Day 2: Early start

After discovering that my wife's bike had been stolen from the bus stop where I had chained it up for my ride home last night meant that today was going to be an early start. 4:30am EARLY!

After some bad news yesterday which impacted on the family resulted in a sleepless night. Getting back to sleep after getting up at 2:00am for my two year old was no problem. Waking two and half hours later was. But I needed to get to work early and with my bike still at work that meant I needed to run the 12km to the nearest bus stop. Usually easier said than done but after riding and running yesterday and with glycogen-depleted muscles yet to adapt to the changes in nutrition I have recently made I was dragging my feet.

Day 2:
Ketone reading - 0.4 (+0.2)
Weight = 79.6kg (-0.4)

Exercise:
0515: Run 12km (Garmin died so no time recorded but around 55mins)
Run to bus stop. Nothing pretty but motored along in low gear. Thinking that I was sweating more than normal (perhaps diet related?)

1900: Run 10km
Ran home trying to take it easy in the dark. Tripped in a pot hole which is easy to do after all the rain we have had and the damage to the roads. Hip took most of the impact.

Diet:
On waking: black coffee
Breakfast: Cheddar cheese and danish salami (~100g of each), 3 brazil nuts
Mid-morning: black coffee with cream, macadamia nuts
Lunch: half chicken, babel cheese (2)
Afternoon: black coffee, cream, cup of stock (sodium)
Dinner: steak, salad with blue cheese, handful of almonds
Late: raspberries with full cream, 1Tbs coconut oil

Keto Day 1: Motivation and Purpose

Finding motivation and a sense of purpose is often difficult when faced with so many choices.

What I have found is that one of the key ways to help resolve my motivation and sense of purpose is to share my story and help people on theirs.

Wherever I go people are always interested in what, why and how I do things either with exercise or with diet. I find that I really enjoy giving out information and telling my story that it helps to give me the focus I need to remain on my own path.

One problem I find though is that sometimes I get so focused on helping and supporting other people that I fail to dedicate enough time for myself.

I’m lucky to have found a few people who are dedicated (perhaps obsessive is a better description) who I can bounce a few ideas off and are willing to experiment with their diet and training to challenge their beliefs and function outside of the box.

Case in point. I lent out my low carb endurance book to a work colleague who is a cyclist and within three days he had read the book, bought himself a ketone monitor and arrived at work with a bunch of questions about blood ketone readings, training and what sorts of foods he should be eating to get himself into nutritional ketosis. Talk about dedication! He even showed me his tracking spreadsheets complete with graphs.

Being surrounded by these sorts of people whether in close physical proximity or around the world connected by various social media and email really helps to keep me dedicated and living my life’s purpose.

Day one – nutritional ketosis

Ketone reading – 0.2 (I reckon I was almost bleeding sugar)

Weight – 80.0kg

Diet

Pre-ride: black coffee + 1Tbs coconut oil

Post-ride: 3 eggs (- 1 white removed) + 120g cheese + 3 brazil nuts

Snack: ¼ cup cream + long black

Lunch: Caesar salad (no croutons), Greek salad, salami

Afternoon snack: macadamia nuts, cream, black coffee

Run

Dinner: Spicy Country Chicken with steamed veggies (broccoli, cauliflower), walnuts

Exercise

0600: Ride 42km in 1:28 - felt strong

1800: Run 12km in 0:52 - ran from bus to home. Felt good which I was surprised at considering I'd consumed about 30gm of carbs today.

Keto-adaptation (the evolution of self experimentation)

This is what I'm currently reading and after listening to podcast interviews with Jeff Volek, Stephen Phinney, Peter Attia and Tim Noakes I've decided to experiment with a nutritional ketogenic diet and endurance training.

I've had many discussions with endurance athletes from all nutritional disciplines and it's always ended with "show me an athlete that has success following a low carb approach". I searched around the internet and studied some of the published research and didn't come across much.

Often the diet is associated with training and racing at low intensity levels (60-70% VO2 max) but I'm interested to see if I can apply this nutritional approach to an athlete that is interested in finishing near the top of ultra-distance races.

When I embarked on my 30 day Primal Challenge back in 2008 I questioned whether an athlete could perform while ingesting lower levels of carbohydrates than the typically recommended endurance diet and my results concluded that I could not only run well but I could run at an intensity which gave me my first sub 3 hour marathon and a smashing run over a 90km trail where I set the fastest known time.

Email exchanges and blog posts from Mark's Daily Apple even suggested that we could adapt to a high fat/low carbohydrate diet to achieve additional athletic performance gains. Being a person that likes to do things a little differently to the conventional I've always been interested to see if this was possible. I've decided NOW is the time.

What I hope to get out of this experiment is to see if there are any benefits to athletic performance in being in nutritional ketosis - reduced lactate production, increased recovery, reduced inflammation, increased fat utilisation, etc.

My plan is to journal my progress for at least 30 days starting tomorrow.

I've got myself one of these so I'll be able to track my blood ketone levels.