Turkey Trot Time
by Ali Smith, ACSM-CPT, USA-T Level 1 Coach, RRCA Coach
It’s that time of year again. Time for gathering around the dinner table with friends and family to give thanks for the many blessings we have received over the year. But, before any of that takes place, there is a great tradition that sweeps the nation on Thanksgiving morning, your local Turkey Trot.

This is also the time that questions come pouring in from first time 5K runners. So here are the big questions I am asked during the week leading up to the race.

Should I "carb-load" the night before the race?
No, you don’t need to overload the night before. The best strategy is to eat a normal portion of your regular healthy dinner just like you did before your training runs. There’s no sense in changing your routine now.

They gave me a shirt when I picked up my number the day before, should I wear it for the race? Two things to consider here: 1) what material is it made out of and 2) what do you normally wear when you run? If the race shirt is made of cotton, set it aside and wear it to brag after you finish. If the race shirt is “wick-away” material AND you have been running in these during training, then go right ahead. The most important thing is that you are comfortable.

What should I eat in the morning before the race?
Eat a small breakfast 2-3 hours before the race is scheduled to start. Oatmeal and a banana is a great pre-race meal. Make sure you drink water throughout the morning to be properly hydrated when the race begins.

Do I need to warm up before the race?
A brisk walk from the car to the start line should be enough. Make sure you swing by the port-a-potties on the way to the start line as well. These lines can get long, so get this taken care of early leaving you with plenty of time to get positioned appropriately.

Where should I position myself at the start of the race?
The front is where the competitive, veteran runners will line up. This can be a tense atmosphere and not where you want to be for your first run. Head to the back of the crowd where the attitude is more relaxed and fun.

Should I run as fast as possible from the start?
No. You don’t want to burn out at the start and not make it to the finish line. Don’t worry if everyone else takes off around you. Stick to your training plan. Start off easy and build your pace as you go.

Just remember, the most important thing is to have fun! When you cross the finish line, give yourself a big pat on the back for finishing your first 5K AND for getting out of bed to do it when thousands of others are still at home!

Travel Running
by Christine Ann Kawalec, Smith Sports Athlete
One of the best things about traveling for me is incorporating a good run along the countryside of a place I have yet to discover. I recently went to Oregon for vacation and traveled to a place where eating right and exercising is the norm. I had read that Portland was the most biker friendly city in the nation, but I did not realize what all that entails. Everyone had a bike, every street had a bike lane, even the MAX Light Rail (the mass transit system) had bike hooks inside the train to hang your bike and then continue on with your ride later. I had the opportunity to run in Tacoma, Portland, Corvallis and Seattle, all of which where absolutely beautiful in scenery and equally challenging in course. Being a Florida native and living at sea level my entire life, I’ve been very sheltered to the wonderful world of running hills, real hills, which are so steep you could probably walk up them faster than run.

Now if you want to stick out like a tourist in the Northwest, bundle up before your run like you’re going to experience the frozen tundra. Really after five minutes, you’re warm enough to delayer. The Oregonians are some of the friendliest welcoming people I’ve ever experienced. I had more conversations along my runs than I ever had in Florida. At some point on one of the trails I jogged along Puget Sound with a lovely woman and her chocolate lab for a mile and she proceeded to list all the outdoor adventuring someone like me would thoroughly enjoy. It was like I had stepped into an ulterior universe. Everyone is running with their dogs or biking with their little dogs in a side basket, polite and overtly friendly and helpful. I recommend a trip to Oregon to all you runners out there, especially those who have never been out west. The outdoorsy culture and hippy feel creates a warm, genuinely unique place to unravel in the midst of your off road trailing.

The Knee
by Adam Davis, NASM-CPT, NSCA-CSCS, NASM-CES, Applied Functional Science
The knee is a very “stupid” joint that only becomes a joint because of two other bones (tibia and femur). As we know from the first few articles, the hamstring, quads, foot and abdominals all function in three planes of motion. The knee is no different and by training the knee the exact way it was designed, you will prevent a knee injury as well as optimize running performance.

