But damn. That right foot! Just when he was reaching his peak, a sore spot behind Stu’s little toe kept swelling until it was big as a Ping-Pong ball and made his entire leg throb like an abscessed tooth. Stu was supposed to be boarding a flight for France in a few weeks for another six-day race, this time as the only American invited to a showdown of international all-stars, but after shuffling from one specialist to another, his foot wasn’t any better. Stu’s last tune-up before the event was a triathlon in Long Island. He postponed the inevitable as long as he could and even showed up at registration, but he finally had to limp up to the race director and break the news that he was bowing out.
Please, the race director pleaded, first do me a favor. Long Island triathlons don’t get many TV sensations in their lineups, least of all model-handsome men of steel fresh off the Today show and a week-long spot on Nightline. Before you make up your mind, the race director urged, see Dr. Phil Maffetone.
Stu sighed. I have already seen nearly a dozen medical doctors, chiropractors, and body workers and have basically given up hope that my injury can be healed, he thought. Still, he decided to humor the guy and hear what Dr. Phil had to say. That way, at least, he could drop out with a clear conscience while satisfying his own curiosity. For some time, he’d been hearing stories that were too good to be true about this healer of last resort who not only fixed the unfixable but coaxed astonishing performances out of slumping runners and triathletes. “Phil has a reputation for getting broken-down, over-trained, world-class athletes back up and running,” Stu would recall.
Luckily, Dr. Phil Maffetone was right at hand. He’d come to watch one of his reconstruction projects compete, and he agreed to take a look at Stu right there on the lawn outside the VFW hall. As they chatted, Stu discovered Phil wasn’t even an M.D.; he was a chiropractor with such severe attention-deficiency that he’d barely squeaked through high school and still couldn’t stand to read books. Granted, Phil was a former track athlete, but otherwise there was no outward reason he should know anything other doctors didn’t. Maybe Stu’s friends were only impressed because Phil treated them like real patients and not high-functioning psychotics. Phil didn’t lecture them that “all that pounding is bad for the body” or answer with a shrug and “What do you expect?” when they described how their heels ached after a two-hour run. Phil wasn’t shocked by big miles and didn’t smirk at the adventurers who tackled them; as far as he was concerned, a properly fueled and maintained body could click along forever. He took their pain—and their potential—seriously.
Phil had Stu lie down on the grass. He began pushing Stu’s arms and legs to assess muscle resistance. “Relax,” he said. He grasped Stu’s foot and gave it a yank. Angels sang.
“Suddenly,” Stu says, “the lump disappears!” He can’t believe it. He jogs around gingerly, and for the first time in months he can run without pain. He’s so thrilled, he gets stupid; instead of playing it safe and seeing if the miracle lasts until lunch, Stu decides to jump right into the triathlon. He storms along to a top-twenty finish and his foot feels fantastic.
“This is just first aid,” Phil warns him. He’d found a dislodged bone in Stu’s foot and managed to snap it into place, but worse breakdowns lay ahead unless Stu made some serious changes.
Stu was all ears. Sure. What’s my problem—running technique? Weak arches?
Sugar.
Sug—really?
And not only sweets and sodas, Phil explained. Pasta, power bars, pancakes, pizza, orange juice, rice, bread, cereal, granola, oatmeal—all the processed carbohydrates that Stu had been told were the ideal runner’s diet. They’re just sugar in disguise, Phil believed. Humans are superb endurance athletes who’ve roamed farther across this planet than any other species, and we didn’t do it on Gatorade and bagels. We did it by relying on a much richer and cleaner burning fueclass="underline" our own body fat.
“The point of your training isn’t to see how fast you can get your feet to move,” Phil said. “The point is to get your body to change the way it gets energy. You want it to burn more fat and less sugar.” And as it stood now, Stu’s body was “a sugar-burning, fat-storing monstrosity.”
Stu was baffled. Okay. But how does food hurt your foot?
Think of your body as a furnace, Phil explained. Fill it with slow-burning logs and it will run smooth and strong for hours. But fill it with paper and gas-soaked rags and it will burn hot, rattle the pipes, and die out until it’s fed again. That’s what you did, Phil said. You shook yourself into an injury by stuffing your furnace with garbage. If you want to stay healthy and perform your best, you need to teach your body to use fat as fuel. Immediately.
Stu saw three major difficulties. The first problem with Phil’s plan, of course, was Phil. The man was—and there’s no way to sugarcoat it—a stone-cold hippie. He had long hair and a dangly ponytail and used words that made Stu’s stomach heave: “holistic” and “hormones” and “walk before you run.” Literally: walk. Phil wanted Stu to start his next race by walking. Good Lord. The second problem with Phil’s plan was Stu: he had a major international championship in three weeks, and Rule #1 for all sports is Don’t Experiment Before Game Day. Phil wasn’t even proposing an overhaul; he wanted Stu to completely reverse his diet, training, and race strategy and do it all in less than twenty days.
But the biggest problem was Everyone Else in the World. Everyone Else in the World thought the “Maffetone Method” was nuts. Carbs were warrior food; everybody knew that. Stu was an academic by training, and right from the beginning he’d made himself a student of his sport. “I cut back my work hours, lived like an ascetic monk, trained like a maniac, ate only what Runner’s World told me I should, and did a carbohydrate depletion followed by a carbo load in the last few days before the event,” Stu would recall. So now what? Runner’s World was dead wrong? All those pre-race pasta dinners were poison? Carbohydrates were hurting, not helping?
The Maffetone Method even defied the greatest voice of alclass="underline" Dr. Tim Noakes, author of Lore of Running and one of the world’s most respected sports scientists. Dr. Noakes was both a medical doctor and the head of Exercise and Sports Science research at the University of Cape Town, and so trusted an authority that he served as expedition doctor for Lewis Pugh’s North Pole swim and spearheaded reforms that dramatically reduced South African rugby injuries. Moreover, Noakes was his own space monkey; by age sixty-four he’d run South Africa’s fifty-six-mile Comrades ultramarathon seven times and had another seventy marathons under his belt. With more than four hundred scientific papers and two thousand competitive miles to his name, Noakes knew more about runners, living and dead, than the runners themselves. He’d not only written the eight-hundred-page Lore, but he kept rewriting it; every few years, Noakes updated his bible with fresh science. The best in the world listened to Dr. Tim Noakes, and Dr. Tim Noakes was all about carbs.
“Athletes whose training involves prolonged high-intensity daily exercise must eat high-carbohydrates diets,” Noakes made it clear. “Performance during prolonged exercise can potentially be enhanced by increasing the amount of carbohydrate stored before exercise,” he went on, “and by maintaining a high rate of carbohydrate utilization, particularly when fatigued, via ingestion of carbohydrates in the appropriate amounts.” It was all right there in chapter 3. And all those fifty-plus pages on “Energy Systems and Running Performance” could be nicely summed up in just seven words: Stuff in carbs and keep on stuffing.