The results of a new study that was published in August confirms what I’ve been telling people for years – exercise is a horrible way to try and lose weight!

Turns out those “calories burned” calculators on fitness apps or exercise equipment at the gym are not even close to being accurate. Think you just burned 500 calories with a 30 minute session on the elliptical? Turns out it was more like 300 or 350.

If you have tried to lose weight through a new exercise program, you know that most people lose less weight than would be expected based on the number of calories they think they are burning during their workouts, even if they strictly monitor their diets.

The researchers in this study wanted to see why that is, so they set out to see what happens to our metabolisms when we move. They pulled data for 1,754 adults (692 men and 1,062 women aged 18 to 96 years) that included their water consumption, measures of their body compositions and basal energy expenditure, which is how many calories they burn simply by being alive, even if they otherwise are inactive. Subtracting basal numbers from total energy expenditure gave the researchers an approximation of people’s energy expenditure from exercise and other movement, such as standing, walking and general fidgeting.

The study found that we tend to automatically compensate for at least a quarter of the calories we expend during exercise. They also found that this calorie compensation varies from person to person, based on how your unique metabolism responds to workouts.

What they found was that most people seemed to be burning only about 72 percent as many additional calories through movement, on average, as would be expected.

The results also show that carrying extra pounds unfortunately compounds calorie compensation, making weight loss through exercise even more elusive for those who are already overweight. They tended to compensate for 50 percent or more of the calories they burned by being active.

It appears that our bodies compensate by dialing back overall calorie burning the longer or more frequently we exercise or move…to avoid starvation. This is likely part of our ancestral make-up to keep us alive while burning calories to find food.

With this knowledge, in the future it might be possible to screen individuals to ascertain whether exercise would be a valuable fat loss intervention because they are “weak compensators” or a fruitless fat loss intervention because they are strong compensators. The researches also think that there may be other factors that play into your level of compensation, such as a compromised immune system or recovery from injury.

The few national guidelines that have been published converge on the recommendation of a 500–600 kcal/day deficit through exercising to instigate fat loss. These guidelines are general for the population and do not factor in the variation in energy compensation exhibited by people with different levels of fat mass, as demonstrated in the study. Public health strategies for fat loss should be revised to recognize energy compensation as our understanding progresses about which individuals compensate and by how much.

Don’t let this study discourage you from exercising. Even if your body compensates for 50 percent or more of the calories you burn during physical activity – this is still more than if you stayed on the couch! Not to mention that exercise can combat health conditions and diseases, improves mood, boosts energy and promote better sleep among other benefits. Bottom line is that you should not use exercise for weight loss. To drop pounds, you just must eat better…there’s no way around it.

You can read the full study here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221011209

I started training for this race in the fall of 2019. I had signed up to run the full marathon in April of 2020. A global pandemic caused a slight change to those plans! I was in great shape in the months leading up to the race that was planned for April 25th. My workout times were faster and my heart rate was lower. I was poised to run a fast race. Then on March 25th, for the first time in it's 19 years (47 years for the half marathon), the race was cancelled. The half was rescheduled for August 2020, the full was not going to be run at all in 2020 - the only option would be virtual at some point later in the year - which I was not interested in doing.

So I stopped my training. All that fitness was wasted as there were no other races anywhere else to run either. While I continued to run a few times a week, they weren't focused runs and with no races on my calendar, my diet started to slack as well. 

Then in December came the announcement that you could defer your race registration to the 2021 race. Since I knew that I wanted to do the race live, and didn't want to lose my entry fee, I signed up for the April 2021 race. I was still not feeling motivated, but hoped that once I get back into my training, my mental state would improve!

I decided to kick off my training with a long run at the end of 2020. I wanted to see where things stood both physically and mentally. It wasn't pretty. I had a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. I still wasn't excited about the race. So I decided a good way to ensure that I put in the work and was ready come race day was to challenge myself publicly. On January 2nd, I posted the following to social media:

It worked. Any time I didn't want to push that last run interval, or any time I wanted to eat that dessert, I thought of this post. I thought of that feeling I would have when I crossed the finish line with a new Personal Record (PR) and how good that would make me feel. That feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction far outweighs any temporary feeling of pleasure I get from eating a piece of cake or indulging in some Jet's pizza! When my body wanted to call it quits at 6 hill repeats when the training plan called for 8, I thought about crossing that finish line on April 24th and did those last two reps.

