Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Ebook "Finish Strong"

A couple weeks ago I got the ebook Finish Strong by Jason Fitzgerald.  I got on his email list through the blog fANNEtastic Food. He and the blog author work together on some posts about running and eating that I think are pretty good, so I thought I'd like to try this book, which was on fueling for running: training and racing.  Well, the ebook turned out to be WAY overpriced for what it was: 60 pages of text with so much white space that it could've been on 20 pages.  And a lot of the space was taken up with tables that had things like the timing of three evenly-spaced fuelings for a 2-hr half-marathon.  Really?  I need a table to tell me to do this every 30 min?  Are we really so bad at math?

The other thing I was disappointed about with the ebook is that the quotes by past clients of Jason Fitzgerald's that were used to promote the ebook suggested that it would have some guidance for eating overall and specifically eating to train and lose a bit of weight.  Well, there was some very short and general guidance on eating overall, which basically could be summed up as "eat your carbs", but nothing on weight loss.  I should know better than to believe quotes, but it was annoying.

There were some good parts to the book, such as specific calorie values for eating before a morning run, and exact suggestions on how much to fuel for various race distances.  But overall it was not worth the money.  And it's a big loss for Jason Fitzgerald, because I won't be buying anything from him again unless I have much better reviews and sources that let me know it's worth it.

One thing the book did emphasize was the caffeine has definitely been shown to enhance performance in running.  The book suggested drinking coffee.  I don't care for coffee, so I decided to get some caffeine pills.  I got 100-mg pills, because for my weight the suggested supplementation was about 120 mg.  I usually would be taking them with a soda before a run, so that will add some caffeine.  We'll see if it helps.

Yesterday after work I did the next run on my training schedule, which was a 50-min easy run.  I did this on the treadmill at 5.1 mph, and the distance totaled 4.25 mi.  This run really was pretty easy, even though it lasted awhile, so I suppose that's good.  I'm not sure if it is because my aerobic capacity is improving, or because of my caffeine supplement.

This morning I did P90X3 MMX, preceded by Cold Start.  This definitely got a good sweat going.  I burned about 160 calories.  Afterward, I did my shortened version of P90X3 Dynamix.  I finally remembered to time it today, and it took about 13 minutes.  I don't really have the time or patience to do the whole thing when I'm doing it as an extra routine, but that much time is reasonable.


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