What Not To Do 3 Weeks Before Your First 100

As you've read, I did achieve some moderate success and improvement while utilizing the Maffetone Method. In fact, for someone who is not on a ketogenic diet, I would still recommend this type of training (though perhaps only for a 3-4 month stretch out of the year).

Again, the basic premise behind the Maffetone Method is to teach the body to better burn fat as fuel, and increase the efficiency of the aerobic energy pathways. The problem, of course, is that when you exceed your Max HR as defined by Maffetone, your body reverts to using some glycogen (stored carbohydrates) and fuel itself through the anaerobic energy pathways.

And eventually, those glycogen stores run out.

In fact, those glycogen stores run out relatively quickly, at least in the mind of an ultra runner. Usually, in around 2 hours, if you're usually primarily glycogen for energy. In addition, since you still race and train above your max HR during certain periods of the year, you still have some skeletal muscle tissue that is optimized for glycogen burning.

But here's an interesting concept: what if we just got rid of all the glycogen? (Well, most of it.) We could force the body to use fat as a fuel regardless of our heart rate. I could run as fast as I want and never run out of fuel!

Sound too good to be true? Well, it sort of is. Needless to say, there are some significant, important details that I just glossed over. But you get the basic idea for now. I'll delve into the nitty gritty stuff in subsequent posts.

And this leads me to the biggest mistake I've made in my relatively short running career.

I switched over to a well-formulated, very low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet.

Three weeks before the Old Dominion 100.

Anyone who's been on a ketogenic diet (especially runners) is experiencing some combination of a grimace and chuckle right now.

Turns out there's this thing called adaptation. Generally speaking, there are several periods of adaptation when switching over to a ketogenic diet.

First, your body runs through its glycogen stores, and then eventually switches over to running on fatty acids and ketones. This takes anywhere from 3 days to a week, and you generally feel a little groggy with a headache during this time. This occurs because your blood sugar drops, but your body isn't quite making enough replacement ketones for your brain to be happy.

Second, the way your body handles electrolytes and minerals changes, leading to a quick loss of water weight, and a flushing of sodium as the body tries to balance sodium and potassium levels. This takes a few days, and can be alleviated by extra sodium intake.

I figured that I had 3 weeks, and that was enough time for these first two adaptations to occur. Unfortunately, there's a third equally important change: your body slowly changes the muscle tissue makeup of your skeletal muscle system. This takes a long time. Like 6-18 months.

Yeah, pretty much ignored that part of the book.

Since I was in taper at this point, I didn't really get in a lot of running while going through these adaptations. So I didn't really know how my body was going to react when I ran further than 12 miles. But, after the first few days, I really did feel great. I headed down to Virginia with hopes of running a sub-20 hour race.

We got down there, I checked in, and got an alright night's sleep, considering how excited I was! My wife's family came down to crew for me, and we all got up early to get ready. Before I knew it, I was at the starting line, and off we went!

My goal was to not start off too fast, so I let the front runners go, and ran along at 9:15 pace. But I felt sluggish. 9:15 actually felt a little fast. I wasn't worried at this point, as I thought I was just warming up.

I got through the first climbs, and started to feel better. I fueled for the race with regular ingestion of Generation UCAN (a product I still use), mixed nuts, and S-Caps. Or at least, I fueled with this combination for the first 50 miles. After that, things started to fall apart.

Yeah, OD!

I was tired. I had gotten lost at mile 22, and ran an extra 6 miles. That didn't help. I just felt sluggish and needed energy, so after mile 50, I went a little crazy with the sugar. At pretty much every aid station from that point on, I grabbed as many mini candy bars as I could fit in my pockets, and drank a cup of coke. I struggled, putting one foot in front of the other, running as much as I could, and power walking when I couldn't.

After 23 hours and 49 minutes, I shuffled across the finish line. And to be honest, I was happy. I had finished my first 100, and buckled to boot.

But I felt like I hadn't run to my potential. I really hurt myself by drastically changing my diet so close to a race. Looking back, I'm actually pretty surprised I finished. I really attribute my finish to 3 things:

1. I'm stubborn as hell. Ask my wife.

2. I have a pretty strong stomach, especially when running. I basically gorged myself on sugar for 12 hours, and never had stomach issues.

3. I spent significant periods of time over the previous year following the Maffetone Method, which probably had allowed my muscles to at least start becoming optimized for fat burning (aerobic energy pathways).

So, I basically broke the cardinal rule of ultra running: never try something new for the first time during a race. But I survived, learned from my mistakes, and moved forward.

My next post will discuss a ketogenic diet in more detail, and talk about what happened after my experience at Old Dominion.

Hint: Sympathy Weight.

-Dave