Here is an article by a friend of mine, Matt Fitzgerald. He has just released his book “Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance”. Matt wrote the book to help runners, like you, manage their weight during their training schedules. I don’t know about you, but there are definitely hundreds, if not thousands of runners who jump into running to get that instant gratification; they want to shed those pounds ASAP!

Matt shows you how to realistcally manage weight and the challenges along the way. Enjoy the article!

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“There are lots of good books on endurance sports nutrition. There’s Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes, by Monique Ryan; Nutrition Periodization for Endurance Athletes, by Bob Seebohar; Performance Nutrition for Runners, by yours truly; and many others. Most of these books contain a chapter on weight management. But body weight and body composition are such major factors in endurance performance that they really deserve more than a single chapter, don’t you think?

I thought so, anyway, so last year I set about writing the first book exclusively focused on the issue of weight management for endurance athletes. That book, entitled Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance”, has just been published. If you have ever struggled to reach and maintain your optimal racing weight, you’ll want to check it out. I know I’m biased, but I think it will help you!

Racing Weight is divided into three parts. Part I (“Finding Your Racing Weight”) covers the importance of being light and lean if you want to perform better and gives you some unique new tools to determine your own optimal performance weight and to track your progress toward it. In this section you will also find chapters that address seasonal considerations (which cover topics such as managing your weight during the off-season versus the competitive season), as well as sport-specific nutritional challenges, and tips for beginning endurance athletes.

Part II (“Five Steps to Your Racing Weight”) presents a five-step plan to get leaner and lighter in a way that maximizes performance and all-around health. Each step in the plan is based on the latest advances in the science of weight management, especially as they relate to endurance athletes, and on the practices that are proven to work best in the real world. Here’s a quick synopsis of the Racing Weight plan for body weight optimization:

Step 1: Improve your diet quality.

Step 1 in my Racing Weight plan is to improve your diet quality, or the amount of nutrition you get from each calorie in your diet. Increasing the nutrition-per-calorie ratio of your diet will enable you to get all the nutrients you need for maximum performance from fewer total calories, thus enabling you to become leaner. An effective way to improve your diet quality is to grade or score the quality of your current diet and continue to score your diet quality as you make efforts to improve it. Nutrition scientists have come up with various ways of measuring diet quality. Most of these approaches are a bit too complex to be useful to the average runner, so I created a simplified diet-quality scoring system that you will find very easy to work with and that will help you nourish your body for health and endurance performance.

Step 2: Balance your energy sources.

There are three main sources of energy for the human body: carbohydrate, fat and protein. Each of these three “macronutrients” is used by the body in a different way. There are also different types of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that affect the body in slightly different ways. Consuming the right balance of macronutrients and the right balance of carbohydrate, fat, and protein types will help you achieve your optimal performance weight.

Step 3: Time your nutrition.

When you eat affects your body as much as what you eat. The timing of your food intake has a big impact on what’s known as energy partitioning, or what becomes of the calories you consume. There are three main destinations of food calories in your body: muscle, fat cells, and energy. If you want to become leaner, you need to shift the balance of energy partitioning so that more calories are incorporated into your muscles, fewer calories are stored in your fat tissues, and more calories are used to supply your body’s immediate and short-term energy needs. This shift will lead to more metabolism-boosting lean tissue and less health-jeopardizing fat tissue.

Interestingly, you can often achieve this objective with little or no reduction in the total number of calories that enter your body. We’re really talking about redirecting calories once they’ve entered your body, not about decreasing the number of calories that enter your body in the first place. The practice of nutrient timing, or consuming the right nutrients at the right times throughout the day, will enable you to partition your energy more effectively and achieve your racing weight.

Step 4: Manage your appetite.

Appetite is important. It is your body’s built-in mechanism for food intake regulation, and its job is to drive you to eat enough to meet your body’s energy and micronutrient needs, and no more. The appetite mechanism works very well under normal circumstances, having survived millions of years of evolutionary testing to the benefit of our health. But our modern lifestyle does not constitute “normal circumstances” in relation to the environment in which most of our evolution took place. Consequently, our appetite cannot be entirely relied upon to ensure that we don’t overeat.

In recent years scientists have learned a lot about how the appetite mechanism works. Understanding how your appetite works puts you in a better position to manage it effectively so that you consume only the number of calories you need to maximize your performance and no more.

Step 5: Train right.

Training errors are common in every endurance sport, even at the highest levels of competition. Many of these training errors not only limit performance but also prevent athletes from becoming as lean as they could be. Training methods continue to evolve at the elite level of each endurance sport. Bringing your training methods up to date will help you raise your level of performance and achieve or maintain your racing weight.

