Finding Ultra (16 page)

Still wary? Then here's my challenge to you. Using the information in this book's appendixes, adopt the PlantPower Diet. Stick to it religiously for thirty days straight and you'll feel dramatically better. Your energy levels will rise. You'll feel lighter. Your focus will increase. Your mood and sleep will improve. Your blood pressure and cholesterol levels will normalize. You'll feel motivated to exercise. If you're an athlete, your recovery time, and thus your performance, will improve. And yes, you'll lose weight. And if after a month you haven't experienced most, if not all, of the above drastic improvements, I'll happily wish you well as you return to your disease-provoking, artery-clogging, animal protein–based style of eating.

The year was 2007. I was a few months into my evolving experiment in plant-based nutrition. Nutrient-dense foods slowly replaced empty-calorie processed foods. Raw vegetable, fruit, and superfood smoothie blends prepared in my beloved high-powered Vitamix blender took the place of gluten-rich, high-starch refined grains. In fact, almost everything artificial was swapped for plant-based whole foods, my waist slimming in proportion to my expanding nutritional knowledge. With my energy levels skyrocketing to an unprecedented high, I began a routine of mild exercise. Then came “the run” that I described in Chapter One. And once that was accomplished, a yearning for a midlife athletic challenge took root.

On a whim, I signed up for the Wildflower Long Course Triathlon. A tough, very hilly half-Ironman test, the race is held in rural central California every March. I knew that competing in a full Ironman competition was not within my reach at that point. But given how I was beginning to feel, I thought,
No problem with this Wildflower thing. I got this
.

And without any inkling whatsoever of how to properly prepare for a triathlon, I got to work in my own half-baked, weekend-warrior style. Just as I'd launched into a vegetarian diet without any real investigation or understanding, I relied on my past experience as a swimmer as a baseline for how triathlon training should be approached and just threw myself into it.
My way
. My routine was nothing crazy, extreme, or even all that time-consuming. One or
two morning trail runs a week. A quick swim or two at lunch should my work schedule permit. And one bike excursion every Saturday morning with my buddies Trevor Mullen and Chris Uettwiller.

I took the time my daily demands allotted and just pushed the pace as fast as I could—much as I'd approached every swim workout back in the day. If I had an hour to run, I ran as hard as I could until my lungs seared, my thighs screamed, and I buckled over. I blasted my short swim sets. And I pushed the pedals to the maximum until I bonked.
No pain, no gain, right?
Recalling my halcyon Stanford days when I used to routinely puke in the pool gutter, I did what I assumed any serious athlete would do in preparation for such a race. There was no reason to believe that what had served me well in the past would fail to reap results now. I might have been brand-new to this triathlon thing, particularly everything having to do with a bike, but how hard could it be? Wildflower was going to be a snap.

But I was wrong. Just 500 meters into the 1.2-mile swim, my lungs were searing. Hasty and overconfident, my body suddenly seized up in lactate paralysis from going out too hard, too soon. Not halfway through the swim, I actually had to stop, roll over on my back, and spend the next five minutes trying to catch my breath. What followed was a mighty struggle just to complete the swim. Stumbling light-headed into the “transition” area, I somehow became lost searching for my bike, and when I finally located my trusty two-wheeled steed, I bent over and threw up all over my cycling shoes.

The bike portion of the race only heightened my humiliation. No matter how hard I pedaled my Trek road bike, I seemed to go backward, helpless as countless cyclists effortlessly zipped by in their fancy time-trial chariots. Somehow I completed the fifty-mile ride, but it took everything I had. And when I bent down to remove my cycling cleats, I cramped so severely that I actually collapsed on
the ground. It took eons just to get my running shoes on. Then I tried to run. I made it about a hundred yards before I realized it wasn't going to happen. I just couldn't move my legs. And that's when I quit. Not from a failure of will but from a complete failure of the body.

Next to my name on the race results appeared the acronym every endurance athlete dreads: “DNF”—Did Not Finish.

This triathlon thing had turned out to be much harder than I'd thought.

