Less is More

I’ve been rather quiet on the ol’ blog lately, for good reason. I have been a lot less focused on training & racing since September and this blog has always been mostly about triathlon. I managed to burn myself out again, despite what I should have learned from the last three months of 2009. So after Tuscaloosa I decided to back off, mentally and physically, until it felt fun again.

I had a few other good reasons for backing off --

1. I agreed to take on a new role at Microsoft, and I really want to see what I can accomplish there. I’ve been rather happy with my racing efforts over the years but I’ve often felt like I could do a bit better at my “day job,” so I am making that a higher priority this year.
2. A friend and I have opened a personal training business called GeekFit. There is enough going on here that I’ll do a more detailed post soon, but let’s just say that GeekFit is giving me a great outlet for my passions for exercise, nutrition, wellness and teaching. If you live or work near Microsoft and you are looking for a smart, efficient workout, let me know!!
3. General health – I’d been slowly driving myself into the ground with my overly ambitious mix of racing & work & life. I thrive on being busy … but apparently I have limits, too. A lot of the GeekFit research told me that my lifestyle isn’t all that good for my long-term health, so I am trying to “slow down” a little and to reduce stress & inflammation.

An intriguing piece of all of this is that this lower-stress, lower-volume approach might actually lead to faster racing for me in 2011 and beyond. I thought that my past approach was very well-researched and meticulous, but I was probably piling on too much work without letting my body recover enough.

After September, I adopted an approach of “Swim/bike/run when you feel like it, if friends are going, if you’re excited about it. Otherwise, sleep in, go out, rest, work, enjoy life.”

As I hit the end of the calendar year, I started thinking about what a GeekFit-inspired training program would look like: lower volume, very focused intensity, lots of recovery… I’ve been doing our GeekFit strength workout once every 10-14 days and I’ve thrown in some very infrequent but focused/hard swims, bikes and runs. I am still trying to figure out exactly what the right structure should be, but for awhile I did a ten-day cycle with the GeekFit workout on day one, a hard swim+bike+run on day six, and everything else easy/social/optional. I really enjoy hard group workouts and my friend have been on the track a lot, so for the past ~3 weeks I’ve done a (running) track workout every Wednesday while keeping spacing to any GeekFit workouts and to one hard swim (3/21) and one hard ride (3/12 in Austin!).

Recall that in 2010 I would do 1-2 hard runs, a long run, 2-3 hard rides and 2-3 hard swims EVERY WEEK, plus a lot of easy/volume.

I raced a 5K on the track today at the Club Northwest Spring Break Open. I surprised myself by running a smooth, easy 16:01 – eleven seconds faster than my previous PR! The first two miles felt super-easy as I sat behind a guy I knew… then I took off with a mile to go, splitting something like 5:04, 5:16, 5:04 for the three 1600s. (Yes, there is an extra 200 in there somewhere.) I could have run a bit faster in that second mile. I went in with no expectations … but next time I’ll be expecting 15:45!

So I’m training less, sleeping more, focusing more on work, and (running) faster than ever! As for the swim and the bike… well… maybe next weekend?

TIME Cover: Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

I saw this cover story today on a Time magazine in a waiting room: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-2,00.html.  The subtitle on the paper copy was a bit more intriguing: “The Myth About Exercise. Of course it’s good for you, but it won’t make you lose weight. Why it’s what you eat that really counts.”  (emphasis mine)

Could it be that the science behind our Paleo/Primal/Atkins approach is finally going mainstream?  I just read a line last night in Hunter Thompson’s book about Hell’s Angels where he has something to the effect of “Publication X tries to propose new ideas whereas magazines like Time are more about capturing and documenting the conventional wisdom of the current time.”  So if Time magazine does a cover article about what you eat being more important than how much you eat, that would imply that this line of thinking is going mainstream. Yay!

But is that what they’re really saying, or did they have a different perspective?

Main points that I see in the article:

• Exercise has other health benefits other than weight loss.  Regardless of what the author says about obesity, he is not denying that exercise helps reduce risk for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, … cognitive function in the elderly, chronic back pain,
• In a recent clinical study of 464 overweight women, exercise didn’t influence the amount of weight lost.
• He talks of two types of “compensation” – eating more or reducing activity at other times in the day.  (This is very consistent with my understanding of caloric balance, eh?)
• He still thinks a lot in terms of caloric balance, i.e. “… you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight.”
• Humans fatten more easily than other animals because we have very little “brown fat.”
• A study in Plymouth, England, found that youngsters at three different schools expended about the same amount of energy in spite of having widely varying amounts of organized activity in PE class. (This is also consistent with my understanding of caloric balance.)
• He implies that organized/planned/structured exercise stimulates your appetite whereas other activity (which I would call NEAT) does not.
• In a diabetes study, a healthy body mass index is more important than being aerobically fit.
• He even mentioned Taubes at the end!

But the only advice that he provides on losing weight is “eat less.”  How can you mention Taubes and still push for caloric balance??  Despite the subtitle, he never talks about what you eat and the influence that this has on fat storage and use.  I was disappointed but not surprised.

He mentioned that caloric consumption tends to be proportional to energy expenditure.  This seems to contradict caloric balance theory.  So I think that there is room for an excellent follow-up article that goes into why some people attain unhealthy weights and what approaches can work to get them back to a healthy weight.

I continue to believe that insulin resistance by far the most common cause, affecting 80-90% of obese people.  Let’s see an article about that in the mainstream press!

Seniors using Wii to stay active

Over the holidays I taught my grandmother how to play skeeball on my brother's Wii.  She got the hang of it rather quickly but had to take a break after every round or two to rest & recover.  What seemed like a rather small amount of activity to an exercise nut like me could be a healthy amount of activity for a wheelchair-bound senior.

The idea of seniors using the Wii to stay active is picking up a lot of momentum.  Residents of the Lilac Plaza Retirement Community in Spokane sold recipe boks in order to raise enough money to buy one, only to have it stolen out of their rec room.  Luckily you and I aren't the only ones who felt outrage at this and it looks like they'll get at least one replacement courtesy of RawmeatCowboy on the GoNintendo blog. 

But that makes me think... there are lots of seniors out there who could benefit from a bit of entertainment and movement.  Is there a local center or a relative who you could help?  I'm looking into options for my grandmother's retirement community.  Some government-funded senior centers are using wellness grants to buy systems.  Nintendo donated 15 Wiis to the Erickson chain of retirement communities according to this article.  I'll post a follow-up once I figure out what's possible for my grandmother.

The good folks at Nintendo are already considering more fitness options for Wii owners.  Check out the WiiFit at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlOG3PM_xHA.