From the New York Times — For people who are trying to lose weight, it does not matter if they are counting carbohydrates, protein or fat. All that matters is that they are counting something. This is what researchers from Boston have found and have reported in a recently published study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In summary, more than 800 overweight adults were assigned to one of four diets that reduced calories through different combinations of fat, carbohydrates and protein. Each plan cut about 750 calories from a participant’s normal diet, but no one ate fewer than 1,200 calories a day.

After two years, every diet group had lost — and regained — about the same amount of weight regardless of what diet had been assigned.

The New York Times article on the study can be read here. Or, if you’re more interested in reading the research paper itself it can be accessed here.

The City of Vancouver has just released its 2008 / 2009 Cycling Statistics Update. The report contains a lot of details but Frances Bula on the State of Vancouver blog has summarized the important points nicely:

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- just over 40 per cent of people who live in the Downtown or West End walk or cycle to work. (For the city as a whole, it’s 16 per cent; for all of Metro, eight per cent.)

- in all of Vancouver, cycling accounts for 3.7 per cent of trips to work. Cycling actually decreased slightly in the Downtown and West End between 1996 and 2006, according to census stats, but walking trips there went up in the same time period.

- The Point Grey/Kits, Commercial Drive and lowers Main Street neighbourhoods had the highest rates of cycling to work, up to almost 12 per cent in some of them. I’m not surprised, since I live on a bike route in the Main Street area and see great herds of them go past my house every day.

- Summer peak hour counts along the bike routes show the highest traffic around Ontario and Prior, where the two most heavily used north-south and east-west routes intersect. The count there just over 700. the 10th Avenue route the next heaviest, with about 500.

- No numbers for the Burrard Bridge per se. In fact, the map in this report makes it look as though there is no bridge. Interesting.

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The full report can be read here.

Christopher Kelsall’s latest interview is will Kiwi athlete, coach and author Keith Livingstone. Keith is a Lydiard method enthusist, and has just published a book on the famous training method titled: Healthy Intelligent Training (H.I.T). This is a long interview, but if you are a fan of the Lydiard method then it is well worth the read. 

Note: this interview was originally published on the Flotrack website and is reproduced here with permission from Chris. 

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(c) Copyright – 2009 – Christopher Kelsall

Keith Livingstone, from New Zealand recently published a new book about an old training method, writing it in today’s language. He has taken the famous training method of the late and incomparable Arthur Lydiard and modernized it so everyone can understand the theory and application fully in a book he calls, Healthy Intelligent Training or H.I.T for short.

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Are you a book and adventure lover? NileGuidance , a popular travel blog, has just published its list of the top 50 adventure books of all time. The list is well-received and comprehensive, with the books covering subjects ranging from surviving mountaineering disasters to musings by the likes of Hemingway and Aldo Leopold. Following are the first 10 books, for the complete list head over to the NileGuidance Blog .

1. The Snow Leopard – Peter Mathiessen’s seminal work about a journey of (re)discovery to the remotest Himalayan region of Nepal
2. Wind, Sand and Stars – an ode to the golden years of flying and adventure by the author of The Little Prince
3. The Long Walk – an epic tale of escape from a Russian prison camp followed by a 2,000 mile walk to freedom (so unbelievable that some have questioned its authenticity)
4. Three Cups of Tea – everyone’s favorite book about a climber discovering his true calling by building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan
5. No Picnic on Mount Kenya – Italian POW’s reinvigorate their own humanity through adventure
6. A Soldier of the Great War – sure it’s fiction, but this story set in the Italian Alps of World War I can’t help but ignite the adventurous spirit within all of us
7. Seven Years in Tibet – the book is better than the movie (duh)
8. The Climb – get the perspective of one of the real heroes of the 1996 Everest disaster, the late Anatoli Bourkreev
9. Into the Wild – while the movie was good, the book was better still. Krakauer weaves in his own personal dramas to add perspective
10. The Worst Journey in the World – this polar adventure fulfills the definition of “epic” in every sense of the word

In just a few days Trainharder.com’s own Donald "Jarhead" Peterson will be running the Fifth Edition of The World’s Expedition Run™

Set for February 1st through 6th in Southern Costa Rica The Coastal Challenge is the “World’s Expedition Run™,” releasing runners over approximately 225 – 250 kilometers of exotic and wild Costa Rican mountainous regions and rugged coastline. For six days, runners embrace the spirit of adventure, discovery and camaraderie within a long distance running competition while navigating wide river crossings, rainforests, jungles, windswept highlands, beaches, and rock outcroppings.  It is an expedition run of epic proportions introducing competitors to the hospitality of the local Tico culture while pushing the limits of their will and endurance. For more information visit www.thecoastalchallenge.com .

