Want to jump-start your fitness, improve your running form, snap out of feeling stale? Start training for the mile.

Rob Delong was like most kids growing up when it came to running. Every year in gym class, he had to run a mile.

That was the endurance component of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, a grade school program developed during the Eisenhower administration to encourage American children to be healthy and active after a study showed their European counterparts were much more fit.

Fast-forward 20 years and, in the midst of getting fit for his first marathon, Delong, a 34-year-old Manhattan currency broker, found himself channeling his younger self.

In his debut marathon, Delong clicked off a steady percussion of 8:50 miles to finish the Chicago Marathon in 3:52:31. Glancing back through Delong鈥檚 lightning-fast progression into a fit runner, one particular race highlight jumps out: specifically training to run the Fifth Avenue Mile in New York City. Training for and racing in a 1-mile race, Delong says, clearly helped him hold a faster marathon race pace in Chicago.

This was by design, says his coach, Brian Rosetti, creator of the , a group of 10 national-class runner-coaches, at different locations around the country, who guide runners of all levels through individually designed programs set to the doctrines and principles through author and coaching great, Dr. Jack Daniels.

鈥淚 have clients who are training for races from the 5K to the marathon,鈥� Rosetti says. 鈥淭he repetition work that our runners do is at their current 1-mile race pace, and it serves the purpose of boosting your economy and efficiency, which feeds into the longer stuff.鈥�

Rosetti鈥攁 former member of the ZAP Fitness Olympic Development program with track PRs of 3:44 in the 1500 and 8:08 in the 3,000鈥攕ays that the value of training for the 1-mile race or low-key time trial is not just a matter of increasing speed and efficiency. He argues that it also helps runners reduce the risk of injury.

鈥淭here鈥檚 a misconception that speed work injures people,鈥� Rosetti says. 鈥淚n fact, proper speed training will teach you how to run with good form and build the strength to hold good form longer.鈥� It鈥檚 in longer, fatigue-inducing runs, he explains, that form breaks down and exposes the body鈥檚 weaknesses to wear-and-tear.

Stay Smart and Sub-Maximal

The key, Rosetti adds, is to be disciplined in your aerobic training and smart about your speed work. Adding flexibility and will also help develop speed, but the act of getting faster for a distance runner doesn鈥檛 come from all-out sprints. Instead, workouts are run at a controlled, sub-maximal pace with small amounts of rest to build speed endurance.

鈥淧eople get into trouble when they don鈥檛 understand that what鈥檚 important is to run the target pace of the rep workouts; not just run them as fast as you can, just because you can,鈥� he says.

Turning your workouts into races not only undercuts the true purpose of the workout, but the red-line intensity can wear you down and wear you out, prolonging recovery and increasing injury risk. Additional measures that Rosetti suggests for runners doing speed work at 1-mile race pace are to take the time you need to warm up thoroughly, and be sure to take adequate recovery between the repetitions.

With such precautions in place, Rosetti says that spiking your overall road running and racing plan with an intermediate goal of a mile race or time trial can serve up improved efficiency and strength. 鈥淎nd, for distance runners, a 1-mile race can be a great tuneup before a big goal event. The 5th Avenue Mile draws a lot of crazed NYC Marathoners, as a matter of fact.鈥�

Fellow Run Smart coach Malindi Elmore agrees. A 2004 Olympic 1500-meter runner for Canada, she knows from experience how speed has spread: She has a 1500 PR of 4:02, a 15:02 for 5000 and a 33-flat best for 10K on the road.

鈥淚 think most people will find training for a mile race helps their longer races,鈥� Elmore says. 鈥淥ur body doesn鈥檛 always like doing the same thing and sometimes a stimulus to your training and racing will provide huge breakthroughs in other events.鈥� Elmore adds that even if you cut down your overall volume during a training spell for a 1-mile race, you won鈥檛 lose out on strength. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e still really working the legs, lungs and heart. When you return to longer and slower work you will have given yourself a real fitness boost.鈥�

Give it One Day a Week

So how do you do it? How do you shift your training, and your physiology, into the lactic-acid storm waiting for you in the mile? According to Rosetti, a runner who wants to spice up their road training and racing by jumping in a mile race can adequately prepare by simply including into their working program one day per week of speed work at a current mile race pace.

First, determine your mile race pace either with a time trial or by entering a recent 5K or 10K clocking into a pace calculator to get a projected time.

Then after a thorough warm-up, run repetition intervals at that pace, in simple workouts like 8 x 200 meters with a rest interval of 200 meters of easy jogging, or, if you鈥檙e a more advanced runner, 4 x 400 meters with 400 meters of easy jogging. Be sure to run that specific pace and to allow for the recovery you need. You can also take these workouts to a modest hill and simulate the same effort to get a good dose of power training. Additionally, after tempo runs you can add some similar repetition intervals, like 100s or 200s 鈥� once again at mile race pace.

鈥淥ne of the best strength and drill training sessions for runners is pure sprinting,鈥� Elmore says. But distance runners have to be careful about adding such elements of fasting running. Do this by adding striders to the end of your regular runs or in track workouts where you focus on really fast 100s.

鈥淵ou become a better and smoother runner by practicing running faster than you would in a race.鈥�

Or practicing a race shorter than your goal race, as was the case for Rob Delong.

To search for a 1-mile race on either the road or the track, check with your local running clubs or surf the vast listings at . If you can’t find a race nearby, do a time trial on your local high school track.

How To Train For The Mile

Want to run a faster mile later this summer? You need to build your speed and speed endurance over a six- to eight-week span. The following is a sample week for ramping up your mile training as suggested by Elmore. Assuming you have a solid running base, implement a week like this (or some of its workouts) on a regular basis as you approach a mile race or time trial.

Monday
2- to 3-mile easy warm-up run, followed by dynamic warm-up drills and 3 x 60-meter build-up strides at 75-80 percent effort

[BEGINNER] 8 x 200m in 35-40 seconds with a 60-90-second recovery jog between reps

[INTERMEDIATE] 4 x 400m in 80-90 seconds with a 60-90-second recovery jog between reps

[ADVANCED] 8 x 400m in 75-85 seconds with a 60-90-second recovery jog between reps; 2- to 4-mile cool-down

Tuesday
Easy 5- to 7-mile run, followed by 6 x 60-meter build-up strides at 75-80 percent effort

Wednesday
2-mile warm-up, followed by dynamic warm-up drills

5 x 1,000-meter repeats at your 5K race pace with a 3-minute recovery jog between reps

2-mile cool-down

Thursday
Easy 4- to 6-mile run, followed by 6 x 60-meter build-up strides at 75-85 percent effort

Friday
15-minute easy warm-up run

15- to 20-minute run at a 鈥渃omfortably hard鈥� tempo pace (or a pace 20-30 seconds slower per mile than your 5K race pace)

15-minute easy cool-down

Saturday
Cross-training with cycling, swimming or gym fitness.

Sunday
75- to 90-minute easy run, followed by 6 x 60-meter build-up strides at 75-85 percent effort

How To Race The Mile

Elmore knows how to race: She鈥檚 a 15-time middle-distance national champion for Canada. As far as pacing, what words does she have for the aspiring distance-runner-turned-miler?

Don鈥檛 worry about pacing, she says.

鈥淭he point of the mile is to run as fast as you can and the hold on until you don鈥檛 think you can possible go any further,鈥� she says. 鈥淏ut not to stop 鈥� just keep digging to the end!鈥�

In the process you will likely enjoy both a rush of adrenaline and then some of the special joys known to milers.

鈥淏urning legs, bursting lungs, exploding heads and churning stomachs,鈥� she says. Forget the sit-and-kick version of the mile you see in the Olympic final, Elmore counsels 鈥� the true satisfaction in the mile is found in going hard from the gun.

鈥淭he final few minutes might be a bit painful but pushing your body hard is very rewarding and addicting. It is really cool to see how fast you can go for a relatively short period of time and participate in such an epic and historical event.鈥�

Q&A With Leo Manzano, Olympic Miler

Leo Manzano has run 3:50.64 for the mile, making him the ninth-fastest American ever at that distance. But the 29-year-old sealed his status in the history of U.S. running with a relentless finishing kick in the final of the 1500m event (the mile鈥檚 metric alternative) at the 2012 London Olympics. The Mexican-born American dashed to a second-place finish, becoming the first U.S. runner since 1968 to win an Olympic medal at that distance.

What makes the mile so special?

鈥淚t鈥檚 the ultimate race, especially here in the U.S. If you ask anybody about it, most people have a pretty good idea what a mile is all about. Everybody runs it in school. Everything here is measured in miles. Most people don鈥檛 know what the 1500m race is, even though it鈥檚 almost the same thing. But when you hear someone say they run a 3-minute, 50-second mile, they say, 鈥榃ow, that鈥檚 fast.鈥� Most runners here know how fast a mile is because every time they run, either in training or a race, is broken down by miles and pace-per-mile.鈥�

How can anyone relate to the mile?

鈥淚鈥檒l get a little philosophical here, but racing the mile is kind of a metaphor for life in some ways. You can鈥檛 go out too fast, and you can鈥檛 live life too fast. You have to pace yourself, and that鈥檚 the same thing in the mile, too. In second and third lap of the mile, it gets pretty hard, just like in life. Then the fourth lap is the hardest. But you have to know there is always going to be a finish and whatever your troubles or challenges are, you just have to keep pushing and you鈥檒l be done soon enough. But it鈥檚 all about balance, too. You can鈥檛 get behind and go too slow in either one, you鈥檝e got to live.鈥�

How can any runner get faster?

鈥淚f a runner is trying to get faster, they definitely have to work on their speed. A lot of people might think they can go out and run and run and then run fast when it鈥檚 time to race. But it doesn鈥檛 work that way and the chances of getting hurt are very high if you normally don鈥檛 run fast. One of the best ways to start approaching speed, even without doing a hard speed work session, is to do eight to 10 strides after almost every run to loosen up your legs muscles and teach the body how to get used to running fast.鈥�

Updated from an article that first appeared May 2014

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Is the 50K your next challenge?

Crossing the finishing line of a marathon brings with it a heady mix of exhilaration, exhaustion and relief. Not to mention trashed hamstrings, quads and calves. Yet inevitably in the wake of the personal victory and after the pain has receded into a distorted memory it鈥檚 time to figure out what鈥檚 next.

For some, a special breed, the next challenge is about going farther. It鈥檚 time to take the journey into what is not just the next distance, but also the next world: Ultrarunning. The 50K (roughly 31 miles) is the 鈥渟hortest鈥� standard distance you鈥檒l find when you push beyond the limits of the marathon. This guide is aimed at training you to go the distance and, perhaps, give you a taste of, one day, going even farther and training for a 50- or 100-mile race.

