How many trail runners take thought about increasing Cellular Oxygenation? What about Buffering Lactic Acid? Not many I've discovered. Trail and ultra running is an endurance sport that is made up almost entirely of amateur athletes who train without the benefit of coaches and experts. Compared to a sport like cycling, where there science of the sport and muscle endurance is studied in depth, trail and ultra running is still a very raw and unrefined sport where expert knowledge is usually just passed down from whomever currently is on top of the ladder.
Eighteen months ago, I approached a friend of mine, Cameron Hoffman, about some of the stomach issues that Sam had been having. At the time, Sam was unable to go for longer than about five hours without getting pretty sick, and his performance would tank. Cameron is widely known as one of the top amateur road cyclists in Utah. He currently holds the Individual Men's record for LOTOJA and was chosen by cyclingutah.com as the Utah Male Road Racer of the year in 2015. I wanted his opinion on nutrition as Sam and I were phasing into longer distances. He gave me a bottle of his own product of supplements.
Cameron has long been a believer in nutritional supplements. But had found that all the different things he was looking for was not found in a single supplement. So, already working in the supplements field, he went about creating his own that would help the body build up a store of the essential minerals, amino acids, herbs and vitamins it needed for endurance sports. He gave me a bottle to try out.
I didn't tell him at the time, but I was pretty sure spending money on supplements wasn't too far off of buying snake oil directly from the manufacturer. I agreed to try them out because he is a friend and has been such a successful endurance athlete who obviously knew a thing or two about endurance sports. In fact, I was so skeptical of supplements in general that it has taken me 18 months to come to a conclusion on it. I took it in long streaks, and I'd stop for a while. I took it at the recommended dose with light workouts, hard workout periods without the supplement, and at a minimal dose with hard workouts. Over the last 18 months, I've gone through most of the iterations you could imagine with it. And every time I ran out, I'd reach out to him to get me more because I wasn't done trying it out yet.
So... after 18 months of trail running with this stuff, here's what I've decided. It actually does have some benefits that I think are worth the cost. I'm sold on it, and will most likely continue to take it for as long as I'm running trails. Personally, I think a lot of the top tier runners could benefit greatly from this.
So, what are the claims of Endurance 360?
Lactic Acid Buffering & Recovery - This essentially is how fast you can recover, and turn around and run again after a hard workout. Last year, during one extensive test of the product, I wanted to see if I could run Ben Lomond peak every day for 6 days. It is a 15.5 mile trip with 3500' elevation gain. And while I was only able to get in 5 of the 6 runs, I was shocked every day to find that my legs felt strong and renewed. This has been the case every time I take the product solid for several weeks with hard workouts and races. Most recently, I was shocked to discover that only 2 days after finishing the buffalo 50 miler ten days ago, that my muscles felt good and I was able to do a 5 mile jaunt.
Cellular Oxygenation - This relates to VO2 max. Truthfully, I haven't seen any noticeable benefits from this. I'm not often doing red-line workouts where I'm trying to get the KOM on Strava, so I can't speak personally for seeing any improvements.
Muscle Endurance - I have seen noticeable but not significant increases in this area during my trial periods.
Energy Blend - At first I took the non-caffeinated blend, but switched to the caffeinated blend after trying it a few times. While the energy blend doesn't really make much of a difference during the day, I found it extremely helpful to get out of bed and get running very early in the morning without having to down soda for the energy boost. My morning workouts were always much worse without the product.
Muscle Cramp Protection - I've never had trouble with this, so it doesn't really apply.
Seven and a half weeks prior to running the Buffalo 50 mile, I started training from scratch. I had been sidelined with a health issue that left me unable to train at all for several weeks. At the race, I beat my goal time by about a half hour. Mostly, the ability to train for this was due to my legs being able to do a good solid workout every morning. And I credit the Endurance 360+ with helping a lot with that.
Basically, I don't know if product reviews are something that will happen much on this blog, but I am happy enough with the product that I would like to see other trail runners give it a try and let me know what they think.