Even in a pandemic, not much has changed from a stand point of free time I have to train. Making time to train for a marathon is not easy with a full time (50+ hours a week) job, a wife, four kids, a dog (that I'm training), and countless responsibilities around the house. I knew that I had to follow the Balanced Approach plan that I developed while training for four Ironman triathlons.

At the beginning of January, I got the training plan out and got to work. I pulled just the running workouts out of the 36 week plan and counted back. I had 20 weeks until race day. Every workout was going to be important, there was no room for wasted days when the plan was cut 16 weeks short.

Each week consisted of three runs. Usually one with hill repeats, one with sprints and one that was either all aerobic or a progression run. When it was all said and done, I went back and looked at the 20 weeks of training. My average week consisted of just 18.75 miles and only 2 hours and 39 minutes of running! Compare this to most marathon training plans that require you to run 5-6 times a week with weekly mileage in the 45-50 mile range!! Seriously, who has time to run for 7 or 8 hours every week?!?!

If you are interested in learning more about the training plan I followed, you can find it here: The Balanced Approach to Marathon Training

The workouts and my fitness improved, and in the weeks leading up to the race, so did my confidence in my ability to get that PR. My previous best for a stand-alone marathon was 3:40:31. That was what I needed to beat. Even just one second faster would be enough!

The actual race was unlike any other that I had done. While still navigating a pandemic, the race organizers did the best they could to create a safe environment for everyone. That meant staggered start times and no (very, very few) spectators. It also meant a new course that was basically on walking/running paths instead of roads. The aid stations were a mix of water bottles and giant water coolers for runners to self-fill their own bottles. Runners would be required to carry their own nutrition. This was no problem for me, as I always have my own food anyway. For this race, I decided to try something new. In my search for real food that is both portable and easy to digest while running, I decided to try out baby food. That's right, I was going to fuel my 26.2 miles with the stuff that you feel to your one year old. I spent some time in the baby isle at the store reading ingredient labels and thinking about how easy it would be to carry 4 or 5 of these pouches. I grabbed a few different kinds to test on some runs. I ultimately landed on the Biodynamic brand made by White Leaf Provisions. I tucked four of them into my fuel belt and ate one at miles 5, 10, 15 and 20...and it worked great. Being fat adapted meant that the 160 total calories (40 calories per pouch) is all that I needed to get me through.  

Beating my goal time equated to a pace of 8:24 minutes per mile. I knew that I wanted a little to spare, so I set my sights on holding a pace of 8:20 or less. I knew not to go out too fast, so I was checking my pace every few minutes to make sure I wasn't getting much under 8:10's. I'm happy with my pacing and I honestly feel like holding a steady pace is a huge key to running a successful marathon. It wasn't until mile 22 that my pace started to fall off. As expected, those last 4 miles are brutal.

Good thing the course was pretty lonely, there were several times that I was talking to myself out-loud. Trying to keep my legs moving and willing myself to hold as close to my 8:20 pace as possible. My Garmin was telling me that I was 0.15 miles long the whole day. The mile markers on the course always came 0.15 to 0.17 miles after my watch beeped for the mile split. I think I ran the extra distance early in the race at the turn around at Eva Badman Park. There was no sign, cone, or even paint or arrows on the ground to indicate where to turn around and I'm sure I went too far. So my actual distance for this race turned out to be 26.37 miles! Not that I needed that extra 0.17!!

There's not much better than that feeling you get when you try to do math with a little over a mile to go and after assessing how you feel and how fast you need to run, you realize that you are going to meet your goal. I knew that despite the race course being long, I would still set a marathon PR! My official time was 3:38:49.

The finish line was very anticlimactic. No PA system. No one announcing your name as you sprint toward the line. No finish line shoot full of cheering spectators. No music playing.  - Just a small flag that says "Finish" and a timing strip on the ground. I cross the line, stopped my watch, and stumbled up to the rack of medals. No one was there to put it over my head like I just won gold in the Olympics. I took one off the rack and put it around my own neck. I looked around. There were only a few other race finishers standing around. Everyone looked a little lost. So I just started walking back to my car.

While inside I was busting with joy, I'm sure to anyone that saw me, they probably thought I was disappointed. It was weird. I worked so hard, made so many sacrifices to accomplish my goal and then there was no one there to celebrate it with. The good news is that 20 minutes later, I was in my living room surrounded by people that were proud of me and were more than happy to celebrate with me!

