Author Archives: tim

My DNAFit report

Posted on by

In several recent podcasts Ben Greenfield has mentioned DNAFit as a good way to find out what, genetically, you should be doing as far as exercise goes.   It got me curious and since I already had my 23andMe data I figured it couldn’t hurt to pay a bit to see what they had to say.  The process of importing your 23andMe data couldn’t be easier and $79 later I had my first report, the Fitness Lite report.

Well, no huge surprises in the results really.  In summary I am built for endurance, recover moderately quickly and am highly prone to soft tissue injury.   I’ve pretty much found this out on my own over the last 55 years.  I’m not a power person at all but can pretty much walk or run all day with no problems.   I recover fairly quickly from workouts, usually never needing more than a day or so even for very long runs.  And yes, I am prone to soft tissue injury and my main complaint is always some form of tendonitis somewhere though since I’ve changed up my training program in the last few months I haven’t been getting plagued by that at all and have been able to drastically increase distance without any injury at all.

Continue reading →

Tiger Mountain 12k

Posted on by
That was quite a hill!

That was quite a hill!

Today was the first ever sanctioned Tiger Mountain Trail Run put on by Northwest Trail Runs.  It was run on the backside of Tiger Mountain and had distances of 5k, 12k, Half Marathon and 50k.  I had originally signed up for the half but given the nearly 3000′ of climbing and the 9:30 start time I had my doubts I could get done in time to take our new pup, Lira, to the vet by 1 p.m. so I switched to the 12k course.   As usual I arrived early to do registration and we had a rocking reg team with Suzanne and Ann both of whom I had worked with before so things went very smoothly.    The 50k started at 8:30 with about 25 runners, the half at 9:30 with about 100 and finally the 5k and 12k started at 10:00 with a total of about 115 runners and we started on a different loop than the other starts.

Continue reading →

Hawkeye 25k and the magic of fat burning

Posted on by

IMG_0885Two years ago I had planned on going back to Iowa to run the Hawkeye 25k and then SIBO hit me hard making it impossible.  Finally this year I was able to go for it and I was very interested to see if my new Primal Endurance training regime was going to pay off during the run.    I had done a half marathon last month at the Redmond Watershed and since then had been running fairly low mileage only up to a 7 mile distance on a weekend run but always kept my heart rate in the aerobic phase below 125bpm and sticking to nose breathing through my runs.  My plan was to do this keeping my breathing steady through my nose and not push my heart rate up.  I wasn’t competing like I did at the Redmond half but I sort of hoped I’d set a new 25k PR just because I was dealing with about 1100′ of elevation gain instead of 3000′.   This was going to be the longest distance I’d run since getting sick 2.5 years ago.

Continue reading →

More Portland Paleo

Posted on by

IMG_0691Another trip to Portland and another restaurant to try out, we love eating in Portland.   I have done two posts already about this city – Portland Paleo and Portland Paleo II from last year’s trips.   We headed to Portland last weekend to go look at a dog and decided to try something new.  Originally I was going to just head to Brooklyn House but felt it was better to explore.  Tasty & Sons had been recommended to us by a friend and their menu had potential but it was one the other side of the river so I found Tasty & Alder which is just a block away from our hotel in the Pearl District and looked to be very Paleo friendly.

Continue reading →

Redmond Watershed Half Marathon

Posted on by

IMG_8312Three years ago I ran my last half marathon, at the Redmond Watershed in fact, in 1:54:40 which was a PR for me on a trail half.  Right after that half I got injured which wouldn’t heal and then I got SIBO which took forever to heal so three years later I was finally ready to run another half marathon.   The Watershed was the perfect place to do this since it is one of the easier courses around and doesn’t have too much elevation with only 1100′ of gain, I often do that in a 4-5 mile run at Tiger.

Continue reading →

End of one season, getting ready for the next

Posted on by

IMG_0355It has been a grueling winter here in the PNW, the wettest on record and the rivers have been blown out not only locally but also on the Eastside where one can usually go fish by March and have great conditions.    I had my last pheasant hunting trip at the end of February with friends Mike & Carolina and their dog Penny and we managed to get a few birds but even the pheasants were in a weird mood.   I  pulled off a cast & blast that day hitting the river after the hunt and managed to catch a couple of trout to go with the two roosters I got, one of them a 17″ rainbow and a decent cutthroat.   This was the last day the Yak was in decent barely fishable condition.

Continue reading →

Start a SIBO Support Group

Posted on by

support-groupsSIBO can be a very isolating illness.  Suddenly you can’t go out to eat with your friends since you are sensitive to everything.  You can’t really go out to a bar with your friends either, drinking is not recommended.   Often you just don’t feel like even leaving the couch when your gut is churning and you aren’t sure when you’ll next need to run to the bathroom.    Friends and family rarely can understand what is going on since until you experience SIBO you really don’t get it.  All of that can leave you feeling alone and a bit depressed, I know it did me.   I think the only person I saw outside of my immediate family for months was a string of doctors as I was trying to figure out what exactly was wrong and what to do about it.

Continue reading →

Can you breath your way out of SIBO?

Posted on by
Me with puffed out cheeks doing my breathing

Me with puffed out cheeks doing my breathing

SIBO may be happening in your small intestine but in many cases it is specifically a motility problem and thus tied to the enteric nervous system in the gut.   The most common cause  of SIBO is actually an auto-immune reaction where the body destroys a key protein that is part of this enteric nervous system and drives the migrating motor complex, the MMC.  The MMC fires the small intestine’s cleansing wave to flush any unwanted bacteria out.   If this protein, vinculin, is destroyed then the cleansing waves to do not fire as strongly and bacteria can back up in the small intestine causing the symptoms of SIBO.  The MMC can also be compromised if there is an issue in the vagus nerve, the main nerve bundle between the brain and the gut.   The vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system is so important that the gut is known as the ‘second brain’.  In fact, there are more neurotransmitters in the gut than in the brain itself, 95% of the serotonin in the body is produced in the gut and serotonin is a key transmitter in the MMC.

Continue reading →

Finally, some UBiome results

Posted on by
My gut bacteria

My gut bacteria ratios

It only took about 3 months but I finally got my first set of results back from my UBiome test back in November.  I’m doing a series of three tests each spaced 2 months apart to see if I’m making any progress with my gut repopulation.   I really don’t know what to make of a lot of these results but a few I do know what to make of.   I did a Genova test in August which had me in semi-bad shape, way low on the diversity index and in the red zone on butyrate and short chain fatty acids.   After that test I started heavily in on probiotics and fermented foods in hopes that this would improve.   Well, I have to say I think it worked!

Continue reading →

Getting fit again after SIBO

Posted on by

NP9A2836-X3In one of my recent posts I talked a bit about exercise in relation to the Primary Foods concept and a bit about how I slowly got back in shape as I healed up from SIBO.  I thought this topic deserved a bit more discussion since it is an important part of my life and I know many people who are currently struggling with how to get back in shape after being ill for a year or longer.

Before SIBO I was in the best shape of my life.  I had come off a solid year with a  personal trainer, I had run several trail marathons and an ultra marathon and was pretty much doing  13+ mile trail run every Saturday.   When I got sick all that fitness went out the door. I lost a lot of weight, down a total of 35-40 lbs and with that weight went a lot of muscle mass.   With Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV)( coursing through my system I was exhausted and seriously unable to get up and do much of anything so all my cardio conditioning went out the door too.   After a year of this I went from being in great shape to being in the worst shape I’d probably been in for most of my adult life.

Continue reading →