FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL Read Online Free PDF Page B

by 112 miles on a bicycle, immediately followed by running a full 26.2 mile marathon.
    Any one of these feats by themselves is heroic. Put them together and it’s almost inconceivable to the average person. So, by anyone's definition, these contestants would have to be among the most fit human beings on the planet. And aerobically they might be.
    But they don’t always look it.
    How do I know? Because I always stay to the end of these competitions. That’s where the real human drama is. Sure, we all admire the pros who do it in record time, but what about the regular folks, the people who have trained as many hours as the pros and are in it to prove to themselves that they can do something that seems impossible? At the end of the competition, between the fifteenth and seventeenth hour, you see the true triumph of the human spirit. People who are literally willing their bodies across the finish line just to prove they can.
    I love these people. Watching them is like being in a quadruple feature of Rudy , Rocky , Something For Joey and Brian’s Song . So I know what I’m talking about when I say that these folks, the back-of-the-packers, the ones with something to prove, these folks are often carrying extra weight on them. And not just a little.
    How is that possible?
    Can you imagine the amount of calories they expend training for this? Hundreds of thousands. By the pure calorie in, calorie out theory, they should all be rail thin, but they’re not. So why the disparity?
    Because what pros do and what they say they do are two different things.
    Understand this—pros, in order to survive financially, have to have sponsorships. Gatorade, Power Bar, Gu. There’s no shortage of companies willing to pay them money to publicly endorse and use their products. And the pros do use their products … when the cameras are on them or the fans are around. But Gatorade and all the other sport drink companies make fundamentally the same thing: sugar water. The only thing that differentiates it from soda is carbonation.
    The pros know this.
    And they also know that, in order to secure these sponsorships, they need to win races and stay lean. But if they spend their days drinking sugar water, it’s going to be tough to keep the weight off. So they take a few sips for the benefit of the public but, in private, they know enough to quench their thirst with water, hydration we still haven’t improved on. By the way, that reminds me of a Vinnie-ism.
    You want to know where you can find the fountain of youth? Look in a fountain .
    The same thing holds true for Power Bars and all the other sport-type bars. They’re full of sugar, not to mention, in many cases, partially hydrogenated oils, which make them about as nutritious as a candy bar. Again, in public, you’ll see the pros nibble but, in private, they’ll try to get their carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables.
    Same holds true for all the goops and sports gels that promise to give you “sustained energy.” Again, they’re all sugar. The pros eat them for the cameras and during long endurance events, but during training, they eat proper diets. High protein, high fat along with some carbs.
    In fact, if you ate the way the pros pretend to eat to satisfy their sponsors, you could eat healthier at an eight-year-old’s birthday party. If you think I’m kidding, recently the Jelly Belly company started marketing “sports beans” which are just jelly beans with a few vitamins thrown in. The pros won’t touch them. Why?
    Because pros know nothing will shut you down quicker than sugar.
    But let’s get back to our amateur triathletes. They don’t necessarily know all this. They drink the Gatorade, they eat the power bars and they buy into the concept of “carb-loading” where you eat nothing but pasta, bread and rice for days on end to give you “energy.” They’ve trained like champions and have brought themselves physically and mentally to a place where they can complete a