Putting races on the calendar and setting goals for them has always been a driving force behind training hard and keeping myself healthy through diet and lifestyle. With no races in 2020, it was hard to stay on track. Despite the persona I put out, I struggle to make good choices sometimes when it comes to food and doing things to improve my mental state. With several races on the calendar for 2021, I'm hoping that I can make this a year where I can get things back in alignment. A marathon PR is a good start!

​Depending on where you are, your life looks different than it did 8-10 weeks ago. Here in the United States, it was mid-March that things started to shut down and we were told to stay home. In order to prevent the COVID-19 virus from spreading too quickly and overwhelming our hospitals, we shut down all non-essential businesses. This ​meant not only no access to gyms and pools, but also most people working from home.

So what impact did all of this have on exercise? Did people give up completely on their routine since there was no access to treadmills, ellipticals, weights, spin class or the pool? Would people find something else to do since they could not go to Pure Barre, Orangetheory or their local CrossFit Box?

While it's impossible to gather all of the data to determine how exercise habits changed over the last two and a half months, Garmin compiled data from it's users and came up with some pretty interesting results. For those of you not familiar with Garmin, they ​produce activity trackers and sports watches, aimed at activities such as running, watersports, golf, cycling and swimming with sensors such as heart rate and GPS. Most users upload their workouts to the Garmin website or app, giving the company access to the activity of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

​Here are some of the more interesting statistics from the Garmin report:

Total steps worldwide decreased 12% in the month of April - but some countries saw a sharper drop-off than others. This is likely due to how strict the lockdowns were. ​While some countries stay at home orders meant that it was hard to leave the house for any reason, others allowed people more freedom to get out. The map below shows how people's step counts differed from the same time period one year earlier. If you look back to data from March, step counts in the United States dropped almost 13% from March 1, 2020 to March 31, 2020.

​Another method of exercise that has seen an increase worldwide ​is indoor workouts with fitness equipment. In China, Mexico, South Africa and a handful of other countries, fitness equipment workouts increased more than any other activity. ​People were able to shift from gym-structured workouts to home-based workouts. Good luck trying to buy a Kettle Bell or Dumbell Set right now! People also ​turned to bodyweight only workouts and found that they could be just as effective. 

Offering further reassurance on the dual physical and emotional health front is the positive trend for yoga. Garmin wearable device data showed an 11% increase in yoga in March.

Along with Swimming, Multisport (triathlon) training,​ hiking and golf also ranked as the activities with the largest decreases in multiple countries. But according to Garmin, athletes that focused on these sports have been finding alternatives. In South Africa, for example, 20% of the users who were golfing in April 2019 turned to indoor fitness workouts in April 2020, while another 11% began indoor cycling.

After analyzing the activity trend data for two months, ​Garmin is using the phrase “fitness is finding a way”.  ​I am encouraged, but not surprised that hard-core athletes have not stopped training, but are just adapting and finding other ways to exercise. My hope is that the casual exerciser or even those that did not exercise before have started a new routine and will continue to walk, ride, run or even do yoga after things open back up! ​

If you have lifted weights or spent much time working out, you have likely heard that you need to 'keep the body guessing' by regularly switching up your workout routine. For those just starting out, it’s much easier to follow the same plan day in day out. However, doing the same workouts for too long will bring your training progress and gains to a slow crawl.

The biggest problem of not altering your routine is simply boredom. There are certainly people out there that would do the same thing every day for years if they thought it would help them accomplish their goals. There is a certain segment of the population (Type A Personalities), that will do whatever necessary to succeed…even at the cost of being bored. But the truth is, you will at some point plateau and no longer adapt to your training. Not to mention the risk of injury from overuse. Nagging injuries could be a sign you’ve reached a threshold pattern called pattern overload—an injury to the soft tissues resulting from repetitive motion in one pattern of movement.

Your training should be physically challenging and mentally stimulating. If you are constantly progressing, it's highly likely that you will remain motivated to keep training hard and progressing. But if your body starts feeling sluggish, fatigued, or it's taking you longer than usual to recover in between workouts, a change of pace might be what you need.

Even slightly altering your routine every so often will lead to the best results. Just switching your grip position is enough to create a different stimulus. For instance, a different stance in your squats, or changing from front squats to back squats. Doing narrow grip versus wide grip bench press is an easy way to switch things up as well. And it doesn’t need to be just new exercises, either. Trying a new sport or even a new kind of workout class—say spin or bootcamp if you never venture out of the weight room and treadmill.

