Cardio Junkies Take Note!!

Hey Everyone, I just wanted to throw a few resources your way to help dial in your endurance efforts. The first is the Triathletes Training Bible from Coach Joe Friel and the other is The Paleo Diet For Athletes By Joe Friel and Prof. Loren Cordain.





















I will be pestering y'all about changing your nutrition in the future not only to enhance your performance, but also to help some silly crap like health and longevity. I don't know about you, but I find all those topics to be important. The conventional endurance athlete wisdom of high carb, loads of grains and Franken-foods like GOO is horribly flawed. It can work, but at a high price. What I'm proposing is you can eat healthier, perform better and live to tell the tale. For now I'm just going to leave you with an excerpt from The Paleo Diet For Athletes describing Coach Friel's conversion to the paleo diet. Before I get to that it is interesting to note that Coach Friel is one of the most sought after endurance specialists in the world, was an Olympic team coach, nearly every endurance athlete I know owns one of his books...and NO ONE pays any attention to the nutritional recommendations.

Here is that excerpt:

“I have known Dr. Cordain for many years, but I didn’t become aware of his work until 1995. That year we began to discuss nutrition for sports. As a longtime adherent to a very high-carbohydrate diet for athletes, I was skeptical of his claims that eating less starch would benefit performance. Nearly every successful endurance athlete I had known ate as I did, with a heavy emphasis on cereals, bread, rice, pasta, pancakes, and potatoes. In fact, I had done quite well on this diet, having been an All-American age-group duathlete (bike and run), and finishing in the top 10 at World Championships. I had also coached many successful athletes, both professional and amateur, who ate the same way I did.”

“Our discussions eventually led to a challenge. Dr. Cordain suggested I try eating a diet more in line with what he recommended for one month. I took the challenge, determined to show him that eating as I had for years was the way to go. I started by simply cutting back significantly on starches, and replacing those lost calories with fruits, vegetables, and very lean meats.”

“For the first two weeks I felt miserable. My recovery following workouts was slow and my workouts were sluggish. I knew that I was well on my way to proving that he was wrong. But in week three, a curious thing happened. I began to notice that I was not only feeling better, but that my recovery was speeding up significantly. In the fourth week I experimented to see how many hours I could train.

“Since my early 40s (I was 51 at the time), I had not been able to train more than about 12 hours per week. Whenever I exceeded this weekly volume, upper respiratory infections would soon set me back. In Week Four of the “experiment,” I trained 16 hours without a sign of a cold, sore throat, or ear infection. I was amazed. I hadn’t done that many hours in nearly 10 years. I decided to keep the experiment going.”

“That year I finished third at the U.S. national championship with an excellent race, and qualified for the U.S. team for the World Championships. I had a stellar season, one of my best in years. This, of course, led to more questions of Dr. Cordain and my continued refining of the diet he recommended.”

“I was soon recommending it to the athletes I coached, including Ryan Bolton, who was on the U.S. Olympic Triathlon team. Since 1995. I have written four books on training for endurance athletes and have described and recommended the Stone Age diet in each of them. Many athletes have told me a story similar to mine: They have tried eating this way, somewhat skeptically at first, and then discovered that they also recovered faster and trained better.”

Check out the books by Coach Friel and Prof. Cordain. Your Performance, Health and Longevity will thank you.