Tag: Health

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Burn 1,000 calories in an hour, lower back pain, kidneys and dehydration

What: A small addendum to the cardio training post, let’s expand on it with a real world experience that happened just a few weeks ago at Pacific Raceways.

If I knew then what I know now: Hydration, hydration, hydration – start it at least 5 days prior the first day on track and keep it up while you are on track.  Simply drinking lots of water the weekend of, is not enough.

Check out: 

1 Hour Mini Enduro’s as a Workout

Most of my racing is a sprint format, but each Saturday afternoon, there is a 1 Hour Mini-Endurance race (referred to as Enduro’s but spell check hates this word). During the May 20th 1-Hour Enduro at Pacific Raceways, I decided to start a ‘workout’ using my Apple Watch to track my heart rate and calories burned, more accurately.  In this mode, the watch samples movement, skin temperature, heart rate, etc. at least 1x per second, versus about 1x per minute, while generally going about your day.

So what happened?

First, Pacific Raceways is already a physically demanding race track – super old school, banked turns, big time elevation change and even catching air on all 4 wheels.  Before I even looked at the data, this is how I felt:

Thank Goodness for the Dead Pedal: While you probably aren’t going to be able to tell from the video, the combination of braking, lateral g-forces, camber in the road and downhill ascent of 3a and 3b complex, make it super grueling as you are carrying a good amount of speed.  I found myself hanging on for dear life, thanking my OMP seat, Schroth harnesses and most importantly – the dead pedal.  After each session I found myself thinking – “man, if it weren’t for the dead pedal – I think I would have fallen out of the seat.”

Oh dead pedal, how I love thee!

Dehydration: That day was warm but not ‘hot’ with a high of 72 degrees Fahrenheit.  I have a helmet blower system hooked up to my Stilo ST5 GT Wide Composite SA2015 Helmet with Noise Attenuating Ear Muffs (Large), of which after experiencing this – I don’t know how everyone doesn’t have one.  And we were planning to run the Cool Shirt CS-12 Club System but we forgot to pickup ice.  No worries, we went on regardless.  Well after a day of two qualifying sessions, one 20 minute race and an hour race, I felt drained and truly dehydrated – with my lips feeling chapped, which is a rare occurrence for me.  I’ve probably used chap-stick or lip balm maybe a half-dozen times in my life.  I have a rule that 7 days prior to stepping into a race car, I don’t drink any alcohol (usually wine) and that week, I bent the rules and I think that didn’t help.  While I only had a couple glasses with dinner, I could feel the difference.

Lower-Back Pain: Yeah – even this!  WTF!?!?!  I climbed out of the car with my lower back, not throbbing, but sure as crap not feeling great.  During the race I felt sharp pains and while I’ve had back issues the past few years – a combination of physical therapy, cross-training, plyometrics, stretching and chiropractor visits have my back in pretty good shape. Even still, I had back pain.  One theory, was that this was actually kidney related as it is common to have lower back pain, from your kidneys, when you’re too dehydrated and I felt it.

As an aside, the following morning I was pretty sore – especially on my right foot, calf, lower back, right shoulder, forearm and hand.  These PRO3 cars don’t have power-steering or ABS, so they are quite the analog animal to manhandle.

The data says… holy crap!

Calories burned during an auto race
This is the health data from throughout the day. You can see the spike when I logged a workout during the 1-hour endurance race. I didn’t log a workout during the earlier three sessions (two qualifying sessions and one non-points race)
Here is an hour by hour breakdown of my heart rate – note that during the 1-hour endurance race, my heart rate reached around 160-165 beats per minute.

 

Think about this – when was the last time you did a workout and burned (approximately) 1,000+ calories?  I am talking about just the logged ‘workout’ because in the previous three sessions, I didn’t have the Apple Watch Nike+ 42mm logging calories or else the full day of calories burned would have been 2,000+.  That is a TON of calories and physical effort.

Conclusion

Competitive racing is a legit, physical sport that is incredibly demanding.  We are using our hand-foot-eye coordination, reflexes, core-strength, neck-strength, arm-strength, leg-strength, cardio stamina and mental stamina, just like happens in many other ‘high intensity sports’.

If you are and an avid racer, actually competing and on a regular basis – I highly encourage you to have a regular training program and eat well at minimum to avoid injury and really, to help improve your performance.  Yes, you need to know what to do with your driver inputs to go fast but you also need to be able to physically do this, consistently and over long periods of time – especially for all those endurance racers.  If you aren’t exhausted when you get out of a race car – you’re just not driving hard/fast enough.

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Training the Body – Cardio for Drivers

What: Motorsports is exactly that, a sport that revolves around motors.  It is a sport, thus health and fitness is important.  Road racing works your heart (and lungs) like if you were running a marathon.  A healthy heart is critical!

If I knew then, what I know now: Have a healthy mix of aerobic, anaerobic and strength training to your work out program.  Too much of anything is not good.  I’ll cover this in a separate post.

Products that can make running easier: 

Foundational truths

Before we dive into what should be done, let’s all get on the same page about what happens when you’re driving and especially when you’re competing.

  1. Your heart is important:  This is not a question or an opinion. It is important for you to not only live but to handle stressful situations.  While most of us enjoy putting a car, motorcycle, kart or boat through it’s paces, the fact that your heart rate goes up, means that it is a stressful situation, where your body and heart (and lungs) specifically, work harder.
  2. Aging doesn’t help our cause: Generally speaking, as we get older, our hearts are not able to work as well and our maximum heart rate slowly goes down over time. Here is a good article on Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) from Runners World.
  3. Oh yeah, the lungs: The lungs are the things that bring oxygen into the bloodstream, of which then the heart pumps all that good, nutrient and oxygen rich goodness all over the body.  Then the various body parts use that goodness to power themselves, such as the brain, eyes, muscles, literally everything in your body.

