Happy October FARC members! I hope that you are enjoying the warm weather that we have been having and will continue next week (but not on Marine Corps Marathon day thankfully). Speaking of the Marine Corps Marathon, good luck to all who are running. May your training give you strong and speedy legs enroute to your PR and a very memorable experience. I would also be remiss in not congratulating those of you who participated in the Army 10-miler. Well done!!! This past month we had another Grand Prix Race, the 10K Thru History. It was a great event, and the weather was absolutely perfect! We are heading into the home stretch in the Grand Prix with three races remaining, so you still have time to get your seven races and earn your seasonal medals. Speaking of the Grand Prix, the 2025 schedule has been finalized. For your planning purposes, here are the dates: Dahlgren Half: February 15th Grand Slam 5K: March 15th Stafford Hospital 5K: April 5th Heppe 15K: April 26th SPCA 5K: June 8th Fallen Heroes: July 4th Devil’s Den 10-Miler: August 17th Downtown Mile: September 13th Braswell 5K: September 20th Run Thru History: October 12th Fred Nats 5K: November 9th Blue and Gray Half: December 7th Frosty 5K: December 13th As I mentioned last month, we are in the process of assembling your 2025 Board of Directors. This month, we have included the nominees for the open positions. There is still time to nominate someone or yourself before we vote. In this month’s newsletter, Vic begins a new series on his favorite races. I asked Vic to write about this as he has run races in all 50 states and will take us out of the area on some of his grandest adventures. This month, he starts with a fun marathon. The feature article is all about Protein for Athletes. As always FARC members, happy running and stay safe with the later sunrise! Will Triplett FARC SATURDAY GROUP RUN Saturday Fun Runs start at 8a.m. The group meets on the corner of William and Princess Anne St. Choose to run 6 or 3 miles. All abilities are welcome. We have fast runners, run/walkers, and everything in between. Arrive a bit early to get in on the pre-run photo and meet the group. SOCIAL RUN Our next monthly Social Run will be on November 13th. The run will start at Red Dragon Brewery located at 1419 Princess Anne Street in Fredericksburg at 6p.m. Light snacks will be provided. BOARD MEETING Our next board meeting will be on November 21st at 7p.m. The board meetings are held at the Courtyard by Marriott Downtown. All members are welcome to attend. Please RSVP to info@runfarc.com so we can ensure sufficient space is available. FARC MEMBERS OUT AND ABOUT Another full month of activities with the weekly and social runs having extraordinary turnout. In addition, we had the 10K Run Thru History in Spotsylvania and the Army 10-Miler. Well done to all participants! Photos courtesy of FARC.
RAPPAHANNOCK OSPREYS Your Rappahannock Ospreys were in action on October 5th at the Fork Union Middle School Invitational. It was a very good day for the team. First race of the morning on the very tough Fork Union course was the 6th grade and under 2500 meters. The following athletes placed for the Ospreys. 2nd Javin Smith 9:53 3rd Isaac Rudd 9:58 6th Maxwell Rowland 10:19 7th Kaleb Bedford 10:22 13th Henry Tweedale 11:36 On the girls side Alexis Rasnick was your overall girls champion! She ran a time of 10:36 which gave her a winning margin of 50 seconds! The middle school boys squad had a heck of a day as well. The boys placed 2nd overall, while beating some of the best Middle School programs in the state. The following are the Ospreys places. The middle school 7th and 8th grade race was a 5km. 2. Ethan Towery 19:34 5. Ryan Arnold 20:22 7. Ryzon Imholte 20:28 11. Samuel Thompson 21:28 52. Oliver Harris 27:16 55. Aden Avalos 27:53 In the girls race we had two placers, in 16th place was Harper Dittamo in 26:41 and in 25th place Teagan Nearman in 29:05. Overall a very good day for the team over a VERY difficult cross country course. Next race for the Ospreys is the VA XC Showcase down at Pole Green Park. It is one of the largest and best XC meets on the East Coast. Look for some fast times next weekend. CALLING ALL FARC MEMBERS – IT’S TIME TO VOTE!!! Mark your calendars to attend the FARC board meeting on Thursday, December 19th, at 7pm, so you can vote for the 6 board member positions coming up for election/re-election. The only way to vote is to attend the December board meeting, either in person or virtually.There’s still time to nominate yourself or another club member and nominations will also be accepted during the December board meeting. Email your nominations and RSVP for the December board meeting to secretary@runfarc.com. The current nominees are: President: Denise Freeman, Brian Pessolano Vice President: Angela Anderson, Vic Barthelemy (2) 2-Year Directors: Brian Morgan, Will Triplett (2) 1-Year Directors: Gerry Griffin, James Kemp FARC will offer FREE runner training in January, and we need volunteers to come out and run with training participants. There will be three sequential programs: 0-5K, 5K-10K, and 10K to Historic Half. The 5K and 10K training programs will meet on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings. The Historic Half training will only meet on Saturdays for paced long runs (9mm, 10:30mm, 12mm, and 13-14mm run/walk paces). Register here or use the QR code in the flyer.
