The Mummy Returns

Yes, after managing to keep a safe distance between me and the pavement for the better part of a year and a half now (since my last crash in which I broke my hip and a couple of other things), my streak came to a crashing halt last Tuesday when I ran into some relatively immovable object on the roadway and came off second best.

Let me tell you, broken fingers aren’t too far down the pain scale from broken hips, but thanks to my friendly nurse with his morphine drip on hand, the pain was relatively short lived. Unfortunately, my ER doc’s attempt of ‘popping’ one of my fingers back into place didn’t work out and I wound up in surgery getting my finger pinned in place and my fractured elbow drained.

It maybe a little sad to admit that the first thought that went through my head after hitting the deck was “How much fitness am I going to lose this time?”. After my last experience of going from lifetime best fitness to completely starting over, after 3 months of bed rest, I must say, having to do it again is one of my greatest fears.

As it turns out, the answer to my question was 1 week (it would have been sooner but my doc made me promise not to work out until I was off the pain meds!!) I just got back from my first workout back, 1hr on the bike trainer followed by 30 minutes on the treadmill. After pushing a dismal 160W in my aerobic zone (50W less than usual), I am reminded yet again of the power of consistency. Avoid time off at all costs. Keep the engine ticking over at all times. Even in recovery cycles, movement is good!!

But, I digress. As promised, the topic of this week’s post is a follow up to my post 2 weeks ago on practical ways to improve fat oxidation. I will present a brief (typing with one hand sucks!! :-) case study of the athlete that we have witnessed the greatest improvement in fat oxidation thus far and I will highlight some of the practical methods that we have used to get him to this point.

I have been coaching this athlete for a little over a year now. He came to me as a relative ‘newbie’ to the sport (2yrs), with no experience over long-course triathlon (but a tendency for a performance drop off with increased duration, if we compare his best single sport efforts with his best longer duration tri efforts). Incidentally, this profile describes the majority of male athletes coming to me to prepare for their first Ironman. When we look at this athletes first substrate profile, it is not hard to see why many athletes do great over short duration efforts but have a hard time fuelling long duration efforts, e.g the Ironman.



As many of you know, my rule of thumb for best case Ironman (and day to day) pacing for an intermediate triathlete is ~10kcal of CHO/min. This is based on the simple math of average glycogen stores going into the event plus the maximum rate of glycogen sparing if the athlete fuels appropriately. Based on this athletes first test, even at his slowest pace he was expending >10kcal of CHO/min. If he raced at this level of fitness, clearly he would be in for a very long day with a best case scenario of walking the marathon. With very respectable ‘top end’ performances of 18:15 for a 5K and sub 60min for a 40K TT, clearly fat oxidation was the big limiter.

ACTION PLAN:

Nutrition: Our 2 goals for this athlete were (A) an improvement in fat oxidation at all intensities (B) a reduction in bodyweight. In order to accomplish these goals, I put this athlete on a diet of 400g of CHO/200g of (lean) Protein and 100g of (good) Fat. This represents 3300kcal/day and 48%/24%/28% macronutrient breakdown. Irrespective of whether the diet is eucaloric or not, I have found these percentages to be ideal in the base phase of training. This is (indirectly) also supported by the literature, e.g. Bergstrom et al. (1967) – check this study out. Lots of practical implications for the endurance athlete!!

Training: To support our objectives, training volume was quite high (20-23hrs/wk) but initially of a very low intensity (with most sessions having a cap of 50 beats below max!!) Incidentally, this is the sort of training that a very successful German ex-pro triathlete advocated when I was fortunate enough to chat with him about how he reached the pinnacle of the sport. It is what Dan Empfield called in an article about how the Germans trained “ridiculously slow”.

Our key sessions each week were a 4hr long flat bike (usually a trainer session due to weather constraints) followed the day after by a long, relatively flat hike of 4+ hours. Other sessions during the week were an aerobic maintenance brick, a strength maintenance session and several technique focused swims.

A couple of important caveats to the athlete looking to undertake such a program:

1. The athlete is a graduate student with limited commitments and therefore has ample time to devote to such a program without losing sleep.
2. The athlete is one of the most focused and compliant athletes in my stable. The above program is for the athlete intent on improving performance whatever it takes. This is not for everyone.
3. This athlete had one of the widest gaps between his ‘top end’ performance and his ‘all day’ performance. Most of the programs for my other athletes, while similar in overall emphasis are more ‘balanced’ across the intensity spectrum.

So, what results did 9 months on the above program yield…….



Simply, the highest rate of fat oxidation that we have seen to date (elites included) and, the first athlete to achieve the golden number that Professor Tim Noakes hypothesized that Mark Allen must have averaged to support his Kona performances, i.e 10 kcal of fat burned per minute!! In some ways to us, that barrier was like the 4 minute mile, something that sounded theoretically possible but something that we wouldn’t really buy into until we witnessed it first hand. Well, we witnessed it and it was glorious!!

This is not to say that I’m expecting this guy to be challenging Macca for the Kona win anytime soon. If you look at the charts you will see that while his overall economy is dramatically improving, he is still a big guy that chews up a good amount of juice to hold a given pace. However, having a physiological quality that very few people on earth possess (if our sample is anything close to representative) is a great starting point!!

With the sort of base that this athlete has patiently and deliberately taken the time to establish, I will be expecting big things from him in the coming years.