TFK Fun Runners Thread 2024

TreatyStones · August 21, 2024, 1:55pm

What if they pay you, you are delayed transferring the entry and the payment starts accruing interest?

Mac · August 21, 2024, 2:03pm

Yep that’s it exactly

Bandage · August 23, 2024, 6:21pm

I’ve formally switched to the Lisbon half marathon on 6 October & sold my Dublin marathon ticket too. Haven’t had much chance to run this week due to life & had a rotten 45 minute easy run there. I’ll aim for 100 minutes on Sunday after 90 minutes last weekend & might try some tempo or interval stuff next week for the first time in nearly 2 months. I’m told to train to my current level of fitness so these will be conservative paces. Hard to be patient when even easy runs feel hard & you’re not seeing any progress.

fenwaypark · August 23, 2024, 7:02pm

Forget about the fast stuff for now. The body is not ready and you are inviting a setback. Plenty of very easy runs and build up slowly.

TreatyStones · September 6, 2024, 8:41am

Dingle Half Marathon in morning, won’t be breaking any records after a very short training block but looking forward to running the route.
The elevation profile is stacked against the half marathon too, but that’s outweighed by the finish at Krugers pub

balbec · September 6, 2024, 8:48am

Mine is 55. That’s down from 62 a year ago.

Bandage · September 7, 2024, 1:11pm

Great run this morning, well done. Lots of elevation on that course but scenery must be something else. You would break 90 mins for the half with a full training block.

TreatyStones · September 7, 2024, 1:49pm

Cheers, ya very happy with it, 4:35 - 4:40 was where I felt I was at, but finished strong bar a bit of cramp at the top of the hill on km 19. Weather was unreal, it’s a phenomenal route but definitely not a half or marathon you’d be targeting for time.

This is the elevation profile of the half.

TreatyStones · September 7, 2024, 1:58pm

About 3km I was tipping along keeping left, pretty much on the dotted yellow line, when some prick decided to needlessly barge up my inside.

Well I spotted the prick up ahead with a KM to go so I made it my mission to catch him, and gave a discreet Eamonn Coughlan fist pump as I left him for dust.

I’d be petty that way.

Locke · September 7, 2024, 2:23pm

No point being from limerick if you can’t be petty

TheUlteriorMotive · September 9, 2024, 7:50pm

Good advice here for lads who want to run faster and shit themselves whilst out for a jog cc @Bandage

Cathal Dennehy: Settled guts equal glory now that bicarb juice is wor…

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“Bicarb has been around a long time and the performance benefits have been known, but there’s always been this huge risk because of the GI issues…explosive diarrhea is one of the symptoms.”

Cathal Dennehy: Settled guts equal glory now that bicarb juice is worth the squeeze

BICARB ON THE MENU: Great Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson with her gold medal following victory in the Women’s 800m Final at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games in France. Pic: PA Wire

Mon, 09 Sep, 2024 - 06:55

For many of the world’s best athletes, the race sometimes starts at the finish line. Once they’ve done their thing on the track, drawn their breath, the next port of call is often the nearest bathroom.

This was the case at one major championship I attended this year, an Irish athlete apologising for a frantic dash through the mixed zone and after returning, they explained they had an urgent need to – how do I put this? – shit themselves.

The reason? They were among the growing number of athletes who, in their search for a performance edge, is consuming sodium bicarbonate before races. Better known as baking soda, its performance benefits have long been known and going back to the 1980s, athletes were using it to counteract the rising acidity in their muscles during events like the 800 metres.

But for many years, the gastrointestinal issues caused by bicarb meant the juice was often not worth the squeeze. But that’s changed over the past year, utterly, with improved methods of delivery that reduce GI distress. As a result, bicarb is now the hottest supplement in town in many sports, and it’s perfectly legal.

At the warm-up track at major athletics events, many athletes can be seen mixing a yoghurt-like substance in a plastic bowl and getting it down the hatch about 90 minutes before races. It’s called Bicarb System, and was created by Swedish sports nutrition company Maurten, which made its name with the hydrogel technology that offered a more effective way to consume carbohydrates during intense exercise.

