If you wanna do long distance running, be sure to check out Mark Sissons last book: The Primal Endurance.
It´s about the latest science about how to train for events like Marathons, Iron man´s, Ultra maratons, Bike events and so on.
The book is highly recommended.
http://www.primalblueprintpublishing.com...endurance/
About the book:
Primal Endurance shakes up the status quo and challenges the overly stressful, ineffective conventional approach to endurance training. While marathons and triathlons are wildly popular and bring much gratification and camaraderie to the participants, the majority of athletes are too slow, continually tired, and carry too much body fat respective to the time they devote to training. The prevailing “chronic cardio” approach promotes carbohydrate dependency, overly stressful lifestyle patterns, and ultimately burnout.
Primal Endurance applies an all-encompassing approach to endurance training that includes primal-aligned eating to escape carbohydrate dependency and enhance fat metabolism, building an aerobic base with comfortably paced workouts, strategically introducing high intensity strength and sprint workouts, emphasizing rest, recovery, and an annual periodization, and finally cultivating an intuitive approach to training instead of the usual robotic approach of fixed weekly workout schedules. When you “go Primal” as an endurance athlete, you can expect to enjoy these and other benefits in short order:
Easily reduce excess body fat and keep it off permanently, even during periods of reduced training
Perform better by reprogramming your genes to burn fat and spare glycogen during sustained endurance efforts
Avoid overtraining, burnout, illness, and injury by improving your balance of stress and rest, both in training and everyday life
Spend fewer total hours training and get more return on investment with periodic and purposeful workout patterns
Have more fun, be more spontaneous, and break free from the pull of the obsessive/compulsive mindset that is common among highly motivated, goal-oriented endurance athletes
Have more energy and better focus during daily life instead of suffering from the “active couch potato syndrome,” with cumulative fatigue from incessant heavy training, which makes you lazy and sluggish
Primal Endurance is about slowing down, balancing out, chilling out, and having more fun with your endurance pursuits. It’s about building your health through sensible training patterns, instead of destroying your health through chronic training patterns. While it might be hard to believe at first glance, you can actually get faster by backing off from the overly aggressive and overly regimented “Type-A” training approach that prevails in today’s endurance community. Primal Endurance will show you how, every step of the way.