Cygon’s Blog

I was in the mood for some experiments these days:

Experiment 1: Running Drunk

Last weak, I drank 1 liter of beer (I get rather easily drunk, that’s a moderate dose for me), waited 30 minutes for the stuff to enter my blood vessels and went off to my favorite jogging route. I think I read somewhere that about 50 years ago, alcoholic drinks were served to long-distance runners because it was believed that they restore the bodies’ electrolytes quicker than water or so.

For the initial 30 minutes of running, I had a legendary low. Legs felt fresh, but power just wouldn’t come, whenever I increased my pace, I felt wasted after just a few minutes. I kept going at it and after about half an hour, I started to put up a really good performance that saved the day. I’m not sure whether I just had a bad day or whether the alcohol caused it. And if the alohol caused the low, was the high because the alcohol had been catabolized away or was it the alcohol that gave me a delayed boost?

Experiment 2: Starving

Well, time for another experiment. Today it’s been 45 hours (or in other words, nearly two days) since I had my last meal. Thus my stomach is completely void of anything solid. As I’m writing this, I just came back from another running session on the same route. Digesting food requires energy as well, so running with an empty stomach should theoretically give more power initially (the body of a good runner can distribute nearly 95% of its power resources to the arms and legs anyway - the digestive system just stops in its tracks - on the negative side you may start to puke, however). With no food, you will run out glycogen quicker and the body has to use energy from stored fat, which makes it harder to keep running.

I had a really good start. A feeling as if my legs were much lighter than they used to. The first uphill part quickly drained my reserves and left me barely running with stitches on the left side of my lower belly. At about 40 minutes, at the beginning of the next uphill section I was practically dead, but while forcing my self to keep going, I got better and better. Crossing the peak at just 62 minutes, I even did a little sprint to get up a short steep road. My vision faded slightly for a moment, but I attribute that to the fact that it was my first try at a post-60-minute-running sprint this year

Conclusion

So, if you ever wondered what happens if need to run but you’re drunk or have nothing to eat — from my observation it merely might place some ups and downs in your performance. I’ll keep away from good until friday (meaning about 120 hours or five days without food) and repeat the exercise.

Of course I’m not a physician and whatever you do is your own choice, so if you run drop-dead drunk and get run over by a car, don’t put the finger on me