Red Bull: The (Nearly) Two-Percent Solution

Spend enough time with a demographic which closely resembles the target viewing audience for adventure sporting events, and you cannot help but notice the large drink cans close by.  Even after nine weeks of boot camp, with plenty of exercise and the finest food the military has to offer, (all right, there's a good reason the dining facilities are called "mess halls) the young men and women I encountered on a weekly basis in my classroom drank can after can of sugary "energy drinks." 

When my wife makes the decision to party she doesn't hit the white zinfandel or the belgian Trappist ale.  She resorts to a very popular energy drink, often mixed with vodka.  The drink mixture makes as much sense as my Sunday brunch switch between a large cup of Seattle's finest export, the name of which rhymes with "four bucks," and a chilled flute of mimosa.  Take enough of the stuff in and you have a buzz in two different forms...a very alert drunk.  But that's a different editorial statement altogether.

The folks who make the beverage in the little blue and silver cans seem to be everywhere in the past couple of months.  Whether it's a guy who wants to go the speed of sound without an aircraft or a bunch of runners who want to outrun roller derby girls, the beverage and it's logo is darned near ubiquitous.  And the advertising is more, er, mature now.  I haven't seen as many of the silly black-and-white line-drawing animated cartoons.  They're back to focusing on a message of: 'drink this if you want to go farther than anyone else.'

That little blue and silver can...what's it got?  Well, about the same amount of sugar or sweetener as a typical soda...about 65 percent of the caffeine of the same sized coffee...some B-vitamins, a chemical found in detox drinks, and the amino acid taurine.  If you're used to drinking coffee before a race or a workout, there's a really good chance you probably won't be hurt drinking the beverage that reportedly "gives you wings."  In fact, it's not just the caffeine that may help your run performance, but the taurine.

First, taurine is commonly found in skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle and brain tissue; the chemical has been suspected to have a strong role in a number of physiological actions but until recently there was little research done.  Four researchers in the United Kingdom recently investigated the amino acid's effect on endurance performance, testing run performance for a three-kilometer time trial.  They found the subjects who took the taurine two hours prior to a maximum simulated 3K effort on a treadmill improved their performance by an average of 1.7 (and up to 4.2) percent, without appreciable change in heart rate, oxygen intake or perceived effort.  The researchers weren't able to explain the specific reason for the improved performance, however.

But, the little aluminum can is not necessarily the "two percent solution."  Energy drinks containing the two known ergogenics (caffeine and taurine) in other studies were shown to aid in endurance and resistance to fatigue, but the additional ingredients may slow or limit the body's ability to benefit from them.

REFERENCE:  Balshaw, TG, Bampouras, TM, Barry, TJ, Sparks, A (2012). The effect of acute taurine ingestion on 3-km running performance in trained middle distance runners.  Amino acids.  Springer-Verlag, Aug 2

Running Mad - Does Stress Help Runners?

Consider me a modern-day "Martin," travel-and-adventure companion of Candide in Voltaire's short story of the same name.

I'm the anchor-like balance to my wife's "best of all possible worlds" point of view. We balance each other quite well, and have done so over the past eight-and-a-half years. My bad days normally coincide with her positive moods; the moments Suzanne feels like ripping out the hearts of her adversaries like an Aztec priestess are balanced by my 'karma happens; they'll receive their just reward soon enough' attitude.

Fortunately for the world around us, both Bowens are rarely in a cranky mood. But when those days come, it's usually the perfect timing for a workout.

I had banged my head against the desk all day yesterday, and suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous commuter misadventure. What is it about idiots who want to whip around you, just so they can sit in front of you at the intersection? 'Oh, goody, you get a cookie for making it to the stoplight first. Now you can sit there as long as I do, jerk.'

I came through the front door to see my loving bride seated at her computer, running gear on. No greeting, save for "I really need to hit the treadmill today."

Funny, but that's exactly how I felt.

Minutes later, we walked the half-mile to our neighborhood gym, which gave Suzanne the opportunity to vent about the major topics of the day. When she mentioned she had eight telephone calls interrupt her labors I had to admit a small twinge of guilt; I was responsible for 25-percent of them. Well, the calls seemed pretty darn important at the time.