Despite my less-than-stellar debut as a middle-aged endurance athlete, I was determined to improve. And so for the remainder of 2007, I kept at it.
I just need more time
. After all, I'd only been exercising a few months after spending the vast majority of adulthood in the prone position.
What did I expect?
So I crushed the trails when I could, continued with my all-out Saturday rides, and every once in a while jumped in the pool. By the time autumn rolled around, I felt ready for another competitive go. So I showed up at the starting line in Long Beach for my first official marathon.

Everything started out fine. But at mile 18, my legs completely gave out. And I walked the remaining eight miles.

It had been a full year since my staircase epiphany, a period of time in which I'd taken a giant leap forward in improving my health. But it was pretty clear that a future in endurance sports held little promise.

So what?
It was this new lifestyle—not race results, finishing times, or age-group rankings—that captivated me. I reveled in the simple purity of the outdoor experience that washed over me in the midst of a trail run, the feeling of calm that enveloped me while
engaged in a hard swim, and the satisfying camaraderie I discovered while pedaling with gung-ho fellow bikers.

Fast or slow, it mattered little. I was in with both feet. Hooked.

That first year taught me a few important lessons. First, you can't build Rome in a year, let alone a day. Second, I had absolutely no clue about what I was doing; it was time to get educated. And third, deeply aware of what makes me tick, I knew I needed a goal to better focus both my energy and my time.

And that goal boiled down to one word:
Ironman
.

Ironman is considered by many to be the ultimate test in endurance, a race that entails a 2.4-mile open-water swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, and culminating with a full marathon—26.2 miles of running. All in one day. Long before NBC began winning Emmys for its Hawaii Ironman World Championships broadcast, and decades before triathlon grew to become one of the biggest participation sports in the world, Ironman was born from one hotly debated question: Who are the fittest athletes—swimmers, cyclists, or runners? In 1978, U.S. Naval Commander John Collins resolved to answer this question once and for all by combining the essence of three Hawaiian Island of Oahu–set events—the Waikiki Rough Water Swim, the Around-Oahu Bike Race, and the Honolulu Marathon—into an informal one-day slugfest among friends. That year, fifteen athletes undertook the challenge. Twelve finished.

The rest is history. With tens of thousands of athletes participating in dozens of races across the globe, today Ironman isn't just huge business; it's a phenomenon. And a year and a half after my age-forty epiphany, the Ironman seemed, to my push-it-to-the-max self, the obvious choice to test my abilities. Forget the fact that I'd yet to even finish a single triathlon or complete a marathon without stopping.

In April of 2008 I was on the phone with Gavin, my former roommate from my San Francisco days, grilling him about his past
Ironman experiences, when he suggested that I get in touch with his friend Chris Hauth.

“Everybody needs a coach, Rich. And he's the guy who can take you there.”

Not only had Chris swum in two Olympiads for Germany, he was a top Ironman professional triathlete with a thriving business coaching many successful amateur athletes—people with full-time jobs and families, like both Gavin and me. So on the strength of Gavin's endorsement, I made the call.

“Which Ironman do you want to do?” Chris asked me early in our conversation. I was stumped. “Well, let's just work on some base fitness for now, until you figure it out.”

Base fitness? What does that mean exactly? And don't I already have that?
Apparently not.

Before he would even begin to train me, Chris insisted that I undertake what is called a
lactate test
—a torturous procedure scientifically designed to identify a person's level of fitness with relative exactitude. So the first week of May 2008 I visited Phase IV Scientific Health and Performance Center in Santa Monica. My bike was rigged up to a machine called a CompuTrainer, which used a computer to calculate my cycling cadence and watts—the measure of power my legs exerted with each pedal stroke. After a brief warm-up, watts—or pedal resistance—were progressively increased every four minutes until failure. And with each successive four-minute interval, my heart rate was recorded and my blood tested—all to evaluate the level of lactate in my system, an indicator of physiological fatigue.

I felt good, and figured I'd rocked the test. Chris's response? “Just as I thought.” Translation: I couldn't have been more wrong. Despite all my self-styled “training,” the test results were dismal, reflecting the farthest thing from a truly fit endurance athlete.

