Running on fat (1700km in 26 days!)

It’s a personal one this week. My husband is called Andy. Andy’s brother is called James. James’ running mate is called Mal. James and Mal live in New Zealand, but James was born in Wales and Mal is from Merseyside. Both of them are fanatical trail runners – they especially like running up and down hills and they like very long runs, as opposed to short ones.

In 2015, Mal raised $500,000 for mental health doing The High-Five-0 challenge – 50 mountain marathons over 50 peaks around NZ in 50 consecutive days. James joined Mal on a number of the marathons and the two became running partners. Soon after the High-Five-0 challenge was complete, the two men started to plan their next challenge. They decided to run clockwise around Wales, covering 1700km – including a detour up and down Snowdon. The route has apparently only ever been run twice and the record stands at 39 days (without the Snowdon bit). James and Mal planned to do the route in 26 days – cutting one third off the current record – and they did exactly what they set out to do, arriving back in Chepstow on Saturday 27th May 2017.

What interests me is why and how they did this and that was the focus of my interview with James and Mal on Monday 1st May – the night before they set off on their epic endeavour.

Why?

We are surrounded by castles in Wales. A few years ago, before Penhow Castle was bought by a private owner, it was open to the public and I took the opportunity to be a tourist. I did the whole experience – head-set and all. The head-set guided me through each room and what life would have been like – particularly in the 1500s when Jane Seymour was courted there by Henry VIII (she went on to become his third wife). When we got to the dining hall, the soundtrack played medieval music and sounds of joyful dancing, trying to re-create a harvest festival and the incredible highlight of the year that this was. Back in those days, a full tummy, spare food in storage, the weather still warm and a jolly knees-up was as good as it got. Today we have more food than we could possibly eat, every sound track available at the click of a button, warmth, shelter and no need to labour in fields all day long and yet we aren’t as happy as this comfort suggests we should be.

I could not conceive of why anyone would want to take on a physical challenge such as this until I spoke to James and Mal and Mal’s wife Sally (also an endurance runner). Something that Sally said really struck me: “ultra-running is about overcoming problems and adversity.” She then explained that “the little things – like warmth, sleep and food – become twice as nice as a result.”

Maybe this kind of extreme challenge takes us back to how we have evolved to live. Only in the last 100 years or so, out of approximately 3.5 million years of evolution, have we ‘never had it so good.’ Yet, without the lows and the struggle, can we really feel the highs like we did before? I was also struck by the symbiosis of this run being done for both the challenge per se and to raise money for mental health. In a world where anti-depressants can smooth out the lows, but only by also smoothing out the highs, is there something to be said for experiencing such suffering that a cup of tea and a warm bed become treasured? Mal added a personal and useful insight on this topic. He shared that he becomes “very present” while running: “I’m bad at living in the moment at any other time” he said.

One of my favourite books is “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle and it’s all about living in the moment. There are certain activities that put us completely ‘in the present’ and we feel good when we are in this state. For some people it’s playing music, for others it’s skiing or Pilates. It might be chatting with a friend or stroking a pet. For Mal, James and Sally, it’s running and, if being able to think about nothing other than pain puts one in the present, who am I to judge?!

Mental well being

Mental health is personal for James and Mal, as they share on the website about the challenge. They have lost friends and/or family members to suicide and Mal has experienced ‘The black dog’ personally. Mal talked about a programme that he had seen called “Mind over marathon”, where people with mental health problems had been trained to run a marathon. The programme shared five steps to mental well-being: be active; connect with others; give; be present; and keep learning. “Be present” is increasingly being encouraged, as society develops a growing awareness of the benefits of ‘mindfulness’.

Mal thinks that there is a sixth key aspect of mental well-being – have a goal/a sense of purpose. It is clear to see how running a marathon for charity ticks all the boxes for mental health. The synergy between what Mal and James are doing, why they are doing it and for which charity is perfect.

How – food

James is a fan of Dr Phil Maffetone and Professor Tim Noakes. I noticed Prof Noakes pay tribute to Maffetone on Twitter recently, so the respect may well be mutual. Both have as their basic nutrition principle “Eat real food” – that gets my vote straight away. Both have realised that carbohydrate stores in the body are limited. We can store approximately 100 grams of glycogen in the liver and 250-400 grams in the muscles. Even if the regular carbohydrate eater has the lower end of 350 grams of glycogen in the body – that represents 1,400 calories available for energy. At the higher end, it represents 2,000 calories available. For ultra athletes, 1,400-2,000 calories are not enough to fuel 70km runs on a daily basis. The ‘elephant in the room’, as I heard Professor Noakes call it during a presentation (Cape Town February 2015), is the amount of fat that a person has stored relative to carbohydrate. Even Paula Radcliffe, at an estimated 54kg, will be approximately 14% body fat. With body fat approximating to (by no means accurately) 7-8,000 calories per kg, even Radcliffe has 50-60,000 calories in her fat store room; many times the amount of carbohydrate that she could possibly store. This has been one of the breakthrough realisations in sport over recent years. This knowledge has increasingly been used to ensure that endurance athletes are ‘fat adapted’ – able to switch seamlessly and efficiently to fuelling on fat whenever glucose (glycogen) is unavailable.