Getting Started on Your 50K Training Journey

We asked veteran ultrarunning coach Sean Meissner for the essential advice he would give to a runner wanting to take on the challenge of a first 50K. Meissner, who is based in Spokane, Wash., knows what he鈥檚 talking about. Not only does he have more than 100 ultra-distance race finishes to his name鈥攊ncluding consecutive victories (2010 and 2011) at the Desert RATS 148-mile stage race between Fruita, Colo., and Moab, Utah鈥攈e has also been coaching beginning ultrarunners for more than a decade.

The following plan assumes you have a solid marathon or two (or more) under your belt and the critical experience and base-building that comes with it.

鈥淚 think a 16-week build-up would be about perfect for the marathoner looking to complete their first 50K,鈥� Meissner says.

But he鈥檚 quick to point out there is no one-size-fits-all approach to a foray into ultrarunning. Adapting to increased mileage, developing the ability to run while fatigued and experimenting with different nutrition and hydration needs are all very individual endeavors. 鈥淎sk others for advice, but try things for yourself because everyone is so different in what works best for them,鈥� he says.

Meissner generally believes long runs鈥攚hich vary between 10 and 26 miles in this plan鈥攕hould be spaced between six and 10 days apart. He also suggests seeking out hilly trails to bolster strength and refine trail running skills. Since most 50K races are trail races, he says it鈥檚 important to recalibrate your expectations of speed (you鈥檙e going to go slower than on the roads) and understand that the key goal of the long run is to develop your aerobic capacity and strength to handle the goal race distance.

To prepare his runners for the rigors of the final miles of the 50K, Meissner schedules a tempo-like run the day following the key long runs in the program.

鈥淭his will help simulate the fatigue you鈥檒l be dealing with in the latter stages of the race.鈥� Additionally, Meissner is a big believer in incorporating hill running and hill repeats into the overall program to build strength.

鈥淚鈥檓 a big fan of hill work,鈥� Meissner says. 鈥淔or newer ultrarunners, I advocate adding hills into long runs and one other day each week on a shorter run.听 For a bit more experienced runners, one day every week or two of hill repeats are great, along with a hilly long run. The strength gained from running hills not only makes a runner stronger, but that strength then also turns into speed on the flats without the added pounding of actual speed work.鈥�

Included in the schedule are opportunities to include races to sharpen strength.

鈥淭une-up races are great,鈥� Meissner says. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e fun to run, great for checking to see where you鈥檙e at fitness-wise, and are a great chance to test your gear and nutrition for the upcoming ultra. When doing tune-up races, it鈥檚 best to keep the eye on the goal and not go too all out.鈥� In other words, be on the cautious side with your pacing.

16-Week 50K Training Plan

Build A 50K Nutrition Program

Sunny Blende, M.S., is a noted sports nutritionist within the ultrarunning world and a longtime ultra endurance athlete with a focus on the 50K to 50-mile trail races. Blende started her nutrition consulting company, Eat4Fitness, in 1998 and has since become one of the most sought-out pace runners in the ultra world. (Imagine having a sports nutritionist at your side while you鈥檙e battling your way through 130-degree heat at the 135-mile Badwater ultramarathon. Not a bad idea, huh?)

Blende characterized what ultrarunning is all about when she told 鈥淏orn to Run鈥� author Christopher McDougall, ultramarathons are 鈥渆ating and drinking contests with a little exercise and scenery thrown in.鈥�

鈥淚f you鈥檙e doing your first 50K,鈥� Blende says. 鈥淵ou should expect to be out there at least five or six hours.鈥�

Unlike the typical road marathon event where aid stations can be as often as every mile, an ultrarunner needs to be far more self-sufficient. There are fewer aid stations and they are far between while the needs of hydration, electrolyte and energy intake are heightened by the vast amount of time spent on the trail or road.

Her key piece of advice? 鈥淪tart early and don鈥檛 get behind,鈥� she says. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 make it up later in the race. Let鈥檚 say you鈥檙e running 10-minute miles. That requires at least 600 calories per hour, while your body is likely only going to be able to absorb 240 calories per hour. So it鈥檚 a fuel-deficit sport.鈥� Blende suggests during the first hour to 90 minutes to only take in water, but after it鈥檚 best to get on strict schedule tuned to what you learned in training. 鈥淚 suggest setting your watch timer so that it beeps every 20 or 30 minutes.鈥� When the watch beeps, it鈥檚 time to drink and eat per the race plan you鈥檝e established through experimentation with your training.

A second important thing to learn, Blende says, is what she says elite runners have learned and mastered when it comes to mid-race nutrition:听鈥淭he elite runners don鈥檛 think of it as food when they鈥檙e racing. They think of it as fuel.鈥�

Blende鈥檚 point is if you want to be successful in the ultra world it鈥檚 time to forget about being picky with what you eat. 鈥淚t鈥檚 all about just getting gas into the car.”

1. Find out what you can about the products offered on the course. Check the website or contact the 50K race to see what kind of gels, bars, drinks and foods will be available on the course and how often. While you may be able to haul along your own supplies during the race, having access to nutrition during the race will make things easier. Keep in mind, too, that many aid stations will have a variety of 鈥渞eal鈥� food, including everything from buckets of fried chicken to pizza and cups of warm mashed potatoes.

2. Create a race nutrition training plan. 鈥淭here are no scientific studies to rely on,鈥� Blende says about ultra running. Most sports nutrition studies max out at 2 or 3 hours, and after that it鈥檚 hard to get scientists or subjects interested in being in the lab any longer. Hence, you need to become your own scientist. With an idea of what will be available at aid stations, use all of your long training runs as opportunities to conduct experiments on what and how much food and drink you can consume while running long. Make this a key part of your training log so you can dial in your race day nutrition.

3. Determine your sweat rate. 鈥淲ithout proper hydration nothing else works,鈥� Blende says. 鈥淵ou want to know your sweat rate so you can adequately rehydrate while your running.鈥� To determine your sweat rate, weigh yourself naked before a 1-hour run. Run the run without taking in any food or drink. At the end of the run, pee if you need to, then re-weigh yourself. For every two pounds of weight you鈥檝e lost, you鈥檝e lost one liter of water. So if you lost four pounds in the hour, your sweat rate is two liters per hour鈥攖his would be your target intake of liquids.

4. Use your long runs to test how many calories you can consume. With your sweat rate in hand, start testing your hydration and nutrition plan with your very first run. Again, use your watch timer to keep you on track. Blende recommends starting by trying to consume 200 calories of energy per hour. If you鈥檙e using gels, for example, check the package for caloric content. Many gels provide around 100 calories, so plan on taking two gel packets per hour on your first long run. If you can tolerate this level of intake during your first long run, increase the number of calories your next time out to 220 or more per hour. 鈥淵ou should keep testing until you get sick,鈥� Blende says. 鈥淵ou want to find out the maximum amount you can take in without getting sick.鈥� The more calories, the more energy you鈥檒l have to burn during the race. By the time your 50K rolls around you should have a good idea of how much you can take in and with what kind of foods. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a matter of the individual,鈥� she says. 鈥淵ou may be able to comfortably eat 300 calories per hour,鈥� which is all the better for your race.

Ultrarunning Body Shop

In 2011, Tim Neckar, running coach and ultra-runner based in Houston, Tex., won the Tuscubia 75-mile Winter Ultra. What鈥檚 particularly impressive about Neckar鈥檚 performance is that he鈥檚 an anomaly in the distance running world (and especially the ultramarathon world); while the pounding seems to catch up with most (e.g. chronic limping, knee injuries, hip replacements), Neckar鈥檚 been logging high-mileage weeks for 37 years. Among a host of achievements, Neckar has competed at Badwater, the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim, the Hawaii Ironman, the Marathon de Sables, the Boston Marathon and Susitna 100, aka 鈥淭he race across frozen Alaska.鈥� Neckar continues to churn out 70 to 100 miles per week year round.

Here are some crucial tips Neckar instructs his clients to adopt to make running a lifelong endeavor the way he has:

1. Incorporate a strength routine into your weekly schedule. 鈥淢y theory is the stronger you are the less energy it takes to go forward,鈥� Neckar says. He particularly emphasized a strong core鈥攖he muscles surrounding and supporting the trunk. 鈥淓verything comes from the core. It helps you run with better form.鈥� This strength, Neckar adds, becomes even more vital if you鈥檙e using a hydration pack or running 听with 16-ounce water bottles in your hands.

2. Ice Baths. After long runs and races, Neckar breaks open three or four 10-pound bags of ice and empties them into a tub of cold water, then plunges his chewed up legs into the ice bath for 15 minutes.

3. Massage. Along with ice baths, Neckar relies on sports massage to bring life back to beaten muscles. 鈥淚 get at least one a week. Sometimes two,鈥� he says. If frequent massage is beyond the reach of your pocket book, consider getting a foam roller and a lacrosse ball and implementing a self-massage program to get the blood flowing to the damaged tissues.

Advice For Newbies Training for 50K

As you鈥檒l find scanning ultra race calendars, most 50K events are trail races. We asked Tucson鈥檚 legendary Pam Reed鈥攖he first woman to win the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon outright in 2002 (and again in 2003) and author of the book, 鈥攆or some quick tips to get on the right path.

What advice to your offer aspiring trail runners?

It’s funny because as I get older I am more cautious when trail running鈥攑robably because I badly tore my hamstring a couple of years ago.听I would just say go out there and do it.听 It is so beautiful and you get to go to so many great places and see things most people听never see.听I think that is what I love most about it.

What about gear?

Run in whatever shoes feels comfortable.听You want to be comfortable especially when you’re going long.听Your feet will swell at least a half size during ultra-distance runs, and maybe even a full size if it鈥檚 hot. I also recommend a sock thicker than the typical running sock. I wear PowerSox and love them.听They give my foot a little bit more support and that has helped me not get as many blisters.听I also use a Nathan pack听and the Fuel Belt with the eight ounce bottles and a little pack for some Clif Bloks.

Is there a key tip you offer in regard to running technique for the trail?

Lift your feet, keep your eye on the trail and hold your arms out wide to your balance.听I have seen so many people fall, and that is not fun.

What about cross-training?

When I first started I just ran.听I now do TRX, which is nice for quad strength and also core.听 I also do a lot of swimming, which seems to keep me limber and, when I have time, I do hot yoga.

Article first published January 2014

The post Going Longer: How To Train For Your First 50K appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

In the past several years, as measured by Google Trends, interest in an unusual style of eating called the ketogenic diet has tripled, and chances are you have a friend or coworker who鈥檚 tried it. Early adopters are typically people who run or ride a lot and want a food plan that doesn鈥檛 just fill their tanks but also boosts performance. Followers scarf eggs, cheese, and olive oil in hunger-killing quantities, turning their backs on just about every carb other than vegetables. They don鈥檛 use half-and-half in their coffee鈥攖hey use heavy cream. Still, they鈥檙e likely to look a little lean, since the ketogenic diet turns them into 24/7 fat burners. (Even while surfing the couch.) And don鈥檛 be surprised if they report feeling better and stronger than ever.

