Chevron Houston Marathon Blog

The Science of Running (Answers Mysteries and Fixes Problems!)

 Thursday was a running geek’s dream day. But it came with some CONCERNS.

 After all, if you’re a running geek, running isn’t just running. It’s an obsessed hobby that requires its own wardrobe, food, thought and time. Lots of it. And Thursday, I got plenty of food for thought.

Memorial Hermann’s Ironman Institute offers human performance testing for runners, cyclists and triathletes - scientifically and medically uncovering the strengths and weaknesses of endurance athletes. I went through a battery of tests and found answers to some mysteries I had been content to let linger… mysteries that I and every runner need to address.

 First up: resting metabolic rate. This test was conducted by nutritionist Penny Wilson. She had me sit quietly for a few minutes before the test began, since I had been fighting morning traffic into the Texas Medical Center. Then she had me breathe quietly into a mask that measured my intake and output. (Naturally, it’s challenging to breathe normally when all you’re doing is thinking about your breathing and you’re doing it into a mask.)

 The end result: on my couch potato days (I don’t have many of those), I burn about 1700 calories a day.

Next: body composition analysis. The team had me get into a swimsuit. They weighed me (123 pounds) and then had me step into a pool of bathtub-warm water. I sat in a swing in the pool and on the count of 3, I plunged underwater in a ball and blew all of my air out. And I mean ALL of my air. I was told that anything that makes me buoyant – air, fat, et cetera, would be read as fat, and so in order to get the most accurate reading, I had to push out as much air as I could.

Result: 12.5 pounds of fat, or 10 percent body fat and about 110 pounds of muscle, bone, organs, and so on. This might sound good, but it’s something that many female endurance runners need to be concerned about. Here’s why: sports medicine experts recommend women have body fat of 12-20 percent. I’m too far below that and that’s something I have to address in order to be healthy, look my best and be a good runner.

Then, the lactate profile, the KCals per hour measurement (how many calories I burn per hour at different paces) and the 2-d running gait analysis (they looked at my running form). For all of this, I jumped on a treadmill. For the first three intervals, the team had me wear a mask that measured my oxygen intake and CO2 output to measure how many calories I was burning at first a 9:21 minute/mile pace, then a 9:04 pace, then an 8:42 pace. I did seven 3.5 minute long intervals in all of increasing speed, beginning at a 9:21 pace and ending at a 7:04 pace. In between each interval, Terry Dupler, Ph.D., the director of the Human Performance Lab, took blood from a finger to measure my body’s lactate production. The harder you work, the more lactate you release into your bloodstream and the lactate profile measures exactly where your body begins to work hard and where it begins to work very hard and where it begins to work too hard.

The result: I burn 705 calories an hour at an 8:42 pace. And if I want to qualify for the Boston Marathon, I’m going to have to do a lot more of my miles at that 8:42 pace… and a lot more speedwork at the excruciatingly uncomfortable 7:04 pace (I top out in lactate production at that pace.)

 

They also videotaped me running on the treadmill to take a slow-motion look at my gait. Analysis: Pretty good. I land on my forefoot; I land with my calf and foot right underneath the knee; I run very upright. On the downside, my calf muscles take a beating and I drop my hip a little at each stride and that makes a tiny little muscle called the piriformis sore, because it’s working harder than it’s supposed to.

To fix that, Anthony Falcone showed me some exercises on a stabilizer ball and showed me how to foam roll sore muscles and tendons.

Then it was back to a sit-down with nutritionist Penny Wilson again. This is when she explained what my resting metabolic rate is (again, that 1700 calories burned on the days I do absolutely nothing.) I had emailed her this three day food log:

 Saturday

7:30 am – one piece of whole grain toast, buttered, with Sarabeth’s blueberry-cherry preserves. Coffee. Felt hungry with a stomachache before, satisfied afterwards.

8:30am – iced grande Americano with cream and Equal

9:45 am – banana. 1 donut. 1 kolache. Felt full after banana, felt pressured to eat kolache and donut, felt too full afterwards.

11:30 am – Lean Cuisine meat lasagna

3pm – large organic apple (Felt a little hungry before, felt fine afterwards.)

 6:30 pm – Amy’s palak paneer meal (Indian; spinach with cheese, beans, steamed rice), 1 slice pumpkin pie. (felt hungry before, felt satisfied afterwards.)

Sunday

5am – Coffee. Buttered whole grain toast with Sarabeth’s blueberry-cherry preserves. (felt hungry before)

5:45 – second coffee. One bottle of cherry-lime Propel Zero.

6:30 am – one Cherry lime Gu

7am-7:45 – ran first leg of the Metric Marathon Relay. 8 min pace for nearly six miles, 70 degrees and humid. Drank maybe two mouthfuls of water at mile 2 or so.