The next obvious question is, how often should you switch up the routine? A good general rule is every 4-6 weeks for most people.

As with most things, you can overdo it. You do have to be careful not to bounce from program to program too regularly, as your body is not going to know what to adapt to and you will never get the results you want because you are not sticking to anything long enough to see measurable progress.

All that being said, you can keep a few key exercises or lifts as part of your routine even if you change up other parts of it. Complex lifts such as deadlifts, pull-ups, squats, bench presses and rows are worthy enough to always have a place in your program. Mobility exercises are also a key part of staying injury free.

Happy training!

Some bad news hit the local road racing community this week. After 35 straight years, the Louisville Triple Crown of Running will not take place in 2020. The series consisted of a 5K, a 10K and a 10 Miler each spring. At the beginning of the series, it included a half marathon before that became a stand-alone event at the 5K was added in its place.

Thousands of runners would race at least one of the races, and many would do all three, which took place over a four to five week stretch. Training for these races would be the start of the race season for many runners and for others a reason to get moving after the holidays. I personally participated in one or more of these races eleven times and eight of the last ten years. It had become a tradition for me as well.

With the news this week came a lot of questions. The official reason the race organizers gave for cancelling the race series was "steady decline in participation, available sponsorship dollars and rising operating costs.” They went on to say that they "could not continue to create the type of experience that would meet their standards and measure up to the quality events they have nurtured for nearly four decades."

People speculated as to how the races that continued to draw around 4,000 participants per race could have trouble with costs. With race entry fees of $25-$35 per race (depending on when you registered), how could they not be making enough money to keep the series going?

While I have never attempted to organize a race, I have worked closely with people and organizations that have put on road races and triathlons. I can tell you that for the most part, when it’s a local race and not put on by global corporation like Ironman®, race organizers are not making much money. They put on races for the love of it and to support the local community.  It’s not an easy job. A race director or committee has to worry about the safety and satisfaction of hundreds or thousands of participants and volunteers. It’s a big responsibility!

In the last few years, fundraising for a charitable organization has become an objective of most races. If this is the case, it creates an added stress of the balance between offering a quality race for the participants and raising as much money as possible for the beneficiaries. As for the Louisville Triple Crown, according to their website all net proceeds from the 3 events went to the Crusade for Children and they have contributed $1.8 million to the charity in the last 17 years, which averages out to over $100,000 per year. So where they just not willing to continue the races if this amount was going to be less going forward?

There are numerous variables that impact what a race may cost and how much money can be raised for a charity or earned by the race director. These usually include:

• The number of participants registered
  
• The race experience and “professionalism” you want the participants to feel.
• The venue where the event is being held (cost of road closures, permit fees, etc.)
• The swag participants get (t-shirt, food, entertainment, timing, medals, etc.)
• The race beneficiary (if for charity) and how much it is expecting to receive
  

According to a few sources and a little research, a typical race budget looks something like this:

   20% - Miscellaneous and charity donations

    20% - Race equipment rental (sound system, port-o-pots, trucks, tents, start and finish lines, etc.)

        15% - Management fees & Insurance (USATF or USAT Sanctions)

10% - Police coverage (blocking roads, directing traffic, etc.).

    10% - Advertising, marketing, and promotions (social media, print, email, flyers for other race goodie bags, booth at race expos)

10% - Participant and volunteer t-shirts, medals and awards.

    10% - Timing equipment (race bibs, timing mats, computers)

    5% - Medical coverage (Having EMS on the course and at the finish line).

When you break it down like this, it’s easy to see how you can blow throw a $25 per person race entry fee pretty quickly. There are few places where you can cut corners, but would people continue to do the race if you went with a non-technical shirt or a chintzy finishers medal? Or is it worth all the planning and work if you only end up being able to donate a few thousand dollars to your charity?

Getting sponsors to cover some of the race expenses is pretty common for bigger races. A corporate sponsor could even have the race named after them. The Louisville Triple Crown races were most recently called the “Anthem” 5K, the “Rodes” City Run and the “Papa John’s” 10 Miler. While I do not know how much the sponsors paid to have the naming rights, I would suspect that it was not inexpensive. Not to mention the many sponsors the contributed less, but still got their logo on the race shirt and their banners at the start and finish lines. According to their website, the Louisville Triple Crown had over 20 sponsors.