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Ketones are a type of organic substance that includes ketone bodies, a collective name for the three molecules that are produced naturally by the liver when it breaks down fat for energy, a process that the ketogenic diet jump-starts. Under normal circumstances鈥攖hat is, if you鈥檙e eating a standard, balanced diet鈥攜our body gets most of its energy by turning听carbohydrates into glucose, which cells then convert to听energy. If you significantly听re颅duce carb intake (typically听to less than 50 grams per day),听your body undergoes a funda颅men颅tal change: it starts relying on fat-generated ketone bodies听as its primary energy source. The brain, heart, and muscles can all burn ketone bodies effi颅c颅颅iently if you鈥檝e been eating this way for a month or so. This metabolic state is called ketosis.

A Day in Food on the Ketone Diet

How endurance athlete Patrick Sweeney puts away nearly 3,000 calories a day on the ketone diet.

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Historically used as a driver of weight loss, carb 颅restriction has recently gained favor in ultra-endurance circles and the military鈥檚 Special Forces. The idea is to radically crank up fat burning so that athletes and soldiers are in ketosis during grueling, survival-like situations. The biochemistry of听how ketone bodies aid performance is complicated, but the processes and benefits are summed up well for laypeople by Dr. Ken Ford, a ketones expert who runs the Florida-based Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a nonprofit research outfit that鈥檚 funded by organizations like DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

鈥淒uring ketosis, the liver produces ketone bodies that are converted into substances that feed cellular energy production,鈥� Ford says. 鈥淪o basically, an athlete in ketosis can access additional fuel. Though there鈥檚 no scientific reason to believe that a ketogenic diet would increase anaerobic power or muscular strength, there is reason to believe that aerobic capacity and muscular endurance could be improved when sufficient ketone bodies are present to complement glucose.鈥� The upshot is that for lower-intensity, longer-range exertion, ketone bodies offer the physiological equivalent of solar power.

There鈥檚 more. Ketone bodies apparently switch on specific genes responsible for a flurry of molecular upgrades, enhancing health and lengthening lifespan. Scientists are now investigating their use for treating everything from traumatic brain injury to cancer.听

This broadband interest is new. The diet itself isn鈥檛. Ketosis got a foothold in medicine in the 1920s, when it was used successfully to treat children with epilepsy who didn鈥檛 respond to drugs. Labeled the hyperketogenic diet, the regimen gave patients 90 percent听of their daily calories from fat听to help prevent seizures. 鈥淣o one knew how it worked,鈥� 颅Nobel Prize鈥搘inning biophysicist Rod MacKinnon says. 鈥淭hey just knew it worked.鈥�

More recently, there鈥檚 been听a keto buzz among endurance athletes. It started in听2012, when , a runner who follows a ketosis-friendly diet, broke the record at the Western States 100, the rugged, revered annual trail race in the Sierra Nevada. Last year, , another ketones-adapted runner, set the American record for 100 miles on a track鈥�11 hours 40 minutes 55 seconds. Data from a study conducted by Ohio听State human-sciences professor Jeff Volek showed that 颅during Bitter鈥檚 runs, as much听as 98 percent of his energy听can come from fat and only听2 percent from carbs. Your body can store a maximum of around 2,500 carbohydrate calories. But if you鈥檙e carrying around, say, 25 pounds of stored fat, that鈥檚 the equivalent of roughly 100,000 potential calories. So a fat-adapted runner can, in theory, chug along indefinitely.

In May, I visited Ford at the IHMC campus in Pensacola. The lab鈥檚 big thing, he said, is 鈥渢he extension and leveraging鈥� of human capacities and resilience. Recently featured in Scientific American for programming a semiautonomous robot that can traverse the rubble of a simulated nuclear disaster, IHMC is also studying the ketogenic diet. Leaders in the field of ketosis鈥攍ike Volek and University of South Florida associate professor Dom D鈥橝gostino鈥攁re linked听in with IHMC鈥檚 inner circle.

Ford is the hub of the current ketones conversation. A baritone-voiced polymath with expertise in computer science, artificial intelligence, and biochemistry, he has held leadership posts at NASA and the National Science Board, which advises the president and Congress on science and engineering issues. When Ford isn鈥檛 traveling, a typical day involves gulping shots of espresso (鈥渢he elixir of the mind,鈥� as he calls it) while whizzing around the IHMC campus, checking in with his scientists as they tinker in their labs.

鈥淲e wouldn鈥檛 be here as a species without ketones,鈥� Ford told me. He said we鈥檝e known since 1965 that the brain, the body鈥檚 most energy-hungry organ, is ravenous for them. A study done that year by Harvard Medical School researcher George Cahill scuttled what was then the conventional belief that the brain can burn only glucose. 鈥淚n fact the brain will听metabolize ketones preferentially,鈥� Ford said.

Cahill conducted a series of starvation studies with divinity students, monitoring fasts lasting up to 40 days. The protocols wouldn鈥檛 pass today鈥檚 ethical standards. The students didn鈥檛 eat: their intake was reduced to water augmented with electrolytes and vitamins. 鈥淚f Cahill tried to do those studies now, he鈥檇 be thrown in jail,鈥� Ford said, only half joking.

Cahill measured the students鈥� blood glucose as well as the presence of two ketone bodies, 颅betahydroxybuterate and acetoacetate. 鈥淏etahydroxybuterate,鈥� he wrote, 鈥渋s not just a fuel, but a superfuel.鈥� His studies helped illuminate the mechanism that allows humans to survive long periods without food. As he showed, when your glucose supply runs low, insulin drops, which switches on ketone production.

But ketosis is more than a backup generator, Ford said. Harking back to our caveman days, ketosis signals to the body and brain鈥攁s in, 鈥淗ey, there鈥檚 no food!鈥濃�攖hat they need to improve resilience and efficiency in cells and neurons.

Ford, who is now 61, has practiced a ketogenic diet himself since 2006 and says he has consistently experienced improved cognition. His body fat is under 10 percent. He prefers not to drop out of ketosis, but sometimes he does. 鈥淥nce when I was in Italy, I ate a half-bowl of pasta after a workout,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 felt like a zombie.鈥�

These days, D鈥橝gostino and others are researching new medical applications for ketone bodies. With epilepsy as a start颅ing point, their neuro颅protective functions have inspired a whole new field.

For six years, D鈥橝gostino has studied why ketone bodies are anticonvulsive, flowing the data into metabolic-therapy models that he hopes will prove useful in the management of neuro颅degenerative diseases like ALS and Parkinson鈥檚. With money from the Office of Naval Research, D鈥橝gostino鈥檚 lab is also closing in on a solution for Navy SEALs who use diving rebreathers to eliminate telltale bubbles 颅during missions. The devices can lead to oxygen toxicity that can cause seizures. D鈥橝gostino鈥檚 team has produced encouraging results in testing ketone esters, an exogenous form that you can drink or eat to boost ketone bodies with or without a ketogenic diet.

Another research area is the treatment of traumatic brain injury. According to the Department of Defense, TBI has been a serious problem for some 340,000 American soldiers. In May, I sat down with a former Special Forces medic (who asked not to be named) who served multiple combat tours. He said that at the most elite levels of the U.S. military, people aren鈥檛 waiting for research to confirm the benefits of a keto diet. 鈥淚鈥檇 say more than a third of the guys are doing it, for the endurance and also for the cognition,鈥� he said. As research by D鈥橝gostino and others indicates, the anti-颅inflammatory benefits of ketone bodies on the brain may add a measure of injury protection. In fact, the medic told me that he used the keto diet to supplement his own TBI treatment听at Walter Reed hospital.

鈥淜etosis appears to be beneficial in a surprisingly broad range of seemingly unrelated diseases,鈥� Ford said. 鈥淎t first blush, nutritional ketosis can sound like snake oil鈥攖hat it鈥檚 good for whatever ails you.鈥� The thing is, there鈥檚 some truth to that generalization. 鈥淜etosis represents a profound and fundamental shift in metabolism,鈥� he said, 鈥渨hich has broad epigenetic effects as well as energetic effects.鈥�
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These effects are having an impact in the ultra-endurance world. At the 2012 Western States 100, Volek brought a team of graduate students to study runners. He picked the right year: Timothy Olson, making only his second start at the race, became the first person to cover the epic course鈥攚hich involves 18,090 feet of ascents and 22,970 feet of descents鈥攊n under 15 hours. Volek鈥檚 subsequent studies,听conducted on runners and triathletes who had been fat-adapting for six months or 颅longer, recorded fat-burning rates close to Zach Bitter鈥檚听1.7 grams per minute.

Not everybody buys in, of course. One detractor of lockstep low-carb, high-fat protocols for athletes is Louise Burke, head of sports nutrition at the Australian Institute of Sport. Burke pub颅lished called 鈥溾�楩at Adaptation鈥� for Athletic Performance: The Nail in the Coffin?鈥� (She with 鈥淩e-颅Examining High-Fat Diets for Sports Performance: Did We Call the 鈥楴ail in the Coffin鈥� Too Soon?鈥�) Burke maintains that a low-carb, high-fat diet drains power by interfering with production of an enzyme called pyruvate dehydrogenase, or PDH. The PDH gene gets disrupted, according to Burke, and study subjects rapidly run out of gas. But peers like Volek say these studies are flawed听in part because the subjects went through fat-adaptation phases of as little as five days. 鈥淣othing good happens in five days,鈥� Ford told me. In endurance athletes who have spent months in ketosis, skeletal-muscle samples don鈥檛 show听any decrease in PDH.听

Burke鈥檚 theory, that high power output is impaired by a ketogenic diet, is not uncommon. Biochemist Robb Wolf, author of the bestselling book , told me that even though he loves how he thinks and feels when he鈥檚 in ketosis, he struggles with power outages in his sport of choice, jujitsu. He fares better on the mat when he works sweet potatoes and cashews into his diet.

Ford鈥檚 contention is that while there鈥檚 no reason to believe ketosis will increase anaerobic power or muscular strength, a well-formulated diet鈥攇iven time to take hold鈥攕houldn鈥檛 decrease power or strength and will improve aerobic capacity and muscular endurance. Ford, an aficionado of high-intensity resistance training, thinks that generating more ketones through diet may be a partial answer to the power-loss problem. 鈥淚 like听to go into my hard interval workouts with higher ketone levels, at least two millimoles per liter of blood. Otherwise听I get smoked,鈥� Ford said.

The takeaway from conversations with Ford, Volek, and D鈥橝gostino is that the ketogenic diet isn鈥檛 about making the Olympics. As Volek told me, 鈥淢y real interest is in how the diet can help solve obesity and other health problems. But bias against anything low-carb makes it tough to get funding.鈥�

Volek鈥檚 comment reminded me of my early introduction to听the topic. My wife鈥檚 aunt Mar颅tha, her husband, Ray, and their adult sons struggled for years with severe obesity. In less than three months on a keto diet, they lost an 颅average of 35 pounds each. I was floored when I saw them at a 颅family gathering, not recognizing them at first. They told me about their weight-loss plan, which involved no exercise, no calorie counting, and a lot of bacon.

