First of all, just because Doug has years of experience as a competitive athlete and tons of knowledge about training & nutrition doesn't necessarily mean that he's the ONLY one in the club with valuable and practical knowledge to share to the masses. At some point, we may even even exhaust his seemingly endless plethora of wisdom on these topics, who knows? In any case, we would be happy to share your unique training or nutrition successes, so please feel free to email Linda with your "guru" article.
Here's Doug's guru wisdom for November:
Okay, let's lay it on the table right up front: Because you live in Portland (and environs), you are Not. Getting. Enough.
Same thing for anyone who lives above 37 degrees latitude, which is everything north of San Francisco. Not. Getting. Enough.
We're talking vitamin D, heretofore an off-the-radar supplement, the forgotten *** stepsibling of its more glamorous screw-top supplements B and C.
And it is practically impossible to get enough of this essential stuff without popping a D-cap every day.
Because the only 2 reliable sources of vitamin D are the sun, of which we see damn little up here for like 9 months a year, and supplements. Sunlight exposure is the only reliable way for your body to generate vitamin D which is produced by your skin in response to exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In fact, this is such an efficient system that most of us make approx. 20,000 units of vitamin D after only 20 minutes of summer sun. That's 20 minutes WITHOUT sunscreen. That's 100 times more than the RDA! There must be a good evolutionary reason why we make so much in so little time.
So sun does the job. But you need those 20 minutes of unblocked rays EVERY DAY. In Portland???? Ha! Hell, even in July and August we often ride under overcast.
Moreover, you do not generate vitamin D when sitting behind a glass window, whether in your car or at home because UV rays cannot penetrate glass to generate vitamin D in your skin Also sunscreens, even wimpy spf 50s like Traci uses, almost completely block your body's ability to generate vitamin D.
What about getting it through the grub I eat every day? you ask.
Sorry. Not gonna happen.
See, only about 10% of your vitamin D comes from food, so it is well nigh impossible to use chowtime to score adequate amounts of vitamin D.
That, and the sources of vitamin D are depressingly meager: Fish liver oils, such as cod liver oil. Fatty wild fish like mackerel, salmon, halibut, tuna, sardines and herring. Fortified milk, orange juice and cereal. Maybe egg yolks. But that's it.
Worse, to get your necessary daily fix, you would have to eat at least 5 servings of salmon a day. Every day. Or drink 20 cups of fortified milk a day. Every day.
Why do I say "NECESSARY daily fix"? Because it is. Vital, even. For a number of reasons. All of them directly tied in to athletic performance and/or overall health and longevity.
YeahYeahYeah,you're thinking. Heard all this doomsday stuff before. So, then, let's focus on the one thing here that you really care about: ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE. Stated simply, can getting your Daily D help you move up from, say, the 17s to the 19s? Or allow you to rip up a 150-yard roller faster and in a bigger gear?
Well . . . maybe. Let's see what we have here.
1. Researchers recently found that many of a group of distance runners also had poor Vitamin D status. Forty percent of the runners, who trained outdoors in sunny Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had insufficient Vitamin D. “It was something of a surprise,” says D. Enette Larson-Meyer, an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Wyoming and one of the authors of the study. If these topless skinnies, who are often out for 2 hour runs and IN THE SUN even if it's early morning or late afternoon, can't get enough, what's that say about you covered head to toe like a freaking astronaut for a 40-mile ride in the Eternal Gray that is our lot up here?
2. Poor, unloved Vitamin D is a too often overlooked element in athletic achievement, a “sleeper nutrient,” says John Anderson, a professor emeritus of nutrition at the University of North Carolina and one of the authors of a review article published online in May about Vitamin D and athletic performance. Vitamin D once was thought to be primarily involved in bone development. But a growing body of research suggests that it’s vital in multiple different bodily functions, including allowing body cells to utilize calcium (which is essential for cell metabolism), muscle fibers to develop and grow normally, and the immune system to function properly. “Almost every cell in the body has receptors” for Vitamin D, Anderson says. “It can up-regulate and down-regulate hundreds, maybe even thousands of genes,” Larson-Meyer says. “We’re only at the start of understanding how important it is.”
