The Great Ganesha

Heh! I bet the title caught your eye, eh? [Wink wink, nudge nudge] Sort of like the last time I blogged about Britney Spears being nude in NYC! Well, all the various national interest groups with ‘Family’ in their name can rest easy. I’m not talking about all the bonking that went on between Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral (now isn’t that a blast from the past), but about the kind of bonking that happens when you run. An article in today’s NYT talked about it, and it seems to be the latest buzzword in all of the running mags.

Buzzwords and hype notwithstanding, if you’re a runner then you’ve bonked at some point in your running career. So what the hell is bonking you ask? Well, basically, it’s when you hit the proverbial ‘wall’ during one of your long runs or long races. If you’ve seen that Gatorade commercial where the athlete has his legs start to wobble and then he collapses, then you’ve seen one of the extreme cases. [The athlete, incidentally, was Chris Legh, an Australian triathlete, who was competing in the 1997 Ironman championships at the time.]

According to today’s NYT article, there are three kinds of bonking, based on their respective cause:

Number One: Fluid bonking is plain old dehydration. You know, when you don’t have enough fluids in your body. Perhaps you should think of sipping some tea on your next run?

Number Two: Energy bonking is when:

[you] feel as if your legs are mired in quicksand or as if your brain suddenly says “no more,” like Forrest Gump did at the end of his cross-country trek. [link]

This happens because your blood sugar is low and Lisa Dorfman, the sports nutritionist for the University of Miami, and who the NYT has quoted throughout the article, advices that you can prevent energy bonks by:

drinking a sports drink, or eating a citrus slice or banana, to boost glycogen and increase blood sugar. [link]

And, Number Three: Electrolyte bonking occurs when you have a depletion of electrolytes such as sodium and potassium. When you suffer from electrolyte bonking you usually:

see dots, feel nauseated, cramp up or have persistent headaches. [link]

Now, I don’t know about you, but I am painfully familiar with this type of bonking. To add to that, I also suffer from postural hypotension, which has even caused me to pass out a couple of times, particularly after an intense workout.

Needless to say, bonking is no fun. So how do you prevent it? Well, for me, a bottle of Gatorade in my hand while running has solved most of my bonking problems. But other than that, you should also watch what you eat, as well as when you eat it.

Most elite athletes today realize that what they eat and when they eat affects not only race-day performance but also how quickly they can recover from workouts.

It’s the rest of us who have been slow to catch on. [link]

So drinking Gatorade while running is good, but it’s better still if you load up on those glycogens a little before running:

“Taking in glucose during exercise will help offset muscle glycogen depletion,” said Monique Ryan, the author of “Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes” and a registered dietitian. “Studies have shown if you start doing it earlier on, you can prolong exercise.” [link]

As for me personally, I like to load up on the carbs starting the day before a long race, eating healthy whole-wheat carbs in small doses throughout the day, rather than all at once at night. That’s worked pretty well for me, so far. That’s for the day before a race. What about during the race? In the marathon, I ate half a power bar (not the Powerbar brand, which I hate, but another one) some time between the 16th and the 17th mile. I found that this really perked me up.

But everything in moderation. The middle-path of the Buddha. So eat during the race to avoid bonking, but don’t eat too much, either. Otherwise you’ll end up like Dennis Meeker, a 35-year-old triathlete from Boulder, Colo. who:

polished off extra PowerBars on the bike because he thought the heat would prevent him from eating during the last leg. Thirteen miles into the foot race, with little water in his system, he had caught the man in second. Then, Mr. Meeker said, “I just couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. There was cement in my legs and gut.”

… Comparing past successful triathlons to this gut wrencher, he calculated that the difference came down to a common problem (too little water) and a surprising one (too many calories, which sat like a lump in his stomach). Next time, he plans to ease off the PowerBars. [link]

An excellent decision, I might add.

Other than that, be smart and don’t run like a maniac in the beginning of a race, especially a marathon or a half-marathon. It’s easy to get caught up in race-day excitement. In fact, I consciously run slower in the first mile of a long race, taking around a minute or two more than my fastest anticipated race pace. Then I start running at my normal pace. The best gauge of whether you’re running too fast is your mental and physical state in the last couple of miles. You should be able to smile and sprint. If you can do that, then you’re doing good.

On the other hand, if you find yourself cursing all the innocent bystanders and wishing you had never signed up for the damn race (and believe me, I’ve been there a few times myself), then there’s a good chance that you’re running low on sugar, ran too fast through the race, or just plain didn’t get enough rest beforehand.

So here’s to running without bonking. And here’s also to bonking without running. In the latter’s case, I do mean the Hugh Grant-Andie MacDowell variety!

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