I feel like the Louisville Triple Crown could continue with a few changes, but I am not privy to all of the information the committee had before making their decision. While raising money and awareness for children with special needs holds a special place in my heart, having local races that encourage and motivate people to stay active is important to me as well.

The American College of Sports Medicine published a Fitness Index this past May. It evaluated the cities on 33 indicators, including health behaviors; health outcomes, from obesity to pedestrian fatalities; and various community and environmental factors. Louisville ranked 95^th out of 100. Our city is not healthy. These races provided a reason for a lot of people in this city to get off the couch in January and start running. I fear that their absence will lead to an absence of exercise for many people in this community.

We’ve all had to take some time off from exercising. It is usually related to an injury or a change in schedules at home or work. It can be frustrating to know that all the gains in fitness you made are slowing going away as you miss workout after workout. But how long does it really take to lose all that you had gained? Once you get back to running, cycling or lifting again, do you get back to your previous level of fitness much faster than it originally took to get there? I wanted to know the answers to these questions, so I started doing some research.

It’s important to note that “fitness” can take on two forms. Aerobic fitness is the measurement of how efficiently your body can absorb oxygen into the blood and transport it to your muscles. In running this means your ability to maintain a certain level of performance, essentially your endurance. Structural fitness ​relates to the strength of your muscles, and for runners, this translates into how well your body can absorb and tolerate the impact of running. Structural strength is essential for avoiding overuse running injuries.

Both research and personal experience shows that an experienced runner who has built up running endurance over many years will retain most of their aerobic fitness for several months, while a beginner runner’s overall aerobic fitness will drop sooner (within a week) following a period of inactivity.

Structural fitness will start to decline after seven days or more of inactivity, but the big difference being it will take longer than aerobic fitness to build back up again. You're demonstrating to your body that you don't need those muscles anymore. Over time your body will revert to a stable state that's adapted to the workload that you're giving it. Your body will also start shifting more attention to type 1 muscle fibers away from the high burning Type 2 muscles. At this point, it really depends on who you are and how well you're trained. Some athletes see a loss of about 6% muscle density after three weeks. Some power lifters see losses of as much as 35% after seven months. Young women who trained for seven weeks and gained two pounds of muscle mass, lost nearly all of it after detraining for seven weeks.

In 2016, there was a study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29212672) done with 21 people that had trained and raced the Boston Marathon. Immediately after completing the race, they were only allowed to exercise a total of two hours or less a week with no more than 3-4 miles total running per week . During their training leading up to the race, they averaged nearly 32 miles a week. So these were some well-conditioned athletes.

After the first four weeks, the runners had significant drops in blood volume and plasma volume. These changes can be thought of as the body’s blood-pumping system deteriorating, both in terms of the size and power of the pump. The result of this would make a given running pace feel harder, because less oxygen would reach working muscles per heart beat than had been the case at the time of their marathon. The changes that were experienced in the first four weeks stabilized and didn’t get much worse over the second four weeks.

At the end of the 8 weeks, a treadmill test found that the average time to exhaustion decreased by 5 to 6 seconds per week. This test matches most runners’ observations that their ability to sustain a hard pace had declined more than their ability to maintain their easy pace. It’s worthy of noting that there was a lack of decline in VO2 max and haemoglobin mass. According to the researchers, this suggests that with the resumption of training, you would see a fairly rapid return to form.

When researching cycling detraining, I found a review of over 60 studies from The Journals of Medicine and Science in Sports & Exercise and Sports Medicine.

They summarized what can occur during a 2 to 4 week break from training. They found the same drops in blood and plasma volume as the Boston Marathon runners study. Other effects of detraining include a loss of flexibility, a decrease in your lactate threshold pace, and large reductions in your muscle glycogen concentration and aerobic enzyme activity. Interestingly, the fitter you are, the greater these losses tend to be.

They found that endurance performance tends to remain the same or actually improve after just a few days without training. This is not surprising because when you are in hard training you are perpetually fatigued, so a short break allows your body to recover and adapt to your previous training (i.e. a taper before a race). Between 1 and 2 weeks off from training, however, the benefits of recovery start to become outweighed by a loss in fitness. Performance is likely to decrease by about 3-5% after 3 to 4 weeks of detraining.