Biomechanics
The knee is only reactive to what happens at the foot and hip. When designing a functional workout or rehabilitation for the knee, we must focus on the foot and hip only and this will in fact influence the knee. Basically, to train the knee we don’t ever have to go to the knee. In gait when our foot hits the ground, we know that the ankle will evert (go in) which will rotate the tibia in and will drag the “knee” and femur with it. When you have a rigid foot or a tight quad or hip flexor, these both will inhibit proper rotational loading in function and now the knee will take a hit. The knee has great motion in the sagittal plane (straight ahead), but also has tremendous motions in the frontal (side) and transverse (twist) plane. The major muscles that influence the knee may not even cross the knee. This could be the trunk, or abs, as well as muscles around the pelvis to name a few. If we train the knee with the foot off the floor then we never really have the components of function present. Therefore when you go run or bike, you have lost the neuromuscular connection to move right. This makes it imperative to have the foot, the hip, the back, thoracic spine and even cervical spine working properly, for each one can influence the knee.

Training
There can be a million exercises for the knee, but in this segment we will look at a three plane power load for the knee. If you have tight quads and hip flexors or your abdominals are not functionally sound then you may want to regress these exercises.

Sagittal Plane 2 Leg Hops

Feet together and jump back and forth.

Frontal Plane 2 Leg Hops

Feet together and jump side to side repeatedly.

Transverse Plane 2 Leg Hops

Feet together and jump, twisting feet to alternating sides.

Advancing the Exercises: If you are good at performing the above exercises you can alter the difficulty by taking some of “the friends”, or other muscles away. Also try moving in various ways/positions while performing the exercises to see if the knee can handle doing things on its own. *Do all the same exercises above but twist one or both arms around your body as much as you can and keep them there for all the jumps. This will challenge the knee to take some hits without the abs and pelvis in a good position. If you stimulate the knee this way, then when performing activities with “the friends”, you will have a much better functioning knee.

Next month we will focus on the patella femoral joint and how this joint greatly influences knee performance as well as optimal performance of any activity.

Louisville Ironman
by Poncho Smith, Smith Sports Athlete
Train, train, train! I couldn’t wait for race day to come…at least the 2 weeks leading up to it so I could taper and rest. Coach Ali (for all of you it is Coach Ali, for me it is daughter/Coach Ali!) kept me training relentlessly for this race. She could see the potential in me for Louisville, even though at times I questioned my own abilities to get the results that we had talked about coming into it.

When I race, my goal is always to finish in the top 10%, and in the back of my mind is always the thought of earning one of those slots for the big show in Kona. With a downriver swim, a not too hilly bike course, and a flat and fast run, Louisville Ironman was the race for me to focus on going after that dream! Not to mention, the slots for Kona rolled down to 14th in my age group at last year’s race. So I was all in for the race in 2009!

We arrived in Louisville the Wednesday before the race. It’s great to have the opportunity to be there early and get settled in. Friday morning was my first experience swimming in the disturbingly brown Ohio River. A little different from the clean, clear waters of Lake Michigan I’m used to swimming in. Due to the warmer water, this was a non wetsuit race. That meant, new TYR Sayonara speed suit for me. Looking around, I realized I wasn’t the only one with that idea. After the swim, Nan and I drove the bike race. It’s always good to get familiar with the course and scope out big hills and tight turns. Kentucky does offer some beautiful rolling country side scenery. As if the day hadn’t already been busy enough, we still had the athlete dinner and mandatory meeting that evening, followed by a midnight run to the airport to pick up Coach Ali.

As per the Coach’s instructions, we were down to the water by 8:30 am on Saturday! Coach and I did a nice swim up stream then cruised back down. The rest of the day was all about conserving energy for the big day tomorrow. But before heading back to the motorhome to put the feet up, we meet up with one of Ali’s previous co-workers & friend from the gym in Clearwater, Florida. Dustin took us on a tour of some of the cool sites and historical places in Louisville. I myself, not being much of a horse person, didn’t think that going to Churchill Downs was going to be that interesting. Boy was I wrong! The history at that old and beautiful place was incredible. Looking around the track and stables, you could almost see the horses parading and racing around. A must see if you are ever in Louisville. It was a great afternoon and a nice way to get the mind off what was coming up tomorrow.

When race day arrives, it arrives early! I like to be up at least 2 hours before transition area opens, and that was at 5 am for this event! Unlike the majority of Ironman events that are mass starts, this was a time trial start, which means we needed to get to transition early and then get over to the swim start and get in line early. When we got to the swim start at 5:15 am, there were already a good 300 athletes in line…yes, triathletes are type A people! After napping on the sidewalk, it was finally time to get the show on the road. Once the pros took off, the line began to slowly move down the ramp to the dock. The closer we got, the more the line picked up in speed. Before I knew it, I was running down the dock, jumped up and started swimming…game on! I told myself that I was not going to go out too fast at the start, just kind of ease into it and get the short upstream swim behind me. Then, turn and burn down stream. Unfortunately, somewhere after the turn, I forgot to burn. I was focused so much on staying out of trouble and not getting kicked or punched in the head that I forgot to pick up the pace. I suppose that would explain the 1:16 swim! It was still good enough for 25th in my age group, which had 167 of us old guys in it.

