I've been experimenting lately on a very low carb, high protein & fat diet. Well, that's not exactly true. My wife's been experimenting on me. She started this low carb thing about 2-3 months ago. I just started whole hog last weekend.
Basically what it means is that I keep my total daily carb grams low, on the order of less than 30. Less than 120 calories from carbs. That's really low. Especially considering I'm probably ingesting about 2000 calories a day. I'm not religious about it, so I may go slightly over 30 grams a day. But I really doubt it. For the most part, my only carbs on a weekday come from a bottle or two of beer.
I say weekday because I allow myself to cheat on Friday afternoon through Saturday morning. At least that's the plan. This past weekend (weekend #2 on the diet) I cheated with carbs through Sunday afternoon. Still not too many carbs, less than 100 grams.
But the thing I've noticed is that this diet has had an impact on my swimming. I am immediately tired after the warm-up. My arms feels heavy like deadwood. I haven't led my lane for many workouts. I just can't keep up. My last solo day I knocked out 5000, but those laps were slow, on my CSS+:10, which is my 20K+ race pace. I beat the beep every lap, but it wasn't easy. My arms and lower back were killing me.
The wife tells me that when she first started her joints hurt for a few weeks. My knees killed me the first week and that lower back pain (reminiscent to my last 10K attempt) scared me. Joint pain has gone away (we'll see after tonight's practice).
We'll see. I don't see how any ultra-endurance athlete can perform on this diet. What do you drink or eat in the middle of the hours and hours of running/biking/swimming? Carbs! Maybe I need to try beef broth, a la Webb, in my marathon swims this year. Do you think my volunteer kayaker in North Dakota will balk when I give him 3 one-gallon thermoses of hot beef broth?
I'll be interested to hear how this story progresses. I think will lethargy will pass. I've also heard if you're trying to do a keto diet combined with endurance training, you can get away with more carbs than the baseline recommendation with the same results.
Posted by: Evan | 19 March 2013 at 02:12
Hmmmm, that shamrock shake pushed your weekly carb average to 800 g a day. If I had my way I'd feed you through a little sliding door. Only then could I be sure....
Posted by: MTheads | 19 March 2013 at 17:35