Applications for the 2025 Victor I. Culp and John Robbins scholarships are now available. These scholarships will be given to a club member who is graduating from High School in 2025, attending college in the fall of 2025 and is a member of their Track or Cross-Country teams. While both scholarships ask for community service that will be considered more favorably for the John Robbins scholarship. Of note, applicants will only be able to win one of the scholarships. For an application email vic@farc.org. The FARC Holiday party is scheduled for 14 December at Highmark Brewery. Details to follow, but make sure you put this on your calendar. GRANDFATHER MOUNTAIN MARATHON Vic Culp I ran this marathon in July 2003. The last year the race had results on marathonguide.com was 2021. Perhaps the race did not survive COVID. Considered one of America’s toughest marathons, the race starts in Kidd Brewer Stadium at Appalachian State University at 3240 feet in Boone, North Carolina. The race was first held in 1969. Boone was named after Daniel Boone, who camped in the area, and his nephews stayed as the city was formed. After an initial lap on the university track, the course heads to Route 221. After mile 7, the Blue Ridge Parkway is used for a section until returning to Route 221. Route 221 crosses the eastern continental divide. While running past that sign, I swear I was running uphill. After mile 24, we passed the entrance road to Grandfather Mountain State Park. Fortunately, we continued on Route 221 as the mountain peaks out at 5946 feet and is the highest point on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains, reaching Mac Rae Meadows at 4400 feet, the race finishes with a lap around the dirt track. Over the marathon distance, there is 2400 feet of elevation gain. Since 1956, Mac Rae Meadows has been the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games site. The race finished on the Saturday of the games, So the entire infield of the track was lined with spectators as we finished, As the crow flies, the meadows are 13 miles southwest of Boone. The Highland Games are scheduled for July 10 to 13, 2025. So, if the race is resurrected, the race date would be July 12. Mountain weather in western North Carolina in July is great for running. In 2003, the temperature at race start was in the low 40s and stayed below 50 most of the morning. In the past month, Hurricane Helene wreaked destruction in the area due to high winds and feet of rain. Boone and Asheville were cut off from the outside for a time. Asheville is southwest of Boone on the western side of the divide. It sits at 2134 feet on the confluence of the Swannanona and French Broad Rivers. Though hilly, areas of Asheville were flooded when the French Broad overflowed its banks, ——- Vic Culp is a co-founder of the Fredericksburg Area Running Club in 1994. He has managed a few races and run a few more. You can follow his blog at slowoldrunner.com and subscribe to receive notification emails from that site. Check out his book “Go for 25” on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B094YFRJ7G.
AN EXPERT’S GUIDE TO PROTEIN FOR ATHLETES Leading researcher Daniel Moore weighs in on myths, truths, and misconceptions about how much protein athletes need. Published: Oct 15, 2024. Alex Hutchinson Photos: Education Images/Contributor/Getty Depending on which corners of the internet you’ve been hanging around in lately, how much protein you eat is either the single most important factor determining your health and athletic performance, or an overhyped and overconsumed indulgence that’s driving you to an early grave. The truth is obviously somewhere in the middle—but where, exactly? Last month, the University of Toronto’s Tanenbaum Institute for Science in Sport hosted a conference on high-performance sports science. Along with deep dives into esoteric topics like NBA motion-capture data, artificial intelligence in pro sports, and international rules about intersex and transgender athletes, attendees got a practical primer on the current state of knowledge about protein for athletes from University of Toronto professor Daniel Moore, one of the world’s leading experts on the topic. Moore’s talk addressed a series of commonly circulated protein myths, misconceptions, and truths. Some of the points were ones that I’ve written about recently—most notably, the question of whether very-high-protein diets damage your kidneys, and the idea that you can only digest a certain amount of protein at a time. Others addressed longstanding debates about the what, when, why, and how much of protein. Here are some of the highlights I took from the talk. Protein Isn’t Just About Muscle The fundamental goal of training is to trigger a cycle of recovery and adaptation in your body so that it gets stronger. That recovery process involves refueling, rehydrating, and repairing the cellular damage done by your workout so your body can build back better. We usually think about protein in the context of repair—and for good reason. On any given day, you’re breaking down 1 to 2 percent of the muscle in your body and rebuilding it. Hard training increases that number. Overall (as muscle physiologist Luc van Loon notes), that means you’re completely rebuilding your body every two to three months. The protein you eat provides the amino acids that serve as the building blocks for repairing existing muscle and adding new muscle. But protein can also play a role in refueling and rehydrating. Moore points to research showing that downing a recovery drink containing carbohydrate and protein rather than just carbohydrate after a hard workout helps your muscles restock their glycogen—the form in which your muscles store carbohydrate—more rapidly. Similarly, there’s research showing that protein can increase fluid retention when you’re dehydrated, which is one of the reasons that milk is sometimes tipped as a good recovery beverage. There’s even research suggesting that protein helps you acclimatize to heat training more effectively. It’s worth noting that the enhanced post-workout glycogen storage with protein seems to only matter if you’re taking in less-than-optimal amounts of carbohydrate. More generally, as long as you’re not trying to survive exclusively on sports drinks, you’re likely to get whatever protein