Author Archives: Steven Gomez

Dec 09 2018
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Life, Running, Training

Meeting the (Jeff’s Birthday) Challenge

This year I decided to participate in Jeff’s Birthday Challenge, a week long virtual event that NoCal ultra runner Jeff Fleming decided to put up for the week of his 49th birthday.

The details to the challenge are in the link, but basically anyone willing could participate, and while the scope of the challenge is up to you the crux of the challenge was to post about your running for the challenge, cheerlead others… and eat cake (or anything similar) on Sunday (Jeff’s birthday) to celebrate completing the challenge.

Also, you were to do some running that involved any of these key numbers (the relevance of which is discussed in the link): 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 49, 69 (#nice).

At someone’s random semi-recommendation, I decided instead of cake on Sunday I would eat donuts from Firecakes right after every run I could.

I decided I would run 49 miles for the week of the Challenge.

And while this admittedly came to me a day or two into the Challenge, I decided I would do a run that somehow hit all of the other numbers.

DonutsChallenge

Mission Accomplished:

Monday: 5.86 miles: 2.56 mile run to go and get the donuts after work. After the donuts were safely delivered at home, another 3.30 mile run in the neighborhood.

Tuesday: 5.23 mile haul run home from work, with my backpack on.

Wednesday: 5.81 mile haul run from work that took 69 minutes (#nice).

Thursday: A 4(.05) mile run during a lunch break at work.

Friday: 10.45 miles: A 2(.32) mile run during a lunch break at work. Then, after returning home from work, a frigid 12K+ evening run that actually totaled 8.13 miles.

Saturday: 8.60 miles: First a 6(.03) mile run during the early afternoon. Then, a 2.57 mile run around the neighborhood during the evening.

Sunday (today): A 9(.02) mile run during the mid-afternoon.

Total: 49(.02) miles.

I had a chocolate frosted donut after a run every day except for Thursday. The run was during the workday, and by the time I returned home it was so long after the run I didn’t feel it was right to eat one. However, I did eat two on Saturday, one after each run.

This was fun, and it was also a good way for me to restore high volume to my training, as I had struggled to get in more than 30ish miles into my previous weeks due to various schedule factors and other concerns. Making a point to get all that running in helped me close the gap.

I’m glad I was able to do it. Would be nice to do it again next year!

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Dec 09 2018
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cross training, Exercise, General health

Preworkout is probably just another (not so) cheap stimulant

This is admittedly geared more towards people who lift weights at the gym than anyone who runs. I’d be surprised if anyone who trains as a distance runner uses this.

One increasingly popular supplement to gym workouts is the use of preworkout, a mix of stimulants that’s supposed to “prime” you for your workout.

Yeah, okay. We’ve had this for decades. We just called it caffeine.

Of course, preworkout is a mix of a wider variety of chemicals. But that’s literally all it is: A stimulant. And for many lifters and fitness enthusiasts, it’s mostly unnecessary. And on top of it, the stuff costs a lot of money.

I won’t go as far as to call preworkout a placebo, because it’s full of enough chemical stimulants to definitely not be a placebo. But it’s not the reason people lack the drive to work out.

As a runner who has to put in dozens of miles a week after work from a full time job, I realize as well as anyone that it’s hard most days to find the energy and drive to get a workout done. I realize a lot of people go workout early in the morning and it’s hard to shake off the cobwebs of sleep to get the workout in.

People who take preworkout believe that the kick it gives them is absolutely necessary to get them to function in the gym. And as a coffee drinker, far be it from me to tell people to not do stimulants in the morning, ever.

But ultimately the stimulants are in some effect a placebo for the motivation you need to work out. They are in effect a crutch. Pushing a barbell does not become impossible or even substantially more difficult if you don’t take preworkout. Nor does pumping yourself full of stimulants make the task substantially easier… even if it does give you a lot more energy to throw at it.

As I’ve said before, your motivation to work out comes from your habits. You form habits and follow the groove those habits cut into your everyday life. That, rather than anything you take or are given, is what drives most of your “motivation”.

Uppers or not, it’s ultimately up to you to decide to do the work, and then actually do it. The money spent on preworkout might be better spent elsewhere, while you look a little more at your habits to motivate your training.

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Dec 03 2018
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Exercise, Food, General health

You won’t see your abs until you see fat loss

 

I’m not sharing any groundbreaking info in repeating this, but it’s important:

If you want washboard abs, or at the least for your ab muscles to appear on your stomach… you have to lose enough body fat for them to appear.

Making the ab muscles bigger won’t work in itself. They are covered in fat, and you have to burn that fat in order for them to appear.

You also cannot spot-reduce fat. Fat burns in a mostly even fashion from the inside out, all across your body. To lose the fat over your abs, you have to lose a corresponding amount of fat all over your body.

