From Chapter One:
THE HAWAII IRONMAN
I was in the best shape of my life in the fall of 1982. I had been training for the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon since late spring. I was chiseled and ripped, weighed 170 pounds, sported low body fat, and looked great in a pair of jeans. I had rock-hard quads and calves forged from cycling, a wide trapezoidal back developed through swimming, and flat, serrated abs created by running.
This newly sculpted body belonged to me, the welcomed byproduct of working out between ten and fifteen hours per week for nearly half a year. Yet it also felt like I was inhabiting someone else’s physique. It’s not that I missed having a slightly protruding carbo-belly hang around like a house guest who refuses to leave. It just seemed unusual to be this fit. Walking past mirrors, instead of sucking in my gut, I’d silently nod in approval. I liked wearing shorts or going without a shirt in the sun.
Strange, then, that the journey taking me to the Big Island for the Ironman almost never happened in the first place. Fate, luck, timing, perseverance, and desire all played their respective roles.
One lazy Sunday afternoon in February 1982, I happened to watch ABC’s Wide World of Sports coverage of the Ironman, which featured one of the most remarkable finishes of any race, any sport, any time. Julie Moss was leading the women’s race but collapsed from fatigue and leg cramps only yards from the finish line. As she crawled along the ground, second-place woman Kathleen McCartney ran right past her and won.
Julie’s finish was nearly as epic and unforgettable as the Greek warrior Phidippedes crossing the plains of Marathon and dying after delivering his battlefield message to the Athenians. But in Julie’s case, television cameras were right there in her face, broadcasting her courageous plight to millions.
I turned off the television and said to my girlfriend Terri, “Wow! I’m gonna do the Ironman.”
She replied, “But Bill, you don’t know how to swim.” “Yeah, you’re right. What am I thinking?” Terri was two years younger and a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a graduate student in political science. We had met six months earlier in a rooming house near campus. She was the practical and levelheaded one in our relationship....
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From Chapter Two:
DO RUNNING SHOES CAUSE INJURIES?
If you haven’t been running for years but suspect that your feet will need extra pampering, do you buy a new pair of costly, shock-absorbing running shoes? Or go cheap and minimalist? Which option is best and will lead to many miles of injury-free running? Despite the universal availability of tricked-out running shoes, with amply cushioned soles, rigid foot box, and inch-thick heels, the injury rates among runners have virtually stayed the same since the 1970s. How can this be?
In a widely publicized 1999 study, Dr. Steven Robbins, a biomechanics expert at the McGill University Centre for Studies in Aging at Montreal, dis- covered that expensive running shoes aren’t worth the money and may even increase your risk of injury. Dr. Robbins found that overly thick soles cause a loss of balance.“It’s a myth that thick soles offer the most protection,” he told reporters.
Subsequent studies by other researchers confirmed Robbins’s findings. Runners in thick-soled shoes were more than twice as likely to suffer injuries as runners in thin soles. Robbins even went on to suggest that athletic shoes should be classified as “safety hazards” rather than “protective devices.” His red-alert warning was certainly not the message footwear giants like Nike, New Balance, or Reebok wanted the public to hear.
The main problem with most running shoes is that the human foot was anatomically designed to provide a flexible yet durable platform to allow the lower body to move along the ground. (Our closest living relatives, the orangutans and chimpanzees, use their feet primarily for grasping and climbing; they seldom walk very far.) For eons, man walked, trotted, loped, and ran barefoot. Even the Egyptian pharaohs went barefoot. Because the foot is not dainty or fragile, it doesn’t require a stiff, unyielding container to protect it from repetitive-motion impact. But when encased in a protective sheath like an excessively built-up running shoe, the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in the lower extremities begin to atrophy, leading to what one exercise re- searcher called “wimpy feet.” Another critic called running shoes “little foot coffins.” Instead of the foot and lower leg acting as shock absorbers, it’s the shoe doing the work—which in turn causes a weakening of foot muscles, nerves, and tendons. Artificially supporting the foot contributes to its structural and biomechanical deterioration. Yet people who go around barefoot, observed Robbins, don’t suffer from chronic foot, ankle, or knee problems.