Sounds great. But is the payoff worth the lifestyle price?

Even if it鈥檚 the right path to follow, low-carb eating in a high-carb world is tricky. 国产吃瓜黑料 Online鈥檚 editor, Scott Rosenfield鈥攁 long-distance mountain biker鈥攖ried the diet earlier this year, leaning heavily on canned sardines and staying under 50 grams of carbs per day. He liked the results. 鈥淥ne day I did a 100-mile solo ride on my fat-tire bike,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 felt like Superman.鈥�

The sustained power was one thing; sustaining the diet was another. 鈥淚t got monotonous,鈥� Rosenfield said. Another problem was ordering 鈥渨eird鈥� food at restaurants and having to explain the diet to bewildered friends and service staff. Predictably, eating sardines became a chore. He fell off.

I told Rosenfield about Ford鈥檚 advice: if you stick with the ketogenic diet for six months or so, you can stay in keto颅sis at 100 grams per day. He brightened. 鈥淭hat seems more doable,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 could have听a tortilla with my eggs.鈥澨齌he basic parameters of the diet are simple. Restrict your daily carb intake to 50 grams or less. (A Starbucks blueberry muffin contains 53 grams.) Don鈥檛 overdo it with meat, either鈥攖oo much will drive up insulin levels and boot you out of ketosis. Low-carb diets increase dehydration and provoke electrolyte loss; Volek says to drink a lot of water and increase salt intake. When it comes to fat, feel no fear鈥攐live oil, butter, and chicken skin are all just fine. Make fatty fish a staple. Eat some vegetables, but take it easy on the fruit. Get a keto cookbook to avoid monotony. Buy a blood-ketone tester from a drugstore or Amazon, and check your levels periodically. A measurement of over 0.5 millimole of ketones means you鈥檝e crossed into a state of ketosis.

When you鈥檙e in ketosis,听Ford explained, you see real benefits. Drop out of it and you don鈥檛. Bottom line: stay in it听as best you can. Consistency, Ford and other advocates insist, earns you a new metabolism.

I asked Ford about the potential hazards of eating a diet that mandates a lot of fat. He responded by sending me a massive independent review of the subject, put out by Credit Suisse Research, which analyzed more than 400 studies on fat intake in the human diet. 鈥淭his comes to the inescapable conclusion that fat is not the enemy,鈥� Ford said.

Talking with D鈥橝gostino led me to , a tech millionaire who uses the ketogenic diet for health and performance. A former Olympic 颅rower now in his forties, Sweeney gravitated to ketosis after being diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in 2004.听

鈥淚鈥檓 sure it was because I鈥檇 been working 75 hours a week, drinking at night, and getting up early because I felt guilty听for the drinking,鈥� he told me. When informed by a doctor that eating a single grapefruit could reduce the effects of听chemotherapy, he began reading, which led him to information about low-carb eating.听For Sweeney, the main draw of this route was that most cancer cells metabolize only glucose. Not ketones.

If there鈥檚 a dietary middle ground, Sweeney may be plotting it. To prep for long mountain-bike rides, he goes strict with keto. 鈥淚鈥檒l hammer the three months before a race or an adventure like Kilimanjaro to make sure my ketone levels are high, above one millimole per liter,鈥� he said. 鈥淚n between adventures, I鈥檒l be less strict.鈥�

He鈥檚 also not afraid to let down his guard from time to time, like during the holidays. On such occasions, he said,听鈥淚 fall in love again with pale ales, French wine, and Irish whiskey.鈥� 听

T. J. Murphy (@) wrote about Paleo guru Mark Sisson in march.

The post Is the Ketogenic Diet Right for You? appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Ask a group of marathoners why they run, and then count how many of them say, half-seriously, 鈥淪o I can eat as much as I want.鈥� The wish list usually includes carb-heavy foods like pasta, fruit, mac and cheese, pancakes, and Cap鈥檔 Crunch. For decades now, the value of carbs for improving performance and preventing bonks has been drummed into the heads of runners, cyclists, and triathletes by Ph.D.鈥檚 like Ed Burke, Tim Noakes, and Ed Coyle.

The way these experts framed it, high-mileage runners weren鈥檛 eating enough sugars and starches, no matter how hard they tried. Whenever a new diet came along that opposed this basic carb-loading idea, as the paleo diet famously began doing a few years ago, runners tended to yawn and make a third trip to the pizza bar. Paleo was especially easy to ignore given its restrictions: no pasta, no legumes, no bread, no dairy. No beer.

Through diet crazes like the Zone, Atkins, and paleo, I too stuck with carbs, chugging sports drinks on a daily basis. At the aid stations of Ironmans, I chased PowerBars with Gatorade and Coke. During a period when I dug into a bag of Chips Ahoy several times a day, I weighed 158 pounds and could run a 2:38 marathon. My belief was in sync with other running geeks: just burn it off.

Perhaps the first to break ranks with this way of thinking was Mark Sisson, who was once a 2:18 marathoner and an elite Ironman triathlete. Sisson says the high-carb doctrine is disastrously wrong, for runners and everyone else. Over the past decade, he鈥檚 been using his popular blog, , to warn people that such a diet will sooner or later rob you of health. Sisson believes that regular payloads of carbs disrupt the body鈥檚 hormonal balance, leading to chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and even leaky gut鈥攑orous, nutrient-wasting intestines. These are complications you won鈥檛 be able to cure by running farther.

Sisson was 28 when his health collapsed, despite 30 hours a week of exercise. He鈥檚 62 now. Instead of distance runs and bike rides, his weekly routine consists of a couple of trips to the gym for workouts that may last as little as 15 minutes, an Ultimate Frisbee game with twentysomethings, and maybe a long hike on the trails of Zuma Canyon, near his hilltop home in Malibu, California.

鈥淪ometimes I think about going for a run the way I used to,鈥� he says, 鈥渂ut I get about a half-block before I think, What鈥檚 the point?鈥� And yet, Sisson鈥檚 body-fat level, around 10 percent, is roughly the same as it was when he was a young athlete. His secret, he says, is that he eats a diet composed mostly of animals and vegetables, free of cereal and grains, relatively high in fat, and low in carbs. Somehow this has reengineered his cells to make them super-efficient at burning fat.

These days, Sisson earns a very good living by selling a modified caveman lifestyle to fitness buffs, defined by ten 鈥減rimal鈥� laws, including 鈥淢ove around a lot at a slow pace,鈥� 鈥淕et lots of sleep,鈥� and 鈥淧lay.鈥� Mark鈥檚 Daily Apple gets two million hits per month, and Sisson has sold more than 400,000 copies of his book . Though his wavy hair has gone from surfer blond to gray, he looks just as fit now鈥攎aybe fitter鈥攁s he did when he appeared on the cover of Runner鈥檚 World in 1986.

I started poking around Sisson鈥檚 blog early last year. I鈥檇 been frustrated by a chronic Achilles-tendon injury in my left leg, and I had moved from the Bay Area to Boston, where blizzards limited my exercise to occasional walks around the block with my wife, our infant son, and our dog. That, coupled with a few workouts at an overpriced CrossFit gym, put me in a funk. TV and Dogfish Head IPA became appealing countermeasures, and the consequences soon rolled in. At my annual checkup, I stepped on a scale and watched the pointer go past 200. My body-mass index was around 27 percent.

Sisson caught my eye because of an old blog post he wrote that pinpointed my excuse for not exercising鈥攖he expense. He touted a 鈥減rison workout鈥� that required 鈥渘o specialized equipment, no gimmicks, no late-night infomercial tchotchkes, no gym membership.鈥� All you needed was a cell-size amount of space and the will to work hard. 鈥淚t is you against everyone else in prison, so you better get in shape,鈥� he barked.

The basic routine involved lots of burpees. Back in the 1940s, an exercise physiologist named Royal Burpee invented this full-body exercise, which was used to assess the fitness of U.S. Army recruits. From a standing position, you drop down into a squat, then thrust your legs backward so that you land in the push-up position. You do the push-up, then jump back to upright and stand for a count of one. Then you do it all again, and again, fatigue building rapidly as you go.

Aside from pared-down exercise regimens, Sisson鈥檚 main sell was his take on the paleo diet, which stems from a belief that modern humans would be much healthier if we ate the way our ancestors did thousands of years ago, before agriculture gave us wheat, grain, and, more recently, packaged foods made with vegetable oils and high-fructose corn syrup. Sisson鈥檚 advocacy of paleo initially made me reluctant to buy in. I had talked to a few paleo CrossFitters at the gym before, and they鈥檇 droned on and on about all the bacon they ate. But Sisson wasn鈥檛 like that.

He has his share of critics, those who say that this style of nutrition is baseless. A 2013 article in Scientific American, 鈥�,鈥� attacked Sisson and the archetype he created in his writing: 鈥淕rok,鈥� a male hunter-gatherer living 10,000 years ago in the Central Valley of California. The article, by prominent science journalist Feris Jabr, claimed that Sisson and his ilk were wrong to suggest that human evolution hasn鈥檛 been able to keep up with changes in the foods we consume. 鈥淕rok cannot teach us how to live or eat,鈥� Jabr wrote. 鈥淗e never existed. Living off the land or restricting oneself to foods available before agriculture and industry does not guarantee good health.鈥�

Even so, I felt drawn to Sisson鈥檚 ideas. He鈥檇 been a runner鈥攁 good one. He quit competing after coming down with osteoarthritis, a series of respiratory infections, and irritable bowel syndrome. He apparently had reverse-engineered his problems and concluded that diet and 鈥渃hronic cardio鈥濃�攄oing obsessive amounts of cardiovascular exercise鈥攚ere to blame.

In March of last year, I talked to Sisson on the phone, asking him how I could use his Primal Blueprint diet to get back in shape. 鈥淏ody composition is 80 percent the result of your diet,鈥� he told me. 鈥淭he first thing it鈥檚 going to do for you, T.J., is get rid of that twenty-pound backpack you鈥檙e wearing.鈥�

Stick to a low-carb diet for 21 days and I would begin to transform myself from a sugar burner into a fat-burning beast, as he put it. This gets to the why of paleo: if the human genome has changed little in the past 10,000 years, then we have the hunter-gatherer genes encoded within us. According to Sisson, carb deprivation would switch my genes into fat-burning caveman survival mode. After this 鈥渇at-adaptation phase,鈥� I should experiment with intermittent fasting. 鈥淥nce you鈥檙e fat adapted, you鈥檙e not chained down by hunger,鈥� he said. It鈥檚 no big deal to miss meals when your liver is efficiently breaking down fat into usable energy, including ketones, which your brain can use when glucose levels are low.