Maximum Heart Rate (MHR)

Per above, as we get older, this goes down.  See below and find your age.

Find your age and see what the estimated ranges are for you.

I am currently 33 (less than a month from 34) and what this says is that my maximum heart rate is around 185 Beats Per Minute (bpm).  If I were to get my heart going above that OR near that level for too long, I’d probably end up in a hospital unless I explicitly trained my heart for those situations.

It’s been documented in several articles, studies and my own personal data collection (below) that for a racing car driver, the heart rate can range from 120 – 160bpm, throughout a race.

Below is an example from a race, in August this past summer as I was wearing an Apple Watch and collected  heart rate data (note – I did not start a workout session and thus why it didn’t collect data every 1 second).  Note that you can see when I started doing warm up exercises before getting into the car and my heart rate picking up as we got into the thick of the race.  If I remember correctly, the race started ~4:35pm and was a 1-hour race.

Heart Rate data from my Apple Watch during a 1-hour endurance race.
Heart Rate data from my Apple Watch during a 1-hour endurance race.

Update: When I was originally writing this post, I looked everywhere for this screenshot below.  This was taken using a Fitbit Surge, during a day of three races and near 100 degree heat.  That is some serious heat, sweat and elevated heart rate.  Racing is no joke!

Heart rate logs using Fitbit Surge during a race day.
Heart rate logs from one day of intense racing in nearly 100F.

Now, here is a screenshot from a 4+ mile run I did recently as well at a ~9:00 minute mile pace.  Not super fast but not a slouch by most measures.

August 2017 ~6 mile run using Endomondo and a Polar Heart Rate monitor

What does this tell us?  Driving at even 7/10’s in a track day or racing session for ~20 minutes is the equivalent, cardiovascularly, as going for a relatively intense run.  So you are sitting in a hot race car, covered head to toe with fire-resistant material and your heart and lungs are working like if you were running a half-marathon.

Ok, healthy heart and lungs are important, but why again?

Like everything else on this site, it’s about helping you be a better driver.  A driver who makes good decisions, usually, ends up being a faster and more consistent driver than someone who doesn’t make good decisions.  Several things can lead to someone making bad decisions behind the wheel (on-track that is):

  • Being nervous or confused (which usually elevates the heart rate)
  • Being scared (which usually elevates the heart rate)
  • Being angry aka the red mist! (also elevates the heart rate)
  • Being tired (I won’t repeat again)

It gets more difficult to make good decisions, quickly, when you are tired, sweaty and out of breath.  So the goal here is to condition your heart and lungs in a way, that you’re comfortable being in the stamina & endurance zones, and can make good decisions.

I personally felt like my overall athletic and aerobic endurance was and is a competitive advantage in most races, as I felt just as fresh at the start of a race, as I did at the beginning.  Start strong and finish just as strong!  This was even more pronounced on the 1 hour or longer races and especially when it was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

What should you do?

Disclaimer: We are not doctors, nor play them on TV.  Consider consulting your doctor before taking on a new exercise program.

We will cover other types of exercise for different benefits in future posts but for here, we will focus on cardio health.  The goal is to do exercises, that have you for the most part, in the stamina & endurance zones. It’s ok to peak every once in a while into the conditioning zone or drop momentarily into the weigh loss zone.

Most of my driving sessions are 20 or 30 minutes and sometimes 60 minutes long.  So I target conditioning myself to be able to easily handle 30 minutes by exercising for 45-60 minutes and having regular (about every other week) 60-75 minute workout sessions, usually 6+ mile runs.  This is grounded in a theory from playing football and Taekwondo.  Practice should be harder than the actual competition (most of the time) so that at least from a conditioning standpoint, the competition will be a relative breeze or you at least have plenty of reserves to go harder.

Here are some top exercises and plans to consider:

  • Running: It’s pretty much free.  I found it the best to sign up for a race that forces you to build up to a goal, set a schedule and stick to it.  Better yet, do a race with a friend or two, so you have support and accountability for when you’re too lazy to run in the rain.
    • Highly suggest downloading an app like Endomondo, Nike Run Club or MyRunKeeper.  They all have some kind of functionality where you can state your goal (like run a 10k), the pace you want to have and when your race will be held.  They come up with a personalized training program to build up your performance, you just run!  Sometimes these are in premium memberships but you can easily find training plans online and just track them manually.

  • Cycling: One downside to running is the repetitive joint impact throughout the body, especially toes, ankles, knees, hips and back.  Cycling is a great alternative to running for cardiovascular performance.  I personally bought a used Bianchi road bike and over the past few years have used it off and on as an alternative to running.
    • Here is a link to my Strava profile – it’s been sparse lately because it’s cold and rainy in Seattle.  🙁
    • Same plan though – whatever time you were planning to run, get on a bike in the gym or on a trail and cycle up a storm.
  • Swimming: Admittedly, I am the least experienced here as I rarely get in a pool but I know it is great for aerobic exercise, working the body overall, core development and joint relief.  If you have access to a pool, get on it!

Conclusion

Cardiovascular health and performance are not just important to live but they can give you a significant performance edge in driving.  There is a reason you see several top professional drivers all over the world, also spend significant amounts of time doing the exercises above and in examples like Jenson Button, competing in Iron Man and Triathlon competitions.

Consider regular cardiovascular exercise to be part of keeping yourself healthier and it has a big potential upside to your driving.