What the Heck is a Keto-Adapted Athlete?

I just listened to a podcast interview of Mark Sisson, the author of The Primal Blueprint, and the host of Mark's Daily Apple. The interview was fascinating for me, because as I commit more and more to trying to become as close to ketogenic as I can, while still allowing myself the choice to have a beer on a special occasion, I have been constantly wondering how I will learn and adapt to ketosis and training for events at the same time.  So far, because I'm still in the very early stages of transition, and I've had a couple "cheat" days, where I've consumed more carbohydrates at a time than I allow otherwise, I do not think that I've been truly "ketogenic" for periods longer than 5 days in the past 7 weeks that I've been on a paleo diet template.

That said, I've noticed that I feel lighter and faster while running, and even on a day when I did a 5.5 mile trail run, I never felt like I was running on carb-empty.  I felt fine, great, actually.  But as I go through this process, and actually get back on my bike for more than 8 miles, I am sure that I will start to experience the various ups and downs of low-carb eating and how that may impact what I'm used to with regards to cycling, running, and swimming.  Swimming, so far, seems only improved.  I can sprint in the pool and feel relaxed, fueled, and fast (relatively, some people's warm-up speeds are my fast).  Running, well, I just don't run long enough right now to feel anything but good.  Although, I have noticed a difference in the way my muscles react during and after running, and it seems to be changing, and it's difficult to describe.

But cycling...that is a whole different ball game. Cycling leads to bonking.  I've bonked hard before, and it isn't pretty.  There is nothing worse than being 25 miles from home during a mountain bike and feeling like only an act of god will bring you home. So, I need to go bike. Long.  Without a pocket full of gels, but with something.  What?  That is my question.  Apples?  Dates?  Nuts?  A hard-boiled egg?  Nothing?

This is one aspect of the paleo-sphere that I'm super interested in -- fueling for the endurance athlete.  There is very little written on the subject that I've been able to find that answers the questions I have.  But I'm sure there is information tucked in places I haven't found yet.  Information like the following excerpt from the interview I linked to above:

Mark Sisson: It’s entirely possible to be a keto-adapted endurance athlete. I touched upon this briefly in my Paleo FX talk. One of the things about being keto-adapted is that it’s really a commitment. And once you’re keto-adapted and once you’ve made the necessary dietary changes, and some of the training changes to increase mitochondrial biogenesis and increase what we call the metabolic machinery that’s involved in using ketones and ramping up fat metabolism, you can go long periods of time at a very high output and not have to depend on glycogen stores or an exogenous feeding of glucose. It takes a little bit longer to do this, it takes months of training. But there are a number of athletes that are doing this now, including two of the guys who basically wrote the book on ketosis: that’s Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek.  Both of them are athletes in their own rights. One is an Olympic lifter and the other one cycles, century rides. And they do this completely ketogenic. The problem comes when you think you’re going to be a ketogenic athlete and then you start to slide into, “Well, maybe I’ll have 100 grams of carbs, maybe 120 grams of carbs. Because what that does is… the cutoff is about 60 to 70 grams of carbs a day for an athlete. And once you get past that, then you shut off the ketosis. And the danger zone is when you’ve turned off ketosis but you haven’t supplied enough glucose to take over that new fuel partitioning. So the idea is that you’re either going to be a sugar-burning athlete taking in 300 to 400 grams of carbs a day  and training for the Spartan races, or you’re going to be 100% keto and keep the carbs at less than 70 a day. And in that middle ground lies epic failure for a lot of people. For most people, I would say. So you kind of have to pick and choose where you want to be. And if you’re willing to be on the side of that keto-adapted athlete, there is the possibility that you could drop the weight and the possibility that you’ll probably perform even better than if you were just depending on carbohydrate and glucose.

Abel James: So how much time would he have to give himself before a race to get adapted?

Mark: I mean, I think it’s a three to four month adaptation period. And during that time you have to ramp up your long-slow distance and if you’re doing trail running if you’re doing a little metabolic conditioning stuff you have to be very careful about how you do it and not go into the anaerobic zone too much. Now you can go anaerobic once in a while and come back down. I’m pretty much a keto-adapted athlete and I’ll play two hours of ultimate Frisbee on the weekend, and I’ll do a lot of sprints, but because I have a lot of time to rest in-between, the way you do in soccer, I don’t feel like I’m depleting glycogen I just feel like I’m burning fat and I’m able to completely do anaerobic, ATP-type sprints and recover very, very quickly and easily. I’m usually the kind of guy that, at the end of a two–hour game, I’m out –performing everybody because, you know, they’re all toasted. They’re all out of juice.

Abel: Now, what about carb cycling? That’s something that you used to do a lot of, I imagine, but you probably don’t anymore?

Mark: Well, I don’t do any carb cycling at all. I used to be…I didn’t even call it carb cycling, I was just at I carb a loaded every day of my life. I had 1,000 grams of carbs just about every day of my life for 15 or 20 years. And that’s because I was training as hard as I was. In my running days, that meant 100 to 110 miles a week, in my Triathlon days it was 50 miles of running and 250 miles of cycling and 25,000 meters of swimming. Plus anything else you had to do in the weight room and other things, too.

So, in those days, I just slammed down the carbs willy-nilly, a-la-Michael Phelps at 12,000 calories a day (which I think is a bit of an over-estimate). In terms of carb-cycling now, if you were a sugar-burning athlete, and I don’t mean to use the term disparagingly, but if you’re an athlete who has chosen to continue to rely on glycogen stores, then it seems that the best way to manage weight an fuel-partitioning is to do an appropriate amount of carbs, not an excessive amount of carbs. So if you’re a guy who’s doing one hard work-out a day, it’s probably appropriate that you take in 250 to 350, maybe 400 grams, but not much more than 400 grams of carbs per day. NOT 700 or 1,000 or 1,200. And in that regard, you can maintain that appropriate amount of carbohydrate intake and continue to train the way you do and, hopefully, in the process, ramp up your fat-burning machinery a little bit. You won’t be doing much with ketones, but you’ll be ramping up your fat-burning ability.

Then there’s another group of athletes who are trying to do what we call ‘train low, race high’. So they train on low glycogen stores, and they try to ramp up their fat metabolism. Again, they’re still not really taking full advantage of their keto-adaptation. But they’re training at low glycogen, and then, days before either a really hard work-out—maybe one that’s going to have massive amounts of intervals in it—or the day of a race, they’ll carb-up. They’ll fill their glycogen stores up. And, again, these are all choices, and I don’t purport to have the answer. Because if I did, I’d be coaching a world-class team of athletes. These are choices, and we’re still trying to work out the variables that give you the best possible outcome for that choice.

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Another good source of information about metabolism and ketosis is found here on Dr. Michael Eade's site, and which I found truly informative.

I'm new to all this, but I'm eager to learn as much as I possibly can.  The researcher in me is hungry for information, and I plan to sift through as much as I can.