Juneathon day 6: calf-friendly activity and low carb eating. Help!

Written Jun 6, 2013, tagged under post,amersham,exercise,health,juneathon,orchestra,rickmansworth,swimming

Written around lunchtime:

Thursday is orchestra evening - the Misbourne Symphony Orchestra, rehearsing in Amersham. It doesn't leave a lot of time for exercise, so I thought I'd fit in a walk at lunch, as a calf-recovery-friendly option. I had a very pleasant wonder around Rickmansworth, managing 3.18 miles in just over an hour. What beautiful weather it is today round here!

I've been reading a bit about low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet in the last few days, after picking up mention of a very interesting book on the subject (The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance, by Volek/Phinney). It has often bothered me that the general advice for long runs revolves around carb-loading, which generally entails eating stuff that isn't Paleo... This book looks at the options for cutting carbs right back to adapt the muscles to run a bit more off fat rather than carbs/glucose. The up-side is that you have far more energy available in fat form than the 2000-odd calories you can hope to put away through carb-loading, which should give you a good deal more endurance. The down-side, as I read it, is that kick-starting the process takes about 2 weeks, and entails cutting your carbs down to less than 50g per day, and making up the difference through increased fat consumption.

This approach has a lot of common ground compared to Paleo, but differs in a number of respects that affect me. For instance, Paleo says that fruit is all good, natural and fine, while LCHF points out that some fruit is laden with sugar aka carbs, so you need to be careful. And 50g of carbs isn't much; my morning paleo pancake hits half of it in one swoop!

Anyway, on my walk I ended up in Tesco Metro trying to buy some lunch; it really hit me how few options there are if you are avoiding baked and sugary food. So I munched on a wedge of brie on the way back, to keep me going ready for my salad. 50g ... wow! Anyone have any advice/experience in this area?

Added later:

Well, I was wrong about orchestra; I can't make the next concert, and someone is covering for me - starting today! So after lending her my piccolo, I returned and managed to squash in a quick swim too! I did 1km in about 30 minutes, and really enjoyed it (despite being lapped so much by some of the much better swimmers who were already there). The only issue now is feeling so light-headed due to lack of carbs..!

Juneathon result: walked 3.18 miles, swam 1 km.