From what I found, it appears that the body will lose its ability to tolerate the impact of running sooner so than its loses its ability to run. This can be scary for runners that are returning from injury. Your aerobic fitness might be telling you a six-mile run is fine, whereas your body’s ability to actually tolerate six miles of running has decreased due to the decline of structural fitness.

The better shape you were in, the less time it will take to get back into shape. Your muscle memory remains for a long time after your muscles have faded. Your body remembers how it was able to run and lift, you just have to remind it and get those muscles, blood vessels, and lungs back in shape to make it happen again​. Of course, it will take more time the longer you go without exercise. So slowly build the mileage back up as you are more at risk of injury because of the decrease in structural fitness. This applies to both beginner and experienced athletes.

Part of the current Holistic Hundred Challenge is doing 100 body-weight exercises every day! This might sound simple to some of you, but I would challenge everyone to try this, even if you are not doing the Holistic Hundred Challenge.

This time of year, lots of people spend a lot of money going to the gym. They have been lead to believe that in order to get in shape and build muscle, they must be in a gym with machines or free weights. Stand in line at the grocery store and you will see magazines with men and women on them with weights in their hand. I'm even seeing lots of billboards now with people liftting weights or using machines. But to most people, getting “huge” is not the goal and is not even necessary for overall health.

With that in mind, I recommend you try to start doing body-weight exercises every day. Below are a list of my top 5. Start off with 10-20 of each and try to consistently do them to the point where you can increase the quantity or add in variations.

1. Burpees

The burpee may be the perfect body-weight exercise. It combines resistance training and cardiovascular conditioning in one exercise. I started doing them on a consistent basis when training for Spartan races last year and they kick my butt every time. No matter how many I’ve done.

2. Squats

Back when I had a gym membership, I would see people doing squats with a barbell or even on a machine. Most of them had excruciatingly bad form. To the point where they were going to hurt themselves. The body-weight squat is a great exercise to assess your strength, awareness and lower-body mobility. Squatting your body-weight may sound simple, but you’d be surprised how many people struggle with doing these correctly.

3. Push-Ups

Push-ups are a great alternative to the bench press because a slight change in hand or foot position can hit the chest completely differently. They also recruit your quads, glutes and abs, you’re stabilizing your body as you push your own weight.

4. Planks

The plank recruits different types of muscles in order to properly do the exercise. You might think that it just works the abs, but when done correctly, it also recruits the quads and glutes to help keep your body tight in an efficient position. Planks help with core stability and balance, but they can also help with posture and lower back pain. Much like push-ups, there are several plank variations that you can use to increase intensity.

5. Pull-Ups

Out of every exercise you can do for your upper-body, the pull-up is the most efficient. You can purchase your own pull-up bar to hang on a doorframe (this is what I have), or you can use a beam in your basement (or office) or a jungle gym at a park. To ensure you’re getting the maximum results it is crucial to perform pull-ups in a controlled manner. Crossfit has lots of benefits (I'm using their videos in this post to show proper form), but the pull-ups used in their workouts (called Kipping pull-ups) are made for speed and can lead to injury. Do pull-ups in a very controlled manner. Up slow and down slow, avoid swinging your body. You can start by having your feet on a chair under you to assist if you can't do a pull-up the proper way when starting out.

The best thing about body-weight exercises is that they usually require no equipment and can be done just about anywhere.

My race schedule has been different in 2018 than previous years. It has not been littered with triathlons and road running races. This year was a year for me to explore new things and challenge myself. As the year progressed and I found some races I wanted to do, I saw that October was going to be a busy month for me!

THE BOURBON CHASE

​

I gathered up a team of 12 consisting of some old friends and some new ones. We left at noon on Friday, October 12^th on our journey to cover 200 miles of running through central Kentucky while hitting six different bourbon distilleries along the way. Our team consisted of some veteran runners and some guys that had only been running less than a year. We definitely exceeded expectations. Team “Holistic Athletes” finished in 27 hours and 34 minutes, placing us 19^th our of 109 all-male teams and 36th out of 400 total teams. Lots of good memories were made while being stuck in a van together for over 34 hours. It had been four years since I ran The Bourbon Chase and I had missed it. Absolutely planning to get another team together for 2019!

