Eleven Miler And Dietary Nitrate Supplementation

Eleven Miler and Dietary Nitrate Supplementation

Ran a nice eleven miler this morning. Creekside to Leland to Zoom to Chainsaw to Creekside. It's great to have all of these trails back open, and it really adds some nice variety and switches up the hills. It took me 1:21:17 today to crank out the eleven miles (~1,400' gain). Felt pretty good, but a bit slow/heavy from yesterday's effort.

An interesting study has been published looking at the impact of dietary nitrate supplementation via beetroot juice on exercising muscle vascular control. As noted in a previous study, consumption of beetroot juice had a significant beneficial impact on running velocity, as well as in perceived exertion. In this study, the authors were interested in finding out if nitrate supplementation had a similar beneficial impact on exercising muscle vascular control. Based on their results, nitrate supplementation improves vascular control and elevates skeletal muscle O2 delivery during exercise, predominantly in fast-twitch type II muscles. So as with the previous study, nitrate supplementation (via beetroot juice) can not only help running velocity, but also oxygen delivery and vascular control to your muscles. More scientific evidence supporting the idea that athletes need to consume lots of veggies (and not just carbs and proteins) in order to ensure that they are getting enough natural nitrates in their diet.

Sunday Run

Elk Creek - D2 - Waterboard - Secret Trail - Zoom

Did a faster run last night. The map doesn't have the secret trail on it (for obvious reasons), but it only adds perhaps .5 miles more of fun single track.  Really tried to push on all of the climbs and keep the pace up on the flats. Felt good overall. Did it in 1:23. Really inspired with all of the amazing trail running possibilities here - there are so many options and hardly a soul out there.

Friday Training Run

Friday Training Run 

Working on different loops at different paces to get ready for this season. This is the first year that I have actually done any official races, let alone kept track of routes and mileage via a website. We will see what happens...

This is a nice loop with a solid climb from Creekside up to Kings Creek road. Started out mellow and then picked up the pace once I hit the waterboard road from Creekside. Felt good on the climb, keeping a fairly decent pace from there all the way to Zoom, at which point I turned it up a notch for the decent.