According to the results printed in the spring of 1984 in the Times News, Pottsville Republican, and The Morning Call, there was no outstanding AA 3200-meter girls’ relay team in District 11. That led me to believe the Palmerton girls I coached could win the event at the district meet.

But only with lineup changes that would remove the senior who had run leadoff most of the season with a 400-meter runner who had never run the event, and replace the anchor with a girl who wasn’t usually as fast but was a true gamer. Being a first-year coach and fearful of mutiny, I decided to visit the older teacher who had coached all these girls the year before and ask his opinion.

The guy gave me good advice, the best of which occurred before he ever uttered a word.

In his classroom was a small handmade poster in his inimitable scrawl. It read: “Do what you did, get what you got.”

Long story short: I made the changes. At districts, the new lead runner kept us close. The true gamer ran the anchor leg as if she had stolen the Hope Diamond, lost consciousness, and collapsed.

She broke the tape a half stride ahead of the second-place runner.

Like the memories of that race, “Do what you did, get what you got” has stayed with me. Occasionally, I’ve offered those words to those seeking advice.

More regularly, I’ve said them to myself and then started an eating or exercise experiment.

Because when it comes to what you should eat and how you should exercise, you never have things fully figured out.

Nonetheless, on this much you can count. If you don’t want more of what you already got, you need to do things differently and experiment intelligently.

I wanted better bicycling racing results back in the summer of 2002 when I interviewed Dr. Bill Misner, Ph.D., and author of Nutrition For Endurance for an article about insulin and glucagon published by MuscleMag International in February of 2003. We shared a love of cycling, so the doc shared a breakthrough he had made as Director of Research and Product Development for E-Caps, Inc., now known as Hammer Nutrition.

Eat nothing in the three hours before the warmup of a race.

Doing so causes your body to use a higher percentage of fat as fuel during the warmup and the less-intense parts of the race, he explained, thereby sparing glycogen, the fuel stored in the muscles and used along with blood glucose during intense efforts - those where your heart beats at 85 to 100% of its maximum rate.

So I experimented and found such success in races that I also began fasting for three hours before important training rides. Before long, it became my standard practice, regardless of the intensity of the ride or type of workout that morning.

Until 10 days ago.

I’ve been less than thrilled with how my legs have responded during intense efforts on the bike lately. I’ve attributed it to my advancing age and an accumulation of injuries that have caused them to lose muscle and power.

Background reading for the column I write for RoadBikeRider.com, however, planted this seed in my mind: Less leg muscle probably means less storage space for glycogen - which possibly means a greater need for energy from blood glucose during the intense parts of rides. But a three-hour fast before exercise drops your blood glucose level so low that the pancreas secretes glucagon.

That allows stored fat to be used as energy, but it’s an inferior form of energy for hard effort.

So as a firm believer in “Do what you did, get what you got,” I did something I hadn’t done in nearly 20 years - consume about 200 calories of mostly carbs before a ride. But I made sure I did so no more than a minute or two before starting.

Eating that closely to your ride won’t increase the rate in which you tap into glycogen, your best form of fuel, nearly as quickly as consuming carbs 30 to 60 minutes before exercise. Yet many mainstream medicos and internet sites suggest just that.

Maybe it was the placebo effect, but my legs felt more powerful early in the ride. Making that first hard effort didn’t seem quite so hard.

Throughout the ride, that feeling remained and inspired me ride harder.

Afterwards, I checked the amount of time I had ridden at 80 percent or more of my heart rate max, and found it was about 18 minutes more than my normal for a hilly solo ride of two and a half hours. While other factors could’ve caused some of the increase (it was hot and humid, for instance), the ride ended with me feeling hopeful, as if I could’ve ridden longer, and motivated to replicate the experiment.

Which I did four days later before a longer ride where I met a group of 30 or so for 12 miles of simulated racing. The simulated racing went much better than the week before and the ride home alone was faster than typical, so maybe I’m on to something.