Unless you're in danger of
overdosing on exercise, don't eat like it.
To
most people, “bonking” implies an R-rated activity. To marathon runners,
cyclists, and other endurance athletes, it’s something else entirely.
In
sports jargon, someone who “bonks” suffers severe
fatigue after running out of their stored energy. People who experience the
condition, also known as “hitting the wall,” describe it
as having “your legs turned to cement.” Some folks hallucinate too.
Once
you bonk — as Lance Armstrong famously did during the 2000 Tour de France — you
might be able to eat or drink something sugary and keep going, but you might be
done for the day. For someone running a marathon, this would be a huge bummer.
On a long hike up a mountain, it could be dangerous.
As
I train to attempt hiking Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the continental
United States, bonking is a concern. My friend’s daughter hit the wall right as
she got to the top, a precarious place to spend time due to frequent storms. He
practically had to carry her back down the entire 11-mile trail.
Eating
on the trail to avoid bonking runs against practically anything you’ve ever
heard about nutrition. Skip the protein and fat — stick with carbs. And not
those complex carbohydrates that are oh-so-good for you. You need refined
carbs, like white flour and sugar.
As
your body depletes its energy stores, sugary foods provide the quick, easily
accessible energy you need to keep going. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of
such foods on the market.
Forcing
myself to eat large quantities of what usually counts as junk grates on me, but
I take my safety seriously. I use long hikes to indulge in treats I love but
normally try to avoid, like cookies. I’m also a fan of bananas and sugary dried
fruit. But many athletes turn to products marketed especially for them: sports
drinks, energy bars, and even pouches of sugary gel that are appropriately
named GU.
Fortunately,
most Americans are in no danger of overdosing on exercise. And yet, many still
eat like they are.
If
you aren’t burning a few thousand calories by engaging in high-intensity
exercise for several hours, you have nothing to fear. To put things in context,
marathon runners are the most prone to hitting the wall after they’ve run 18
miles or more.
Odds
are that many of the 77 million
Americans who drink sports drinks are not marathon runners. In
fact, only about 19
million of us completed at least one of those 26.2-mile races
in 2012.
Little
separates some of these products from candy. Take those Snickers Marathon bars
on the energy bar shelf of the grocery store. And Jelly Belly markets Sports
Beans, labeled as “Energizing” or “Extreme Energizing” jelly beans. (If you’re
wondering, the companyputs caffeine in
the “extreme” ones.)
Sure,
these products contain electrolytes in addition to sugar, and you need
electrolytes to replace what you lose through sweat. But do you know what
electrolytes even are?
Electrolytes
include sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium, but products like Gatorade
typically just include sodium and potassium. You could also get those by eating
something salty and a banana.
It’s
wonderful that endurance athletes have no shortage of excellent products
available to prevent a bonk, but I fear that these sugary foods are doing us
more harm than good on the whole.
High-intensity
exercise for more than two hours, like running a marathon, requires more or
less the opposite nutritionally from a normal, healthy diet, which means that —
unless you are climbing a mountain or running a marathon — these foods are the
opposite of good for you.
Or
put more simply, they are junk.
Americans
will be better off if we steer clear of these sugary energy products except for
when we truly need them.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
OtherWords.org