[dude]

Nummer 2:

"I was a very fit, accomplished runner o more than 25 years, had competed in numerous marathons, and was enjoying numerous PRs and growth in my running. My goals at the marathon distance had eluded me however despite peaking at 70-80 miles per week.

I was under the impression that I was working out so hard, that I could pretty much eat what I wanted, and this turned out not to be true.

My coach is an engineer and former auto-racing enthusiast. He explained to me that weight was everything, and since I was at about 10% body fat and spending a decent amount of time in the gym, that I might be able to further improve performance by laying off the lifting and losing a bit of weight. I dropped ten pounds simply by making sure that I ate about 250 calories less per day than I was burning.

Not only did I take a good 15 minutes off my average marathon time (the rule I've heard is 3 secs per mile per pound lost) I became phenomenally fast at every other distance. I'm shaving off a few more pounds for this year's Boston, and I'm setting PRs left and right.

And in fact, running fast does little to make you lean. If you look at the caloric demand for various speeds, going from a 10 to a 5 minute mile burns almost no additional calories. Plus, since you can run it for but a fraction of the time, you burn almost no calories by comparison.

Think about it, if I handed you a forty-five pound weight and told you to sprint up a 400-meter hill, you'd slow down considerably. Take away the weight, and you'd be faster. I can't think of a sport where this isn't the case--car racing, horse racing, running, etc.

A related issue is shoe weight, where every once of reduction is good for about a second per mile. This has more to do with swing weight of the leg than the unsprung weight one loses in fat. Again, we see the same issues in car racing.

Moving on, I agree that 1,300 calories seems way too low for anyone training seriously. I have heard that starvation diets force the body to shut down weight loss, though there are so many myths out there, I am a little suspicious about that.

The fact is, again, that weight loss does matter and it is based on some pretty simple math: take in a few hundred less calories than you burn up and weight will come off.

I wouldn't restrict my intake too much, but at the same time, I don't understand why eating more would ever really help if you are trying to lose weight (unless the aforementioned theory about starvation diets is true).

As to ideal race weight, again, you don't want to carry around any extra fat or muscle on race day. To do otherwise is to waste energy carrying around baggage that isn't contributing to your speed. For men, I think this means having your percent body fat at about 5% and for women at about 8%. There are people who are the exception, but for most of us, it's a bit unhealthy to go any lower.

Still, many accomplished athletes are not at these levels and could benefit from being so."