Harvey Lewis has been a runner all his life and ran his first marathon at age 15. At the tender age of 20, Harvey was having to deal with becoming a new parent all while trying to cope with the loss of his mother one year earlier. After 17 years of tireless work, Harvey finally finished with a time that qualified him for the Boston Marathon. 6 years later he found himself as a member of the USA Track and Field Team for international 24-hour competitions. In 2012, he was a member of the USATF team that claimed bronze in 24 Hour competition in Poland and gold the following year in the Netherlands. Harvey also won the 2014 Badwater Ultramarathon, which National Geographic called “the world's toughest race.”
When it comes to protein, most people think about weight training, big muscles and "bulking-up". Do endurance athletes need protein DURING training and racing? The answer is maybe... Let's take a closer look at the ins and outs of protein for endurance athletes during training and racing.
Josh Tostado is a one-of-a-kind athlete when it comes to endurance sports. His first competition, Montezuma's Revenge, was a 24-hour bike marathon that Josh entered just to see if he could even compete. He would go on to take 4th place in a race generally reserved for only the most experienced riders. Josh then won this same event the following two years and set records in 2007 for both distance and altitude, as he climbed riding 156 miles and going through 32,350 feet of altitude change in 24 hours.
This is my world. I get to come up with new ideas on how to solve issues for endurance athletes. I did this after a 15-year banking career. Yes, I am lucky to do what I do.
Beta-alanine is a hot topic in nutrition for exercise performance. Beta-alanine acts as a “muscle buffering agent” within the cells of muscle tissue. It is a naturally occurring amino acid that many athletes take in order to increase their muscles ability to delay fatigue and recover quicker from exercise. But how does it work?
The DeBoom name is one that is familiar in the endurance community. After Tim DeBoom’s back-to-back wins at Kona in 2001 and 2002, the DeBoom name became synonymous with success in triathlon. Tim’s older brother Tony also competed as a top tier triathlete. Tony had a successful career racing around the world as an age grouper and pro competing in Olympic and full Ironman distance triathlons. During his time racing, Tony finished runner-up behind his brother Tim at Ironman California, won Ironman Utah, and earned a coveted spot as an alternate for the 2000 US Olympic Triathlon Team.
It is best if, when riding your bike to a triathlon at 4:00am, one of your contact lenses does not fall out. If it does, you’ll be forced to stop, dig out your spare, and put a new lens in. This delay may give a guy with a flyswatter in his shorts the opportunity to strike up a conversation with you on the side of the bike path in the dark. He may then give you his card, which doesn’t feature his name but does include the title “Flyswatter Guy”.
What is the single biggest issue I see with the age groupers I work with? Let me tell you about an e-mail we received. We received a “complaint” from a customer who said he got dehydrated using his custom INFINIT formulation. First, we very rarely get complaints about the product (if ever). It just does not happen that often and it gets our attention fast. Normally it is from the customer doing too much, we see that over and over. They are drinking their product and happily munching on gels and blocks and wonder why they feel like they ate a bag of nails after 5 hours.
“Cross Training,” what is it? The simple definition of cross training is, simply put, training in activities that are different than your primary sport. Physiologically speaking, however..... “Physiological adaptations in response to physical training are highly specific to the nature of the training activity. Furthermore, the more specific the training program is to a given sport or activity, the greater the improvement in performance in that sport or activity.” - J.H. Wilmore, D.L. Costill, W.L. Kenney
In writing Novemberʼs article on endurance tips, it was hard to narrow down to just a couple of items that would be the most bang for the buck, so to speak. Therefore, I decided to continue last monthʼs theme and expound upon a few more components for great endurance.