little Big Man. But not much is extraneous or inorganic, and that’s a good test of a novel.

As for the running, since that’s our main business, there’s more or less anything you fancy, short of ultras or Death Valley (it’s a wonder he didn’t think of that). True to history, the main frontier-town gambling events are sprints, but variety is provided in setting, competitors, handicap, and innovation (we supposedly witness the first spiked shoes and the first crouch start). There are Highland Games and a Cumberland fell race, Josiah Headley the coal miner quarter-miler and Deerfoot’s world record one-hour run, ride and tie, man against horse in sprint and high jump, Sioux religious running customs and song of the man who ran like the hawk, the world’s first sub-4:30 mile and first sub-two-minute 880, and much else. With splendid impudence, the author ends the book by claiming that his fictitious main character was the first to think of reviving the Olympics and gave the idea to a visiting Frenchman. Uniting all this, grounding its exuberant inventiveness in real human feeling, is the quality that captivates a young German American (who goes on to be one of the main characters) when he first sees sprinters in action. “It was the totality of effort that attracted him—the perfect, utter commitment to cover short distances in a blaze of speed, without hint of reserve. From the moment he first saw sprinters, he knew that was what he wanted to be.”

Omit the words “short” and “blaze,” replace “sprinters” with “runners,” and that is the truth of every book on this list and for every reader of this magazine. The Fast Men is a novel of vivid imagination and passionate truth about running.

Endnotes

1. Readers who run marathons may have noticed that this 5-part series on running in literature somehow fell into 26 sections and that the last section was by far the longest.

2. My thanks especially to Jonathan Beverly, Rich Benyo, Len Francis, Greg Vitiello, and Ray Wallis for suggesting and in some cases lending me books; to Steven Simon for a presentation copy; to my wife, Kathrine Switzer, for the use of others from her collection, some presented to her by their authors; and to the British Library for holding some otherwise vanished titles. es

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Fuel on Fat for the Long Run

It Is More Efficient to Tap Into Your Unlimited Fat Supply.

Miearory BIRDS and whales rely on stored fat to fuel their long, strenuous journeys. Developing your fat engine will increase the amount of energy you can generate, reduce the amount of carbohydrates you use, and stretch out the glycogen supply during long runs. Added together, you have a more stable and enduring energy supply, better endurance, and faster finish times.

To illustrate, let’s consider Shane. Shane is a computer engineer in his late 30s who has stayed active over the years with yard work, occasional football games with his kids, and sporadic attempts to weight train. In short, he was not aerobically fit. Inspired by the fortitude and tenacity of his wife, who just ran her first marathon, he decided to train for a marathon.

He was determined to be informed and methodical about the process. Many of the books he read recommended training with a heart rate monitor. The books said that most people run marathons at 75 to 80 percent of maximum heart rate, so he decided to do a test. He consulted a chart to find his heart rate at a more manageable effort of 65 percent and set off running. After only 90 minutes on the road, he felt nauseated and fatigued. His legs felt like bricks, and finally he was forced to stop. In other words, he bonked well short of the distance he would need to cover to finish the marathon.

Due to his low level of fitness, most of Shane’s energy was coming from the limited carbohydrate stores in his liver and muscles. He simply ran to the end of his carbohydrate supply. Carbohydrates are necessary to maintain exercise at any intensity. An excessively high rate of usage combined with low carbohydrate stores reduced his endurance, even at relatively easy running speeds. Had he eaten GU or drunk Gatorade, he still would not have been able to continue for much longer. A training program that focused on switching to fat for fuel would change that.

PUMP UP THE VOLUME

Arthur Lydiard contended that the most important aspect of conditioning is volume. In the 1960s his training concepts were revolutionary. Even the track athletes whom he coached followed a marathon-based aerobic conditioning program in the initial phases of their training cycles. Considering the phenomenal success of athletes who trained under Lydiard’s tutelage, such as Peter Snell, John Davies, and Lorraine Moller, and other athletes who have followed his program principles, his theories were insightful. Subsequent research has shown that they also possess a sound physiological basis.