8am – one banana, one bottle of water (more thirsty than hungry. Ate because I’m “supposed to”) 10am – iced grande Americano with cream and Equal

10:30am - two scrambled eggs (felt sick with hunger, craved protein, felt a lot better afterwards.)

11:45 – Panini – two slices of rosemary bread with smoked turkey, provolone and slices of apple, crisped with olive oil on panini maker. Kettle cooked potato chips.

2:30 – slice of pumpkin bread

4:30 – slice of pumpkin bread

6:30 – Lean Cuisine chicken and broccoli fettuccine, slice of cake, diet Coke

Monday

8:45am – Coffee, one slice of buttered whole grain toast with Sarabeth’s blueberry-cherry preserves.

10:15am –Chobani mango yogurt.

10:45am – iced grande Americano with cream and Equal

12pm – chicken with steamed vegetables and rice with a ginger-jalapeno broth-like sauce. One fried veggie egg roll. Diet Coke.

3pm – large organic apple

6pm –diet Coke

8pm, slices of pesto provolone cheese, smoked ham, one tortilla, a slice of pumpkin pie (homemade – pumpkin, condensed milk, eggs, graham cracker crust.) 

 But Wilson had some concerns that I am addressing. I need to eat more. Even though I am taking in something every two to three hours, I’m apparently only consuming about 1600 calories a day. Add that to my energy output – imagine anywhere from 350 to 1400 extra calories burned a day on top of my resting metabolic rate of 1700 calories a day, and I am facing the same issues many female endurance athletes face – not fueling enough.

My goal now is to eat more – to give my body the calories it needs to work, run and play. She also said my body composition of 10 percent fat was a little too low – 12 to 20 percent is ideal for women and that it can contribute to health issues like bone loss.

This shouldn’t be a problem because I’m eating more – and taking a calcium supplement.

She encouraged me to take in more calories – starting first with switching my iced Americano with a latte, taking my calorie intake on my espresso-drink habit from a mere 30 calories to 150 calories a pop. She also encouraged me to try to eat more, which may be a challenge given time constraints and given the fact that I get full very very easily.

So, it’s a couple of days later and I have bought a foam roller and a stabilizing ball. I’m drinking a tall nonfat gingerbread latte, light whip please, instead of my customary iced grande Americano with cream in the morning. I’m trying to eat a little more. And I’m running a little faster. The human performance tests were eye-opening – I found out a lot that I didn’t realize. And now it’s going to help me eat more so I can perform better, not just in the marathon, but in life too.

Team Tripod Eats A Cupcake

Marathons involve the brain as much as they involve the legs. Training for one is sometimes a contest between which one will give up first – the mind or the body.

This all starts with the 16 week marathon training plan. When the Internet spits out my four months of training, neatly lining up the days I run and how far I run and how fast I’m supposed to do all this – it’s also spitting out an instruction manual of how I am supposed to arrange my days and weeks in order to make it to the finish line.

This takes some discipline and time management. Some days this is easier than it is on others. Saturday, for instance, it was a piece of cake. The training schedule calls for three easy miles and I did it on the treadmill with my iPod cranked up high. I barely broke a sweat.

Thursday – totally different story. I just did not. Want. To. Run. Period.  I was supposed to run seven miles at a nice easy pace. I ended up eking out six miles before I had to pick up my daughter from school. I think I pouted to myself the entire way.

Anyway, I’m in need of some early-season inspiration. So I signed up for the Texas Metric Marathon Relay with reporter Sonia Azad and photographer Chris Day. And then I bought myself a new pair of the shoes I loved so much last year – the Asics Gel Speedstar. It’s a very obnoxious shoe.

 

So now Sonia (who is running the Aramco Houston Half Marathon) and I have something for which to train, something we’re half looking forward to and half dreading. Here is the email conversation we had after I registered our team:

Sonia: This means it's real!... 

Sent from my iPhone

Me: I know. I have decided in the last half hour that I am too slow to be allowed to live any longer and very out of shape and surely will die before I finish.

Sent from my iPhone

Sonia: Shut up.  I'm going to eat a cupcake now. 

Sent from my iPhone

The Metric Marathon Relay (26.2 km split up into three legs) is Sunday November 13 in downtown Houston.

We are Team Tripod (get it, three legs? Ha ha.)

 

A Texas Runner. Finally.

I am a Texas runner. I proved it in this last, hottest summer on record.

I was a teenager in Colorado when I first laced up a pair of running shoes, a member of my high school cross country team. For years, that alone was proof of my toughness as a runner – I had run the sidewalks and streets of the Mile High City, the trails of the Rocky Mountains, earning my stripes in the thin air.