Ketones sounded like something out of Dune, and reengineering cells sounded like something out of Philip K. Dick. But everything Sisson told me seemed to be supported by research. Oddly enough, it turned out that the most influential sports scientist in the endurance world, Tim Noakes鈥攁n M.D., a professor emeritus at South Africa鈥檚 University of Cape Town, and the author of 鈥攈ad become a proponent of low-carb diets. After talking to Sisson, I Skyped with Noakes, and he confirmed the change of heart.

鈥淔or 30 years I was part of the problem,鈥� Noakes said. Then, after failing to control his weight with running, he adopted the low-carb diet and lost 22 pounds in eight weeks. He put his Type 2 diabetes into remission. He鈥檚 been on the low-carb warpath ever since, despite calls for his head from colleagues who think he鈥檚 promoting a lifestyle that will cause cardiovascular disease.

One reason endurance athletes like to do workouts of two hours and longer is to improve the body鈥檚 fat-burning efficiency. The idea is to spend enough time exercising at a low intensity that you burn through muscle glycogen stores and shift to burning fat. But Sisson鈥攁s well as Noakes鈥攁rgues that carb restriction is the superior path.

Paleo advocates point to ultrarunner Tim Olson as evidence that you can achieve elite performance on a low-carb, high-fat diet. Olson broke the 15-hour barrier in 2012 at the prestigious Western States 100-mile run鈥攖he first to do so, and he still holds the record鈥攁fter adopting a high-fat diet devoid of sugar, grain, and wheat. On long training runs, he doesn鈥檛 carry any food or bottles. 鈥淚f I鈥檓 thirsty,鈥� he says, 鈥淚鈥檒l drink from a stream.鈥�

Sisson suggested I give Sami Inkinen a call if I needed any more convincing. Inkinen is the cofounder of Trulia, the online real-estate network, and a triathlete good enough to win his age group at big races like Wildflower. He used to follow the standard high-carb diet. 鈥淪ometimes I bonked in a race,鈥� he told me. 鈥淚 was always a little sick, always a little sore. I thought it was normal.鈥�

Blood tests showed that he was pre-diabetic. Concerned, he started experimenting with changes in his diet and kept a vigilant eye on his blood-glucose levels. He looked at research by Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek, two Ph.D.鈥檚 who have focused on using a high-fat, low-carb diet to increase fat-burning capacity in endurance athletes. By simply flipping the carbs and fat intake, Inkinen says, he became a better fat burner. To demonstrate what he gained, he paddled a kayak with his girlfriend for 2,750 miles, from the coast of California to Hawaii, living for six weeks on a diet with a carb content of between 6 and 8 percent.

鈥淭he most amazing thing for me was that, after being on a boat for three months, I won a 103-mile bike race that had a lot of heavy climbing,鈥� Inkinen said. 鈥淎nd I鈥檓 not a good climber. The high-fat diet is like a performance-enhancing drug.鈥�

In April, I crossed a footbridge over the Colorado River in downtown Austin, Texas, on my way to the annual conference, where Sisson was scheduled to appear. I smiled at the fact that this gathering of leading ancestral-living experts was being held in the Palmer Events Center, a shiny quadrangle with hyperbolic curves and silver solar panels. It looked like a stranded spaceship.

The paleo diet is largely attributed to Loren Cordain, an exercise scientist and professor emeritus at Colorado State. Cordain based his work on a New England Journal of Medicine article from the 1980s called 鈥淧aleolithic Nutrition.鈥� His hope was that Stone Age dietary principles could reverse the obesity epidemic that, according to current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, now affects more than 78 million Americans.

It took only a few minutes of lurking around PaleoFX to be reminded of how the movement has expanded from a cult diet into a lifestyle industry: the first thing that caught my eye was a couple wearing Flintstones costumes. I weaved through a giddy crowd to peek over shoulders at the stuff being sold in booths. I could buy things like Caveman Coffee, MegaSpore Biotic, and protein bars made with crickets. I saw a paleo dentistry booth and a probiotics skin company that used the slogan 鈥淏acteria Is the New Black.鈥� The idea here was that our skin hosts trillions of microorganisms. Because of daily showers and constant hand sanitizing, we don鈥檛 have all the microbes we need for healthy skin and hair, so it鈥檚 necessary to rub them back on. At one booth, a Mother Dirt product was selling for $49.

I met up with Sisson just before he went on for a talk. He was dressed in Banana Republic casual鈥攕lightly faded blue jeans, a cotton polo, and a nice watch on his tanned left arm. He has the body of a soccer player, with a waist I鈥檇 estimate to be around 30 inches. In a slightly surreal moment, his face appeared on a JumboTron above a stage adjacent to the exposition space while I was talking to the real thing. On the screen, he was savoring bites of a wrap made with an avocado-oil mayo he sells. The voiceover was his voice, and I would see this commercial about 20 times over the next couple of days.

The conference was one of the few chances that Sisson鈥檚 fans got to see him in person. They were here in force, wearing T-shirts bearing an illustration of the fabled Grok, clutching a spear in an outstretched arm while making a Nijinsky leap, with bold-faced words stamped below: LIVE LONG. DROP DEAD. An impromptu line formed in front of Sisson before he took the stage. He graciously accepted people鈥檚 thanks and listened to their stories, tales of how a hundred pounds had been lost or Celiac disease had been pushed into remission.

On stage an enormous picture filled the screen: it was Sisson鈥檚 son, Kyle, soaring through sea spray to catch a Frisbee above the surf. LIVE AWESOME, the slide read. (Sisson and his wife, Carrie, have been married 25 years and also have a daughter, Devyn.) Most of the pictures I had seen that related to Sisson鈥檚 Primal Blueprint were of Sisson himself. His blog is flooded with them: Sisson playing ultimate Frisbee; Sisson, shirtless and showing off a 12-pack, doing an L-sit chin-up under a dock; Sisson smiling, arms outstretched, crossing a slackline strung between two trees in his Malibu backyard. If you鈥檙e wondering whether Sisson might have an ego thing going on, he won鈥檛 argue. 鈥淚鈥檓 vain,鈥� he confessed on his blog in 2010. 鈥淚 want to look good naked.鈥�

In his talk, Sisson鈥檚 mission was a bit different. Everyone in attendance was a believer, so there was no need to sell them on the gospel itself. Rather, his keynote was designed to rein in extremists.

鈥淲e embraced the movement so much we became almost militant about it,鈥� he said, pacing the stage, ticking off the ways in which some paleo fanatics had gone too far. 鈥淲e became a pain in the ass to dine with.鈥�

Sisson emphasized the need for flexibility and perspective. If you decide to fast every time you can鈥檛 find the perfect 鈥済rass-fed, wild, line-caught, pasture-raised鈥� food you want, then you鈥檙e missing the point. The point, he said, is to enjoy life, great health, and good food, not to adhere to rules at all costs. You鈥檙e at a kid鈥檚 birthday party and somebody offers you a piece of cake? Eat it.

鈥淲e stopped having fun,鈥� Sisson said. 鈥淲e got too attached to the numbers.鈥� Too many blood tests, too many wearable devices, too much data. 鈥淲e鈥檙e starting to see what happens if you take the dogma and push it too far.鈥� The paleo obsessed were even becoming unhealthy, not to mention miserable. Sisson suggested an alternative: rather than judge the quality of your life by the degree to which you obey an arbitrary doctrine, stay loose and see what you can get away with. 鈥淢ake choices that will allow you to enjoy your life,鈥� Sisson said. 鈥淒o it.鈥�

Back home, loaded up with info and inspiration, I focused on the basics. The Primal Blueprint starts with food but expands into other dimensions of Grok鈥檚 life, like the various ways he got exercise. (Walking long distances, lifting heavy objects, occasionally sprinting away from tigers.) You鈥檙e advised to get lots of rest and sunlight and avoid things that are poisonous or otherwise might kill you.

I got going on the food, loading my kitchen with vegetables, grass-fed beef, olive oil, berries, and butter. (Unlike many paleos, Sisson is not automatically anti-dairy.) My running injury was healing, but I was still too fat, so I tried my version of the prison workout. I joined a sullen, broken-down gym, in Medford, on the outskirts of Boston. The place smelled iffy and the music was bad, but it cost just $10 a month.

Per Sisson鈥檚 advice, I tested myself to establish baseline numbers: maximum pull-ups (a good measure of strength) and max burpees (stamina). I managed five pull-ups, which wasn鈥檛 bad, but the burpee test was ugly. I set a countdown timer for 15 minutes and started. Before long I felt like I was going to throw up. I could only do 50.

Mark鈥檚 Daily Apple is loaded with nutrition strategies, recipes, tips, hacks, and supplements. It was overwhelming. I zoomed in on what Sisson says makes the biggest difference: carbs. Every day I ate as many calories as I wanted, with olive-oil dressing, macadamia nuts, and avocados providing plenty of fat. But I tried to consume no more than 100 grams of carbs鈥攊n Sisson鈥檚 world, this is the basic secret to losing body fat and weight, with or without exercise.

The diet wasn鈥檛 especially difficult. I ate meat, fish, vegetables, and berries and avoided high-carb stuff like pasta, bread, and beans. (No more Dogfish Head IPA for me, alas.) Sisson鈥檚 plan allows for some flexibility, too. With a happy shrug, he puts heavy cream and a teaspoon of sugar in his coffee every morning. At night I enjoyed red wine and dark chocolate. I just kept an eye on the overall carb count.

The only annoying thing about Primal Blueprint was the flood of marketing offers that began hitting my inbox once Sisson鈥檚 company knew that I existed. I got suckered into a deal that sounded too good to be true: $1,033.97 worth of books, referred to as 鈥渢he bodyweight bundle,鈥� for just $37. All I really wanted was Amazing Feets!, Sisson鈥檚 book on how to switch over to a barefoot-dominant lifestyle. But damn, what a bargain.

Turns out it was too good to be true. I paid, received a bundle of e-files, and discovered that I couldn鈥檛 even find Amazing Feets!, which was buried in the folder somewhere. One of the so-called 鈥渂ooks鈥� was only seven pages long.

So, yes, that was irritating. But the low-carb program? That started working right off. Weight sizzled away.

In May, a work trip took me to Southern California, and I dropped by to meet with Sisson at his clifftop house in Malibu. I passed a shiny black Maserati on the way to his doorstep, circled a fountain, and brushed past a half-dozen palm trees in the front yard. Sisson greeted me, smiling, and asked me in. A baby grand piano sat in the foyer. (Sisson鈥檚 bucket list includes learning to play well enough to earn tips at a lounge bar.) Just past the piano was his office. I could see a stand-up desk and a computer.