James and Mal are fat adapted. They are not strict about macronutrient proportions. They don’t limit carbohydrate in a specific grams-per-day way, but fat is their primary fuel. The runners stayed with us for a couple of days before they started the Wales challenge. Breakfast was a scramble-style ‘slop’ – four eggs, chopped up bacon and about 75-100g of butter. The amount of butter gave the eggs the soft consistency – the more easily that food can be digested, the better for ultra-athletes. The last thing that any runner needs for breakfast is fibre – the body wants to spend the following hours moving, not digesting the indigestible! Caffeine is the only stimulant that an ethical runner will use – cream added for taste and extra fuel. If snacks are needed, the boys carry sausages/pork crackling/pork belly – high-fat, zero-carb, zero-fibre foods. In the evening, dinner is typically a lot of meat with some veg, followed by a lot of cheese and sometimes berries and cream (my cream/egg/85% dark chocolate mousse went down well!) The boys don’t avoid things like a baked potato/oat cakes/grapes etc with dinner. They are fine with carbs – they just no longer carb-load.

They have so many stories about fellow runners whose lives they have changed. James told me about “Fleur”, whom he kept bumping into on races. She was carrying quite a few kilos, which weren’t helping her performance, and she was constantly carb-loading and grazing to avoid frequent energy crashes. James offered her some pork belly on one race (which frazzled her low-fat/high-carb mindset initially), but she quickly noticed that even energy followed. James then gave her the full fat adapted concept and she has never looked back (and has lost 15kg!)

The other inspiration that James and Mal have taken – this time from Professor Noakes especially – is to drink to thirst, not to any ‘two-litres-a-day’ myth. They wear running vests with minimal cargo – a rain mac if necessary, the high fat snack and a very small water bottle. They can run four hours on a beaker of water with no problem.

How – movement

I was fascinated by the science of their running technique – the Maffetone Method, as described here. James told me about Maffetone’s “180 formula”, which dates back to Maffetone’s work on a research project in the 1970s. Maffetone realised that there was a relatively simple formula, upon which aerobic training could be based. At the most simple level, you can find your ideal maximum aerobic heart rate by subtracting your age from 180. The formula is refined here, with modifications based on your health and fitness profile. The idea is then to exercise at this ideal maximum aerobic heart rate (or in the range between this and 10 beats lower). This is to optimise aerobic capacity development and fat burning.

For James and Mal, this means running at an average of approximately 6km an hour, which includes stoppage time. To put this in context, they were running approximately 65km (10-12 hours) every day for almost a month. Some days injury, blisters and a foot infection put them behind and they would then do a 14 hour day soon after to catch up. James commented that 6km an hour feels quite slow at times, but it works. Other ultra athletes swear by the method too. James has also observed that people will often overtake him in the early stages of runs, but he is more likely to be the person overtaking them towards the end. James said – if you know you average 6km an hour, there’s no point setting off at 7 and then ending up at 5 – running steady is far better for body, fuel and mind.

James can run a marathon in under three hours, but he will train at this Maffetone optimal fat burning pace. Athletes can always gear up if they need to, but covering 1.5 marathons a day for 26 days is not done at a sprint pace.

Staying on course

I will never do this level of activity, and most readers of this note will never attempt anything like this, but what can we learn from James and Mal about motivation? Maybe in our attempts to stick to healthy eating? Or our quest to complete a project – whether at work or home? Mal explained that it helps to be aware of when you’re starting to feel a low coming on. James and Mal chat much of the time while they’re running. Mal said, as soon as he just can’t talk, that’s his early warning sign of a tough period. He loses his sense of humour, he will likely feel hungry and tired, often irritable and sometimes he will become aware of physical pain.

He then breaks the task down in his head into little chunks. It’s not “running c. 40 marathons in 26 days”, it’s running 80 half-marathons, it’s getting to the end of today, it’s getting to the next fuel-stop. The trick is to change one’s mind-set, so that the unthinkable becomes manageable. I often talk of this technique in the club, in the context of food addiction. You just need to avoid junk today – that’s all you ever need to do. When the going gets tough, you just need to avoid junk for the next hour, the next minute if necessary. Achieve this and you have conquered sugar addiction.

James and Mal just needed to get to the next peak, or the next beach, or the next coastal path sign post. By having done that and, some hours no more than that, they achieved what they set out to do. They did something for mental health charities, they did something for their own mental health and they shattered the Wales coastal path record. Chwarae Teg, as we say in Wales (fair play!)