STORM EVA BANDMAN CYCLOCROSS RACE

Back in the fall of 2014, I won a gift certificate by randomly having my bib number drawn at the end of a triathlon. I used this gift certificate to buy a Cyclocross bike (it was a BIG gift certificate) from VO2 Multisport, our local swim/bike/run store. I’ve used this bike to do some gravel races and taken it on a few easy trails over the last four years, but I always seemed to find an excuse when it came to actually registering and riding in a Cyclocross race. For those of you not familiar with Cyclocross, it’s a bike race that typically takes place in the autumn and winter and consist of many laps of a short (1.5 –​2  mile) course featuring pavement, wooded trails, sand, grass, steep hills and obstacles requiring the rider to quickly dismount, carry the bike while navigating the obstacle and remount. Races are generally between 30 minutes and an hour long, with the distance varying depending on the ground conditions and lead rider times. The sport originated in Europe and we are fortunate enough to have a big CX scene here in Louisville.

With no excuses this year, I signed up for a local race on October 21^st that is part of an Ohio Valley series of races. I took the bike out for a practice run a few weeks before the race, practiced dismounting and mounting a few times and thought that I was as ready as I could be. I jumped in the Cat5 race (lowest level) and was ready to see what this sport was all about!

The race had a Halloween theme, so riders were asked to wear costumes. Most people did NOT, but I did. Since my Alma-mater had upset the #2 team in the country the night before, I proudly dressed up as a Purdue University football player.

Based on some advice from my friend Peter, I took the first lap slow to avoid congestion. Despite this plan, I had to jump off my bike when someone in front of my fell going up the first hill. This put me pretty far behind everyone else and I spend the rest of the race trying to catch everyone else. My lap times were 7:54, 7:41, 7:19, 7:22. So as you can see, I got stronger was the race progressed. I ended up 12^th out of 38 riders, which was better than I thought I would do. Now that I know not to hang back on the first lap, I’m hopeful that I can place better next time around.

SPARTAN ATLANTA

After doing my first Spartan Race at Ft. Knox back in July, I knew that I wanted to train specifically for obstacle course racing and try to do another one before the end of the year. The only option in driving distance was Atlanta, so I signed up for the October 28^th race and decided to step up from the Sprint distance and do a Super. This meant a total of 8-10 miles of trail running with 25-30 obstacles mixed in.

My confidence was pretty high after doing lots of monkey bars and burpees as pat of my runs a few times a week over the last two months. Despite the training, I still struggled with a few things.

Spartan Atlanta Super Obstacles:

Overwalls - COMPLETED

6’ Wall​- COMPLETED

Hay Pyramid - COMPLETED

Vertical Cargo Net- COMPLETED

Rope Climb – FAILED = 30 burpees

Inverted Wall - COMPLETED

Monkey Bars - COMPLETED

Bucket Brigade - COMPLETED

Hurdles- COMPLETED

Cliff Climb / Cargo - COMPLETED

Atlas Carry - COMPLETED

Rolling Mud - COMPLETED

Slip Wall - COMPLETED

Spear Throw – FAILED = 30 burpees

Hercules Hoist - COMPLETED

Twister – FAILED = 30 burpees

Sandbag Carry - COMPLETED

Plate Drag - COMPLETED

Bender - COMPLETED

8’ Wall - COMPLETED

Z Walls - COMPLETED

Low Crawl - COMPLETED

Stairway – FAILED = 30 burpees

Barbed Wire - COMPLETED

7’ Walls - COMPLETED

Olympus - COMPLETED

Muti Rig – FAILED = 30 burpees

A-Frame Cargo - COMPLETED

Fire Jump - COMPLETED

​

So in the end, I failed five obstacles and had to do 150 burpees (+ five as part of the atlas carry). I figure that each set of 30 burpees takes me about 3-4 minutes to complete. So if I can get through this distance race without any penalty burpees, I could shave 15-20 minutes off of my time. In this race, that would have moved me up close to a top 10 finish. I ended up placing 28^th out of 66 in my age group.

The 9 miles of trail running was not a problem for me and I was routinely passing people between obstacles. The trail took us through some waist-deep water a few times and lots of shin-deep mud. The varying terrain was actually pretty fun, it's been several years since I ran trails. I came away bruised, bloody and very muddy, but I had a lot of fun and I’m ready to figure out how to train for the rope climb, twister and multi rig so that I can continue to climb up the results board. I’m not sure yet with my 2019 race schedule will look like, but I’m pretty certain that it will contain some Spartan races! These things are a blast!