Sacramento Running News

Now that your December marathon is done and the baked goods are piling up around the office, are you worried about packing on the pounds over the holidays?

To investigate the impact of when you exercise , a team of sadistic, Belgian researchers put a group of athletes on a horrible, high-fat diet (probably not much different than the standard American holiday diet) and had them not workout, workout before breakfast, or workout after breakfast.

Naturally, the non-exercising group packed on the pounds (those lazy bastards!). But there was a significant difference in the weight gain between the other two groups.

The after-breakfast exercise group, of course, put on less weight than the non-exercise group, but they still gained. However, the pre-breakfast exercisers hardly gained any weight at all.  Their blood chemistry was better too, showing better insulin response.

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You promised yourself you’d get at least eight hours sleep tonight, but you just downloaded the latest Stieg Larson novel to your iPad and now you can’t wait to see what comes next.

You remember you’ve got that hard track workout scheduled for the morning but figure your target marathon is still months away and while you may not be at your peak tomorrow, you can catch up later.

We all know, after all, that sleep is important for top athletic performance and that extra sleep can improve performance and even that lack of sleep makes you fat.

If that isn’t enough to shut your eyes and dream about Lisbet Salander then maybe an appeal to your vanity will do the trick. It turns out that not only does lack of sleep make you fat and slow, we now know it makes you ugly, too.

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Last weekend, Dylan Wykes came down from Kingston, Ontario and won CIM, leading wire-to-wire. I know you are all wondering: “Who is that guy?”

Flotrack has a lengthy interview with Wykes.

It’s an interesting read, covering the race and what it takes to train for something like that. Turns out, Wykes is a Montreal Canadiens fan.