Part III of Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance” (“The Racing Weight Menu”) provides resources that will help you put the Racing Weight plan into practice. These resources include sample food journals from elite athletes in several different endurance sports (including Ryan Hall and Chrissie Wellington);

21 delicious and easy-to-prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes created by professional triathlete and dietitian Pip Taylor; and information about the few nutritional supplements that may help you get leaner.

‘Tis the Season

The holiday season – also known as the off-season for many endurance athletes – is upon us. This is the time of year when we tend to stray farthest from our ideal racing weight. That makes it the perfect time to invest a little pocket change in a resource that will help you reverse the trend. Don’t wait: Get your copy of Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance” today!”

Racing without thoughts of anxiety is an obstacle that suddenly hits runners in the last week before the race. Runners usually face a level of uncertainty and a little self-doubt on their abilities to run a race. There are few reasons for why this happens and I will share some ways of getting rid of anxiety.

photo credit: cguille

WHY ME?!?!

When that wierd, uncomfortable feeling hits, it spirals out of control which can really mess with your head.  The common reasons for these feelings are:

• Self Doubt: When you believe that you aren’t ready to run your marathon or worse, you don’t believe you’re a runner, it can really damage your self image. You honestly have to believe that you are mentally and phsyically prepared to run your race.
• A Bad Run: If a runner has a bad run near the last couple of days before race day, it can hurt you mentally. The fact is that there are going to be some days where you feel like crap! Forget that day even happened and move on; you’re better than that!
• Getting Sick: There are runners who get sick during their training. It’s heart breaking to dedicate yourself to train for so long and all of it fall apart because of a cold. It depends on the severity of your sickness and how quick you recover.  This topic is sensitive because it depends on how badly you have fallen into a cold.

There are more reasons that creates a level of anxiety and I would like to hear what you think in the comments section below.

How Do I Get That Boost!

There are a lot of books, audios and videos to get yourself “out of the dumps” and get your mind focused on the task at hand: running the marathon to the best of your ability. Here are methods to cope with thoughts of anxiety:

• Learn to Meditate: there are a lot of activities that are going on around us everyday that every once in a while, we need a release. To let go of the built up stress, I recommend that you practice yoga. If you have never practiced yoga, you are really missing out because it helps strengthen your muscles while relaxing your body to state that you have never experienced before. If yoga is out of the question, practice deep breathing in a quiet environment and believe me, it helps.
• Run a Tune Up Race:  a tune up race is a shorter race that prepares you mentally to deal with all the hype and energy of a race. Once you run the tune up, you will feel you have a stronger ability to deal with situations where you would usually lose your cool.
• Consult Your Inner Circle: I strongly believe in expressing whatever is troubling you, you need to get it out of your system. I like writing in a journal to get my thoughts out and into the open. A better option that a journal is to talk to people who care and understand what you’re facing; this is priceless. Build a network around you where you can bounce questions off one another, deal with issues each person is facing, etc. What you’ll notice that your inner circle’s abilties as runners will increase dramatically.

If you have heard some of these tips before or think that you already “knew that”, ask yourself: how much of it have I actually put in practice? Have you tried yoga? Have you attempted deep breathing?

I had a belief that deep breathing not something I see myself doing but when I tried it, I have to say that it has helped me in situation where I would have struggled.

What’s Next?

Please, please, PLEASE put this into practice.

If you are still struggling to reduce your anxiety, I would recommend that you pick up a book to get a better understanding how to cope with your anxiety. To be truly transparent, I haven’t read these books but I hear positive feedback for these books through forums and their ratings on Amazon:

• From Panic to Power: Proven Techniques to Calm Your Anxieties, Conquer Your Fears, and Put You in Control of Your Life
• The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques: Understanding How Your Brain Makes You Anxious and What You Can Do to Change It

They couldn’t choose titles that were any longer? ;)

Look Nehal…I’M SCREWED!

If you are seriously having issues, I want you to do one thing: ASK ME!

Please don’t hesitate to talk to me because I’m here to facilitate. You are smarter than you think and I know you have knowledge to solve obstacles that you’re facing. I am here to help you find answers to questions that you already know how to answer. What you can do to get my attention is either leave me comment below OR if it’s private, you can contact me and share what you’re facing.

I Pass The Mic Over to You:

What kind of obstacles are you facing in terms of anxiety or any mental barriers? If you have already faced some obstacles before, how did you deal with them? New runners who are shy to comment will get value out of it! :)