Once we got to the gym, we attacked the treadmills; taking no prisoners, giving no quarter, leaving nothing behind but sweat.

Returning home didn't mean the end. We immediately leashed my sister-in-law's terrier and our greyhound and took them for a walk. We took no doo-doo from them, either, pun intended. It wasn't until some time close(r) to 7:30 when we finally relaxed enough to sit down for dinner.

Suzanne has told me she enjoys working out or racing while she's angry. One of her best half-marathon performances - or one of her best performances in a half-marathon, I cannot rightly recall - came after a younger woman made a wise crack about her age at the bottom of a hill. She put on a surge which amazed the course worker at the to the top of the hill, coasting through the remainder of the course under a full head of steam. Suzanne, nor the course workers, recalled seeing the younger woman nearby for the remainder of the race.

On the other hand, I consider anger or other emotions a fuel good only for very short-term endeavors. All those chemicals which contribute to the classic fight-or-flight response may light off the afterburners, but they also cause a few less-than-positive consequences:

First, the breathing becomes more shallow. I'm not so certain about you, but I have enough difficulties keeping enough air in my lungs during the course of a 5,000-meter road race. So, stressing out doesn't work so well for me cardiovascular-wise.

Second, the muscles are tensed up in order to either kick, swing, pummel, bludgeon or withstand a kicking, swinging, pummelling or bludgeoning. Tense muscles are inefficient muscles...we do speed training to learn how to run at speed in as relaxed a manner as possible, not in as tight a manner as possible.

Third, the brain tends to think less critically. It's one of the unintended consequences of all that nice adrenaline, epinephrine, cortisol, cholesterol, glucose...and the many other chemicals pumped into our bloodstream by our endocrine system. Anyone who has ever been in a life-or-death situation will say they probably were thinking of little else but how to get to the nearest egress. And thinking, serious status checking, is crucial for road racing...especially when the race distance moves from 5k to 10k, from 10k to 21k, and so on. Lapses in thought can cost seconds and minutes.

So, remember that running ought to be the release from the stress of the day, not an extension of the stressors.

Take A Few Days And Call Me In The Morning

I wrote last week about a case of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), what I jokingly referred to as "God's Way Of Saying You Should Have Kept Walking," at least in my case. For a solid week I was mystified, mortified, stupified - and in the case of my quadriceps muscles - petrified and nearly-ossified. There's nothing like the frightening feeling of having those big leg muscles fire off, leaving your legs to wobble in unexpected ways, especially when you're walking down the halls of your office building on a Thursday afternoon. It could have been sympathy pains for all of those marathoners I watched a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not certain.

When it comes to physical activity after a race, I've tried to follow a few rules of thumb which I picked up over time with my athletes:

1. A day of light activity (translate this as "no running") or rest for every hour of racing. I've traditionally taken a day off, or run very gently, the day after racing a 5K or 10K, and recommended the same to my own athletes.

2. A day of easy running for every mile raced. An athlete running a 5K or 10K would be constrained from hard interval workouts or tempo running for three-to-six days. In our case here, track workouts usually have been two or more days out from a race, or easy in intensity.

Marathons and half-marathons usually do a different kind of damage to the average (citizen) athlete; there's a lot of eccentric muscle activity over an extended period of time. Many coaches and training plans recommend easy running in the days following to keep the large leg muscles from becoming too damaged. The problem is that those easy runs, especially in the first week, do little but delay the recovery process, as defined by decreased muscle volume contraction, decreased running efficiency and increase in blood chemical markers related to muscle damage. Groups of runners who rested in the days following a marathon performance were found to have greater muscle strength and decreased soreness.

So, if there's that compulsion to get out and do something in the days after a long race, let it be something at the perceived intensity level of four on a one-to-ten scale...or less. Odds are good that's going to be a walk, but that's okay. You'll be back to running - and excited - in about five or six days.

God's way of saying "Take two and call Me in the morning..." It certainly beats hobbling.