Supplements Part 1

And with that out of the way, here’s a quick look at the topic of supplements, while the information was originally aimed at mixed sports (think team sports, boxing, MMA, anything that requires a mix of strength, endurance, etc. for performance), what I have to say pretty much applies to other areas as well.

How We Get Fat

Ok, this is going to be a bit ranty but, trust me, I write better when I’m upset. If the Internet has proven anything to me over the years it’s this: basic literacy is sorely lacking. Because the comments in response to the article I wrote on Tuesday, Excess Protein and Fat Storage – Q&A indicate that not only can people not understand rather basic concepts, they insist on reading things into what I am saying that I have never said. I could rant about making uncritical inferences but I’ll spare everyone that.

Excess Protein and Fat Storage – Q&A

Which means that the odds of protein being converted to fat in any quantitatively meaningful fashion is simply not going to happen. Certain amino acids are processed to a great degree in the liver (as I discuss in The Protein Book) and this can produce glucose, ketones and a few other things. But triglycerides (the storage form of ‘fat’) isn’t one of them.

No Regrets Part 8

It turned out that training for a summer sport like outdoor inline starts with a transition in Mid-November and then you start building your base. I’m not a superstitious man but this all of what I wrote about in Part 7 seemed to be happening at the right time. The two weeks easy recovery I needed were exactly when I’d have been taking a transition period from a summer sport anyhow. My decision was made. I was going back to inline. Now the last time I raced was in 1995 on 80mm wheels; now everyone races on 110’s. The first thing I did was to invest in a new pair of skates.

No Regrets Part 7

We got straight into summer training and it was on almost immediately. We were on inline once per week, short-track twice weekly, drylanding, biking and doing weights. And everything was clicking. I was starting to get comfortable on the short-track and inline workouts were going well. Dryland had always gone well and I was getting stronger on the bike. My technique was finally catching up with my fitness which was at a lifetime peak.

No Regrets Part 6

People used to ask me all the time when racing season started and in this regards, speed skating is that much more unique. Outside of a few events that nobody cares about, there really isn’t a racing series except for the top skaters at least not in the United States. They skate World Cup and World Championships (both the overall and individual distances) and there are a handful of other events at most.

No Regrets Part 5

I’d note that it became abundantly clear that my original plan of only 1.5 years in SLC (I had planned to stay through Torino trials and that was it) was an amusing pipe dream. That came and went before I’d even learned to skate. But since I still had doing something (even if it was only skating in Olympic trials) as a goal and nothing else going on, I signed on for the next 4 year cycle. So I’ll be talking about 5.5 years for the rest of this series.

No Regrets Part 4

As I quickly found out, my technique absolutely sucked. I mean everything I did was wrong. I was fit as hell and strong as hell but it didn’t do me any good on the ice. Without technique, nothing happens; you can’t muscle your way through the ice. And undoing bad technique takes a lot longer than learning it right the first time.

No Regrets Part 3

Rex and I went to the Panda Express in my ‘hood for dinner where I proceeded, for about 2 hours, to interview/interrogate him. Due to my own experiences with coaching, I have some rather strongly held opinions about certain things and had to make sure we were on the same wavelength before I took him on as coach. We were. The long and the short of it is that he’d made the Olympic trials in 1980 but was too overtrained to make the team.

No Regrets Part 2

Part of me must have been thinking about the ice because, somehow, I then managed to stumble across across an Introduction to Long-track camp being held at the Salt Lake City Olympic Oval. I signed up immediately. If nothing else, I wanted to be able to say that I had at least tried the ice once.