Another week of fasting, running and weight loss

Another week of alternate day fasting and running and I am starting to get my mojo back. Things have not been great over the past 2 weeks, my weight has not really moved much and my 5k time trial did not go as hoped. At the same time I have made some good progress with my running motivation and am back into the swing of it. My goals have changed from doing the 5k training plan to building my base.

I mean really building my base should always have been my aim but I really wanted to speed up, then again building you base can speed you up. I am back to 2lbs away from being a healthy BMI as well and longer slower running should help with this. 

Wow this post is all over the place. Anyway my primary reason for shifting back to longer slower running is the heat but also that fast running doesn't work great with fasting (at this point). If you run hard before you eat you are feeling quite depleted and the act of running fast makes you deplete glycogen stores and then it is harder to stay fasted as this increased your hunger. 

Overall I am further ahead of where I was in 2015 in terms of weight loss and on a par with my fast running pace. I am currently on a run steak of 6 days running at least 20 minutes, though with 2 10 mile runs in there as well I feel it was a productive week. 

Now my plan to to keep my run streak of at least 20 minutes a day going for as long as I am healthy to do so but with the aim of increase my miles. Next week I will aim for 3 10 mile runs, which will be helped by England Athletics advising that running clubs can start again. So hopefully next week I can do 3 x 10 miles runs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (always helps with the Saturday morning weight in) and then do at least 20 minutes on the other days. Will aim to build this up to more and more days a week, with lots of recovery chucked in of course and hopefully by the time I am back in the office I will have done my highest ever mileage week. 

Keto running

As I have mentioned in my first post my wife and I have been on a Keto / low carb diet since the end of 2014. This life-style just twigged for us, it worked so well and we felt so good on it that there was no going back. When doing research you could not help but come across the name of Tim Noakes. As such it only seems fitting that the first paper I review is one of his, to be honest the only other choice was an IF paper I found by Jason Fung).

So the paper I picked to have a look through is:

High Rates of Fat Oxidation Induced by a Low-Carbohydrate, High-Fat Diet, Do Not Impair 5-km Running Performance in Competitive Recreational Athletes

Or in other words, you can still run just as fast over 5k if you are on a high far, low carb diet as if you are on a typical high carb diet. A point I want to get in early is that this only looks at athletes that are already in decent shape (<21 minutes 5k), I bet if you were to look at slower (or at least over-weight) runners you would see an improvement in performance on a HFLC diet due to the weight loss.

It should be noted that, as stated in the paper, an adjustment period was needed and tests after 4 days did not show favourable results for the low carb runners.

If you want to hear more from Tim Noakes, check out the following podcast: 

My Experience: 

As this is an early post I feel it is valid to add my experience. As I have probably stated elsewhere before adopting low carb my 5k PB was 29:29, this was a really hard effort. After going low carb and losing loads of weight I ran many sub 20 5ks (would have been more without buggy running) including 1 with a running buggy containing my 4 year old daughter. 

I have certainly not suffered any issues over the shorter distances and found the weight loss on a low carb diet to be significant enough to allow me to run much faster.