Running Times, Online

I hate buying granola bars from the grocery store. My list of complaints is long and gets very whiney sounding by the end but they are too expensive, too few to a box, too small and too sweet, to name a few. Years ago I saw a recipe for homemade granola bars which caused a minor revelation in my little world. Woah. I could make my own…

I proceeded to do just that and ended up with batch after batch of granola (minus the whole Bar part). The concoctions were certainly tasty (who can complain about a combination of honey, peanut butter, sesame seeds and raisins?) but at their best, they only retained a semblance of bar-like shape when handled like that bright blue half of a robin’s egg you find laying in your yard in the spring - Very Carefully. If touched when the wind was blowing the wrong direction it disintegrated in your palm.

This year I set out to finally come up with a granola bar that WORKS. Armed with 5 pounds of honey, 50 pounds of oats and an armful of recipes that I cut and pasted together such that the end product in no way resembles its parts, this is what I ended up with:

Granola Bars That Work
makes 1 9×13″ pan, or about 18 bars

Ingredients:
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup grated coconut
1/4 cup wheat germ or oat bran or rice bran or okara
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup honey or barley malt (for slightly less sweet bars)
1/2 cup natural peanut butter
1 cup extras (raisins, flax seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, nuts, puffed rice, etc.)

Preheat oven to 325.

Combine oats, coconut, wheat germ and any nuts or seeds you wish to toast for the bars in a 9×13″ pan. Toast for 25 minutes. Remove pan and turn oven up to 350.

While the oats toast, combine butter, sugar & honey in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the butter is melted and sugar dissolved. Add the peanut butter at this time and stir in thoroughly.

Dump the toasted oat mixture into a large mixing bowl. Add any additional extras. Drizzle the syrup over oats and stir until they are all evenly coated. Return everything to the 9×13″ cake pan and press mixture in to form an even, solid mass.

Bake at 350 for 12 minutes (4-6 minutes longer if you like crisper bars). Remove pan to cooling rack and let cool completely before cutting. Bars will keep for well over a week in a plastic storage container, or freeze for later use.

Please direct comments and questions to: Katie

by Steve Magness

It’s that time of year where the world stops for several hours on a Sunday night while we huddle up with our friends to watch a football game. The similarities between football and the sport of distance running seem almost non existent, but is it possible that we can learn something from such a different sport?

The game plan that an NFL coach implements is extremely complex. Whatever the situation calls for, the coach has a plan on how to reach that goal. If it is 3rd and 5 yards, he has a list of plays that potentially will get him that 5 yards if executed correctly. On the contrary, most runner’s “game plan’s” are extremely simplistic. Most runners employ some sort of zone training scheme where they do workouts that are classified in 4 or 5 different zones based on intensity. For example one zone scheme would be to have an endurance training zone, a lactate threshold zone, a VO2max zone, and an anaerobic or speed zone.

Using our analogy to the NFL, training using this classification is akin to the type of game plan I had when I played neighborhood football as a kid. We may have had a few designed plays, but basically separated things into a run or a pass. In essence our zone training is like having a couple plays to choose for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th down regardless of the distance or situation. Show that plan to an NFL coach, or even a pee-wee football coach, and you would be laughed out of the room, but that is what we runners are essentially doing. In this article, we will look at the problems with using a zone based training, and later on discuss a better way to classify workouts and train.

One problem with quantifying workouts based on intensity zones is that they are not specific enough. The zones entail a relatively large range of speed and do not take into account that there are different effects based on if you run at the low end or the high end of the zone. Using lactate testing, it can be seen that in some zone schemes, the difference between running in the low and high end of the zone can create a difference in lactate by as high as 8 mmol. This can represent the difference between doing a primarily aerobic workout to doing one that is anaerobic in nature and actually decreases the aerobic capabilities. For example, running slightly below lactate threshold will improve aerobic capacity in Slow Twitch (ST) and some Fast Twitch-A (FT-A) fibers while running slightly above will improve aerobic capacity more in FT-A fibers and some ST fibers may be “overwhelmed”, decreasing their aerobic capacity. In addition the anaerobic capacity can decline significantly more when running just above LT, as opposed to just below. Yet, in zone training, these are all classified as the same workout. This creates a problem because you may think that you are running the same type of workout each week, while in reality the effects are vastly different.

Another problem with zone training is that a range of intensities can improve one particular variable. An example of this would be that to improve Lactate Threshold (LT), a zone training expert would tell you to run workouts in the lactate threshold intensity zone. However other intensities improve the LT too. For instance, depending on the individual, the following will improve LT:

1. Pure mileage
2. A long run with a pickup to marathon pace or sub LT at the end.
3. Marathon Paced running.
4. Sub LT runs
5. Sub LT runs on an incline
6. Runs slightly above LT
7. Long intervals at 10k pace with the “rest” at sub LT pace.
8. Long single effort at 10k pace (ex: 5k at slightly faster than 10k pace)
9. Short intervals with short rests at 3200-5k pace

As you can see the intensity ranges from jogging to faster than 5k pace. In fact even faster work, if the interval length is short enough and rest modulated correctly, can also boost the LT. The key is that each of these workouts will improve the LT for a different reason. If we believed that only running in one zone will improve a variable, then we would miss out on many different stimuli, or workouts, that would take that variable and our performance to the next level.

Seeing these problems with the traditional zone training scheme, the question arises of how should we look at and classify training? Instead of using zone training, each individual workout needs to be looked at to see what effects it will have. If we know the effects each workout has on specific variables then this allows us to plan training much better and eliminates the guess work to some degree. For example, we know the effects of doing a 30 minute threshold run are an increase in aerobic capacity in the muscle fibers that are stimulated, and a decrease in anaerobic capacity. From this information, we can plan accordingly to maintain the anaerobic capacity (if that is a beneficial goal) with a short sprint workout in the days surrounding this threshold run. Classifying workouts based on their effects allows us better to plan the training around each workout and to see how all of the workouts interact in the big picture.

In the next article, we will learn how to look at each individual workout to see what effects it has and how to balance those effects to reach optimal fitness. While it may sound complex to look at every workout, you can easily classify workouts based on if they improve any of several variables which we will cover in the future based on the aerobic and anaerobic characteristics.

Perhaps there is something to take away from football coaches like Tony Dungy. We need to spend more time on our game plan on how to improve race performance. Knowing whether to pass or run is not enough, if we are in a 3rd and 7 yards situation we need to have a plan of what to do. To do this, we need to change from a zone training classification, to one that looks at the effects the workout has on the runner. It may take a little bit more work at first, but it is nothing compared to spending 18 hour days in our office coming up with the game plan against the Bears, like Mr. Dungy does.

One Runner’s View is the RunningTimes.com blog. You will find here anything from opinion articles and recipes to athlete blog entries and interviews. Please take advantage of the comment option to let us know what you think about the topics presented.

Have an idea?

We are always looking for interesting articles on people, places, training methods, history, new literature reviews for One Runner’s View. If you have an idea you’d like to share, contact the administration.