Fuelling For A Marathon

9 APR2010

Many of you will be at the end of or just starting your marathon training for one or more of the many spring and summer marathons taking place both in the UK and overseas. How you fuel the long training runs and re-fuel after these is essential to enable your body to repair and prevent injury during your training and make your training as manageable as possible.

One of the main parts of training for a marathon is increasing your mileage and including long training runs. When to fit these runs in around your other life commitments can be very tricky. It usually ends up being an early morning or a late night outing. But how do you fuel for these? It is not possible to eat a big meal before a morning long run unless you want to get up 2 hours before to let your stomach digest the food otherwise a nasty stitch will follow you out on your run!). Therefore what you eat the night before and what you have to snack on just before you leave become essential (e.g. a banana, a handful of raisins).

Also what you take on the run with you is important. Your body has about 2 hours worth of fuel in the body, after that you need to top up these energy sources so it is important that you take some fuel supplies with you on your run. There are many types available on the market with things like sports jelly beans, cereal bars and sports gels all available. However many find the likes of the sports gels to hard to swallow while running and also the need to take on a specific amount of water with these make them a complex re-fuelling method, it is not easy to monitor exactly how much water you have drunk while you are also focusing on technique, pacing your run and where you are going!

Check out the Runtalk section on www.northernrunningguide.com for some high energy fuelling ideas for those long runs or during the marathon itself.