I read two books last week — Breath by James Nestor and Finding Ultra by Rich Roll.
Breath, which I had bought and read with some reluctance because I didn’t expect to find anything new, was more interesting than I expected. Part of the reason I found the book interesting because of the claims by the author of instant physiological response to changes in breath. While I was always convinced that breathing well had significant psychological and physiological benefits much of what I know came from from yoga and the emphasis there had always been on long term benefits. Nestor’s book reported research that demonstrated immediate benefits of conscious breathing on pulse rates, blood pressure, and even body temperature and ability to sustain physical effort. Since I have just started, over the past few months, a running routine which I hoped would take me from 10k runs to half and full marathons over the year, I found the book very interesting.
I sent a copy of the book to my Pranayama teacher who, I think, is one of the foremost exponent of Pranayama in India. Dr S is a medical doctor who has been studying and teaching pranayama for over nearly five decades. I wrote a letter to him asking if he would read the book and confirm the findings that the author reported. If Dr S confirmed these I would be more motivated to develop and sustain a regular practice of pranayama.
After sending off that letter I was looking for other books that could help me understand what could be done to build more endurance. I downloaded Rich Roll’s book, “Finding Ultra”.
The book was interesting although I found the portions dealing with the author’s struggles with alcohol and food a bit too detailed. In any case the book didn’t contain any worthwhile discussion about how the author built up his ability to complete endurance runs. But from the book it comes across like Rich Roll just had a natural ability to achieve endurance feats. That’s not me and I didn’t find the book very useful from that point of view.
What I did find interesting was the transformation that Roll appeared to have achieved in his habits in a relatively short period of time despite struggling financially. What I took away from that is something I have also always felt — it’s far easier to give up habits that are detrimental to health when short term goals are set up in the opposite direction. I can’t imagine the Kenyan runners sitting around chain smoking — so I can’t create a self image of myself as a runner and still continue to smoke.
Amongst the habit changes that Rick achieved was shifting to a full plant based diet (he calls it the Plantpower Way). That’s something which I am working on and hear many contradictory claims about. It was useful to read Roll’s testimony that a 100-percent plant based diet does not result in any protein deficiency or any problems in recovery for athletes. He has talked about spirulina, hemp protein and tempeh for increasing protein content in diet which sound interesting. Overall he doesn’t see the need for anything more than 1 g of protein per kilo of body weight — which is surprising given his average of 2-3 hours of training on average every day. For less hard working individuals he appears to think half-a-gram of protein per kilo of body weight per day is sufficient. That’s interesting.
On the other hand there was hardly any mention of weight training in his training regimen— it was all running, cycling and swimming. That was surprising.
These two books were interesting and some ideas from these will be included in my training this year.
Looking for the next book to read on the subject I downloaded samples of The Lost Art of Running by Shane Benzie and Tim Major and Eat and Run by Scott Jurek. I finished these last night and on the flight from Guwahati and Kolkata. I bought and downloaded Jurek’s book at Kolkata airport and am reading it now. More food for running thoughts !
Meanwhile in the sample of The Lost Art of Running there was enough interesting stuff for me to decide that I want to come back to it. Chapter 3, which is as far as the sample goes, deals with fascia and the importance of understanding how it functions to improve running form. That sounded very interesting — the only other person who I have heard talk about fascia before is my Physio therapist who is always talking about myofascial releases for aches/stiffness in the neck and hip regions. Must come back to this book — meanwhile Scott Jurek’s book. He is some sort of super performer in the ultra runs space and fuels himself entirely on plant foods. (April 13)