After a short snafu with the zipper of my speed suit in T1, I got through the change tent and headed out to find “Precious”, my bike, in a sea of tri bikes. I went sprinting out of transition, jumped on and was off. Minus my chain jumping off while downshifting on the first hill of the race, the rest of the 5 hours and 37 minutes on the bike was good. The hills of Kentucky are not all that big, but they are long and relentless. The plus side to them is that going down the back side is fast! I had a top speed of over 45 mph!

By the time I finished the second loop of the bike, Precious and I were starting to get on one another's nerves. We were ready to get back to T2 and park it! By the time we got back to transition, Precious and I had worked our way up to 17th in our age group. Now it was a sprint to get my T2 bag. After the third step the legs realized they were not warmed up for the run. I told myself I better slow down a bit and let them get used to this new means of transportation. On the way out the chute to the run course, I heard two familiar voices encouraging me on, Nan and Ali. I gave them a “thumbs up”, letting them know I was good to go and off I went. At about the 2 mile mark, I looked down at my GPS and realized I was running a 7 min/mile pace! Great I thought…if I was doing a 10K run! But this was a marathon I needed to finish. I needed to back down the pace and keep it under control for the rest of the 24 miles! Needless to say it kept getting easier and easier to slow down the closer I got to the finish. 10 miles into the run I heard one of those familiar voices again. Ali was on my mountain bike tagging along side of me…well, far enough away that she didn’t get me DQ’d for having a pacer with me. It was sure nice to have her out on the course talking to me and giving me those bits of coaching advice and later on those loving daughter words of encouragement.

With 5 miles to go, Coach knew I was getting into trouble, I wasn’t talking. First, a few words of care and concern from my daughter, and then the coach kicked in with those words I have heard several times, “Listen to what I tell you to do and I will get you to the finish line!” That did it! I knew then that I was going to make it! Pick them up and put them down, one at a time.

Turning that last corner of the race and seeing the big Ironman arches in front of you is a site you never get used to! It is at that point you realize that you are really an Ironman! The rush that you get from that will carry anyone across the finish line. It is amazing how the mind will keep you going when the rest of your body is not wanting to. I ended up with a 3:47 run, which put me 8th in my age group for the run. But the big question was where would my overall finish time of 10:49 put me in my age group? We had to wait for awhile before it was “official” online due to the time trial start, but I finished 9th in my age group. We knew there were 3 slots for Kona for my age group, so that meant we were praying for a roll down Monday morning after the awards ceremony. Would you believe that this year the top 3 guys claimed the 3 slots? Guess it wasn’t my turn this time. I had some great training races leading up to this event with a couple half Ironmans and several local races. I took my first 1st place finish in my age group at one race and a 1st in Masters in another. It was a great year of training and I am confident that my turn at claiming a Kona slot is drawing closer, so stay tuned!

The Omnivores Dilemma
by David Molnar, PE and Smith Sports Athlete
In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” Michael Pollan takes a novel approach in answering the all too familiar question, “What should we have for dinner?” In it he describes very complex food production processes, environmental consequences, and ethical considerations in an easy to understand manner.

