caffeine and running

Ok. I stole the picture from the NY Times. So I'll link back to their story. Got me thinking a bit, often a dangerous situation.

I'll admit. A bit of boost helps get through the ridiculously long events. Sleep deprivation is a factor. I ran to get coffee for a bald headed truck driver during one notorious local event on early Sunday morning a couple years ago.

The biggest argument I hear is caffeine's jittery, diuretic effects. Here's an interesting take by someone who has done Leadville. A topic close to the bone. Maybe it's not as quick a trip to the plastic space shuttle as previously thought.

They seem to do these tests on cyclists, rather than runners. Easier to hook 'em up to spin bikes and measure resistance, I suppose. Consensus studies seem to be 5-10% performance gain, plus decrease in perceived effort for given level of exercise threshold. A nice article by an MD from a site that wants to sell you nutrition.

What's this mean? Let's do a little math. My running partners will tell me I am not so good at that (tend to round down on pace.) Lowest dose in article above from the MD - 3 mg/kg of body wt. For the metric challenged, divide your wt by 2.2. So a 165 lb runner weighs 165/2.2 = 75 kg. 75 kg x 3 mg/kg = 225 mg caffeine. What's got 225 mg caffeine?

8 oz Cup of coffee - about 100 mg
Mt. Dew - 55 mg
Green Tea - 30 mg
Jolt Cola - 280 mg (visions of college flashback...)
Red Bull - 80 mg
NoDoze pill - 100 mg

Ask wikipedia for more. A double mocha that I am fond of has about that 225 mg of caffeine. If it can get my sorry behind through another endless Govt conf call, I suppose it can get me over a mountain. Better living through chemistry.

The international athletics entities appear to have removed it from their list of banned substances.

I once read an interesting theory. Before civil engineers saved more lives with clean drinking water than doctors could pushing pills, wine and beer were about the only safe source of drinking. Mild alcohol kills bugs. So people in the middle ages (the 'dark ages') were more or less always mildly drunk. Enter the 1600's, the bringing of the coffee bean to Europe, the invention of the coffee house, the Enlightenment, technology explosion, steel weapons and gunpowder against bows and arrows, and here you sit in North America.

Last - the caffeine curve I have pinned to my bulletin board at work.

Yes, this was fueled by a mild does of a legal substance.

-Larry