Set in Costa Rica’s pristine southern region, the “Rainforest Run” will utilize the country’s rich rainforests as a backdrop for a diverse course that moves from jungle and rainforest trails to highlands, coastal ranges, reefs, and river crossings. The route, which takes a decidedly different feel from last year’s “Route of Fire” in the Northwest, and will weave from the beach into the Talamancas, a coastal mountain range, before finishing in Corcovado National Park, one of the world’s premier rainforest experiences and Unesco World Heritage site.

“We considered a wealth of runner feedback when deciding on this year’s route,” said Tim Holmstrom, race director. “The Rainforest Run combines the best of Costa Rica’s natural beauty with a stunning and challenging route that will reward athletes of all levels.”

During the race you will be able to find daily updates at www.tccadventures.com , scroll over the COMPETITORS tab and then down to the Race Information Center .

There will also be updates at the TCC Telegraph, the official 2009 Rainforest Run Blog .

It’s the new year and time to plan your 2009 training and racing scheduale. In a recent posting from Trifuel.com, triathlete coach Matt Russ offers steps for athletes to plan a successful racing year. He recommends dividing races into A, B, and C races in order to plan a calendar that won’t leave you overwhelmed…

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This is an excellent time of year to consider what you would like to accomplish athletically in the upcoming New Year. As with many things, planning is the key to accomplishment for your race season.

If you are a recreational athlete and your goal is simply to complete your events, then you only need to train one aspect of fitness; endurance. This entails planning enough time to slowly build your mileage to within about 10-15% of the distance of your goal race. Note that many overuse injuries are caused by too much mileage too quickly. Do not increase your duration more than 10% per week and take at least every fourth week as a rest and recovery week. During a rest and recovery week, you should cut back your mileage by at least 25%, reduce your overall training volume, and add in an extra rest or active recovery day. If you are a runner, take a day of non-impact cross-training in place of a run.

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Getting the modivation to exercise, smack in-between Christmas and New Years, can be challenging. But there are ways in which we can be active without beging active. In other words, forget that interval workout and try going for a hike instead. For more ideas, Mark Sisson, who blogs about fitness and nutrition on his blog, The Daily Apple , suggests 10 ways to stay active during the holidays. Check out his post here .

New York Times fitness writer Gina Kolata writes about exercise and colds is her latest article….

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YOU have what seems to be a really bad cold. You are coughing and sneezing, and it is hard to breathe. Should you work out? And if you do, should you push yourself as hard as ever or take it easy? Will exercise have no effect, or make you feel better or worse?

It is a question, surprisingly enough, that stumps many exercise physiologists and infectious disease specialists.

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Its Christmas Eve! There’s still time for shopping for that runner on your list! Jesse Squire of The Final Sprint website has published the second installment of his 101 top books relating to running and track. Each listed title includes a short description of the book, ideal for helping us pick the perfect volume for that runner on our Christmas list. Here are the second 10 books in the list in no particular order:

A Cold Clear Day: The Athletic Biography of Buddy Edelen
Frank Murphy
Windsprint Press, 2000
Buddy Edelen was an American runner who didn’t become world-class until he moved to England. In 1963 he set a marathon world record, the first American to do so in over 50 years (Khalid Khannouchi being the only American man since). This slim biography was Frank Murphy’s first book–he has written another two–and it’s unusually good reading for a first-timer and for a sports biography.

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Jesse Squire of The Final Sprint website has recently put together a list of 101 top books relating to running and track. Each listed title includes a short description of the book, ideal for helping us pick the perfect volume for that runner on our Christmas list. Here are the first 10 books in the list in no particular order:

Lon, by Don Potts – Tafnews Press, 1993
A former contributing editor at Track & Field News, now deceased, Potts was an expert on the sprints. This book is an athletic biography of Lon Myers, the first American superstar of track. In the 1880s he dominated short distances from 50 yards to 1 mile, once winning four different national championship races in one day. Included in the appendices is a complete record of Myers’ career races.

The Other Shulman: A novel, by Alan Zweibel – Villard, 2006
Overweight suburbanite T.O. Shulman decides to run the New York City marathon, and the story of his life is told via flashbacks during the race. Zweibel is a former Saturday Night Live writer, and the book won the 2007 Thurber Award for humor writing. While it is laugh-out-loud funny at times, the humor serves to lighten an otherwise mostly sad tale.

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Mark Sisson (of Mark’s Daily Apple ) has just posted a very interested article on some of the world’s healthiest countries and what we can learn from them.

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More than anything, the Primal Blueprint is a pragmatic approach to diet and lifestyle. It is not dogma; rather, it is based on empirical evidence suggesting that following the diet and many lifestyle behaviors of our early ancestors is the healthiest way to live. Though we keep abreast of the latest scientific news, how we feel when we eat, exercise, and live Primally is what motivates us to follow the Primal Blueprint. Results matter, and so we feel it might be useful to take a look at some of the healthiest countries in the world and understand what works for them.

