Low Carb (Paleo) Half Marathon Report

On 2004-09-26, Ignoramus12690 wrote:

1. Saying that I cannot run an extended distance without carbs is
baloney. Even though I am not, by any means, a highly trained athlete.

Sure. No-one said it was impossible, many said it was dumb.

You can also weight-train on a low protein diet. You could do the workouts.
Sure it probably wouldn't be very effective, you'd probably lift less than
a 60 year old woman, much like you ran a time comparable to the midpack 60-65
runners at the local races I compete in.

I'm not knocking your accomplishment, but it doesn't make a very compelling
case for the effectiveness of low carb diets.

6. training runs on LC, if we accept that my glycogen stores are low,
are using fat as fuel from the beginning. Ie, I run for 30 minutes,
probably mostly using fat as fuel. (it is purely a speculation and I
want to read more articles about this). So, I am training my fat
oxidation energy system at every training run. A carb eater runs on
carbs first, and does not train the fat oxidation system. So, once he
runs out of carbs, he bonks since the fat oxidation system is not
trained. That's instead of continuing running, but more slowly.

Again, this is a pure wild assed speculation, but it makes some sense
to me.

It also happens to be erroneous.

I will read up on it.

Good idea.

The implication of this speculation is
that I could train for good performance on long runs, while running
shorter traiing runs, as long as I eat LC.

You can do that anyway, but you still need some long runs. There is more
to long runs than glycogen depletion. If that's all there was to it, no-one
would do long runs, they'd just run on an empty stomach. Doing a 5 miler on
an empty stomach (I often do this) is not a substitute for a 20 miler.

Cheers,
--
Donovan Rebbechi
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/