you need for rehydration and heat acclimatization and so on from whatever food you eat. But these studies offer a useful reminder that protein isn’t just a set of inert building blocks for muscle: it plays numerous roles in your metabolism that are crucial for both health and athletic performance. Endurance Athletes Need Protein Too The cliché of the gym bro with his tub of protein powder is firmly entrenched. Endurance athletes are less interested in—and sometimes actively averse to—packing on muscle. But their protein needs might still be elevated. The repeated pounding of running generates muscle damage that requires extra amino acids to repair. And previous studies have found that endurance athletes can get 5 to 10 percent of the energy they need by burning excess protein rather than incorporating it into their muscles. Last year, Moore and his team published a study in which endurance athletes completed a series of runs ranging from 5K to 20K over several days, then consumed a batch of amino acids tagged with a special molecular label to track their progress through the body. The method enables scientists to determine how much protein is being incorporated into muscles, and how much excess protein is being burned as fuel. By repeating the running protocol while consuming different levels of protein intake, they can determine how much protein is needed to meet the body’s muscle repair needs before you start simply burning the excess for energy. On average, they found that the runners needed about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day to max out muscle-building and repair. The average value means that half the runners were meeting their needs and half weren’t; a safer threshold, where 95 percent of runners will max out their protein requirements, is 1.8 to 1.9 g/kg/day. In contrast, the RDA for protein is just 0.8 g/kg/day, and previous recommendations for endurance athletes were 1.2 to 1.4 g/kg/day. The takeaway, then, is that yes, endurance athletes need more protein than the average person. But there’s one further wrinkle. Endurance athletes also need more calories overall than the average person. When you’re training hard, there’s a good chance you’ll eat so much that you get all the protein you need without any extra effort. One study of Dutch endurance athletes found that they were getting 1.5 g/kg/day, which is at least in the ballpark of Moore’s numbers. So you don’t need to go crazy on the protein. Does More Protein Mean More Muscle? It’s worth comparing those numbers to the latest data on what it takes to optimize strength and muscle growth. The best current evidence is summed up in a 2018 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that pooled the results of 49 studies looking at protein supplementation and resistance training. The key result is that consuming more protein led to bigger gains in muscle mass—up to a point. The breakpoint in their analysis was 1.6 g/kg/day, beyond which taking more protein didn’t produce bigger muscles. The data is messy, so I wouldn’t take that number as the absolute final word on the topic, but it’s notable that it’s roughly the same as the estimated need for endurance athletes. Taken as a whole, the evidence at this point doesn’t support the idea that mega-doses of protein—3 g/kg/day, say—are useful. An interesting footnote: while the relationship between protein intake and muscle mass (up to 1.6 g/kg/day) was clear, the relationship between protein intake and strength was much weaker. There’s obviously a link between muscle mass and strength, but gains in strength also depend on neural adaptations and skill acquisition in the exercise that you’re testing. The positive spin on this is that it’s possible to get much stronger even if you’re not putting on a lot of new muscle. Whey Isn’t the Only Way The “leucine trigger” hypothesis is the idea that the synthesis of new muscle depends in part on the levels of one specific amino acid, leucine. Milk, and in particular whey protein from milk, happen to be particularly high in leucine and other essential amino acids. Here, from a 2018 study in the journal Amino Acids, are the leucine levels and total essential amino acid levels of various protein sources: (Photo: adapted from Amino Acids) You can see that whey is high in leucine and more generally in essential amino acids. But it’s not the only option: corn is surprisingly high in leucine, though its overall level of essential amino acids is lower, and there are lots of other reasonable options. A couple of studies published this year have put this idea to the test: one found that the synthesis of new muscle was the same after consuming corn or milk protein; another found that a blend of pea, brown rice, and canola protein matched the muscle-building performance of whey. This doesn’t mean that all protein sources are created equal. But it does suggest that, with a little effort and attention, you can get all the muscle-building power you need from many different protein sources. The Four Rules of Protein It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of leucine levels and recommended intakes and optimal timings. Moore finished his talk with four pieces of practical advice for athletes looking to get the most out of their training:
These seem like solid—and attainable—guidelines to me. If you weigh 150 pounds, 0.3 g/kg/day works out to about 20 grams of protein per meal. A tuna sandwich will get you there; two eggs (each of which likely contains 6 or 7 grams of protein) won’t quite do it unless you add some toast and milk. As I noted at the top, recent findings suggest that (contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy) you can make up for a low-protein or missed meal by getting extra protein at the next one. I don’t think we know enough to be too dogmatic one way or the other, but the big picture seems clear: at the end of the day, if you want to optimize health and maximize athletic performance, you need to ensure that you’ve taken in enough protein to fuel your training and recovery.
UPCOMING GRAND PRIX RACES FredNats Salute to Veterans – 3 November – Register Blue and Gray Half Marathon – 8 December – Register Frosty 5K and Reindeer Run – 14 December – Register Thank you to our amazing sponsors:
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