We made our way to the back patio, passing his kitchen, freshly remodeled with white marble. On the far side of the center island, Sisson had installed refrigerated drawers, something I never knew existed. On the base of the island itself was a shelf crammed with paleo cookbooks. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 cook,鈥� Sisson confided. 鈥淚 use the books to point out to the housekeeper what I鈥檇 like, and she makes it.鈥�

The backyard had a pool, a whirlpool, and a fireplace filled with glass crystals. There was a canyon view. I walked near the edge and could see what looked like an equestrian ranch. 鈥淟aird Hamilton lives just over there,鈥� Sisson said, pointing.

I asked Sisson about his path to Malibu dreamland. He opened an old folder full of yellowed clippings from his glory days as a runner and triathlete, starting back in the late 1970s. Sisson was elite in an era when the U.S. was awash with sub-2:20 marathoners鈥攖he golden age of Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar. In 1980, Sisson finished fifth in the U.S. National Marathon Championships. In 1982, he finished fourth in the Hawaii Ironman. Then the high mileage started to get to him.

Sisson was a serial entrepreneur from the beginning. After a stint when he painted houses for a living, he started making money as a trainer, using his Ironman cred to charge $100 per hour for his services. He signed on with the governing bodies of triathlon, ultimately serving for 15 years as the anti-doping chairman for the International Triathlon Union, during a time when triathlon had made it into the Olympic Games. Watching young triathletes brutalize their health in pursuit of Olympic gold got Sisson into the business of selling antioxidant supplements. He started Mark鈥檚 Daily Apple in October of 2006, eventually developing a large online following. In 2009, he self-published The Primal Blueprint. He has also published a line of cookbooks.

Later that day, we buzzed down Highway 1 in his Maserati. Sisson drove us to a private beach entry, and we walked down wooden steps to the white sands of Paradise Cove. We headed west, arriving at the spot where Charlton Heston falls to his knees in the original Planet of the Apes.

We plodded along in the bright sunshine, into a light, salty breeze, the rocky bluffs to our right and the blue-green Pacific to our left. I was thinking about a post I had read on LetsRun.com, where a discussion of Sisson was lit up by the following topic: Is he a legitimate athlete?

A correspondent using the handle Whirled Pees bypassed the question and attacked Sisson directly. 鈥淗e鈥檚 in the business of selling you his ideas, so you will buy his products, thereby increasing his income,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淭wenty years ago when he was poor, and only good at running, he probably went to a Tony Robbins seminar 鈥� and the rest is history.鈥�

There鈥檚 a point to the snark: Who are you supposed to trust? On one hand, Sisson is offering all sorts of advice on his blog, but how can you not observe that much of it is directly tied in to what he sells? Walking on the beach, Sisson told me about a new restaurant chain he鈥檚 working on and various angel investments he has going in the paleo universe. If paleo doesn鈥檛 fade quietly away, like Atkins and Zone, then Sisson may be the reason why.

You can certainly connect the dots and follow the money鈥擲isson鈥檚 evangelism on behalf of paleo could sustain and maybe even grow the movement, increasing profits. But if what he says actually works, what鈥檚 wrong with that?

I talked about this with an M.D. friend of mine, Leon Chang, an anesthesiologist who believes in Sisson鈥檚 diet. 鈥淚 learned absolutely nothing about nutrition in medical school,鈥� he told me. 鈥淵ou have to do your research and consider the source, whether it鈥檚 from a doctor or not. And make sure they look the part and walk the walk. Sisson checks out.鈥�

My results were certainly checking out. At three the next morning, I drove down to San Diego. A friend had decided not to race in the and gave me his number. The only 鈥渢raining鈥� I had done was carb restriction, Primal Blueprint style, along with my Blast workouts and a couple of runs to test out the Achilles. My weight was down to 188.

That day I ran slow, in the back of the pack, but I made a point of not drinking any Gatorade or eating any gels the entire race. If I had failed to make progress with Primal Blueprint, I would surely bonk. But as I descended Pershing Drive into Balboa Park, with just a couple of miles left of the 13-mile run, I hadn鈥檛 felt so much as a hitch in my energy. I finished with ease.

People like me鈥攖here are 29.8 million runners in the U.S.鈥攁re a big part of Sisson鈥檚 newest commercial wave. His next book is aimed at changing the minds of stubborn sugar addicts in the endurance crowd.

In June, I hit a snag. Progress had been steady鈥擨 was getting fitter from my prison workouts and decided to add sprinting to my schedule. Sprinting is a Primal Blueprint specialty; Sisson says it can turbocharge your training. But during the second session, I pushed it too hard and limped home.

Oddly, the best part of my experience in Primal鈥攐r paleo or whatever you call it鈥攈appened in early July. I dropped my son off at day care and went to Blast. Movers were carting the TVs out to a truck. 鈥淲e鈥檙e closed,鈥� a woman at the desk said with a glare. Closed for good.

On the drive home, I pulled over near a public soccer field, which had brittle, dying grass and hard ground. July in Boston. Hot and humid. I mashed together a prison workout鈥攕ets of burpees, air squats, and push-ups. The sun was punishing and good.

I followed up with a Grok stretch, and I felt great. A bit jarred and sick to my stomach, but great. I couldn鈥檛 fathom why I鈥檇 been doing my workouts in a junky fitness center to the sound of Pandora playlists. I told Sisson about it. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e starting to get the idea, T.J.,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e being intuitive.鈥�

By the end of August, my weight had dropped to 179 pounds鈥�24 pounds lighter than when I started. During my max pull-up test, I did 12鈥攎ore than I鈥檇 ever done in my life. Then I did 182 burpees, another personal best, and this on a day when I ate less than 50 grams of carbs. According to the conventional wisdom I鈥檝e always lived by, I should have lost steam because of the low carb intake. Granted, I really did want to throw up, and I felt light-headed, but my engine ran full throttle the whole way. Along with the half-marathon experience, this workout convinced me that the low-carb, high-fat protocol worked. Energy was not only plentiful but consistent. Even if my training program sagged, I stayed lean. My wife told me that I was a different person than that grumpy dude I had been last winter. 鈥淣ight and day鈥� was how she put it.

There were parts of Sisson鈥檚 program I struggled with. For one thing: minimalist shoes, which he recommends, just don鈥檛 work for me. I get injured. Maybe I鈥檓 too beat up or too old or too impatient, but there are times when it鈥檚 best to stick with what you know. In my case, a pair of heavy-duty trainers allowed me to run without pain.

Running reminded me of the most important lesson I got from Sisson: Let go, have fun. I had been freed from a rigid structure that limited what I got out of exercising. Along with being liberated from a gym, my running had been unboxed. It used to be that a one-hour run was a one-hour run鈥攕omething I simply did, robotically recording the distance and pace in a logbook.

But the Sisson way changed me. I went out for a run on a wooded trail and spotted a pipe that supported a telephone pole. I jumped up, grabbed it, and did some pull-ups. On the trail, I started dropping down every two minutes for a set of ten push-ups. Later I did sets of step-ups onto a chunk of exposed granite. I wasn鈥檛 leaping through the air in a grass skirt with a spear in my hand, but it was a start.

T. J. Murphy () wrote about Sealfit camp in January 2015.

The post Mark Sisson Is the Pied Piper of Paleo appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

I was scared to swim across San Francisco Bay. I'll admit it.

Even though I'd done many triathlons over the years, the swim that starts off the legendary Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon is unlike any other in the sport: You leap into the water from a packed and heaving ferryboat near the old island prison, then swim toward the city through bone-chilling 50-something-degree water being sucked out beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. There aren't really supposed to be great whites in the Bay, but, well, it only takes one, right? The fear: It's why Alcatraz was made into a federal pen back in 1934.

I jumped in anyway. After 15 minutes of panicked freestyle, I took a break to tread water and catch my breath. Ahead of me was the San Francisco skyline鈥攖he skyscrapers, the hills, Fisherman's Wharf. I snuck a peek over my shoulder at the Rock itself. I was in a splashing column of 1,800 swimmers, all of us being pushed closer to shore by a stiff tide鈥攎aking the swim easier than I'd expected鈥攁nd I realized that not only was I done freaking out, I was having an absolute blast.

That's the thing with triathlons: The event itself always ends up being so much more fun (and doable) than you expect. Blame the sport's first big-time race, the 31-year-old Ironman, for the enduring perception that triathlons are all about agony. These days, races come in many flavors, from the relatively easy “sprint distance” events (half-mile swim, 12-mile bike, three-mile run) to intermediate events like Alcatraz (the 1.5-mile swim is followed by an 18-mile ride and a hilly eight-mile run)鈥攁ll involving much less agony than the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile ride, and 26.2-mile run of an Ironman. And those shorter events have helped spur explosive growth in the sport. Last year, more than 1.2 million people entered a road triathlon鈥攁bout 50 percent more than in 2007鈥攁nd there are almost twice as many triathlons around the country now (1,891) than there were in 2005.

If you're thinking of joining the club, allow me to make a bold suggestion: Do Escape from Alcatraz first. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Sure, Alcatraz is tough on beginners and pros alike. At the end of the swim, you run almost a mile to warm your body, so you're not too hypothermic to ride a bike, and the real running leg includes an are-you-kidding-me grind up the infamous Sand Ladder, 200 wooden beams climbing up from the beach. But if you put in the time to prepare, you're going to find yourself enjoying one of the most exciting and scenic triathlons anywhere.

“The Escape from Alcatraz is incredibly fun,” says Hunter Kemper, three-time Olympian and two-time winner at Alcatraz. “It's impossible to describe the feeling of jumping off that boat. There's nothing cooler for a first-timer.”

And, of course, there are the fantastic fitness benefits that come with triathlon training. The workouts reduce the chance of getting injured (or burned out) by distributing the load across three sports鈥攁ll highly rewarding in their own right鈥攁nd the event virtually demands building a fatigue-proof core that translates to more power in just about any other activity.

As I floated in the Bay, I took in one more 360-degree view, then put my head down and started stroking, this time calmly and with more confidence. I had a lot of work ahead鈥攁 hilly ride and a scenic, if grueling, run鈥攁nd I was going to enjoy every minute of it.

“Escape from Alcatraz is the most unique race in the world,” Kemper says. “You won't be disappointed.”

I'll second that.

The Hardest Part of Triathlons: Getting In

is grueling, of course, but the process simply to get a spot in the race is no picnic either. Would-be contestants entry nine months in advance, and even then only have a 40-percent chance of getting one of 1,700 spots.听Athletes who come up short gambling have a chance at one of 300 extra spots, however, if they're willing to pay the price. Guarantee a spot by qualifying for a one-day in San Francisco ($480).

If you need a Plan C, consider sitting this race out a year and trying these established and popular tris: (St. Petersburg, Florida), (Tunica, Mississippi), or (Richmond, Virginia).

Get Your Tri Bike a Round Trip

Flying with your bike can be a logistical nightmare. If you don't want to rent a rig in San Francisco, you have two alternatives.

