Team Nova–training for a marathon!
Okay, let’s take a moment for the laughter to subside here.
No, I’m not training for a marathon, but Nova did a special with 13 novice runners (so people like me, only different in some important way that I can’t quite put my finger on:) who trained for 9 months for the Boston Marathon. They did short runs on their own during the week & met every weekend to do longer runs (2 miles, 3, 5, 10, 20). Only one person couldn’t complete the training because of bad stress fractures in her shins, but the remaining 12 finished the marathon!
The depressing news: apparently running isn’t really that fat-burning, so diet and additional exercise is needed to lose weight while training. I guess I knew this from my own experience these past few weeks. The one woman on the show who needed to lose 70 pds did so by training for the run & dieting & doing a weekly boot camp. But she did lose 45 pds in 9 months, & she ended up being the fastest of the women runners on the team.
The good news: apparently humans were born to run long distances…as the depressing news above indicates, we can do it without expending too much energy, we’re hairless, we have sweat glands everywhere to keep our bodies cool, and we can out distance any number of other great runners (like dogs and deer).
I’m posting a link to their website cause it was a really interesting story about how the body burns energy. For the marathon trainees, their bodies became more efficient (stronger and better at translating fat & carbs into energy) around week 9…I smiled & thought, “hey, I’m not training for a marathon, but I have been training for a 5K for 6 weeks, so 3 weeks to go & look out world!”
Anyway, here’s the link.
One of my skinny active girlfriends who is a runner save this Nova special and called me. She said, “Now that you’re running too, we should totally train for a marathon.” After I stopped laughing, I hung up on her : )