5. HEALTH | | Protein quality and timing.
Scientist Don Layman, PhD, shares his 40-year career knowledge on optimal protein quantity, quality, and timing on Simon Hill's excellent The Proof podcast.
Don, in his 70s, says that resistance training and aerobic training are both important for long-term health.
In his view, metabolic health is a combination of factors, including good rates of protein synthesis, optimal levels of blood glucose and lipids, mitochondrial health (which determines your ability to oxidise blood lipids), the right level of branch chain amino acids.
The questions he asks when assessing someone's health are: are they metabolising lipids? Are the triglycerides in their blood at the right level?
This was a fascinating conversation, and if you are in awe of your body's ability to do what it does, your awe will go up two notches after listening to these insights. | | 6. TRAINING | | Strong feet, strong runner!
"We live in our shoes, and when we are not in our shoes, we are very often in flip-flops, sandals, or slippers. Thinking back though, when last did you walk barefoot, feeling the texture of the grass or the oozing of mud through your toes?" asks BASI Pilates instructor Sasha Ehlers.
She adds: "While shoes are a fantastic tool in our daily running kit, paying attention to exercising the lower limbs – and bare-naked feet – is an important part of a runner’s training repertoire. My physiotherapist challenged me to run barefoot, on grass, for 20 minutes. My feet were super stiff the next day!"
Get your feet strong with Sasha’s seven-step Pilates footwork series. | | 7. PLANET | | Films for Action showcases real-world solutions.
The past 10 years has seen an unprecedented surge in human activity. It's also seen a rising global awareness of just how much damage our collective eight billion humans can wreak over the rest of nature – unless we become conscious of that, and take drastic steps to change our behaviours.
"Our present moment is saturated in dystopian, apocalyptic fantasies of the future," says the team at Films for Action.
They add: "As the late Mark Fisher said, 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.' We can envision a thousand ways that humanity might destroy itself and the rest of the world, but positive visions of the future remain severely lacking in comparison. Why is that?
"The Dark Ages led to the Renaissance. Feudalism led to capitalism. No era remains stagnant forever. But there's an invisible meme in our culture today that says capitalism is the greatest economic idea humanity has ever invented and it will never be surpassed.
"What this points to, in our view, is a crisis of imagination. Humans at heart are storytellers, and we enact the stories we tell ourselves. As we've written before, our culture is enacting a story that's destroying the world. If humanity is going to unlock the good ending, we've got to imagine it first. We've got to imagine ten thousand localised versions of it. That's how things change."
See the 30 film lineup. | | 8. NEWS | | From Twenty-two into Twenty-three.
~ If you enjoy tales of adventure, listen to coach Fred Richardson's interview with 210km Drakensberg Grand Traverse Run (DGT) winners Matt Bouch and Colin van Den Berg (third pic, click to view).
~ In Cape Town, weekly social phenomenon Tuesday Trails (middle pic) was back for its opening night of 2023. Their wrap? "Never a bad night on the Lion but something was extra good this evening." They're heading to Newlands Forest this coming Tuesday.
~ Spectacular Durban venue Krantkloof Nature Reserve is back in business after last April's floods which washed away infrastructure. If you want to explore on your own, be aware that there are some tricky sections. Alternatively, for a slower introduction, Green Corridors is leading 8km return hikes on Sundays.
~ Kilian Jornet (main image) spent 900 hours training in 2022 – clocking 500,000 metres of elevation in skimo, running, cycling and climbing, and 5,500km of running distance. "But all this comes also at a cost," he said. "My 2022 carbon footprint was 7.7T* of CO2e. This is almost four times what it should be to be on line with the 1.5ºC agreement." (5T was from transport, mainly to and from races.) Kilian photo by Jordi Saragossa.
| | | | THAT'S IT... FOR NOW. HAPPY WEEKEND! | | | | | |
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