Plus, fat is first burned from the center of your body, from around your organs and muscles. As that’s exhausted, then your body moves to the fat closer to your skin. If you want to burn the surface fat over your abs, you’ve got to burn off all that other internal fat first.

This takes quite a bit of fat burning, and you typically need to diet down to a rather low body fat percentage before you can see ab definition. For men, this is about 10-12% max, and for women (who biologically carry more fat) this is around 16-19% max.

Yes, strength training helps you get there, not just because muscle burns calories (and in turn fat), but because more prominent muscle will begin to show through the skin and reduced fat layers sooner than less-prominent muscle.

However, strength training is only one part of achieving the needed definition for visible abs. Diet and body composition is the larger component. You can’t out-train your diet and composition.

So if you want six pack abs, maybe take it easy on the core training and ab workouts. While good for core strength, that’s only one minor component of getting your abs to show. You need to lose the fat in a healthy fashion for the muscle to emerge.

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Dec 02 2018
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cross training, Recovery, Running, Training

The Hike-Run: A commuter’s easy hedge between recovery days and missed training runs

On Thursday I had a morning run scheduled but didn’t manage to get it in.

I work late Thursdays, and taking a normal run after work closer to bedtime wasn’t a practical solution. In my experience, running too close to the end of the day revs me too far up to be able to get to or stay asleep. A shorter run might be okay, but I didn’t want to basically toss out Thursday as an off day with a very short run.

Carrying my backpack at 7pm, not being particularly interested in taking the train or bus, with the sidewalks still being a bit icy from previous snow, and having nothing to lose… I impulsively decided to experiment with what I’m now calling The Hike-Run. It ended up working out so well over 5K that I have decided to implement it as an easy training practice.

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The Hike-Run is an easy run done while carrying weight, whether in a backpack or while wearing heavy gear… basically, the weight of gear you’d be carrying during a hike in the wilderness (even though clearly the north side of Chicago is not the wilderness). Typically, you’ll find opportunities to do Hike-Runs before or after work, while out and about wearing a heavy coat or boots… or while commuting on foot while carrying a bag of stuff.

You typically can do the Hike-Run when you’ve got somewhere to go, and you’re not willing to do a full run with the gear, but need to get some training mileage in and know you probably won’t have much of a chance to do so otherwise.

You start your timer and start at a jog, a very easy sustainable running pace. At any point, if you want to slow to a walk or stop, you not only can, but you don’t need to stop the timer (runners often will stop their timers when they need to stop the run). You’re timing the hike, not a full run. It’s just a comfortable run where you have full permission to slow or stop as much as you please. And of course, you could just not time the Hike-Run at all. You log the mileage covered, and that’s that.

I’ll use my tracker to time the Hike Run as a hike rather than a run, so that the time result isn’t any sort of big deal or factored into any metrics. The only thing I track is the miles (more or less) ran.

The key is just to run most of the way. The Hike Run gives you permission to slow, but is not intended to be a full hike where you run occasionally. If you just want to walk, then just walk and don’t worry about timing it or running.

Ideally you do regular training runs or recovery days most of the week, and the Hike-Run is just a convenient hedge between a full rest day and getting your mileage in. Or, as I did this past Thursday, you use it to supplant planned running that you otherwise can’t get in.

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Dec 01 2018
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Running, Training

Three Valuable Tips for Beginning Runners

1. You should run as slow as you can

You absolutely need to run slow. Slower than you think. Run as slow as you need to in order to keep running. As a newcomer to running, you will struggle to run for any amount of distance, and chances are likely you will quit early unless you first focus on running far as slowly as you can get away with.

A parallel: Competitive walking has a rigid set of rules that constitute what exactly constitutes a walk, and it’s a good guide for the minimum of what you need to do for your movement to qualify as a run.

A key point in race walking is that your back foot must be on the ground until your front foot plants on the ground.

Conversely, if your back foot comes up before your front foot impacts the ground, then you are technically running. See how slowly you can get away with safely doing this, and you may be surprised how slowly you are allowed to run.

2. Take each step as soft and easy as you can

Another key reason you want to run slow is to make it easier for you to run without having to hit the ground hard.

A telltale sign that a runner is outrunning his/her normal capabilities is that their feet hit the ground hard and loud. This isn’t just aesthetically displeasing, but it’s not healthy.

You’re jarring your joints, muscles and ligaments all the way up the chain from your feet up into your core, and risking long term injury. In fact, this is largely where common runner ailments like shin splints and IT band pain come from. You basically just stress those parts of your body until they hurt.

In dance and some theatre circles, performers are taught how to step as softly as they can. There’s usually no real method taught for this, but performers often work at it until they develop the proprioception, the locus of control, to step softly.