While many of America’s marathoners switched focus to quality (and reduced mileage) rather than quantity, coaches from Japan, Italy, Mexico, Germany, and China were incorporating Lydiard’s principles into highly successful training programs. Naoko Takahashi reportedly ran up to 80K (50 miles) per day in preparation to become the first woman marathoner in the world to dip under 2:20. Catherine Ndereba ran comparatively modest 100-mile weeks in the buildup to her world record of 2:18:47 at Chicago in 2001. Jerry Lawson, imitating the high-mileage successes of Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar, and Frank Shorter, ran up to 250 miles per week en route to his then American record of 2:09.

Metabolically, high-volume training makes sense. There are two main sources of fuel for exercise: carbohydrates and fats. The energy supply from carbohydrate and fat is inversely related. High rates of carbohydrate use reduce combustion of fat. Carbohydrates are used preferentially at very high efforts, such as a 5K race, or at low fitness levels when fat metabolism is underdeveloped.

Conversely, when you teach your body to rely on fat for fuel, your combustion of carbohydrates goes down, thus “sparing” carbohydrates. This benefits performance in endurance events. You become very fatigued when you run too low on carbohydrates. We store only a very limited amount of carbohydrate (glycogen) in our bodies. Compare this with a relatively unlimited supply of fat. Even an athlete with only 6 percent body fat will have enough fat to fuel exercise lasting for many hours. When you use more fat, you generate more energy and your carbohydrate supply lasts longer.

Follow the principle of specificity. If you want to teach your body to use more fat for fuel, then create training conditions that generate high fat metabolism. Your body will eventually learn to prefer fat.

Research conducted at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden during the 1980s showed that, within the leg muscles of highly trained endurance men, the activity of enzymes that break down fats was 100 percent higher than in the untrained subjects. As a result, during exercise they had a much higher ability

Deborah Shulman, Ph.D. FUEL ON FAT FORTHE LONG RUN 129

to regenerate the ATP that fuels muscular contraction than those who had a greater reliance on carbohydrates.

These researchers found that the maximal oxygen consumption (or VO,max) was 50 percent greater in the trained men. Maximal oxygen consumption measures aerobic capacity: the efficiency of the lungs to transfer oxygen to the blood, the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen, the power of the heart and blood vessels to deliver large quantities of blood to the muscles, and the ability of the muscles to use the oxygen. Fats cannot be burned without oxygen. Not only did these men have more enzymes to combust the fat, but they also had more oxygen to feed the fire.

Researchers have since demonstrated that, after a 12-week six-day-perweek program of 45 minutes of running and cycling at a high intensity, fat combustion increased by 41 percent. This was accompanied by reduced reliance on carbohydrates.

MILES MAKE MITOCHONDRIA

The enzymes of fat metabolism are located in structures within the muscle cells called mitochondria. Fats are transported into the mitochondria where, in the presence of oxygen, they are broken down to generate energy. More mitochondria means more fat metabolism, more ATP, and more energy.

High-volume training increases the amount and size of mitochondria. Longer exercise bouts produce the greatest gains in mitochondrial content. A 90-minute run provides a better stimulus than a 60-minute run. It is common for runners to do “two-a-day” workouts to get in the necessary mileage. However, this research indicates that a runner will receive much more benefit from running one 90-minute workout than two 45-minute workouts. There is, however, a point of diminishing returns. A three-hour run is better at nudging the mitochondria content upward than a 90-minute run, but the gains are offset by the necessity of a longer recovery time between workouts.

During the base phase of building miles, it is the daily consistency of training over a period of weeks and months that will boost fat metabolism.

After the base phase and basic fat metabolism have been established, training time should be shifted into very prolonged runs of three or more hours, depending on your event. Very long runs are important in preparation for the marathon and longer events. After two to three hours of running, the leg muscles run low on glycogen. Hormonal adjustments to the low glycogen levels shift fat metabolism into an even higher gear.

Miles may make champions, but those miles should be carefully developed, monitored, and arranged to get the maximum effect. In his buildup program, Lydiard recommends alternating longer 90-minute to two-hour runs with 60minute runs on other days, aiming for a total of 10 to 11 hours of weekly running.

Give yourself plenty of time to build up to these levels. Jon Sinclair, former world-class runner turned coach, cautions that it is not practical or even possible for most people with full-time jobs and families to build up to running 10 hours per week in a mere three months. The amount of mileage you will be able to run depends on your lifestyle, physical capabilities, and prior training history. He advises his less-experienced athletes to build up mileage over a period of many months or even years. His associate, Kent Oglesby, took four years to prepare a 3:15 marathoner for the rigors of running 100 miles per week. The result was a 2:46 marathon, which earned her a spot at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials.