In the first of the four meals, Michael Pollan discusses the industrial meal. The common thread in practically all of our industrial meals is corn. It’s fed to the animals we eat, it satisfies our sweet tooth as corn syrup, and it’s in the gas that machines burn to cultivate and ship it in the form of ethanol. Corn products are also commonly found in the ingredients of our food but we’ve probably never realized it. Have you ever heard of modified or unmodified starch, glucose syrup and maltodextrin, crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, maltose and HCFS, MSG and polyols? They are all made from corn. Even the waxy coating on vegetables and the pesticides used to protect them are made from corn. The US produces so much corn that it’s now fed to our meat supply. At a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), livestock are crammed into pens and fed corn and antibiotics until they’ve put on enough mass to be slaughtered. This may not sound like a problem to the average tailgater, but feeding cows corn causes some adverse effects. A cow ferments its food in one of its two stomachs called the rumen. The pH in the rumen is normally neutral but feeding them corn gives them a case of acidosis. In some instances this can cause death but usually it just makes them sick. Symptoms resulting from acidosis are diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, and a weakening of the immune system, leaving them susceptible to pneumonia, coccidiosis, enterotoxaemia, and feedlot polio. The antibiotics that are used to prevent these symptoms results in new resistant super strains of diseases. The other issue with feeding a grazing animal a strict diet of corn is that they don’t ingest the nutrients they normally would have if they were fed a natural diet of grasses. When livestock don’t eat the nutrients they need, we don’t get the nutrients from their meat. To finish his section on industrial farming, he took his family to McDonalds for a meal on the road. It took his family less than ten minutes to eat what they had ordered and while they were eating he wondered why fast food is what it is. When at the end you don’t feel “satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.”

In the second meal Pollan takes us into the world of organic farming. The word organic is gaining in popularity and as the demand for organic food rises, the processes that were once regarded as natural and sustaining are now closer related to the industrial processes the pioneers of organic farming were so strongly against. Terms such as “free range” can be used if chickens have an “opportunity” to go outside “at some point” in their lives. Rarely do they ever take that opportunity. There is a benefit from not using pesticides or antibiotics in the food we eat, but the process is expensive and the large corporations cut corners wherever possible. They are also capable of persuading government officials to help pass vague legislation that works to their advantage.

The third meal, and my favorite section of the book, is the local meal. Pollan visited a farmer in Virginia that developed his own techniques for farming that creates a circle of life with the sun as the primary source of energy. One example starts of course with the sun that feeds the grasses, the cows eat the grasses, the chickens eat the pests out of the cows manure, the now clean manure fertilizes the ground and the circle is complete. That example requires zero pesticides, fertilizers, or antibiotics and the food is said to be quite extraordinary. These farms, though growing in popularity, are only capable of shipping their products locally. Depending on where you live, you may not be able to have a farm near by that can produce enough options of food. One great option for people living in the cities is to set up a co-op, or order group, which would allow them to order enough food to make it worthwhile for the farmer to ship his products. The local meal that he ate at the end of this section probably tasted the best, but it wasn’t the most rewarding. That came in the next chapter.

After spending time researching three different types of farms, Pollan delves deeper into our primitive heritage, in the hunter and gatherer meal. He uses this section of the book to answer some questions about what humans did prior to the agricultural age. You may wonder how humans learned what tasted good, what was poisonous, or how to kill and prepare meat. Pollan describes these in detail and discusses the moral and ethical implications of killing animals for food. He writes at length about mushrooms and has some very interesting life stories from his mushroom hunting in the hills of California. He also met an interesting man that took him hunting and showed him the process of dressing a wild pig. He admits that the hunter and gatherer meal isn’t very practical, but it was definitely the most rewarding and very tasty.

Other then telling us the stories of his travels through the food industry and giving us some crib notes on his extensive research, he really didn’t use this book to attack anyone. In a review by David Kamp in The New York Times, he states that Pollan’s “super meticulous reporting is the book's strength - you're not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from.”

Some critics think that Pollan addresses serious issues with what Americans eat, but his only solution seems to be telling us to eat our fruits and vegetables. Monica Theis, dietitian and senior lecturer for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin was quoted as saying, “I believe in his tenants of eating less and eating more fruits and vegetables, yet I also believe that there is unequal access to these types of food,” She continues. “The people who are economically challenged are the missing voice in many of his discussions.” Though I generally agree with her, I believe she misses the bigger picture. The government subsidizes corn which has created a surplus and caused the only affordable foods to be made out of it. If the government stayed out of it and let the free market judge what they want to eat, prices of food we truly need would be far less expensive. Pollan seems to agree from his article in the New York Times, where he said “AGRIBUSINESS dominates the agriculture committees of Congress, and has swatted away most efforts at reform. But what happens when the health insurance industry realizes that our system of farm subsidies makes junk food cheap, and fresh produce dear, and thus contributes to obesity and Type 2 diabetes?”

Since this book came out in 2006, I believe Michael Pollan has gotten a little more edgy with his quotes. He said recently that “A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius” and that high-fructose corn syrup “may be cheap in the supermarket, but in the environment it could not be more expensive.” In the end, perhaps it would be better if he just “stuck to the facts,” but I will let you decide that.