![]() Check out PubMed to dig deeper, and you’ll see that many of the studies on the first page of search results for “tart cherries” do in fact report lower muscle damage, reduced inflammation, or both, in athletes who supplemented with tart cherries. I looked for each of these studies online, and while I usually couldn’t access the full journal articles, they were from legitimate journals and without obvious conflicts of interest. I tend to be skeptical about even scientific studies, especially when an organization handpicks the ones to highlight. – Soreness after a workout is caused by a combination of inflammation, muscle damage and oxidative stress - and researchers suggest the natural compounds in Montmorency tart cherries, including anthocyanins, may help with all three when consumed prior to working out, as well as after. – In another study, 16 well-trained male cyclists who drank Montmorency tart cherry juice concentrate (the equivalent of 90 Montmorency tart cherries) twice a day for seven days experienced less inflammation and oxidative stress following a 3-day simulated race compared to those who drank another beverage. For instance, runners in two studies who drank Montmorency tart cherry juice before and after long-distance races experienced a faster recovery of strength and less muscle pain compared to those who drank a different beverage. ![]() – Researchers have found that tart cherry juice may help ease muscle pain associated with intense exercise. Here’s the gist of the science, provided to me by the Cherry Marketing Institute, pointing to tart cherry juice as a natural performance-enhancer (sources below): So does tart cherry juice really help with recovery? More importantly for ultrarunners, can you really feel the difference the anti-inflammatory properties make in how sore you feel not just after a long run, but during? He doesn’t use ibuprofen, and of tart cherry juice (he’s an ambassador for one brand), he says: “All-natural tart cherry juice allows me to recover from tough races sooner, without taking needless chemicals that do more harm than good.” And Jurek is certainly not alone: as we’re all becoming more aware of what we put in our bodies, more and more athletes are turning to natural performance boosters like tart cherry juice. ![]() Still though, true to my granola-crunching hypochondriac roots, I don’t like risking even that.Īpparently, neither does vegan ultrarunning hero Scott Jurek. But for targeted use, during a race now and then, I get it. Of course, masking the pain isn’t something you want to do as part of your normal training routine - that pain is there for a reason it’s your body telling you to stop. Any ultrarunner will tell you the relief from Vitamin I is quick and very noticeable. And because pain - usually much more than fatigue - is such a limiting factor in an ultra, there’s a distinct advantage to popping lots of ibuprofen to mask the pain during the race (assuming it doesn’t land you in the hospital). For the next 45 minutes, I felt new life. (See my Vermont 50 recap, where ibuprofen played a big role in my finishing the race.)ĭuring my 100, I took a single ibuprofen tablet just as the sun was beginning to come up at mile 87, when my feet were screaming for mercy. And before I knew enough to be scared of it, I did too. Lots of ultrarunners rely on ibuprofen - Vitamin I, as it’s jokingly called, and somehow that joke becomes funny around mile 40 - to get them through the race. Rest assured that the opinions (and results of my 7-day challenge) are entirely mine. Sponsored posts are new territory for me, so we’ll see how it goes and what you think. Note: This post is the first in a sponsored, 3-part series about a 7-Day Tart Cherry Juice Challenge I’ll be doing. ![]() Which makes them extremely well-suited for ultrarunning, where pain more than anything else eventually becomes the limiting factor … if they deliver. There’s a decent amount of science to say so, and the fact that it’s stuck around a while - I think I first heard of it in 2010 - certainly bodes well.īut what’s most intriguing to me about tart cherries is that they’re not just for recovery: they also have anti-inflammatory properties and have been demonstrated to reduce muscle pain during an event. Speed of recovery is hard to measure, subjectively, and even when the objective evidence is there, the miracle product du jour isn’t often something most of us would want to put in our bodies.īut tart cherry juice may just be an exception: (a) it’s natural and (b) it seems like it might actually promote recovery. And mostly, as runners, we’ve learned to ignore them. If you’re a runner, you know there’s no shortage of new supplements and other products that claim to promote faster recovery for us.
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