I ran through the icy winters of Upper Midwest, swathed in black Lycra tights and fleece tops, breathing through the mask of a balaclava and feeling ice droplets form on my eyelashes. My Yak Traks (essentially tire chains for running shoes) clawed at the snow ruts and slipped over the black ice while I dodged the pot holes and cracks in the asphalt of Michigan’s capital city.

That too, I thought, proved my toughness as a runner – my ability to endure the extreme cold, to get so overheated on 20 degree days, I would rip off my gloves and unzip my running jackets without ever missing a stride.

I knew when I moved here, the heat was going to be an obstacle.

The summer of 2009 was a hot one. I sweated and flushed through my days in the field, reporting, and many days returned to the station at the end of the day with pink cheeks and a heat headache. My photographers would drive, and I would look out of the passenger window at the runners circling Memorial Park or Rice University or cutting through Hermann Park and I would wonder how they did it without collapsing.

The couple of mid-day runs I attempted that summer were slow, short, sickening affairs. I ran a lot on the treadmill at the gym, or after the sun had gone down, striding quietly and surprisingly up on neighbors out walking the dog before they turned in for the night.

It got a little better in 2010. I started to resent too much air conditioning. I returned to the station at the end of a day reporting feeling no different than I had in the morning. I still avoided running outside when the heat index got above 95 or so.

2011 was the year that something changed.

I ran outside without flinching on days when the temperature was 102 and the heat index was easily 105. The running was hard and I’d be dripping with sweat, my face crimson with the effort when I got done with my 3 or 6 miles. I’d stop for water when I could and gave myself mental permission to walk if it just didn’t feel good.

I ran far more often than I walked. The sun didn’t bother me so much anymore, although any breeze was a blessing and I’d run headfirst into one if I found it.

And then the weather broke in the beginning of September – a few sweet days when the highs only got into the low 90s. That’s when I realized what it means to be a Texas runner – when 93 degrees is a nice-cool, easy run; when 105 degrees and blazingly sunny doesn’t keep me inside parked on the couch.

I imagine, though, that I’m going to be making good use of my tough-Michigan-winter running gear to get through Houston’s (comparatively) mild winter.

The trade-off is worth it. Chevron Houston Marathon 2012, here I come.

 

 

One For The Record Book

The marathon isn't much more than a blur to me, one week later.

I woke up at 2:30 marathon morning, with what felt like an asthma attack. An anxiety dream, I'm guessing.

 Sonia Azad and I show off finishers' medals. She ran the half marathon; I ran the full marathon.

The race? It was humid, it rained, it was a long way. I know I ran from 7am untl 10:56am without stopping. I was in an almost-trance and I cannot remember very much of what I thought about. I remember feeling grateful to the people who hand out orange slices along the way. I have vivid snapshots in my mind - the fathers sprinkling holy water at Rice University, the halfway point (it was still raining), the hill on Westpark between 14 and 15 miles, some point in the Galleria, 23 miles on Allen Parkway when I slammed into the wall, 25 miles where I pushed through the wall, the finish line. I was carrying my cell phone and I had forgotten to silence my alarms, so at 9am my alarm went off. It sounds like church bells. It went off over and over again for miles. I'm sure the runners around me were wondering why church bells were ringing in my running shorts for so long. Sorry guys. The last quarter mile was hard - I closed my eyes and whispered to myself, knowing I was going to set a personal record.

3:56:47.

Just a few feet past the finish line and a fist pump, I stopped and doubled over. I thought at the time that I was just stopping to catch my breath, to gather my noodle legs underneath me. But I just saw the pictures and it looks more like a near-collapse, although I swear it was not that dire. Then again, I didn't understand why the medical personnel were on me so fast -- and I had thought the person in the red jacket was a woman. Looking at the Brightroom photos a week later, I see that person was a man - and not only that, there was another medical person, a man in a blue jacket, who I do not remember.

I did not qualify for Boston, but I set a personal record. And now, next year (yes I'm already declaring I will run the full 2012 Chevron Houston Marathon), I just have to shave six minutes off that time.

It was a great race.

Food Loading

I'm not going to call it a "carb load" this year. I'm going to call it a "food load." And I'm starting a week early.

Let me explain the difference between running now and running a year ago. A year ago, it was fine. I was in shape and running was easy. I'd sweat, I'd get all out of breath, I'd run my distance and I'd feel just, well, fine. This year - wow. It feels like I'm gliding from foot to foot, my shoulders square and twisting, my breath just a tick or two above standing still.