I guess it incidentally helped that I studied theatre and dance before becoming a serious runner, as learning this inadvertently, eventually helped me develop better running form.

But you don’t need to dance or do theatre to learn to run soft and easy. Stand up. Find some open space. Take a step forward as softly as you can. Take another step forward as softly as you can. Repeat. Take your time and relax while repeating this. You may find that your body naturally moves and adjusts with you. Eventually your body just knows how to move to comfortably make it work. It also probably feels silly to do, but work with it.

Now try to do it quickly, but stay as relaxed as possible. Do it consistently and quickly enough, and all of a sudden you’re running that way. It may not be fast or intense, but it works.

The home run trot I previously advocated is basically just this. It’s exactly what baseball players are doing. They’re just running as easy and comfortable as possible. Their feet are definitely not slamming into the ground.

3. Eat something with protein within an hour after every run

Recovery is something even experienced runners aren’t great at doing. Most don’t think at all about taking in nutrition within two hours of running, or realize that the half hour after running is a valuable window for refueling the body.

While carbohydrates may be valuable for glycogen restoration, what you do need for sure is protein. You just did a bit of damage to your muscles, and they need protein to rebuild. Consume at least 15-30g of protein.

I’m not saying you should pig out. Just eat a protein bar, some nuts or seeds, or drink a glass of milk, if nothing else. If you are in fact planning to eat a meal like breakfast or dinner right after running, great. Mission accomplished.

I can get into all the science as to why processed junk doesn’t help you as much as whole food, but in a nutshell you’re better off eating something healthy. If you’re in a bind and options are limited, then eat what you must. But given the option, try to eat whole foods in as close to their natural form as you can.

How well you bounce back between workouts is largely a function of how you recover. What you eat or drink soon after the run matters.

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Nov 30 2018
11 Comments
cross training, Exercise, General health

Planet Fitness is not bad

About a year ago, the growing and much maligned Planet Fitness gym chain opened a new location near my Chicago home in Wrigleyville. They advertised a rock bottom $10 per month membership, and “24/5” hours: Open 24 hours a day on weekdays, from midnight Sunday/Monday until 7pm on Friday (then open 7am-7pm on Saturday and Sunday). Other locations have different hours, and many are open 24/7.

Planet Fitness is known, and to many notorious, for their misnomered ‘no judgment’ policy. The policy creates a strict set of rules designed to curb/deter fitness-bro behavior that is deemed intimidating to general gym-goers.

  • No grunting
  • No gallon jugs
  • No wearing stringers/crop tops
  • No deadlifting
  • No dropping or slamming weights on the floor
  • No bags on the gym floor

There are other restrictions, but those are the major ones.

The key feature to Planet Fitness is the presence of the Lunk Alarm, which is set off by staff when a violation of the above policies is clearly observed. This can result in staff intervention and ejection for the offending party.

To a lesser extent, staff may at their discretion quietly confront individuals exhibiting similar behaviors, though this doesn’t typically happen.

Fitness-Bro culture is nowadays very popular, built around the idea of lifting heavy and getting a bigger upper body through low rep, close to max weight compound workouts like this and this. They abhor any aerobic exercise beyond brief, high intensity interval cardio, typically eat a low carb, high protein diet with supplements designed to build muscle, and judge fitness largely on max lifting strength as well as upper body size and definition.

I can address this topic another time, but the above prevalent approach is basically a one dimensional definition of fitness and tends to promote a one dimensional lifestyle. I do not have a problem with people lifting for strength. I have a problem with the implication that it’s the only valid, useful way to work out.

So, needless to say, that crowd doesn’t like Planet Fitness. And because Bro Culture has done a terrific job of using the internet to promote their niche culture as a much larger demographic and voice than they actually are, they have long since successfully crafted a negative cultural movement towards the Planet Fitness brand.

I’m not going to claim all their reservations are unjustified. There are a lot of complaints about Planet Fitness that in some contexts are important. The gym is definitely not for everybody, and certainly not for the 5×5/SS/Stronglifts disciple whose fitness goals revolve around their upper body measurements and their one rep max in a handful of key compound lifts.

There are however a variety of positive, worthwhile fitness goals that are not that. And there’s a variety of ways to build strength and upper body definition that Planet Fitness can productively serve.

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Nov 29 2018
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Food, General health, Life

Losing fat, losing weight, begins with knowing your eating habits

One of the reasons most dieting fails is because people lack a healthy, sustainable diet baseline. Of course, a big part of that is people not having any idea what their baseline is to begin with… if they even have one.

This is also a key reason modern people insidiously gain weight over time. Their metabolism slowing with age and decreased activity certainly doesn’t help. But a lack of consistency and healthy eating habits is the larger contributor.

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