“Yes, We Have No Bananas” (or potatoes, or rice, or pasta)…

How many of you recognize the title to this song?  I confess my own exposure is limited to the charming Hepburn/Bogart duet on the boat in Sabrina. 

As promised, I’m going to describe the carb depletion/load regimen, as I understand it.  It’s torture, and evidence shows that loading without depletion is almost as effective as the classic depletion routine, but having done both, I can report anecdotally that it seems to provide an edge, especially in the last famously challenging six miles.

A week before the marathon, you run a “depletion run” at about 30-45 seconds slower than marathon pace.  The purpose of this run is, counter-intuitively, to deplete your body of glycogen.  For the next three days, you eat as few carbs as humanly possible, starving your runner’s-diet-accustomed-glycogen-saturated cells of what they crave and need most.  That means you eat almost exclusively:  eggs, cheese, meat, nuts, beans, etc.  It sounds all right until about half a day into it, when you instinctively grab the pita and hummus, but force yourself to set them down, and reluctantly dish out a bowl of cottage cheese.  By dinnertime, just about the time you’d normally be getting the water going for brown rice or pasta, you’ve overdosed on protein and your pork chop looks positively insurmountable.

Multiply this by three days, add a couple of concrete-leg runs, and you understand this is not for the faint of heart, or palate.  

Tomorrow, I reverse the process, feeding the glycogen-deprived cells that are presumably almost on strike at this point:  run a few fast miles on the track, guzzle six scoops of Cytomax, and begin a grueling regimen of downing 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour, for eight hours. Rice, fruit, bagels, energy bars, sweet potatoes, couscous.  Counting the Cytomax, that’s almost 4000 calories in eight hours.  I’ve never made it past five or six hours, and by that time, I never want to eat again in my entire life.

Is it worth it?  Ask me at mile 25, and if I’m grinning with thumbs up, you’ll know.