micke-midlife on August 25th, 2008

what a better start for a running blog to write about beer and it’s consumption in the first episode. but, think about it, this is damn important. or not? so, try to live without it for a month…

beer is good for you, isn't it?

beer is good for you, isn't it?

i did the 16k today always knowing that later in the evening there will be gratification, a nice cold oat soda, cerveza, barley pop, boredom-be-gone, loudmouth soup, real man’s zima, homer Juice, beeeeeer! whatever you want to call it.  but then a thought struck me, like a first cloud on a sunny afternoon and you know there might be more beyond the horizong coming your way, “what about those calories?” yes, what about those? the brewery don’t mention them on the label, hm, they might know why… but on the other hand who would care about them in the moment of purchase?

looking at calorie tables we can guess that a 0.33l or just below 12floz bottle of beer has somewhere between 100 and 150 calories. with buring about 900 calories today in 70 minutes this translates into almost 8 minutes of a basic run. i can definitely handle that.

when googling sports and beer (in english), you mostly find links to non-alcoholic stuff or then to the term sports beer itself. when googling it in german, you get at least a popular-scientific reasoning why beer is a good sports drink. googling it in finnish… better don’t do it. tons of scientific research abstracts, helsinki university and such, that tell you how bad beer and alcohol in general is for the athlete. this seems to tell more about consumption habits than the actual effects of one bottle of beer a the end of the long and hard training day.

in the end the 6-pack might last a bit longer, or once in a while it’ll be a shandy (radler, alsterwasser) which is a mix of 50%  beer and 50% sprite or 7-up, that’ll be diet sprite of course! but i think i won’t give up on beer completely.

training otherwise was good today, a basic run of 12 or more km, my standard loop (click on the picture to the right) is slightly more. weather conditions nearly perfect, 17-18 degrees celsius, cloudy, but no rain. now after the helsinki city marathon there are only few runners out there, ja, ja, only the tough ones continue into the fall and our micke-midlife definitely wants to be counted to those. had to hold me back several times not to over do it today, not to go too fast. the tough session is tomorrow.

fortsetzung folgt…