June 16th, 2012: One thing I never realized is all the salt that’s in “sweet” stuff. If you didn’t already know it, the sodium in the salt used to make all the treats I shoveled in causes the body to hold onto water just to maintain a sodium-water balance. This helps explain the quick weight gain after a binge, and then a day or two later the drop. The drop back down doesn’t seem to ever be as far as the gain, though. But I’ll take what I can get. 259 today.
Today is race day, and I’m awake a little earlier than I wanted to be because I couldn’t sleep thinking about it. It’s a little after 6 a.m. and it looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. My goal today is just to finish the 13.1 miles, without stopping, and I have no doubt in my mind that I’ll do it.
The course starts at a place called Snake River Landing in Idaho Falls, ID. It’s a fairly new area, but I think it’s going to have some neat things down there. I’m reading the map correctly, we’ll start by going south to Sunnyside Road, then turn north and go all the way up to Freeman Park by the University of Idaho/Idaho State University extension campus – University Place – and then head back south. I’m not expecting any wind going north, but here in Idaho Falls, this wind likes to blow from the southwest, so heading back may be a bastard.
Oh well, as I’ve written before, I’ll finish this race if I have to drag myself across the line with my lips! Now it’s time to finish this cup of coffee and start getting ready. Wish me luck…
June 16th, 2020: Weight loss science, specifically the biochemistry, would be thrilling to understand completely. I think, perhaps, if I could go back with the perspective I have on life now, I would’ve enjoyed taking more biochemistry or dietetic classes in college. I may have even majored in it.
I always pretty much did what my older brother did when it came to sports, and that included sports, um, “nutrition”. Tom and all his friends used to eat lots of “carbs” on competition days. And, of course, I’d heard about marathon runners carb-loading with donuts. Donuts? Fuckin-A! Pizza, spaghetti, lasagna, pancakes – bring on those carbs. I’ll carb-load until I’m sick. And so that’s what I would do, I would carb-load until I was sick! I was pretty good at sports, I can’t imagine how much better I would’ve felt though, had I known the proper ways to manage diet leading up to athletic competitions.
Competition-day prep would’ve been something I’d have made sure I was dialed-in on had I understood more about the chemistry behind diet. If I was prone to straying outside the navigational beacons in 2012 (more than accidental binges), I might have sacked a dozen donuts 9 years ago on this day. My idea of carb-loading that day, if I remember correctly, because I can’t find anywhere where I recorded it, was to eat two bowls of oatmeal and two bananas. This was probably double my normal breakfast, which still wasn’t many extra calories.
Now there are unending pathways of competition-day nutrition. I have no ability to thoroughly gauge each and every one of those pathways, short of my own experiences. My own experience has led me to the conclusion that I shouldn’t change a single thing on my diet from a normal day to competition day. I have three reasons why: 1) I don’t understand enough about nutrition yet to develop an optimum plan, 2) I train every day with close to the same intensity/duration that I would on competition day (because I’m not a professional athlete), and 3) changing diet on competition day may cause indigestion, in which case you will begin to fart every step you take on that run, and the few people behind you for the miles of that race may want to kill you.