Optimally, you want to run on the ball or forefront of your foot, not the heel. But the thick soles used in today’s running shoes force you to land on your heels. Running on the heel is unnatural and will cause excessive stress throughout your foot and lower leg. Try running barefoot; no matter how slow or fast you go, it’s nearly impossible to land on your heel. Yet we often hear that heel-to-toe striking is the proper way to run. Wrong. Chase your dog or kid around the home with your shoes off, and you will notice that your heels barely touch the ground.
Footwear companies have finally begun to address the paradox behind the sky-high frequency of running injuries and large number of new high- tech shoe models that arrive in stores each year. Nike, for example, introduced in 2004 a thin-soled minimalist shoe called the Free that partially mimics barefoot running. It performs more like a lightweight slipper or moccasin. Newton Shoes, of Boulder, Colorado, recently developed a revolutionary lightweight shoe with a thin sole and a spongy midsection that provides a push-off, touchy-feely rapport with the ground. It’s virtually im- possible to initially land on your heel. Then there’s the truly bizarre-looking Vibram FiveFingers, which one running magazine reviewer likened to “a kind of below-the-ankle nudism that simulates not wearing shoes.” The FiveFingers’ upper section is made with a thin, abrasion-resistant stretch polyamide fabric;the sole is lightweight rubber Vibram;and here’s the real kicker:Small green rubber sleeves individually encase the toes. Each of your little piggies has its own home. The shoe literally fits like a glove—for your foot. Sales of this distinctive footwear have reached $10 million annually.
At the extreme end of the anti-shoe movement is barefoot running. Numerous websites and blogs are passionately devoted to the subject. Even Runner’s World suggested that runners might consider incorporating brief sessions of barefoot running into their training:“Running barefoot a couple of times per week can decrease your risk of injury and boost your ‘push- off’ power.”
If you do decide to go barefoot, it’s recommended that you start with small distances since your biomechanics behave much differently. Think of these short-training sessions as rehab or physical therapy since they will gradually strengthen underutilized tendons, ligaments, joints, and muscles in your feet and lower legs. After a while, you should discover additional barefoot benefits for your entire body, such as better balance and improved posture.
Running barefoot, however, is nothing new. Most Kenyan children and teenagers run without shoes, and the African nation perpetually produces the greatest long-distance runners in the world. Even Olympians go barefoot. At the 1960 Rome games, Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila won his first Olympic marathon and broke the world record while running barefoot. (One of the most amazing things I ever saw at the Hawaii Ironman was a barefoot, bearded competitor in 1985 wearing only a loincloth adorned with a marijuana leaf; he went sub-four hours in the marathon on the scorching hot asphalt to finish the triathlon in just under twelve hours.)
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From Ask the Expert
TESTING LANCE ARMSTRONG IN THE EXERCISE LAB: INTERVIEW WITH ED COYLE, DIRECTOR OF THE HUMAN PERFORMANCE LABORATORY IN AUSTIN,TEXAS
Beginning in the early 1990s, Lance began making the first of eight annual visits to the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. Lance was twenty years old and fresh off from winning the one-day World Cycling Championships and U.S. Pro National Road Championships. The lab’s director, Dr. Ed Coyle, put the young cyclist through a series of exercise tests designed to measure his heart and lung capacity, fatigue threshold, and muscle efficiency.
“Lance wanted to know what he could do to improve himself,” Coyle told the New York Times in 2005. While Lance obviously has a considerable genetic advantage over the rest of us—his oversized heart can beat over two hundred times per minute, thereby delivering more blood and oxygen to his legs—Coyle recognized that his overall muscle efficiency wasn’t all that special. But Lance soon learned to use his muscles more efficiently by using a high-cadence riding style that meant a shift to slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are more suitable for endurance than fast-twitch fibers.
Eight months after completing chemotherapy and radiation therapy, a worried Lance returned to Coyle’s lab, wondering if the damage done to his body was irrevocable
Question: Were you surprised by Lance’s comeback after cancer?’’