We’ve drawn from several recent surveys of the healthiest countries. The Forbes survey, for example, focused almost entirely on healthcare, life expectancy, and air quality, which are certainly important issues – but how much can we really learn when the top ten countries all make the list for the same reasons? The Foreign Policy and Men’s Health lists offered different perspectives, tending to focus on nutrition and exercise. By looking at all three, I think you’ll get a fairly complete picture of what works, and what doesn’t work, to make these countries the healthiest.

Here are our top 10 countries (America not included) in no particular order:

Continue reading on Mark’s website…

Writer and sports geek Andrew Braithwaite’s work has appeared in The Walrus, Azure and Toro. He also maintains a blog called the Sportstrotter, from which this latest article on marathon running appears. For the full posting please visit Andrew’s blog .

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PARIS—In 490 BC, a Greek military leader entrusted the messenger Pheidippides with an important communiqué: the Greek army had triumphed over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. Pheidippides travelled 38 kilometres on foot from a battlefield near the coastal village of Marathon to Athens, maintaining a brisk running pace. Upon delivering the good news, the messenger promptly dropped dead.

And now, two-and-a-half millennia later, people do this sort of thing for fun?

Sorry, sorry guys. I know that’s not how I’m supposed to start one of these sessions. Here goes: Hello, everybody. My name’s Andrew, and I’m a distance runner. I haven’t run a full marathon in 17 months, but I’m scheduled for a relapse ten days from now, in Dublin. So consider this the first in a trilogy of columns on my destructive, enthralling 42.2 kilometre mistress.

When I claim to run marathons, I do make a point of noting that, hey, it’s not like I have 30 of the grueling bastards under my belt. I’ve not yet reached that point in my addiction, not by a long shot. The 2008 Dublin Marathon will only be my second time covering the distance, after all. I ran my first last spring in Ottawa (and have the t-shirt to prove it).

Continue reading…

For dentist, it’s just one of four gruelling desert ordeals

Katherine Dedyna, Times Colonist
Published: Monday, October 20, 2008

It’s cold and rainy outside as Stan Lee and Jon Miller hoof it on the treadmills at the Oak Bay Rec Centre, where they’ve covered 15 kilometres a night for months. They’re really going to miss the crummy weather a pane of glass away.

That’s because it will be blazing hot when the two Greater Victoria men hit the ground running in the Sahara Desert. They leave tomorrow for the hottest of the "4 Deserts " races organized by RacingThePlanet .

At 21, Miller is the youngest of 170 competitors attempting the 250-km run through sand dunes, plateaus and oases from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1. The oldest is a 73-year-old Briton and in between is Dean Karnazes, the American famed for 50 marathons in 50 days.

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Squamish endurance athlete aims for top five in Brazil
By Andrew Mitchell

Jen Segger may not have competed in many events this year compared to past seasons, but the races she has competed in are recognized for being among the toughest in the world — like the 135 mile (217 km) Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley, the 540-km Bull of South Africa adventure race, and the 400-km Baja Travesia.

Segger’s toughest challenge is still to come, as she heads to Brazil at the end of October for the Ecomotion/Pro 2008 Adventure Racing World Championship. This is the third time Segger has competed in Brazil, but it’s on a course she hasn’t seen before in Northern Brazil, where daily temperatures break 40 degrees Celsius.

“The heat is probably an advantage for me after racing in South Africa and going over every mountain range in that country and racing at Badwater,” said Segger, who is racing with Team DART-Nuun.

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The 29th Annual Royal Victoria Marathon takes place this Sunday, October 12th; in addition to the Marathon there is a Half Marathon, 8K Road Race and Thrifty Foods Kids Run.

For details, visit www.royalvictoriamarathon.com .

Here are a few articles about the event:

Canada’s Joggling Phenom to Race Royal Victoria Marathon

Elite Runners confirmed for the Royal Victoria Marathon

Names and Games

Science and fitness writer Gina Kolata has written a great article on the importance of relaxation and and how a lack of it can ruin performance. Published October 1st in the New York Times .

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LIKE so many people around the world, Dr. Michael Joyner was transfixed watching Michael Phelps swim in the Summer Olympics. But while many of us focused on Mr. Phelps’s world records, Dr. Joyner, a competitive Masters swimmer and an exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic, noticed something else.

“I have never seen anyone so relaxed in the water,” he said.

Relaxation. It is a trait that is often underappreciated, coaches and athletic trainers say. Yet it can make the difference between doing your best and not doing well, between feeling dragged down or soaring. Coaches search for better ways to teach it. And many athletes, including some of the world’s best, work on it constantly. An ability to relax while pushing hard, exercise researchers say, is one reason why winners win.