Of course, a year ago, I weighed 28 pounds more than I do now. Watching the size drop on my clothing tags over the last year has been ego-inflating. Wearing a bikini last summer for the first time since before my pregnancy was a GREAT feeling. It's been fantastic to get reacquainted with my cheek bones in the mirror.

But I have found running skinny comes with a whole different set of issues - like having enough fuel to complete some of the tougher runs, and eating enough to keep myself from going over the edge into unhealthy, scary skinny. For the record, I am not a fan of the sickly, skeletal, scary skinny thing. And I have a *thing* for blue cheese burgers and hot crisp french fries coated in salt.

Early on in this training season, I discovered I seemed to lose a significant enough amount of weight after a long run that people would comment that I'd lost yet-more-weight. Not good. I also re-discovered the horrible, dizzy, heart-palpitating feeling of completely running out of fuel on a long run - a long long way away from the car - and realized that I cannot take eating or not for granted anymore. Also not good.

A year ago, I could run 18 miles having eaten only peanut butter toast for breakfast and nothing else. Of course, I was carrying plenty of fuel on board. On Christmas Eve, I crashed and burned attempting 18 miles. As I passed the 11 mile mark, I felt weak and dizzy and sick. I made it to 11.81 miles according to my Garmin and I had to stop. Had to. I made it back to my car slowly and without incident, except for a couple of tears. This kind of burnout - a "bonk" in runnerspeak -always comes with the bottom dropping out of my mood for a few hours until I can rest and eat and drink water.

So lesson learned, I inhaled a blue cheese burger and a side of sweet potato fries 15 minutes after completing a 17 mile run the next week. In the days after that, I ate chocolate chip cookies and a chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting my daughter and I made to begin 2011 on a sweet note. I ate fried Japanese dumplings and scoops of steaming sticky white rice. I crunched on Baked Cheetos and noshed on cheese pizza and made biscuits in my oven and slathered them with salted sweet cream butter. I gulped down a lovely pasta with prosciutto and basil and a cream sauce. I've spooned up buckets of Greek yogurt and swallowed loaves of whole wheat toast. I've had handfuls of banana nut Cheerios and imbibed salads made of organic lettuce and heirloom tomatoes and blue cheese crumbles and red grape halves. I've scrambled free range eggs with artisan cheddar cheese and rolled them up in warm tortillas with homemade salsa.

Yeah, I'm food loading.

I've completed yet another very long run and have one more this week. This year, I believe I'm on track to at least break that frustrating four hour marathon mark. I'm not so sure about qualifying for Boston,
but we'll see. If I don't make it, it won't be because I left out one of the biggest components of marathon training - food.

Mission: Impossible

Cue up the Mission Impossible theme music. I’m aiming for 3:43 this time around.

It probably sounds, well, impossible after I ran my first two Chevron Houston Marathons in 4:twentysomething (I was so disappointed I have blocked my 2009 finishing time from my mind) and 4:11:26. After all, that’s shaving 18 minutes off my marathon personal record – 4:01:26 at Detroit in 2006.

But theoretically, I can do 3:43. I can run a 5k in 23 minutes without too much effort., so I have the speed. I have finished (running, not walking) every marathon I have entered, so I have the endurance.

So what’s the problem? In 2006, I stayed with my training partner for the first 12 miles. She’d pulled a groin muscle a week before the race and I had promised to stay with her as long as I could. She finished. I beat her by 22 minutes. (Update: She just finished the 2010 Detroit Free Press Marathon in 3:44.)

In 2009, I trained for only 12 weeks. I stopped to talk about the race twice during our live coverage. I was also carrying baby weight I hadn’t lost.

In 2010, I paced someone for the first half and stopped at the half to talk to Elissa Rivas for our live broadcast. I was also still carrying weight. I’d stopped calling it baby weight since my daughter was nearly two and a half.

2011 is going to be different. No excuses.

The day after the 2010 marathon, I started eating better and cutting my portion sizes. To date I’ve lost 28 pounds – and that’s 28 pounds that won’t be slowing me down for 26.2 miles. My body mass index dropped from a healthy 24.6 to a svelter but still healthy 20.5.

I have begun a 16 week training plan.

I won’t be pacing or staying with anyone. I’m running solo. I won’t be stopping to talk during our live coverage.

During the 2010 race, it slowed me down by more than 5 minutes. Justin Sternberg, the special projects producer who is part of the marathon coverage, said, “You can make Boston this time.”

Gulp. No excuses.

So my mission, which I have chosen to accept, is 3 hours and 43 minutes. It breaks the frustrating four hour mark. It qualifies me for the prestigious Boston Marathon. And no, I don’t think I’ll self destruct on the way to a 3:43.

See you at the finish line