OK, I admit it. I’m a full-fledged caffeine fiend — have been for almost four years now after never having so much as sipped on coffee or tea at any time during my first 24 years of existence. A cup of black coffee in the morning and another one mid-afternoon, along with the occasional mug of tea after dinner, has become the standard these days.
Oddly enough, and as ashamed as I am to admit it, consuming hot caffeinated beverages has become something I do with unbridled interruption on daily basis. Part of my race-day routine, in fact, involves downing a steaming cuppa joe exactly two hours before the starter’s gun goes off. It’s as important a part of the preparation process to me as making sure my racing flats are tied tightly.
Why is this? Aside from the obvious effects of feeling awake and alert almost instantaneously, my body really feels more primed for a peak performance on the starting line than if I had missed my morning cup. Maybe it’s mental, maybe not, but a new British study seems to support my suspicions and says caffeine consumption may provide performance benefits for endurance athletes such as long-distance runners.
How beneficial? “A small increase in performance via caffeine could mean the difference between a gold medal in the Olympics and an also-ran,” Dr. Rob James, lead researcher at Coventry University in England, was quoted as saying in a recent article posted on FoxNews.com.
James, who was expected to announce the complete results of the study at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Meeting in Prague this week, says high doses of caffeine boosted muscle power output and endurance and improved performance by almost six percent – yes, six percent!
Quite honestly, six percent seems to be on the high side of the improvement spectrum, especially for elite, or sub-elite level athletes. For a 31-minute 10K runner, that yields an improvement of 1 minute, 51.6 seconds over 6.2 miles of racing. Heck, even a three-percent improvement would take almost a minute off that fast of a finishing time. At a pace of 5-minutes per mile or faster, assuming an automatic six-percent performance improvement is nothing short of absurd.
Personally, I’ve never even come close to this amount of improvement since I started my two-to-three-times-a-day caffeine kick, but I do believe the undeniable stimulation that caffeine provides my central nervous system keeps my senses sharp when it’s time to race, which in turn helps me to perform better than if I were standing there feeling lethargic on the starting line. I suspect that for other habitual coffee-drinking endurance athletes, the same belief holds true.
So, then, should caffeine be considered a performance-enhancing drug? Well, yes and no – it depends on who you ask and how you look at the situation. The World Anti-Doping Agency doesn’t think so, and hasn’t thought so since taking it off the banned substance list in 2004. Interestingly enough, however, the NCAA feels differently, saying “if the concentration [of caffeine] in urine exceeds 15 micrograms/milliliter” an athlete will be suspended from competition.
For a 135-lb athlete, this equates to roughly 48 ounces of coffee, or four medium-sized cups, within a few hours of competition. In a nutshell, an athlete would have to ingest caffeine pills, inject themselves with a caffeine concentrate or have the most efficient bladder on the planet to be able to consume this amount of caffeine under normal circumstances – assuming, of course, it takes this much caffeine to give the athlete an unfair advantage.
What can be concluded from this most recent study? In short, you can do worse than downing a cup of coffee before your next big race. In fact, if you have a hard time waking up and staying focused on the starting line, it might just be the wake-up call you need.
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