Ed Coyle: No. I think one of his biggest accomplishments, right up there with winning his first and multiple Tour de Frances, was that he finished fourth in both the road race and the time trial in the World Championships after his first year of serious training after cancer. We had studied Lance on his comeback when he was partially detrained, and so we had a good idea, knowing where Lance had been, before he had cancer.We could then extrapolate what he dropped down to in performance despite being normally inactive, but then he had been training at low intensity and higher volume for about two months when we made our eventual measurement, and so we were able to make a prediction as to what results we’d expecting regarding VO-2 max, lactate threshold, and what heart rate would be at different power outputs. Our predictions were right on. Lance had come in really to see if there was anything permanently changed or wrong in him as a result of not just the cancer, but also the chemotherapy. So that’s a pretty heavy responsibility for us in the lab. I told him that I don’t have a real way of knowing that, but “we’ll measure you.”
Q:You told the New York Times—and I quote you—“One of the reasons for Lance’s success was that he appears to have increased the proportion of his slow-twitch muscles from 60 percent to 80 percent, so he was using slow-twitch muscles for his power output.”
EC: Right, and that was based not on changes in lactate acid per se, but to a given level of oxygen uptake and how
much energy his body’s expending, and so he was able to generate 8 percent more power. His muscles were becoming more efficient, producing more power at a given level of oxygen up- take, at a given level of body stress and fatigue—and that we think was due to the change in the chemistry of the muscle fibers. That 8 percent improvement over seven years in how much power he could generate—that’s a big increase.
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From Chapter 10:
IN PRAISE OF THE PUSH-UP
As I became increasingly satisfied with the positive results of my improved conditioning, I realized that it was time to embark upon a new chapter in my return-to-fitness crusade: rebuilding upper-body strength. Because you begin to lose about 1 percent muscle mass after the age of thirty, there’s only one way to slow down the decline, and that’s with weight training. By defying gravity’s obstinacy when you raise a slab of iron, you don’t necessarily turn back the clock on aging, but you won’t turn into squishy flab either. You are also strengthening your bones.
During that lost fitness decade, I squandered any and all interest in doing chin-ups, pull-ups or push-ups. These existed off the grid. I never went to the gym. So when it came time to get to work on the muscles, I could only manage one chin-up, a half pull-up, and twenty-five push-ups. Those pitiful numbers marked the upper limit of my upper-body strength. And to think that when I was in my twenties and thirties, I would regularly rattle off fifty push-ups or fifteen chin-ups first thing in the morning.
I decided to first focus on doing push-ups. Many fitness experts believe that the push-up is the perfect strength-training exercise because it builds strength in your back, shoulders, and arms. It also revs up your heart rate. When done properly, the push-up engages the body’s core, including abdomen and hips.
“You are just using your own body and your body’s weight,” Steven G. Estes, a physical education professor at Missouri Western State University, told The New York Times. “If you’re going to demonstrate any kind of physical strength and power, that’s the easiest, simplest, fastest way to do it.”
“One of the reasons the push-up has endured so long is it’s cheap, it’s easy, it doesn’t require any equipment, it can work multiple parts of the body at the same time—and pretty much everyone, from beginners to athletes, can derive benefits,” says personal trainer Jonathan Ross, a spokesman for the American Council on Exercise, on WebMD’s website.
The American College of Sports Medicine recommends using the push-up to measure endurance and upper-body strength. The push-up is a fitness staple of the military. Ask any Navy SEAL recruit about push-ups during Hell Week, and you’ll get a thousand-yard stare in return. These brave warriors-in-training learn to worship the almighty push-up. Tough love doesn’t get any tougher.
You can do push-ups in the living room, office kitchen, parking lot, hotel lobby, or dance floor at your nephew’s wedding. The under-appreciated push- up is the ideal exercise in a down economy; it doesn’t require a gym membership or personal trainer. It’s just you, your upper body, and a few square feet of floor space. Fitness god Jack LaLanne entertained television viewers in the 1950s and ‘60s with fingertip pushups.
