My earliest long runs were always followed by hot tea with a dollop of honey and milk. This was the tradition in John J. Kelley’s home, and what he did, I did. Kelley embraced all weather. In winter he particularly enjoyed pitting himself against slanting snow and frigid, penetrating winds. I often returned to his kitchen with frozen hands, toes, nose, ears, and other body parts. Fortunately, Kelley’s wife, Jess, always had a pot of tea ready. It usually took two cups before my extremities began to thaw a bit.
At that point in my life (eighteen to twenty-two), I didn’t even drink coffee. Tea was my first and favorite hot drink. I figured it was also a solid performance beverage. In the 1950s and 1960s, a fair number of the world’s best distance runners came from England. Roger Bannister, Jim Peters, and Ron Hill were just a few. They trained in cold, damp conditions, drank tea to rehydrate and replenish themselves, and then broke records from the mile to the marathon. If tea was good enough for them, it was good enough for me.
Decades later I would travel to the Great Rift Valley of Kenya, land of the world’s current top runners. Many hillsides were covered by tea fields, since Kenya had been colonized by the British, and the Kenyan runners drank amazing quantities of hot tea all day long. They drank tea before running, after running, and while sitting around and not running. Kenyans prepare tea that’s super sweet, heated with milk already in the huge cooking pot, and so steamy that I couldn’t put it to my lips until it had cooled for several minutes.
As for coffee, in the early 1970s, exercise physiologist David Costill, PhD, published research showing that it improves performance. This made coffee all the rage among marathoners. Several decades later another friend and physiologist, Lawrence E. Armstrong, PhD, discovered that moderate coffee drinking has no diuretic effect. His report overturned the conventional thinking.
Don’t worry about coffee alarmists: Coffee is a worldwide beverage, and therefore one whose health effects have been researched in many large population studies. Sure, some people are hypersensitive, and everyone should avoid high-calorie coffee drinks with lots of sugar and cream. But the most recent and biggest coffee studies have linked it to positive health outcomes, particularly lower rates of diabetes and all-cause mortality. It is also associated with reduced incidence of depression and cognitive decline.
In a 2015 report in Circulation, investigators tracked three large subject groups for an amazing 4,690,000 person-years of follow-up. Subjects who consumed up to five cups of coffee a day enjoyed an 8 to 15 percent lower rate of total mortality during the study period than nondrinkers. Coffee had no effect, good or bad, on cancer deaths. The lower mortality came from decreased heart deaths, brain diseases, and suicide.
Drink your antioxidants: What makes coffee a good-for-you beverage? You’ve probably read dozens of articles about the antioxidants, polyphenols, and other healthful enzymes in colorful (red, orange, yellow) fruits and vegetables. Believe it or not, the dark-brown coffee bean has similar properties.
In fact, globally, coffee delivers more antioxidants than any other food group, according to the Journal of Nutrition. Coffee’s health-enhancing qualities probably come from this delivery of antioxidants. Tea is likewise a potent source of antioxidants and polyphenols, particularly green tea. While most endurance performance studies have used coffee as the primary stimulant, tea delivers similar, albeit less pronounced, benefits.
Boost your endurance: Many runners prize coffee for the way it gets them up and moving on early-morning runs. Of course, it can do the same in the late afternoon. None of us wants to start any workout feeling fatigued. Coffee can reverse that, and possibly improve several health markers at the same time.
In mid-2016, the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism published a review of more than six hundred coffee and performance experiments. The journal concluded that pre-event coffee consumption improved completion times by 3.1 percent—a very large difference in scientific terms.
That said, race-day mornings will require careful planning. A cup or two of coffee can help you run faster, but may also necessitate more attention to bathroom visits. Be sure to use coffee on training runs to know how your system will react. Try caffeine tabs—one two-hundred-milligram tab should do fine—if you need an alternative.