For a long time I have struggled with injuries and muscular imbalances, as well as cramping during races. Sometimes the cramping has been so extreme - total Charlie Horses that send the muscle popping out of my leg in a huge lump - that I have gone crashing to the ground and then been unable to get up for several minutes. This has been the case in every Knee Knacker I've done, as well as my last two races the Dirty Duo 50K and Marathon Shuffle.
After going down probably 15-20 times in the Dirty Duo I was talking to fellow ultra runner Pushpa Chandra who is a naturopathic doctor and she suggested it was due to magnesium. I started taking a calcium/magnesium supplement, but at the Marathon Shuffle I was well on the way to a course record when the same thing happened. Although I also got lost after that which didn't help my cause any.
However I began to investigate other possibilities. After doing some reading I realised that all Canadians are deficient in vitamin D, which helps the body absorb and utilise minerals like calcium and magnesium. I eat a very good diet, so in reality I should be able to get most of my nutrients from food and I don't like to supplement anything unless I have to. Through the reading it became apparent that because latitudes north of 45 degrees are too far from the sun to get enough vitamin D from sunlight at any point during the year, and the Canadian border is at 49 degrees we all need to supplement vitamin D year round. Even people in the northern hemisphere but south of 45 degrees need to supplement during the winter months.
The problem compounded itself when I quit drinking conventional milk, which is fortified with vitamin D (so you can absorb the calcium) and started drinking raw milk. The raw milk I drink, while infinitely superior nutritionally and quality wise, has no vitamin D so I lost that source. Conventional milk is typically fortified with 100 IU per cup. The daily requirement to prevent rickets is around 200 IU, while the amount for optimum health is about 2000 IU. There are other things you can eat that contain vitamin D, but most have very low amounts that would never allow you to reach this optimum level of 2000 IU per day or more. Some even recommend 5000 IU. At very high levels vitamin D can be toxic, although it seems this is only at the extreme. Watch out for anything containing vitamin A with the vitamin D as vitamin A has higher toxicity.
As soon as I started taking the vitamin D I noticed huge benefits. Within hours I felt like I had a great amount of energy and my mood was noticeably improved. The next day, some of my old injuries which had been recurring began to really ache. I read up a bit on this and apparently this is due to the body finally utilising enough potassium, calcium and magnesium for those old injuries to rapidly heal. I had to miss my weekly long interval workout with VFAC and went to do my own workout around Rice Lake Loop. I was running each lap almost 2 minutes faster than the last time I did that workout, and the loop is only somewhere between a mile and 2 km. On Saturday I had my track workout with VFAC. For a long time I have literally limped off the track, unable to even to a cool down due to hip pain. Not only did I have my best workout in a long time doing my coach John's 'suprise workout' consisting of all out 200's, 400's, 800's and a mile mixed up, occasionally with suprise short rest. Not only did I feel fine after I felt like I could go for another run even after cool down.
So if you are reading this and suffering from cramping, muscle soreness, or even stomach issues (magnesium deficiency causes the stomach lining to become inflamed further limiting absorption of minerals) - go out and get some vitamin D. Apparently the best kind is vitamin D drops which I'm going to try next. Lookout for anything containing magnesium stearate as this is a sign of low quality - it is toxic but used as an industrial lubricant.
Comments
Cramping During/After Runs
Hey Ryan,
Thx for sharing this. I didn't ever get cramps during runs and wondered what folk who complained about them were doing wrong. Then I started to get cramps.
Now I get them before runs, during runs, after runs and for no apparent reason at all. Same muscles that cramp tend to tear on me, too.
Like you, I attempt to eat well. I even stretch from time to time. I've tried to pay more attention to drinking water. Cramping appears to be getting worse rather than better.
Interesting perspective on vitamin D. I've tried taking magnesium/calcium supplements, but don't feel they do much for me.
Not sure if I'd go so far as to recommend it, but I find I get fewer muscle tears and cramps if I take a couple hits of vitamin I before long runs.