So why did the pushup fall out of favor? Did it remind us too much of gym class? Judging from the recent popularity of websites like http://hundred pushups.com and www.1000pushups.com, the pushup is once again gaining traction. As well it should be. The human species is indebted to the push-up. Three hundred and fifty million years ago, the tiktaalik, a type of extinct fish, used its modified fins to push off from the muddy bottoms of shallow creek beds to search for food on dry land. Paleontologists and evolutionary scientists believe that human DNA is directly descended from the tiktaalik. Those fins eventually evolved into limbs.
Based on national averages, a forty-year-old woman should be able to do sixteen push-ups and a man the same age should do twenty-seven. By the age of sixty, those numbers drop to seventeen for men and six for women. These are minimum numbers.
There are many different types of push-ups—fingertips, hands spread far out, kneeling and against table counters (for beginners), raised legs, clapping, on knuckles, one-handed—but the one I prefer is the basic push-up except with one variation: metal U-shaped push-up bars for greater arm extension.
It’s easy to do a perfect push-up when you are only doing several. But the more you do, the harder they become, as lactic acid builds up in the muscle fibers. Thus, it’s important to maintain proper form, otherwise you aren’t maximizing the push-up’s strength-enhancing benefits, or worse, you can risk injury.
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From Chapter 11
LOSING THAT BELLY
Why are the final ten pounds so difficult to lose? After six months of faithfully adhering to a consistent exercise program—running, biking, strength training—I was proud of my newly reformed body. Muscles had returned from hibernation. Chest, arms, legs. All good. The only region still requiring improvement was the gut. Sure, it had shrunk considerably. Instead of being able to grab Pillsbury Doughboy fistfuls of flab, all I could comfortably squeeze was a several-inch layer of fat.
I had lost weight—perhaps ten or fifteen pounds, though I refused to step on a scale because that’s one daily obsession I could live without. Because muscles are denser and weigh more than fat, the results would have been imprecise. Yet wouldn’t it have been splendid to permanently eliminate the belly excess, to take it out into the execution yard and kill it once and for all? Fat chance! As long as my brain and taste buds demanded luscious treats and comforting carbs—bagels, fruit juice, brownies, cookies—the belly would forever balk at entering witness protection.
If I wanted to acquire a slim breadbasket, I needed To learn more about why most men like myself have trouble losing the extra baggage around their midsection, I did a Google search and came across “7 Things You Didn’t Know About Fat,” on the Canadian website Askmen.com. Topping the list was this eye-opener: “When you consume more calories than you burn off, fat cells in the body swell to as much as six times their minimum size. Everyone has fat cells; they begin to form and take shape before birth. Around the age of 16, the body’s fat cells are mature, and then lifestyle and genes play a role in gaining or losing weight as you age.”
But are love handles really such a bad thing? In Rethinking Thin, New York Times health and science reporter Gina Kolata, who spent two years researching America’s fixation with dieting, eventually concluded that it’s not a lack of a willpower that keeps us above our idealized target weight. She writes:
Scientists know that animals and people have a range of weights that they can comfortably sustain. Each person’s range is different but any weight much above or below a person’s range is almost impossible to maintain. No matter what the diet and no matter how hard they try, most people will not be able to lose a lot of weight and keep it off. They can lose a lot of weight and keep it off briefly, they can lose some weight and keep it off for a longer time, they can learn to control their eating, and they can learn the joy of regular exercise . . . Those who do the best tend to be those who learn to gauge portions and calories and to keep the house as free as possible of food they cannot resist. The effort, the lifelong effort, can be rewarding. But true thinness is likely to elude them.
Kolata’s right. True thinness was never encoded in my DNA. For appetite suppression, however, I kept the cupboards and fridge free of high-caloric temptations like Ben and Jerry’s, gourmet potato chips, and Pepperidge Farm cookies. Plus, if I happened to eat a lot one day, I would back off the next. Fol- lowing a strenuous workout, my appetite, stoked by a revved-up metabolism, usually kicked into high gear and this feeling would last for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. These periods generated some concern—eating when not hungry.
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