Nutrition 101: Macronutrients vs micronutrients

I want to blog a fair bit about nutrition and sport.  With my first ultra running season lying ahead of me I am particularly conscious of the huge effect that nutrition can have on performance in an ultra.

There are hundreds of different viewpoints out there on nutrition and what is best for us in our sport.  What I want to address in this post, as a foundation to all other posts on nutrition, is the crucial difference between macronutrients and micronutrients.

Macronutrients
Macronutrients are the larger building blocks of our nutrition: fats, carbohydrates and proteins.  Most sports nutrition tends to be about macronutrients - what proportion of your diet should each macronutrient have, what macronutrients should you have to enable recovery and what macronutrients in what quantities help you acheieve race weight?  Yes, there is a shift happening in people's thinking, but it is early days and this is where the focus still is in people's minds.

So, in running circles, people are interested in whether you are still on a high-carb diet, a high-fat diet, a paleo diet or whatever; their thinking is that the perfect running diet is found by moving these big building blocks around until you get them in the right quantities at the right time. Sorted!

It is this approach to sports nutrition that results in recommendations as patently stupid as the classic "chocolate milk for recovery". Ugh!  The idea is that it has the perfect 4:1 ratio of carbs to protein that has been "scientifically proven" (cue to turn your brain off and stop actually thinking critically) to "maximise recovery".

Just say "no"!

Micronutrients
In contrast, micronutrients are not you big blocks, but your little blocks (so to speak).  They are your vitamins and minerals, and, more so, antioxidants and phytonutrients that are found in varying quantities in our food.

The science of nutrition is exploding currently.  A hundred or so years ago we thought we had solved our health woes by discovering the main vitamins and minerals.  We could now extract them, replicate them and ensure good health by placing them in our produce.  But now we know that there are probably tens of thosuands of micronutrients all working together in a symbiotic harmony in plants and vegetables.



For people who, like me, have been schooled in the macro-centric mentality regarding nutrition, micronutrients tend to be the things you take in pills as your "insurance policy" for your health.  Finish your run and grab a chocolate milk to help you recover and just so long as you take your daily multi-vit you should, touch wood, be okay.  These days we are moving forward a little and people are talking more about antioxidants and so people may stretch to a few berries and feel good about themselves for doing so.


A different approach
I have so much more I want to say about all this in future posts and this is only intended to be an introduction to it all that I can refer back to later, but let me simply, for now, suggest an alternative approach.


I am a nutritarian these days.  What that basically means is this:  no matter how many calories my body needs in a day, I want to get as many micronutrients as I can into those calories. That's it.  I don't put so much focus (though there is still some) on what macronutrients I eat, as much as what micronutrients I eat.



So when I finish a hard session and have inflamed muscle fibres that need to recover, I'm not bothered about whether I am going to refuel with a 4:1 carb to protein ratio and I am certainly not going to have a glass of chocolate milk which is laden with all sorts of stuff that will produce additional inflammation on a cellular level and has almost no micronutrients.  I am wanting to eat fruit, berries, nuts and even salad that will flush my body with the necessary micronutrients to reduce the inflammation and restore, repair and refresh my body.

I have run a lot of miles over the years and, having studied Sports Science at university, knew the standard line about the right amounts of macronutrients to maximise recovery.  While holding 30+ weeks of 100+M in 2010, I was, unsurprisingly, struggling to recover.  Via a friend, I checked with a sports nutritionist whether I was getting enough protein - the consensus was that running 140-160mpw required more than the textbooks said.  So I started eating a lot more meat. And I felt the effect - I definitely started recovering better. 

In 2012 I really started taking the nutritarian approach to eating and immediately shocked me was that I could run the same amount, eat a fraction of the amount of protein I was eating before I increased it in 2010 and yet recover better than ever before. My legs had never felt so fresh on such a high mileage!


2012 was a learning curve nutritionally, but I started the year experimenting with nutritarianism and finished the year fully committed.  I eat less protein than before, ignore many of the "golden rules" and yet recover much better.  Food for thought... (pun intended).

So, for now, I simply suggest that when you think about sports nutrition you start to give more focus to your micronutrients than you may have done in the past.   More to come on this in the future...

Points in Time: An Introduction

This is an introduction to what I am going to be calling my "Point in Time" posts.  Let me explain...

Some runners who blog never give details of their training at all - I have always disliked the "keep your training secret" approach as I have benefited so much from the "freely you have received, freely give" approach.  Others will give details of key runs and key principles, but not all the minutiae of details - this is great but I often find it frustrating as the details are often the crucial part.  Others will tell us every they have done in training routinely - that is a huge blessing to me and if you don't want those kind of details, you can skim over those posts or ignore them altogether.

As you can tell, I lean to the "more detail" approach of blogging one's training, but for me personally there needs to be a couple of caveats:

1. I have not posted up my training details fully before for several reasons, one of which is that I really am nothing special in the running world.  Please do not take me now doing so as any delusion of grandeur!  It's just that I am unusual in my approach (higher mileage) and am now doing ultras; I myself have scoured the web looking for all the information that would help me cover a ridiculous 100 miles as quickly as possible.  I will approach it my way and I am aiming to be fairly competitive - I'm not looking to simply complete a challenge in the middle of the pack.  So any reader can, like me, look back at what I have done in training, how I have performed in races and learn what they can from it.  Even if it is a case of learning not to do this or that, it has been a productive exercise.
2. I do not ever want the pressure of getting my training up on a weekly or bi-weekly basis routinely.  My life is not conducive to that right now (for many reasons). 