That technology allows carbs to bypass the stomach and be delivered directly to the small intestine, where they can be absorbed for fast-acting energy during races. Maurten quickly realised hydrogel could be applied in other areas and after years of research, they launched Bicarb System last year, which retails at €70 for four servings.

Word has since spread like wildfire and its efficacy has been backed up by two recent studies: one which showed a drastic reduction in GI issues compared to other bicarb supplements, and another that suggests a performance benefit of 1.4% during a 40km cycling time trial.

That may sound small, but at elite level it’d be colossal. In the men’s 800m on the track, it’d mean an improvement of 1.4 seconds for the world’s best – the difference between first and seventh in this year’s Olympic final. In the men’s Olympic cycling time trial in Paris, it would have equated to a 30-second benefit – the difference between first and fifth.

One elite-level coach I spoke to estimates 50-60% of top-level 400m sprinters are now taking bicarb before races, while in the 800m it’s been estimated at 80%. It’s also hugely popular in rowing, cycling and other sports where muscle acidosis is a limiting factor.

Of course, the thinking has changed in this sphere in recent decades. For a long time, the build-up of lactic acid was believed to be the chief driver of fatigue and if you watch top-level athletics, cycling or swimming today, you’ll still hear athletes and commentators speak about it as the villain. But that’s an outdated, incorrect assumption. It’s now well understood that lactate – the base component of lactic acid – is a fuel source and it’s actually the excess of hydrogen ions created during intense exercise that causes the burn we feel in races or while maxing out in a weights session.

Bicarb helps to neutralise the hydrogen ions’ ability to interfere with muscle contractions, which ultimately delays that wading-through-treacle fatigue we see at the end of a 400m or 800m.

Since Maurten released Bicarb System last year, there’s been a notable reduction in 800m times. If we take the quickest and 10th-quickest performances on the men’s and women’s sides and compare 2024 to 2023, the average improvement has been just over a second. Of course, correlation does not equal causation and there are other possible explanations, from it being Olympic year to improvements in spike technology, track surfaces and the potential use of banned substances.

But still, it’s notable that Keely Hodgkinson, the women’s 800m Olympic champion, is a bicarb user, her coach Trevor Painter telling The Telegraph in July he “couldn’t recommend it strongly enough” while men’s Olympic 800m silver medallist Marco Arop said he tried it because “everybody else is using it” and that it was “working wonders”.

Traditionally, bicarb was consumed in large capsules that were broken down in the gut, but Maurten developed a way of delivering it in mini-pills that athletes mix into a hydrogel “soup,” according to Robbie Lawless, an Irishman who is the company’s head of marketing and communications.

“Bicarb has been around a long time and the performance benefits have been known, but there’s always been this huge risk in taking it because of the GI issues that come from taking bicarb and mixing it with your stomach acid,” he says. “Explosive diarrhea is one of the symptoms.”

Lawless says their product allows the bicarb mini-tablets to “pass through the stomach without dissolving” and go “straight into the intestines where they’re absorbed into the bloodstream.” Olympic triathlon champion Alex Yee is among those who use it, along with the Dutch Olympic rowing team, which won eight medals at the Paris Games. “Judging by the buzz it’s creating at track events and talking to athletes, it feels like a bit of a bicarb frenzy,” says Lawless. “At least 50% of the 800m finalists in Paris used bicarb. That’s repeated in rowing, track cycling, with the sprinters and climbers in the pro peloton.

“It’s really early days with this, but we’re seeing athletes are using it even up to ultra events. We can’t really say yet how that’s affecting performance, there isn’t really scientific research being done. But what we do know is in the 800m, right on the cusp of that line between sprint and endurance, those events where you still have to deal with the anaerobic effects of hydrogen ions, it’s having a real impact.”

Lawless says it’s also “used widely” in the pro cycling peloton when short-to-medium-length efforts are needed like in mountaintop finishes, time trials or for sprint finishes. “It’s still focused on power-based sports, but the potential is bigger than that. We’ll see that over the next months and years.”

TFK Fun Runners Thread 2024

Cathal Dennehy: Settled guts equal glory now that bicarb juice is wor…

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