TRAIN AT THE TOP OF YOUR FAT-BURNING ZONE

My speed in long races had been declining since I had become a masters runner. For a number of years I had been running LSD (long, slow distance) type training. In the process of researching and writing about fat metabolism, Iread Lydiard’s book Running the Lydiard Way. Lydiard’s formula advocates not just high-volume training but high volume at speeds near the “maximum steady state.”

In other words, most training should be conducted close to the highest speed that you can run without going anaerobic. This is the speed where fat metabolism is at its highest. For experienced runners, the maximum steady state equals an intensity of 70 to 75 percent of maximum heart rate. For those just launching their running careers, it will be closer to 60 to 65 percent of maximum heart rate.

Studies have confirmed his theories. Volume and intensity interact to produce even greater gains in mitochondria development. Daily runs of 90 minutes at 70 percent max will boost mitochondria 30 percent higher than equivalent time spent at an easier 50 percent effort.

After purchasing a heart rate monitor and calculating my target heart rates, I was surprised to find that my LSD training intensity had been substantially below my target training intensity of 70 percent. Initially I had a hard time running more than 60 minutes at that effort. However, after only six weeks of faster training, I was easily able to maintain that pace for a full two hours. Although LSD training will increase fat metabolism and endurance, it will limit your endurance at marathon paces. Long, slow running will only teach you to run slowly for long periods.

On the other hand, you can run too fast on your daily runs. At faster paces, oxygen demand exceeds supply. You are now anaerobic. Fuel reliance switches predominantly to carbohydrates, and the result is the accumulation of lactic acid. Lactic acid inhibits the enzymes that break down fat and therefore reduces

fat metabolism. If you go out for a 45-minute run at 10K race pace, you will be burning less fat and generating more waste products than if you ran those 45 minutes at only a 60 percent effort. Daily hard efforts will result in accumulation of waste products and decreased recovery, and lead to declining performances. It’s better to run a little too slow than a little too fast.

RAISE THE LACTATE THRESHOLD

Let’s return to Shane after 24 weeks on his Lydiard-based training program. His fat metabolism is augmented, there is a substantially reduced reliance on glycogen, and his glycogen stores are larger. He again decides to test his ability to run at 65 percent of his maximum. Before the test he makes sure to get plenty of carbohydrates in his diet so that his leg muscles and liver are loaded with glycogen. This time he was able to continue for three hours.

His skeletal, connective, and muscle tissues; his metabolism; and his cardiovascular, nervous, and endocrine systems are now prepared for some faster training. His next step is to focus on increasing his endurance running speed and reducing his lactate production.

Endurance races are aerobic races. Marathons tend to be run at just below the level where you start to accumulate lactic acid, which is known as the anaerobic threshold (AT). How many times have you started a race too fast and gone anaerobic, only to suffer later and run slower than you planned oreven had to drop out?

With a higher AT, you will be able to sustain faster marathon and ultramarathon paces. Elite world-class marathoners often have such a highly developed fat-burning engine that they can run marathons at 85 percent or higher of their maximum. For the rest of us, 75 to 80 percent is a realistic goal.

Anaerobic threshold training augments the basic fat metabolism you have spent so much time developing. The result is faster running speeds over the long haul. A measured dose of faster, anaerobic training will teach your muscles and blood to metabolize and buffer lactic acid. The goal is to generate a manageable quantity of lactic acid that your muscles can dispose of easily and permit a sufficiently long training session and quick recovery. Venturing too far into the anaerobic zone will generate too much lactic acid, reduce the amount of work you can do within your training session, and risk lasting fatigue and overreaching. Marathoners don’t derive much benefit from 400-meter repeats.

Faster, sustained running at 80 to 85 percent and mile repeats are good methods to increase lactate tolerance. Oglesby recommends tempo runs of 10 to 12 miles at 15 to 30 seconds per mile faster than goal marathon race pace. An added benefit of these tempo runs is that the marathon pace feels easier and more manageable.

Arecent study examined the effect of high-intensity interval sessions on fat and carbohydrate metabolism and lactate concentrations in cyclists who had been training two to three hours per day for years. They replaced some of their endurance miles with two weekly sessions of 6-9 x 5-minute intervals with 1 minute of recovery between. After six weeks, the percentage of energy coming from fat during a one-hour trial had increased from 6 percent to 13 percent. How well this applies to a race lasting more than two hours is unclear.

