Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us by Murray Carpenter

Author:Murray Carpenter [Carpenter, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cookbooks; Food & Wine, Cooking Education & Reference, History, Health; Fitness & Dieting, Nutrition, Caffeine, Science & Math, Agricultural Sciences, Food Science
ISBN: 9781594631382
Amazon: 1594631387
Publisher: Hudson Street Press
Published: 2014-03-13T06:00:00+00:00

Back at Kona, the race that had started at dawn continued well past noon. It was early afternoon by the time Piampiano came running down Ali’i Drive, a third of the way into the marathon. A gentle breeze blew over the street from the beach, and surfers were riding the chest-high waves just offshore, but it was sweltering under the tropical sun along the road. Piampiano’s red hair was pulled back in a ponytail, sunglasses obscured her blue eyes, and a visor shaded her determined face.

She had sixteen miles left to run, and she moved smartly, at a pace of 7:45 minutes per mile. Most of the race was behind her. She had already been racing for eight hours, with just two to go. This is the part of the race where fatigue—mental and physical—can utterly destroy an athlete. In her left hand, Piampiano clutched a little foil packet, a mocha energy gel that contained another fifty milligrams of caffeine.

After Piampiano ran by, I watched other triathletes as they passed through an aid station, greeted by volunteers shouting out, “water, water” and “energy gels, energy gels.” The athletes danced through, stutter-stepping as they grabbed sponges to drizzle cool water on themselves, sipped water or Coke from paper cups, or grabbed Gu energy gels.

Gu was the first company to market energy gels in the United States and is a longtime sponsor of the Ironman. The company specializes in producing single-serving, foil-packaged energy gels, designed to help athletes stayed fueled during endurance events. While in Kona, I met Gu Energy Labs founder and CEO Brian Vaughan. He told me that Gu gels combine carbohydrates with essential amino acids and electrolytes . . . and caffeine.

Vaughan said roughly two-thirds of his products are caffeinated and that athletes use the drug with great specificity. “The top-end athletes, the pros, want to be able to meter out caffeine during the course of an endurance event. At the beginning, perhaps, it’s all decaf products. There’s no problem with energy at the early stage of a race; a lot of adrenaline is going through the body. Toward the middle and end, athletes will look for different levels of caffeine. It’s always nice to have that second wind late in the race, where you can energize the mind, stimulate the mind, with the central nervous system response from caffeine.”

Vaughan said caffeine can enhance the mental focus that is so critical to endurance athletes, especially as fatigue sets in. “There are moments when the mind begins to wander; you become less competitive when you have these lapses,” he told me. “To really be able to focus on smaller goals within the race is important for the competitive athlete.”

Beyond blocking the sense of mental fatigue, caffeine has another significant effect on metabolism. For years, scientists thought that one of the drug’s primary mechanisms was to spare the glycogen stored in muscles. The theory was that caffeine, by slightly increasing epinephrine (adrenaline), increased the level of free fatty acids in the blood, which muscles would use in lieu of stored glycogen.

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