#1: will pick up your bike from one of their partner bike shops and have it ready for you at the race. Afterwards, drop it off, then pick it up a few days later back at the shop (from $180).

#2: Have your local cycling shop break down and ship your steed to , in San Francisco, a week before the race. Post-race, just drop it off for shipping back to your local shop (from $175, plus shipping to Sports Basement).

Five Triathlon Myths Busted

#1: “I'm not fit enough.”
You actually don't have to be an endurance freak to train for a triathlon鈥攜ou don't even need to be a good runner, cyclist, or swimmer. “There's never a starting point that's too minimal,” says six-time Hawaii Ironman champ and coach Mark Allen. The key to getting ready is to stay away from crash-course programs and give yourself enough time to prepare for race day鈥攁t least three months, but preferably more like five. “You should enjoy this,” says Allen. “Build into it gradually so your body can adapt and you stay injury free.”

#2:听“I swim like a rock.”
Join the club. “The biggest weakness for most triathletes is the swim,” says elite triathlon coach Matt Dixon. “Most racers don't have dedicated swim backgrounds.” Your first step? Slip into some simple swim fins for your first few weeks in the pool. “You'll be able to focus on being relaxed and establishing a good body position,” Dixon says. Second, take a short swim class so you can learn proper form, which will help you keep calm and breathe efficiently. Look for a local one at .

#3:听“I don't have time to train.”
It takes less time than you think. The secret to realistic triathlon training is to train for it like one sport, not three. “If you're going to be successful, it has to fit into your life,” Dixon says. That means just focusing on one run, bike, or swim workout a day, five or six days a week, saving your “brick” workouts (double workouts with swim/run or ride/run) for a few key days later in your training.

#4:听“I hate working out alone.”
You might think it would be harder to find workout buddies when you're training in three sports instead of one鈥攂ut in fact you have a larger pool of partners. There are also nearly 800 newbie-friendly tri clubs across the country; find one near you at . “Training with others is a great way to make friends,” says elite triathlete Linsey Corbin, “and you'll pick up bits of advice along the way.”

#5:听“I don't own a fancy bike.”
You don't need one. While you'll see sleek, $6,000 carbon-fiber tri bikes at every race, it's the last thing you need as an entry-level triathlete. “Pull out whatever two-wheeler you have sitting in the garage and use it to get started,” says Allen.

A Five-Month Triathlon Training Plan

Alcatraz is not for slouches. To finish this (or any) intermediate-distance race without suffering, you'll need to put in equal time in the pool, on the bike, and on the road. This simple plan, developed by Matt Dixon, coach of Ironman World Championship runner-up Chris Lieto, spreads the training over five months, letting you gradually build up stamina and strength in three sports without them taking over your life. Start it January 1, and in the meantime begin shaping up: Take a swim class and sign up for a warm-up sprint-distance tri to get some experience.

Oh, and lest we forget鈥攇et your gear dialed. These three cold-water pieces are essential for first-time triathletes.

#1: A full wetsuit
“Full” meaning complete coverage of your torso, arms, and legs. A more buoyant suit鈥攍ike 2XU's听听($300)鈥攚ill save you energy in the water. If this will be your only tri, a surfing suit will do (but expect a less comfortable swim), or look into Xterra's ($49).

#2: Layered swim caps
Two caps is the standard for keeping your head warm in the Bay, but you'll get just one in your goodie bag鈥攎ade of latex or silicone鈥攁nd you're required to wear it. Bring two extras鈥攐ne latex, like Tyr's 听($3), and one silicone, like the company's ($10)鈥攕o you can wear a second without mixing materials: Latex and silicone slip off each other.

#3: Tri shorts or race suit
Having to change from wetsuit to biking shorts, then biking shorts to running shorts, will cost you time. Instead, start the race with Pearl Izumi's ($65) or听听($90) under your wetsuit. Both are quick-drying and provide a chamois for cycling as well as a chafe-free design for running.

Core Strength for Triathletes

Three sports, one strength recipe.

Planks: Facedown, hold your body in a straight line, resting on your elbows. 2 x 15-60 seconds.

Body-Weight Lunges: Keeping your torso upright, step forward and kneel until your front knee is at a 90-degree angle; repeat with your other leg. 2 x 12 reps.

Bicycle Abs: Lie on your back with knees in the air. Keeping lower legs nearly parallel to the floor, slowly pedal your feet, six to 12 inches off the ground. 2 x 12-15 reps.

Side Plank: Form a plank on one side, with weight on one elbow. 2 x 15颅-60 seconds. Switch sides.

Step-ups: Find a bench just above knee height. Keeping your front knee behind your front foot and an upright back, step slowly onto the bench. 2 x 6-12 reps.

A Triathlon Meal Plan

Before:听Don't go out and binge on pasta the night before. Just eat a standard portion of a carb-based meal you're familiar with. Then, the morning of the race, have an early breakfast. “Get up two to three hours before the start and eat something high in carbohydrates and low in fat and fiber,” says pro triathlete and nutritionist . Toast, bananas, and sports drinks are staples; energy bars also work.

During:听Throughout the bike and run, you want to deliver a steady stream of calories and water to your working muscles鈥攗p to 60 grams of carbs and 20 ounces of fluid per hour. On the run, drink stations will be set up every mile, but bring your own gels鈥攚ash one down with 8 or 10 ounces of water every half-hour. (And sample different products in training so you know what will work best for your system on race day.)

After:听Bounce back quickly by downing a liquid meal supplement with a mix of carbohydrates and lean protein, like听 (from $44 for 12)听within 40 minutes of finishing. Keep one on hand for after the race. (Following hard workouts, simple combos like cereal and milk or chicken and rice work just as well, says Taylor).

Multisport Mistakes

According to Eugene, Oregon鈥揵ased coach (and pro) , these are the three most common blunders made by first-time triathletes:

#1: Swimming only in pools
“Make sure you get open-water experience so you feel comfortable on race day,” Madison says.

#2: Not practicing transitions
Rehearse taking off your wetsuit, getting on and off the bike, and changing from biking to running shoes to make it automatic on race day.

#3: Never finding your speed
It doesn't matter how fast or slow anyone else is. “You need to have an idea of the pace you can hold for the distances of your race.”

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Last October, I watched a former environmentalist from Suffolk, England Chrissie Wellington, a cheerful woman whose friends call her Muppet win the Hawaii Ironman. None of the experts on the Kona course had ever heard of her, and when she took the lead after the halfway point, we assumed she would blow up. Upstarts aren’t supposed to have a prayer in Hawaii, but Wellington owned the race, finishing the 2.4 miles of ocean swimming, 112 miles of biking, and 26.2 miles of running in 9:08:45, five minutes ahead of the next-fastest woman, Samantha McGlone.

Chrissie Wellington biking

Hawaii Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington on the road

Reto Hug

Team TBB's Reto Hug fueling up

Brett Sutton

Sutton at the track

Justin Granger

Triathlete Justin Granger on a break in the pool

At a press conference that evening, we learned that Wellington had quietly raced and won her first Ironman, Ironman Korea, seven weeks before Hawaii, a decent feat but nothing compared with a victory at the Ironman world championship. Equally mystifying was the fact that she’d been a pro, training seriously, for only nine months.

At one point during all this, Wellington took a moment to thank her coach, who wasn’t there but whose name was very familiar to people in the know: Brett Sutton. And with that, the reaction to her win shifted from “How did this happen?” to “Oh.” Since then, she’s proved it was no fluke. Earlier this year she won Ironman Australia and Ironman Germany. Returning to Kona on October 11, she’s a favorite to defend her title in triathlon’s greatest event.

SUTTON IS A 49-year-old Australian who’s been building top triathletes for almost 20 years, among them Wellington, Loretta Harrop, Greg Bennett, and several others. In disciplines both long and short, his pupils have won some 15 world championships and two Olympic medals. He’s widely considered the best, and most unorthodox, coach in the sport.

Sutton is shamelessly at odds with trends in modern-day triathlon. Most of his peers hold exercise-science degrees, still compete themselves, and love technologies like power meters and heart-rate monitors. Sutton is a high school dropout who never ran a triathlon and has no respect for gadgets. He says they’re pointless in a pursuit as purely aerobic as triathlon. Instead, he draws on the performance fundamentals he learned during his early days as a swim coach and as a trainer of racehorses and greyhounds. He’s famous for being a hard-ass. The running joke is that his secret formula is to treat people like animals.

But for the past ten years, Sutton has been a pariah in the sport, because of a crime he was arrested for in 1997, when he was coaching the Australian national triathlon team in preparation for tri’s debut at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In 1999 he confessed to having had sexual relations several times with a female swimmer he coached in 1987 when he was 27 and she was reportedly 14. Investigations after his arrest indicated that this episode was an isolated case; Sutton, it appeared, was not a serial pedophile. He received a two-year suspended jail sentence for sexually assaulting a minor and a three-year sanction by the International Triathlon Union and Triathlon Australia, the governing bodies associated with the Olympics.

During the sanction, he was suspended as a coach and banned from national sports facilities in Australia. He was also barred from attending national and international events, and when he showed up at a race in Japan a few months later, he was escorted out. An official told reporters, “It was like having a black cloud over the race.”

Sutton never stopped coaching, though, and several of his athletes followed him, including Harrop, who would go on to win the silver medal at the 2004 Olympics. Freed from the restrictions of overseeing a national squad, Sutton assembled an international group of triathlon specialists. He set up shop in other countries, such as Switzerland and Brazil.

For years, he earned his living by charging athletes a monthly fee and taking a cut of their winnings. (Which aren’t as large as you’d think. Even a star like Wellington is lucky to pull in around $150,000 a year in prize money.) Last year, a new sponsor took over Sutton’s team an Asian bike-shop chain called the Bike Boutique so he no longer draws money directly from the athletes, a shift that has allowed him to be even choosier about whom he invites onto his team. In the past, one knock against him was that he had never produced a Hawaii Ironman champion. Now, few will be surprised if his athletes start dominating the event.

Although Sutton’s home base is Leysin, Switzerland, where he holds a summer training camp, he prefers Third World countries for his fabled “heat” camps: two months of hard training in a sweltering, humid climate to prepare for the start of the race season, and two more rounds of the same thing before and after Hawaii. In February of this year, he took his team to the U.S. Navy’s defunct base at Subic Bay, in the Philippines, for the first of them.

Sutton has rarely let outsiders in while he works, but when Wellington scored her historic win, I set out to meet him. After five months of back-and-forth by e-mail, he agreed to let me visit him in the Philippines. I was told that everything, including his past, would be up for discussion. I had my doubts, but when we sat down around a coffee table during my first night in camp, I was surprised that he started unloading right away.