You've prompted me to poke around the internet a bit. I'll share what I find here. I wonder if anyone else out there has problems with cramping?
Forgot to mention...
On the incredible healing aspect of vitamin D. I took a bad spill at the Knee Knacker training run last Sunday. It was the worst I've had in my years of running.
I had numerous scrapes and wounds, along with a badly sprained tendon in my hand and finger - the day before my band went into the studio to record bass and drum tracks for our new album no less.
I have been healing at such a rapid rate that it is literally like watching my injuries heal before my eyes. I had a deep scrape cut that left my entire right leg covered in blood mixed with mud. After I got home and cleaned it off it was about the size of the bottom of a beer can. By a couple of days ago it had healed so much that it was two separate wounds one about the size of a dime and one the size of the thickness of a pencil, and now the pinkness in between and around is gone already. I also had a wound about the size of a loonie on my palm which was deep, sore and pussy (not sure abut that spelling but I'll go with it anyway - I am referring to clear fluid coming out of a cut get your mind out of the gutter). I worked an eight hour shift last night and every time I looked at it the area it looked better. Today it looks like little more than a popped blister. I have always healed fairly quickly but this is ridiculous. I wish I would have stuck around for someone with a camera to get a before picture but I was in a rush to get to work. Also it was a good candidate for bloodiest collection of injuries for the year.
On the vitamin I issue, I was having that discussion with a guy Joe who I was running with for some time in the Plain 100. I had already noticed it was stopping my cramping and he mentioned he had had never heard of that but was experiencing the same thing. Pushpa didn't seem very happy with me when I told her that.
Overall it does work, but its probably a better idea to go after the root cause of the problem than try to treat the symptoms - which I suppose is the underlying principle of naturopathic medicine.
Here is the best source for info on vitamin D I have found:
http://www.westonaprice.org/The-Miracle-of-Vitamin-D.html
An interesting thing is that the second richest food source of vitamin D, lard, has been pretty much eliminated from the western diet. If you tried to get all of your vitamin D from the richest source, cod liver oil, you would risk poisoning yourself with vitamin A. And the reason for people removing lard from their diet (preventing heart disease) is completely stupid. Very little of the fats in arterial plaque come from saturated fats, they actually come from vegetable oils (polyunsaturated fats), aside from that the human heart keeps a store of highly saturated fat stored next to it to use in times of need (ie starvation). Yet another reason to toss out the margarine, shortening, vegetable oil, canola oil and all this other crap for the real stuff like organic grass fed butter and going back to lard for frying and pie crusts. Even olive oil becomes harmful at a certain temperature so basically whatever Health Canada says, do the opposite.
Before you say, this guy is crazy - what the hell's he on about - consider this. Coconut oil has recently fallen back into favour and yet it is highly saturated. And the 'French factor' suggesting that wine helps the French have lower rates of heart disease despite eating a diet which is still high in butter and other animal fats. It is constituents in the wine, along with the butter and animal fats, that allow them to have low rates of heart disease despite having high rates of smoking. In fact, heart disease rates there have been increasing there as processed foods loaded with vegetable oils have been increasingly consumed.
Still don't believe me? Consider this, the 'mediterranean diet' which is pretty much the gold standard for diets recommended by doctors to reduce heart disease contains a lot of cold pressed olive oil (which along with coconut oil and palm oil are the true healthy vegetable fats) is actually also loaded with saturated fat from sheep which is one of the most highly saturated of all animal fats. This is where the vitamin D in our diet has disappeared to.
Why did it disappear? The big food companies realised they could make a lot more money off of oil made from inedible grains like canola (which used to have the unpalatable name rapeseed) when they figured out industrial processes to make it edible, and spent vast sums of money in the 1980's to create pseudo science convincing us it was healthy despite all the evidence to the contrary. If people stay healthy from the food they eat, it makes it a lot harder to say strip all the trace minerals out of salt and then sell them back to us at outrageuosly inflated prices.