Good evening fellow coaches and athletes.
After recently attending a college coaches seminar in Jacksonville, I returned home to San Antonio mildly baffled and upset. Heres why.
One of the presenters at the coaches clinic spoke specifically on diet. He spoke about how the professional dieticians and physiologists have once again ALTERED the recommended duration in which runners should be carbohydrate loading before races. It is now, apparently, 72 hours before race time. It is absolutely indespicable that the biochemists and food scientists are now recommending another alteration.
Back in my day (I grew up in the 80s), the recommended carbohydrate loading duration was no more than 24 hours before race time. Then, a few years after the turn of the millennium eclipsed upon us, the apparent knowledgeable knuckleheads change it to 48 hours. If you remember correctly, this shocked the professional running and coaching community; as it went against what all of us old school cats were taught in the 20th century. Yet here we are again with another change.
Carbohydrate loading 3 days prior to a race seem extremely excessive and far fetched to me personally. This is why I do not and will not instruct this pseudoscience to my athletes and allow them to mentally ingest it as some sort of proven statistical verbatum. Instead, alternatively, my pedagogy will only include what I was taught in all of my years of coaching education classes, and that's 24 hours before race day. No more. No less.
Fellow coaches, you love your kids as much as I do (well, maybe not). However, I am sure you understand the bigger issue within the panarama here. The larger dilemma and predicament within this instructional panarama is the fact that we are CONFUSING our runners, day in and day out, with the constant evolution of advice from the scientific headmasters. This must come to an opposing halt. I mean, you existentially MUST concur with me as a coach that the very LAST thing we want to do is confuse the runners that we coach. When I am coaching, I pretty much live by the hippocratic oath, which states- above all, do no harm. I would rather give them no information than bad information. I would rather give them antiquated information as opposed to confusing them with liberalized dietary ideas. Before you know it, they will be telling us to eat a bowl of pasta a month prior to race day.
As the old saying goes, you cant teach an old dog new tricks. I am an old dog, and I utilize elderly senior citizen canine coaching methods. I have the right to do that. It's my team. These are my kids. Even after they graduate, they will always......always.......be my kids.
So hear ye, hear ye. I asketh you so dearly, what is your personal stance on this new fandangled 72 hour carbohydrate recommendation? You sure as heck already know my position.
-the430miler
Owner, teXXXas tanning salons LLC
Coach and adjunct professor
A university in san antonio