Sort of. Sutton, who has a rugged, green-eyed face that’s seen some hard road, didn’t say much that was directly related to the assault charge. Instead he talked about a harsh childhood under the pressure exerted by a father who was a demanding swim coach. “I come from an extremely violent home,” he said. “I was the most passive.” His swimming was poor, but his father led him into coaching at the age of 10. He was almost 15 when he was kicked out of school for coaching in a professional program. He left home and found work at dog- and horse-racing stables in New South Wales. He also said he has suffered from manic depression, and that it kicked in before his arrest, at a time when he was gaining a global reputation as a tri coach.

“I had a business partner who’d killed himself,” he said. “So I was already in a bad way.”

It all sounded a little staged, as if Sutton was trying to offset whatever I might think about his sex crime. But I don’t think the self-loathing was an act. At the hotel one morning during my stay, Sutton came by and sat down while I ate breakfast. He talked for an hour about his training philosophy, and then he visibly sagged as his mind turned to the bad old days.

“People think because you’ve had some success you can forget about certain things in your past, that you can get over it,” he said. “It’s not something that comes and goes. I’ve always hated myself viciously. Now I just hate myself for different reasons.”

SUTTON KNOWS HE has enemies. Athletes invited to join his squad, team TBB, are warned that he’s “damaged goods.”

“I get the rejects, the ones who are desperate,” he says melodramatically. “Others won’t come near me because I’m tainted.”

Obviously, athletes like Wellington have accepted who he is. “All I could do is go by what I saw and the relationship I established with him in a short amount of time,” she told me in the Philippines. “I saw nothing that gave me any concern, and still haven’t.” What they get in return is a level of expertise that will take some of them to the top. For this reason, Sutton has no shortage of applicants, and he tends to turn people down at least twice before agreeing to coach them. He almost always says no to Americans, whom he considers “soft.”

The morning after my first talk with Sutton, he gives me a ride in his minivan to a 7 a.m. swim session at a community swimming pool. Twelve sleepy-looking triathletes are sitting under a palm tree, eagerly waiting for the gate to be opened among them Wellington and Reto Hug, a two-time Olympian from Switzerland. Some of the athletes are away from the camp right now, but the full squad numbers only 18. Sutton prefers not to work with too many people at once, a rarity in the age of Web coaching. “I know I could have 100 people here and make more money,” he says. “But that’s not what I’m about. Coaching is sacred to me.”

During the 90-minute session, they will swim three miles’ worth of intervals, the first of the day’s three workouts. In the hours ahead, I’ll see a few glimpses of Sutton’s hard-man side. One of the triathletes has a water bottle on deck and starts sipping from it between swimming sets. Sutton sees it and hurls it over a fence. “I haven’t yet seen an aid station at an Ironman swim,” he shouts. “If you win a world championship, then you can bring a drink.”

The Bobby Knight moments are few, however, and what stands out more is Sutton’s ability to see into the depths of an individual. He examines each athlete and issues unique instructions one-on-one, as if he were coming up with plans on the spot. Greg Bennett, whom Sutton turned from an average pro to a star in the late nineties, told me about the Sutton eye.

“He has learned how to read animals that are fatigued,” he said, “so when he’s taking on people, isn’t that just another animal?” Bennett added that this skill helps Sutton push his athletes to the brink but not over it. “There were weeks and months where I pushed myself harder and longer than I ever could have imagined. You go into a workout thinking, There is no way I can do what he’s after, and yet day in and day out your body responds.”

In the pool that morning, Wellington does her swim with Bella Comerford, a 31-year-old Scot. Wellington and Comerford demonstrate the contrasting types that Sutton looks for in athletes: They have different levels of natural ability, but they both have a killer work ethic. Wellington, who came to Sutton after competing at the amateur level for three years, was the type of raw talent that other coaches might have overlooked. But she has incredible genetic gifts Sutton calls her a “thoroughbred” so she needs only a few months of training to achieve good form.

Comerford, in contrast, wins by virtue of hard work. “A plow horse,” Sutton calls her. Even if she never wins at Hawaii, in the series races that are triathlon’s bread-and-butter, she’s a star. In the first half of 2008, she won Ironman South Africa and Ironman Lanzarote, the latter contested on what’s considered the toughest course in the sport.

“We call her the little Nazi,” Sutton says. “Bella is my champion soldier.”

SUBIC BAY LIES ABOUT a four-hour drive northwest of Manila. Since the Navy left in 1992, the local government has attempted to transform the area into a tourism destination. Today, for the most part, it’s a partially developed ghost town, with various casinos and hotels, including the Grand Seasons, where Sutton and many of the athletes are staying.

I watch the team train for three days. Rumor has it that Sutton runs a torture academy there are tales of athletes sprinting in wetsuits and of nine-hour bike rides. Those things can happen, but what I see is fairly simple. The team swims an hour and a half per day, bikes two hours or so, and runs more than an hour. A five-hour training day, with the occasional day off, is standard. The really hard part is doing this week after week. Belinda Granger, a 37-year-old tri veteran from Australia who’s been working with Sutton for the past two years, tells me that when a new athlete joins the program, the raw volume can be a shock. “They go backwards before they go forwards,” she says.

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“If it’s not long, it’s got to be hard,” Sutton quips about the workouts, underlining his belief in interval training repeats of fast-paced efforts interspersed with short recoveries. Then there are Sutton’s infamous “black” days Black Wednesday, for example when he issues a virtually endless succession of intervals. During one session, the team swims six miles’ worth of them: 100 meters, 100 times. I was told of another challenge in which the team ran 35 miles in 100-degree heat.

“What fascinates me about Brett is this emphasis on the mental side,” Wellington says. The value of a Black Wednesday, she says, is psychological toughening. For this to work, the athlete has to trust Sutton completely. He demands and gets total submission. If he doesn’t, the athlete can expect to be booted.

“There is a procedure to becoming a world champion,” Sutton says. “It’s not a natural one. It’s not normal. If you want to be a civilian, be a civilian. My athletes are soldiers. This is the jungle. The lion gets up every day. If he doesn’t catch the gazelle, he doesn’t eat. If the gazelle doesn’t outrun the lion, he’s dead.”

Another Sutton admirer is Alec Rukosuev, a former pro triathlete who coaches at the National Training Center in Clermont, Florida, a site for athletes from around the world. For him, it’s simple: Sutton’s methods work. “Guys like Brett are the ones doing it right,” he says. “He has a strong personality. All the great coaches do. They are like Napoleon. People will do anything he says.”

IF SUTTON WEREN’T a famous coach, my guess is that his long-ago crime might be forgotten by now. But it will always be there, and there are people who think he still doesn’t belong in the sport. Richie Cunningham, a professional triathlete from Australia, says, “I would never be coached by the guy. I guess for some it’s OK to sell your soul, as long as you end up winning.”After Wellington’s win, Nikola Tosic, a Serbia-based triathlete and blogger, posted a picture of her with a speech balloon pasted in, which has her saying, “I want to thank my coach, Brett Sutton, a convicted child molester.” Tosic didn’t know about Sutton until Ironman coverage prompted him to search the Web. On his blog he wrote, “Brett Sutton is a convicted sexual abuser of children. For some super crazy lucky reason he is not serving a life sentence or something like that.”

No one has disputed the basic facts surrounding Sutton’s past: He had a sexual relationship with a girl under 16. The girl (whose name has never been made public) grew up and changed sports. When the scandal finally broke, 11 years later, she was married to a triathlon coach named Spot Anderson. They have since divorced.

Recently, I spoke with Anderson about how and why the episode eventually came to light. “Sutton was asking me if I wanted to be an assistant coach for the national team,” he recalled. Anderson wasn’t interested in coaching elites, but the offer prompted a discussion about Sutton with his wife. “Then she told me the story,” Anderson said.

Anderson called Rob Pickard, then a performance manager for the Australian national triathlon team. “I knew Spot pretty well and listened,” Pickard says. “I said, Well, Spot, if you’re that concerned, why are you telling me? If it’s true, you should tell the police.’ “

In 1997, three years before the start of the 2000 Games in Sydney, Sutton was running a swim clinic at the Australian Institute of Sport when police showed up and arrested him. Against the backdrop of triathlon’s Olympic debut, the emotionally gripping story swept the Australian media, generating headlines like DREAM COACH ADMITS SEX WITH GIRL.

Sutton was charged with ten counts of what, in Australia, is called “indecent dealings” with a minor. Anderson says he pressed for a rape charge, which carries a stiffer penalty, but the police dismissed this after their investigation. In the end, Sutton pleaded guilty to six counts of indecent dealings. But his position has been that, even though the sex shouldn’t have happened, it was consensual. When he talked about the case later, he went on the offensive.

“Everyone yelled it was rape, but it wasn’t rape at all,” he told one Australian reporter. “I was never going to, under any circumstances, plead guilty to rape or anything like that. I wanted the charges changed to something more appropriate, and they did that.”

At one point during my e-mail correspondence with Sutton, I asked him to verify certain details about the three-year sanctions he was supposed to serve. He took that as a cue to rail against that penalty one more time. “The whole situation was a farce,” he replied. “They could cancel my registration, with their organizations, legally. They could do absolutely nothing more. The barring and stuff was all fantasy on their behalf.”

The takeaway? Sutton is sorry in some ways, defiant in others. If he wanted to, he could show up at Kona this month, clipboard in hand, but I don’t think he will. Instead he’ll stay in the limbo zone, sending athletes out there to make his statements for him.

THE FINAL AFTERNOON of my stay in the Philippines, I ride in Sutton’s van as he follows Wellington on a hard bike ride. He’s sent the team off in front of her, explaining to me that her bike strength was demoralizing not only most of the women but some of the men. “Look at that,” he says, pointing to the speedometer as we buzz along a flat road. It reads a bit over 30 miles per hour. “This is what I was seeing last year. And people thought I was crazy to send her to Hawaii.”Wellington is looking fitter than she did last October, stronger and several pounds lighter. Wellington has said it’s important to her to show the world she’s for real. Having crushed the doubters, the question now is whether she will break to pieces, get sick of it all, or leave Sutton. Another rap is that he burns people out. One of those who stuck with him the longest, Loretta Harrop, struggled with injuries in the last part of her career.

“We’ve gone up against Sutton for 20 years now,” says Pete Coulson, an Aussie who has coached his wife, Michellie Jones, from the early 1990s to the present. “I think Michellie came in second to four of his world champions. If you look at results only, he’s the best coach there is, no doubt about it.”

Coulson’s criticism of his rival centers on the cumulative mental and physical punishment he doles out. “You look at his athletes, they’re phenomenal for about two years and then they’re gone. Michellie wouldn’t last in his program. Do you want to be great for two years, or do you want a career? Time will tell with Wellington. Looking at her right now, she may be the best Ironman triathlete ever produced.”

Rukosuev who grew up training on a swim team in Siberia doesn’t see the problem. “It was when I was closest to injury that I had my best races,” he says. “Would you rather have the two years of success or five years of mediocrity? Yes, Sutton buries you. Or you could be mediocre for five years. Who cares?”

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