So what I am going to do is put the training up, sometimes more detailed and sometimes less so, but it will all be there.  However, it will be posted sporadically - I may go for a month or more without posting it, I may do it weekly or I may have a great session and post up just a few days after my last "point in time" post.

I would love to be able to see Ryan Hall's training log for the 12 months leading up to this race!

If you read it and if it is helpful, do let me know, either in the comments below, on Facebook or privately.  If nobody says they want to see it I may not bother. But, like I said, I love reading this kind of stuff from others, and there must be others like me out there.

So, 16 days into 2013, I better get on with the first update...

The ABCs of race prioritising

There is something special for a runner when he or she pins a number on.  It's as if our VO2 max increases, our lactate threshold rises and our endurance extends all with that simple act.  But all races are not equal.

We all have our own various ways of categorising races; ways of delineating their priority in comparison with each other.  Some people have "A" races and "B" races (most common), others do it somewhat differently.  What I want to share with you is my own form of categorisation that I use.

ABCs

An "A" race is one of the big ones.  Typically there will only be a few of these each year/season. If you have 10-12 "A" races, then they are probably not "A" races. These are the big few - the ones that really matter.

The way I approach an "A" race is that, when planning my training for the days preceding the race, I ask myself: "Will this help me race better on the big day?"  If the answer is "yes" then that is how I will train.  Other considerations such as maintaining fitness, acheiving mileage goals and looking ahead to future races all become irrelevant.  The only thing to consider is how to be the best you can be on race day. Ultimately, we are talking about the tricky topic of tapering (one for a future post, no doubt) - that act of resting up to get the body ready to rumble without resting so much as to lose fitness and perform less well.  However you do it, the goal is to be ready to perform as well as you can on race day.

Practically speaking, in my case, I'd be careful not to rest to much. I've learnt over the years that my body thrives on plenty of easy miles and so I'd not drop the mileage too much.  I would ease back on both the intensity and the duration of any hard workouts.  But, as I said, more of that in a post on tapering some day.

Now if we drop down to "C" races, these are the races that are more like workouts.  The results don't really matter so much, they are there to see your progress, to assess your fitness or simply to get a decent workout in.

The way I approach "C" races is that, when planning my training for the days preceding the race, I ask myself: "Will this detract from the bigger goals?" If the answer is "yes" then I accept that I may not do as well as I could in the race but I keep my eyes on the prize: the future "A" races.  I will continue to train with the big goals in mind and treat the "C" races more like a workout.

Lydia enjoying the local road relays (a bunch of C- races) for the fun of it!

Practically speaking, I would rest up for a "C" race in a similar way that I would for a decent workout.  For example, tonight is my first race of the year: a 10km on a closed circuit cycle track and most definitely a "C" race.  I have been working on increasing my speed endurance at faster paces in training and this is a chance to see how I am getting on.  So, if tonight were a track session, I would be doing my easy "double" recovery run in the morning (I usually do it in the evening) for 5-7M.  Tonight is a "C" race so this morning I did an easy recovery run of 5-7M. Simple.

"B" races are trickier.  You have to walk that middle ground between "A" races and "C" races.  They are more important than "C" races and you want to be more rested up, get a clearer picture of your form and perform better.   But they are less important than "A" races and you don't want to risk losing fitness and detract too much from the greater goals.

Tim racing himself into shape with a B- 10km a few years ago

Practically speaking, training before an "A" race can change a typical training routine for a week or, occasionally, even 2 or 3 weeks while, as we have seen, a "C" race does not affect it at all.  For  a "B" race I would adjust training for just 1 day typically; 2 days maximum.  My sons and youngest daughter are racing with me tonight and for them this same race is a "B" race, but perhaps closer to "C" than "A".  So they all had an easier day's training yesterday so that they come into this race a little bit fresher.  In comparison, yesterday I did a total of 22.5M in two runs and even did some weights too. No resting up for "C" races!

The extremes: A+ and C-

You can, of course, continue to distinguish races even within those three main categories; as I said, the kids' race tonight is close to a "C" than an "A" and so we could split "B" races into "B+" and "B-".  The "B+" races would be the 2 day adjustment races typically and the "B-" races would be the 1 day adjustment ones, though this of course would be affected by training, fitness and other factors.

The other two further distinctions that I find handy are at the extremes: "A+" and "C-" races.  For me, tonight is definitely a "C-" - I opted for the longest option for my morning run and, when the rare opportunity arose, squeezed in a bonus weights session yesterday without a care for the race ahead of me.  It is a glorified workout with the benefit of the competition, the timing and the all the small scale pomp of number pinning and the like.

The ultimate goal is the "A+" race.  You only get one per year. if you have two then at least one of them, truth be told, is an "A" race.  It is the "big dance"; it is what you are thinking of each training session; it is what gets you out the door when you are tired and it is dark, cold and wet; it is what you dream about; it is what all the training is working towards. It is D day.

Nailing the big one: winning my A+ race of 2005, the North Downs 30K

Summary and Conclusion

So here is the summary of my categorisation of races:
A+  - one race - all year works towards this big goal
A    - 3-5 races max - you turn up tapered and ready, adjusting the training wherever necessary to ensure that you do.
B    - races you want to do well in and allow modest training adjustments so that you get a good result; B+ races will have more training adjustment, sacrifice to the "A" race goals and resting than B- races.
C   - the "filler" races that you do to test yourself without any major alteration from the training plan.
C-  - glorified workouts with numbers, timing and more company than usual.

The advantage of thinking to this degree about race categorisation is that you ensure that you are forced to consider why you are racing, what you hope to acheive and what you are (or are not) prepared to sacrifice for it.

I will be referring back to this post throughout the year as we do our races.

And, in case you wondered, my A+ race is the North Downs 100M in August :)