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Yup. Really. Sam Whittingham, from BC’s Quadra Island, recently broke the self-propelled human speed record in the Nevada desert. Sam peddled his custom made recumbent bike to a top speed of 132.5 kilometers an hour. Chris Keam witnessed this attempt and writes about it on The Tyee. The first few paragraphs are included below, for the full article please visit The Tyee website , where you can also watch a video of Sam’s attempt.

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Sam Whittingham of Quadra Island made history in the Nevada desert on Thursday, pedalling the tear-drop contoured recumbent bike — the Varna Diablo III — to a world record speed of 82.3 mile per hour (132.5 kilometres per hour), claiming the $26,748 deciMach prize as the first person to do so, and cementing his position as the fastest self-propelled human on the planet. (Further down in this story, you can watch a video by Chris Keam and Earl Cassorla of the historic event.)

"I’ve been knocking on this door for years," said Whittingham, before a Thursday morning attempt to crack the deciMach barrier. "I want in!"

In that session, Whittingham went on to post an 80-plus mph time for the second time in his very successful career racing the specialized streamliners. So very close, but still not the new record Whittingham and bike designer Georgi Georgiev have been chasing ever since they were the first team to break the 80 mph barrier in 2002. Then Whittingham did something he’d never done before. He elected to try again during the evening session. In a sport where the athletes often collapse in an oxygen-deprived heap shortly after exiting their streamlined, fully-faired recumbent bikes, it was a risky move. Two runs in one day could have left Sam’s body without enough time to fully recover and destroyed his chances to post competitive times on the last two days of racing.

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Mark Sisson over at The Daily Apple (a great nutrition blog by the way) has written a post on energy drinks and the danger they can pose (think too much sugar, coffee and other stimulants). The first couple of paragraphs are included below, if you want to read the full post please visit his blog here .

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It’s impossible to walk through a bar, college campus, city park, gym(!), or even company break room without spying one. You know, those gi-normous cans with the graphics so obnoxious (e.g. lightning bolts, claw marks, neon slashes and splatters) they leave your eyes bloodshot. (Can you tell we’re in the mood for a rant?)

It used to be if you were tired you grabbed a morning/afternoon cup of joe. Nothing fancy. It was simple, “old school” (if you will), and mercifully cheap. (Relatively bland and weak by today’s standards, but did most of us know any different back then?) Then came the Starbucks/Seattle revolution, and suddenly coffee – and all manner of coffee related drinks – were practically an official American accessory. Seemingly more omnipresent (or at least obviously visible). More potent. Decked out. Pricier to be sure. Not only did the cost and flair go up with this new wave, the caffeine and sugar content of our coffee did as well. (Ever wonder what’s in that special syrup that makes a mochachino a mochachino?)

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A quote from the Race Director of the Thetis Lake Triple Series… "Get out your race calendar and mark these dates down for some quality trail runs!"

Oct 25th | BC Cross Country Championships , Stanley Park, Vancouver
Nov 1st | 1st annual Westwood Lake 22K Relay , Nanaimo
Nov 11th | 12th annual Thetis Lake 20K Relay , Victoria
Nov 23rd | 43rd annual Bazett Farm XC , the oldest cross country race in the province, Duncan
Nov 29th | 24th annual Gunner Shaw 10K Classic , the largest cross country race in the province, Victoria
Dec 6th | 25th annual Gunner Shaw Memorial 10K , hosted by Lions Gate Road Runners, Jericho Beach, Vancouver
Dec 13th | 5th annual Stewart Mountain 10 Mile Challenge , Victoria

The following was written from Christopher Kelsall and originally posted on Flotrack . Thanks again Chris!

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As I understand it and because I may have made this up, for us long distance runners, each pound we are over our optimum weight, we are penalized 2 seconds per-mile when racing. If my calculations stand up to the scrutiny and you happen to be in the unfortunate position of being say 10 pounds over optimum weight, you would race 20 seconds per mile slower than your best. Multiply that by 6.2 miles and you have…well you do the math, I can’t concentrate.

Speaking of weight, refined carbohydrates are after me. They are relentless in their pursuit. Everywhere I go, I am accosted by flour products gone wild, there is no escape from them. I spend my nights trying to avoid refined carbohydrate damnation by the dim stovetop light.

Forced to tip-toe into the kitchen, (because the family is sleeping), during unmerciful and slickly produced commercial breaks, which command me to drink Coke, eat white bread and Oreos; I search for something healthy. By the time the first commercial is half finished, panicking, I give up the healthy food search and look for something in the newly adjusted category of ‘not completely unhealthy’. Further into the cupboard I climb; my standards dropping, the deeper I go. Picture in your mind the historic movie Trainspotting and the legendary toilet dive, only I am slithering through dustbunnies.

I settle for the least unhealthy choice of what remains, potato chips prepared free of hydrogenated oil. On the packaging it states the following fine print: may have come in contact with human feces, during processing.

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