Well, it is a ‘dissertation’. 😉
run more, lose weight, run faster…problem solved.
I lost too much weight resulting in muscle loss and bone fractures, making me slower…
This is not the problem of 99.9% of athletes on this forum or on the start line of any marathon. This MAY apply to 1 out of 1000 runners. There is another thread you can start for the roughly 1/1000 (or less, I picked that number out of the air) from the general population for whom this is a concern
While I pretty much never agree with synthetic he does make a point that more isn’t always better when it comes to weight loss. And just because his advice may not apply to the majority of people reading doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to include. I’d say it’s just as useful as your advice.
Also, if we are talking about female athletes (which are pretty much always forgotten about on this forum), it is way more common than 1 out of 1000 who are at risk for this. When I ran cross country we had a few women on the team who were on the team and ended up with health issues while continuing to try and get lighter and lighter as they thought lighter always meant faster.
I said 1/1000 in the general population not 1/1000 on a female running sqaud. The latter is already 1/1000th out of the general population (add up all women competitive runners and divide by 3.75B woman humans and you have your math).
The thread was a general question. Of course telling Eliud Kipchoge to run more, lose weight and run faster won’t work too. He is already body composition, volume and speed optimized. For people at that pointy end, the answers are more nuanced as is the advice for the women’a cross country team at your NCAA div 1 school.
But that is not 999/1000 or more in the general population. Even if you get on the start line in Boston with 35,000 people at least 34500 are not body composition optimized to run their fastest possible marathon (and that is Ok…there is more to life than being marathon lean)…I have been top 1000 in Boston and lots of people around who would be faster being leaner.
Sadly this is part of being fast. There is a tipping point for everyone where they also break. There is also a lot of messed up psychology that comes with trying to get fast at running but that’s another topic
Yea Paul yours an effective and reasonable plan …run a bunch and get optimally skinny. That is prolly the best advice one can receive . Oh and the other thing is to not get old. Old age seems to slow folks down.
I swam at 185lbs in college with just under 10% body fat. After swimming I raced bikes at 175 and still just under 10%. I was never a good climber but did fairly well in TT events. Started running and every 5 lbs weight (muscle and fat) I lost, I just got faster and faster. Got down to 155lbs and right at 5% body fat. I was running average 60miles a week with a high of 97 miles (always wanted to run a few 100mile weeks as that is what the big boys were running in the 1970s early 80s).
Never quite made it to the 100 miles but I was getting colds and flu about every other month. I cut back to 40 miles a week, let my body fat hover around 8%, weight in the low 160s and ran almost as fast without ever being sick. I know the numbers are correct as the body fats were hydrostatic weighings and cross checked with skin fold calipers in a University lab.
It is hard to get skinny and harder to stay that way. But if you are going to reach your ultimate run potential there better be some ribs showing.