Alpine Climbing

A while back I was recommended The Zone diet by Barry Sears. I can’t say I was that taken with it. The Zone book did get me thinking and reading up on some of the more recent thinking about diet in general.

The thing that really stood out was this book, largely because it focuses on the requirements of endurance athletics, not people trying to loose weight. Endurance events have vastly different requirements in terms of fueling and this book has lots of good information on how to eat before, during and after long workouts.

It’s the paleo diet; high fat, high protein, with a focus on lower GI carbs. That means no dairy and no breads or grains. The paleo diet focuses on nutritious, unprocessed foods with low glycemic index, as such it’s a lower carb diet but not of the excessive “Atkins” variety. However it’s been modified to take into account the carb intake required for endurance activities. Essentially you get to break a lot of the paleo “rules” around your exercise to fuel and then replace the energy expended.

In short this is a diet and exercise book that makes sense and is actually designed for athletes in training, as opposed to couch potatoes trying to loose weight. Well worth a read in my opinion.

I found an interesting article on fueling long distance runs on fat and training fat metabolism.

“Fuel on Fat For the Long Run” on MarathonGuide.com.

So I started doing CrossFit a in mid January but injury and illness have meant that it wasn’t until late March that I actually managed to commit to it regularly. For the last six weeks I’ve been doing it three mornings a week and sometimes squeezing in another session in the evening.

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