3. More recently, when researchers tested the vertical jumping ability of a small group of adolescent athletes, Larson-Meyer says, “they found that those who had the lowest levels of Vitamin D tended not to jump as high,” intimating that too little of the nutrient may impair muscle power. Low levels might also contribute to sports injuries, in part because Vitamin D is so important for bone and muscle health. In a Creighton University study of female naval recruits, stress fractures were reduced significantly after the women started taking supplements of Vitamin D and calcium.
4. A number of recent studies also have shown that, among athletes who train outside year-round, maximal oxygen intake (the famous "VO2 Max" that all of us are constantly trying to elevate as it is THE key to endurance athletic performance) tends to be highest in late summer. The athletes, in other words, are fittest in August, when ultraviolet radiation from the sun is near its zenith. They often then experience an abrupt drop in maximal oxygen intake beginning as early as September, even thought they continue to train just as hard. This decline coincides with the autumnal lengthening of the angle of sunlight. Less ultraviolet radiation reaches the earth and, apparently, sports performance suffers.
5. Finally, there is this. Say what you will about the former East German and Soviet bloc athletic programs and, yes, they often bordered on the monstrous. But those Ruskies were always about 3 years ahead of everyone else when in came to research on athletic performance. So it comes as no surprise that a series of strange but evocative studies undertaken decades ago in Russia and Germany hint that the Eastern Bloc nations may have depended in part on sunlamps and Vitamin D to produce their preternaturally well-muscled and world-beating athletes. In one of the studies, four Russian sprinters were doused with artificial, ultraviolet light. Another group wasn’t. Both trained identically for the 100-meter dash. The control group lowered their sprint times by 1.7 percent. The radiated runners, in comparison, improved by an impressive 7.4 percent.
That's, like, 400% better for the sunlamp sprinters. And a helluva tan to boot.
Okay, there are your Do D Daily performance booster arguments. Now here are some facts you need to know.
1. What is vitamin D?
Although it's called a vitamin, vitamin D is really a hormone not a vitamin (sounds sorta like the set-up for that classic dirty joke, wot?). Vitamins cannot be produced by your body, we get them from dietary sources, whereas hormones like vitamin D are made in your body. It's your body's only source of calcitrol (activated vitamin D), the most potent steroid hormone in the body.
2. What does vitamin D do?
Like all steroid hormones, vitamin D is involved in making hundreds of enzymes and proteins, which are crucial for preserving health and preventing disease. It has the ability to interact and affect more than 2,000 genes in the body. It enhances muscle strength and builds bone. It has anti-inflammatory effects and bolsters the immune system. It helps the action of insulin and has anti-cancer activity. This is why vitamin D deficiency has been linked with so many of the diseases of modern society. Because of its vast array of benefits, maintaining optimal levels of D is essential for your health.
3. How much vitamin D should I supplement with?
Most important, says Dr. Frank Lippman, Director of the Eleven Eleven Wellness Institute in New York, is that you take vitamin D3, (cholecalciferol) the active form of vitamin D. Do not take vitamin D2 as it is not as biologically active nor as effective, and nor as safe as vitamin D3. And taking the right amount is crucial, most doctors tend to under dose. The current recommendations from the Food and Nutrition Board of the U.S. Institute of Medicine: from 200 to 600 IU/day depending on one's age, are way too low, Dr. L says, and just about everything else I've read on this over the past year says the same thing. The daily caps I take are 2,000 IU. Linda says I've been a lot "perkier" since I started downing my D.
4. What about vitamin D toxicity?
It is impossible, Dr. Lippman says, to generate too much vitamin D in your body from sunlight exposure: your body will self-regulate and only generate what it needs. Although very rare, it is possible to overdose and become toxic with supplementation as vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin and therefore stored in the body for longer periods of time. Therefore, he advises, if you are taking 5,000 IU or more daily, you should have your blood levels monitored approximately every 3 months.
The good thing is that this stuff is really cheap. You can get a couple of months worth at CostCo or Target or, like me, from www.vitacost.com for under 10 bucks.
Postscript on FRS. If you recall from last month's column, I was nearing the end of my stash of FRS/quercetin, the "miracle endurance supplement" and had experienced nothing new and improved in my on-bike performance. I tried bigger doses until my supplies ran out, a period of 9 or 10 days. Same Old Same Old. Perhaps a decent enough antioxidant, but hardly the high-octane rocket fuel that some claim.