Chemistry and Endurance: What does the body really require to run for hours, or even days?
I am not a chemist, nor have I taken a chemistry class since college, which wasn’t even in the past decade (nor the one before…nor, uh, you get the point), so when I was recently asked to speak at the University of Regensburg to a group of gifted high school (gymnasium) students interested in studying chemistry, my first reaction was, What does ultra running have to do with chemistry???? Answer: Just about everything. After I thought about it I soon realized that not only do endurance sports and biological chemistry go hand-in-hand, but without a basic understanding of our own body’s chemistry, we runners wouldn’t get very far on our feet! Looking back on my preparations for multi-day stage races, I realized that I’d spent hours determining just what my body needed to function under extreme circumstances because I knew that if my training had been adequate and my mental strength was in good form, then nutrition would be the key to optimizing my performance and rea...