Because of the results from studies on interval training such as these, many runners have opted out of the extended base-building phase citing “quality over quantity” as the rationale. I would like to emphasize that high-intensity training builds on the increased strength, resilience, and fat metabolism developed during those long, high-quality aerobic miles. Jumping into AT training before your body is sufficiently prepared will not produce the desired results: fast marathons.

SHOULD YOU EAT AND RUN?

Itis best to start an exercise session with stable, fasting blood glucose levels and higher blood fat levels. Glucose is a powerful regulator of fat metabolism. The higher the glucose content of the blood, the lower the fat metabolism. High blood glucose levels are generated from dietary carbohydrates.

This effect is associated with insulin. High blood glucose stimulates the hormone insulin to be released from the pancreas. Insulin is a storage and growth hormone. Its main job is to reduce blood glucose but it also acts to store fat and protein. In the process, insulin directly blocks removal of fat from fat deposits. These deposits are an important source of fat for exercising muscle. Insulin also reduces fat burning within the muscle. Therefore, increased insulin is considered to be antagonistic to fat combustion during exercise.

Inaninteresting piece of research, investigators at the University of Limburg in the Netherlands and at the University of Texas collaborated to determine whether high blood glucose and high insulin levels reduce the amount of fat burned during moderate-level exercise. A group of endurance-trained men cycled for 40 minutes at an aerobic 50 percent of maximum after an overnight fast. On another day, they ingested a drink containing 100 grams of glucose at 60 minutes before and then again at 10 minutes prior to the exercise test. This is acarbohydrate equivalent of drinking one and one-half liters of Gatorade an hour before a race and again 10 minutes before the start. While this may not mimic real-life situations, what the researchers found was telling. Fat metabolism was substantially reduced for the full 40 minutes of the exercise after the carbohydrate load.

Deborah Shulman, Ph.D. FUEL ON FAT FORTHE LONG RUN @® 133

While most people would not eat that much carbohydrate before a run, it is common for people to eat a sports bar, bagel, or banana in the hour prior to training. Try to avoid eating for at least two hours before a run.

It takes as little as 20 grams of ingested carbohydrate to raise insulin and reduce fat as fuel. If you have nutrition awareness or read the nutrition labels on foods, you will know that a couple of slices of bread, a banana, a sports bar, or a soda each delivers more than 20 grams of carbohydrate.

Fasting increases blood fat levels. Running after your overnight fast will increase fat burning. A cup of coffee beforehand may boost it even higher. Once exercise has started, eating carbohydrates does not generate a substantive insulin response. If you are starting a long run lasting two hours or more on an empty stomach, you may want to eat a sports gel or bar after 20 to 30 minutes throughout the run. Otherwise you will be faced with the nausea and fatigue of low blood sugar and have a poor training session. If you tend toward hypoglycemia when you get up in the morning, you may want to eat something in the minutes immediately before you head out the door. It takes 30 minutes for insulin levels to peak.

However, before a long race or run you will have more endurance and perform better if you eat a meal containing carbohydrate two to three hours before. Early in the morning, your liver glycogen stores, which supply blood glucose, have been depleted by the overnight fast. The brain and nervous system rely on blood glucose for energy. If you start a marathon without replenishing these stores, you will bonk. The two-hour time interval is sufficient to reduce blood glucose levels back to normal and restore fat metabolism.

WHICH DIET IS BETTER: HIGH FAT OR HIGH CARBOHYDRATE?

There has been considerable research in the past decade on the effect of diet composition on endurance. Prior to now, endurance athletes usually followed a high-carbohydrate diet with the rationale that enhanced glycogen stores are known to fuel superior training and marathon race performances.

Most sports nutritionists recommend a diet that supplies 6 to 8 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight. These levels of dietary carbohydrate can easily reach 400 to 600 grams per day. This adds up to 1,600 to 2,400 calories of carbohydrate per day. This type of diet doesn’t leave room for adequate amounts of fat or protein.

The downside of a high-carbohydrate diet, especially a diet loaded with sugar, is reduced fat metabolism and fatigue. This is largely due to chronically stimulated insulin levels. The effects of insulin can last up to eight hours,