“If you want to work with me,” Chris lectured, “you're going to have to throw out the window everything you learned as a swimmer. We start over. And do it my way. It will take patience, time, and discipline. And you're going to get even slower before you get faster.”

“I'm in.” The date was May 7, 2008. Just one month shy of my ten-year anniversary in sobriety.

What ensued was a training program focused entirely on building the capacity and efficiency of my endurance engine. Our bodies have two basic energy-burning systems. The first is the “aerobic system,” which utilizes oxygen and fat for fuel. It's your “go all day” mechanism that fuels activity up to a certain level of intensity. But when the intensity of exertion exceeds what is called the “aerobic threshold”—the point at which my lactate test curve began to escalate skyward—then the secondary system known as the “anaerobic system” takes over. Used to power more extreme efforts, such as sprint bursts, heavy weight lifts, and fast running, the anaerobic system utilizes glycogen, or sugar, for energy. And it can only be turned on for about ninety minutes before it shuts down, depleted.

Proficiency in endurance sports, explained Chris, is all about building the efficiency of the aerobic, “go all day” system. To accomplish this, I needed to focus on training that system specifically—which meant staying in the second of five specific training “zones” that are established by the lactate test. For a guy like me, that meant slowing down. Way down. No more gut-busting trail runs. Forget about battling my buddies up the Santa Monica Mountains on the bike. From that minute forward, I was to never escalate my heart rate above 140 beats per minute on any run. And on the bike? Cap it at 130. Zone Two. All day. Every day.

“But if all I do is go slow, how will I ever get fast?” I asked Chris.

“The prize never goes to the fastest guy,” Chris replied. “It goes to the guy who slows down the least.” True in endurance sports. And possibly even truer in life.

Doing a bit of corroborative research, I discovered a consensus that consistent Zone Two (aka Z2) training for the endurance athlete will, over time, stimulate an increase in mitochondrial density in muscle cells. And a proliferation of these mitochondria—the cells' power generators—in turn enhances both the efficiency of the aerobic engine and the duration for which one can perform endurance exercise. Do it long enough and Z2 training will lead to an increase in aerobic threshold—the maximum level of intensity at which the body continues to process oxygen and fat for fuel.

Up to this point, I'd been spending the vast majority of my running, cycling, and swimming sessions in what is referred to as the “gray zone”—a dreaded no-man's-land where the effort exerted exceeds that which is required to properly develop the aerobic engine, yet falls short of the intensity necessary to significantly improve speed or increase anaerobic threshold. It's that level of effort that leaves you feeling nice and winded after a brisk run but yields little in terms of performance improvement. In actuality, such training undermines true progress. It leaves you tired, with little to no gains in either endurance or speed. It creates plateaus that stunt athletic development, and often leads to injury.
And it is by far the most common mistake made by amateur endurance athletes—myself included
.

In other words, the typical amateur endurance athlete trains far too hard on the aerobic and active recovery days. But not nearly hard enough on the intense days. A certain level of proficiency can be achieved this way, but full potential is never realized.

Beyond the scientific mumbo-jumbo, I still struggled with just how counterintuitive it all seemed. All I ever knew was
No pain, no gain. Go hard, or go home
. And now I was being told the exact
opposite. It defied everything I'd ever believed about how to condition the body.

“You're just going to have to trust me,” Chris said. “And get a heart-rate monitor. Because it's going to be your new best friend.”

So with my newly purchased Garmin GPS watch on my wrist and the heart-rate monitor strap awkwardly bound across my chest, I headed out for my first official workout under Chris's tutelage, a brief forty-five-minute Z2 run on nearby Victory Trail, on Ahmanson Ranch, a three-thousand-acre open-space preserve smack in the middle of the San Fernando Valley.
Forty-five minutes? That's it? Doesn't Chris realize I've been banging out two- to three-hour runs for a year?
I felt like he was treating me like a child. I resisted embracing the truth—that when it came to endurance sports, I was less than a child; I was an infant.