When I started running, I only ran on the flats and ran poorly on hills.  I kept at it and eventually ran the hills well and enjoyed them.  So, don’t get stuck in one mode.  The human body is flexible if you train it.

At mile 97 of a 100-mile race I reached the bottom of a hill. I told the friends running with me that I felt good and planned to run the hill hard. They looked like they were dying. I climbed strongly. For me something was different. I felt calm, capable, and full of energy. I didn’t understand it then, but I knew I had crossed into another fuel system. Earlier I had stopped eating carbs. I shouldn’t have had that strength, but I did. The only fuel that I had was the fat on my body.

This series of articles is a practical look at running on low-carb fuel rather than being stuck on nothing but carbs, and the advantages of doing that.

Sometimes the difference in a run isn’t the effort, it is the fuel, and that’s your choice.

Carb Loading

Every runner has heard of carb loading.  Let’s skip many decades of testing and summarize: to run well on carbohydrates you need to eat a lot of them to store the energy in muscles and liver.

That energy gets stored by your body’s insulin hormone.  Then you go run on that stored energy.  Eventually, you run out of the energy and you slow down – “hit the wall.”  Every serious runner knows how that works.  In all the energy testing, some people tried to run on fat, instead of carbohydrate, but it didn’t work well.  People on carbs ran faster.  Thus, carbs were given first place in running energy. 

Was the testing fair?  No, it was not, because the tested runners were not given enough time to adapt to running on a different chemistry.  I didn’t run hills well at first, and most runners must train for months before they can run a marathon.  It is a natural fact of the body that you must train to do well. If you take runners who trained by running on carbs, and ask them to run on fat, they won’t do well.  It isn’t a problem with the runners, it is a problem with their training.

Our society has seen carbohydrates everywhere.  They have become a standard energy input.  When carbs are eaten, blood glucose rises and the body releases the hormone insulin to store the carbohydrate as glycogen or as fat.  This raises an important question: Carb storage for immediate use works well, but is it healthy to eat carbs all day long and store all that energy?  Looking at the nation’s health problems, the answer to the question is that a constant over-supply of energy is a serious problem.  The fix?  Eat fewer carbs to produce a lower, healthy amount of insulin.  There is no mystery to this – it is just a matter of fuel management.  This is about what you choose to eat as your fuel input.  This isn’t about pills or drugs, this is about natural foods that are good for your health. 

Carb storage for immediate use works well, but is it healthy to eat carbs all day long and store all that energy?

I’ve been making fat fuel choices for three years now, and I like the results.  This is not an academic exercise - this is about your choices and the results you can get.

These articles will cover a lot of information, but we’ll keep it simple to absorb, and use on your daily runs.  Next, we will look at a key point on insulin generation, and its effect on the use of your body’s fat.  The body has its own method of operation on fat and carbohydrate, and it is important to understand the basic operation.

Then, we’ll talk about how bears use these energy systems. 

If you like to check out technical matters, here is a reference on the over-abundance of insulin in the modern society. This paper is easy at the beginning and end, but technical in the middle.

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