How to Blow a Runner’s Mind
Wow. Lactic acid has been exonerated. It’s not a “foe” but a “fuel.”
Lactic acid will be gone from your muscles within an hour of exercise… You get sore one to three days later. The time frame is not consistent, and the mechanisms have not been found.
The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.
Not that I’d ever known the slightest bit about whatever biochemical mechanism it was purported to work through– but it was one of those thoroughly ingrained accepted bits of wisdom such that because “everybody knew it” you just assumed someone somewhere had actually gone and proven the process step by step.
It brings to mind an episode from my time as a barista in a coffee shop: a patron wanted to know whether our beans had been chemically treated, and was aghast to find we had only one blend that was water-processed. She launched into a tirade as she made her way out of the shop: “Do you know what they use to process that? [Chemical X!] That’s the same thing they use in [some vile toxic product]!” Of course, what it was impossible to get in edgewise was that it was only something on the order of 1 part-per-million of Chemical X was used in the process, and all of that would be burned off by roasting temperatures far higher than Chemical X could withstand. Funny how people can think merely knowing the name of a chemical is enough of an explanation to know that that’s what’s causing Y effect.
But wow. Lactic acid. Now the ultimate example of just how powerful the echo chamber of folklore chemistry can be…
Y’know, I read that article, and all I thought was, “Yes, but if I go out and run a sixty-second quarter, the bear is still going to jump on my back somewhere around the second bend.” (I’m not as fast as I used to be.) This is one of those negative findings in science. “It’s not lactic acid, but we don’t know what it really is.”
Of course, when they do figure out what it really is, maybe then we’ll see some training method changes. That may be interesting.
(And I bet Amby’s all over this: he loves this kind of stuff.)
Comment by pjm — May 19, 2006 @ 7:52 am