Failure.

It’s a critical component to most if not all longstanding success, so I’d love to write that I lovingly embrace it — particularly because that’s what I advise my students to do — but those words would be a half truth.

That’s because about half the time I initially see myself instead of my attempt as the failure and that really, really bothers me.

Yet even after I make that distinction in my mind, I still don’t actually embrace failure. More accurately, you could say that I grudgingly accept it as an immutable law of nature.

And it’s because of my battle with the concept of failure that I will never try to fool you into thinking I possess all the answers for obtaining optimal health and fitness.

What I will profess is to doggedly seek out the ones that mean the most to me and pass along any information that could benefit you.

Immediately after college, for instance, my No. 1 athletic goal was to run 10k races, half-marathons, and marathons as fast as possible. As a result, I experimented with carbohydrate loading.

The night before a race, I would cook a half pound of angel hair pasta — 840 calories’ worth — and eat that and a salad without dressing for supper. I would not use salad dressing or traditional spaghetti sauce since both contained oils.

At that time, I viewed any dietary fat — even olive oil — as unneeded in a diet designed for endurance athletes.

While I did record a few personal bests eating this way, I experienced just as many disappointing performances.

So I deemed this dietary experiment a failure and searched for a better pre-race meal. It took a change in sports and a few more years, but now I eat no more than 350 calories of mostly complex carbs three hours prior to my warmup. If an early race start doesn’t make a three-hour gap practical, I won’t eat anything at all until 40 minutes of warmup.

The plan works so well that I also use it before all training rides as well and have written articles encouraging others to do so.

The lesson to be learned from the carbo-load story: many successful building projects contain a ground floor of failure. But the carbo-load story was told for a second reason: to reveal my early view of dietary fat.

Dietary fat was anathema to me and many dietary experts in the 15 years or so before the turn of the century. Dr. Dean Ornish, for instance, fervently advocated a diet of no more than 10 percent fat.

In fact, he wrote a book, “Eat More, Weigh Less”, urging just that after hundreds of his patients who were diagnosed with severe heart disease avoided surgery by essentially eschewing all dietary fat. Critics claimed such a spartan diet was virtually impossible to follow for any length of time, yet Ornish’s book spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The critics may have ultimately been correct, however, because a diet contradictory to Ornish’s, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, by Robert C. Atkins, M.D., quickly replaced it on bestseller lists. In this diet, carbohydrates are all but eliminated, and the majority of calories come from fat.

As a result of this diet’s popularity and the handful of variations it inspired, many people to this day still cut back on carbs rather than cut out unneeded fat. But a recent study employing young and healthy subjects suggests there could be problems — immediate ones, in fact! — with ingesting too much unneeded fat.

The study, mentioned briefly in last week’s article, found that a single high-fat, high-calorie milkshake similar to the ones purchased at fast food restaurants, ice cream shops, and convenience stores produced myeloperoxidase, a substance linked to blood vessel problems that lead to heart attacks. The single high-fat meal also adversely affected immune system response.

The researchers believe both problems quickly abate with time — although in rare instances a meal of mostly fat has been directly implicated to an immediate heart attack. But there’s one image that I can’t get out of my mind after reading this research.

Two hands stretching a rubber band.

On more than one occasion, I can recall a medical expert stressing the amazing resiliency of the human body. It can be abused and abused and abused, but if given time for the proper convalescence, it recovers — often as if the abuse never occurred.

But just like a rubber band, the recuperative powers of the body can be stretched so often that an eventual stretch creates a snap.

Testimony to that is research performed on mice at the University of Bonn and published last January in the journal Cell. Researchers there discovered that some of the changes done to the immune system by the typical Western diet cannot be undone even by reverting back to a healthful diet for the long term.

Because of that, you need to recognize the potential harm inherent in a single high-fat meal, one that could easily be created by selecting a few of the most popular items from any fast food menu.