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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Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about endurance athletes over-doing it and failing to make it to the starting line.

Local trainer and ultra-running entrepreneur Julie Fingar, and other local runners are quoted extensively.

Most of us in this sport are driven to train. The challenge is to find that point where the training is having a net-negative impact on our lives and our performance. That’s often a tough call!

Thanks to Andy for the tip!

You may have heard the old (and by old I mean ancient) expression: A sound mind in a sound body.  Or, as the Romans said, way back in Roman times, Mens sana in corpore sano. Well, according to some recent research findings, it turns out the two really are linked.  An article in Health Day states:

People with the highest cardiac output for their body size (cardiac index), meaning those with the greatest blood flow from their heart, tended to have more brain volume, which generally indicates a healthier brain.

In fact, the researchers said that people with the lowest cardiac output showed nearly two more years of brain aging than did those with the highest cardiac output.

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