Marathon Fuelling Tips

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!

For breakfast on the morning of the race avoid foods that are either too milky products or ingestion of hard fruits such as apples and pears. Instead go for soft fruits (bananas) and wholemeal breads.You want to focus on easily digestible carbo's as they "store" very easily. Those foods are (type):

-bread,
-oatmeal with water,
-honey,
-maybe some light pasta salads

The goal is to fill the stomach up without taking any risks at all for the race ! You may even want to prepare this the day before. In case the hotel your are staying at does not have the "right" marathon diet for your race day. It is a good idea to do a pre-race meal rehearsal too. Think what you're planning to have the night before the race, have that and then go for a run the next morning just to make sure it works well with you and doesn't repeat on you or make you feel full. That will give you peace of mind the night before the race that nothing will surprise you the next day.

Also remember not to have your evening meal too late. You don't want to go to bed full and sluggish and it might make you not sleep so well.

Happy Running!