A lovely morning for a run

[Yesletsgo]

Yesterday Mr Yes was still feeling the effects of his fast Parkrun so we had a day off. Today we were both bright eyed and bushy tailed. There's a R4 podcast, Just One Thing with Michael Mosley, that suggests small changes you can make which will improve your health without too much effort. It suggested that eating a lot of beetroot will help your running performance. Guess what we've been eating a lot of!

We decided to do a gentle 5k recovery run so set off very slowly, gradually speeding up a little as we crossed the fields where the oilseed rape is blooming sunshine yellow to get to the concrete farm road. If we're doing 5k we turn right here and head to the sea wall. It was a gorgeous sunny morning, the chilly easterly wind now a welcome cooling breeze, so I suggested we turn left, a longer route. Mr Yes was lost in his thoughts and agreed, then as we finally turned towards the water he realised this was a longer run than we'd agreed to. I pointed out that we were both enjoying it so let's just carry on.

Eventually we covered 7km, further than we've gone for quite a while. As we neared the end he told me that he felt less tired and stressed than he had after 2km on the Parkrun. The benefits of slow running, we both felt slightly tired (in a good way) when we got home but otherwise fantastic. I could have run further, I'll do that 10km soon... Maybe the beetroot are working their magic

Thanks to the sunshine the lawn was dry so I laid down among the daisies and dandelions to do my cool down stretches (do you have any idea how much work is involved in strimming round the wildflowers rather than just mowing?). A great start to the day!

[nowster Graduate10]

Lots of beetroot? I assume it's because it's packed with sugars and starches.

Downside: possible purple pee.

[Yesletsgo Administrator Graduate10 in reply to nowster]

Apparently they contain a lot of nitrates, which when you chew them turn to nitrites, which build up muscle. I was a bit confused by this as I thought nitrites were very bad for you (sodium nitrite is used as a preservative in bacon etc). By contrast it seems plant nitrates seem to be good for you. I found a short and interesting article healthline.com/nutrition/ar... point that is made in the article is 'A few studies have shown that beetroot can reduce the oxygen cost of exercise by 5.4%, increase time to exhaustion when running by 15%, and improve sprinting performance by 4%' so maybe that's why we breezed through today's run.

[nowster Graduate10 in reply to Yesletsgo]

Nitrates are not the same as nitrites, as any person who keeps fish in an aquarium will tell you.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrite (NO₂¯ )

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrate (NO₃¯ )

[Yesletsgo Administrator Graduate10 in reply to nowster]

Yes, I know the difference I got rid of my aquarium as the nitrate content of the tap water round here killed off any fish I bought within a few weeks though the nitrite content was OK. I cleaned out the tank and now have cacti in it, which are much harder to kill.

[MrBassmanjazz in reply to Yesletsgo]

😀

[Beatlesforever Graduate10]

Well done! A very good run for you both 😃👏👏👏 I'd never heard about beetroot and running, very interesting. I do love beetroot so I'll make sure I start eating it more often 😋