𝗠𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗗𝗡𝗙 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 😬

1 - Nausea and/or Vomiting 🤮
2. Unable to make cut offs ⏰

These two make up the vast majority of reasons

Often than likely the reason they didn’t make cut offs was due to in-correct fuelling.  

It’s pretty hard to mess up your in race nutrition with a marathon and below if you smash a few gels and take on some water you will generally be fine.

Step up to a trail 50k, 50 miles and beyond and things get a little more complicated.

Learning how to fuel effectively is as important as getting those miles in.

With nausea you can and should train to have a stronger stomach. Your digestive system is a combination of muscular and cellular machinery and it adapts to stress just like the heart and muscles.

You can train your gut and digestive machinery to absorb calories from carbohydrates faster and to digest food more rapidly.

I can go really in depth with this like the damage to the gut created by the lack of blood available to aid digestion and the constant jostling up and down damaging the gut so much that it leaks endotoxins and triggers an immune response that is so severe as if you had a life threatening infection… but that’s extreme.

When and what you are doing while you eat can affect food tolerance and calorie absorption. The less jostling you are experiencing and the more blood flow you have available, the better you will tolerate food.

Eating little and often means less blood flow is required by the gut for digestion and you will have less food bouncing around in your stomach that could potentially damage it.

If you need to take on a big punch of calories then the best time is when you are walking during my recent 100 miler I had a cheese toastie which was epic and macaroni cheese and two pieces of toast. I eat quick, power hiked to give the stomach as much blood as possible to digest then got back to running.

Better training equals less damage to the gut which leads to less GI distress which fuels better performance.

So my tips
• Practice in training, I run with pizza, sandwiches etc
• Little and often around 250kcals an hour.
• I have about 100 from liquids and the rest from whole foods again giving the system less to work with.
• Eat when your walking so long climbs is a good time to take on calories
• Big calories follow up with a good walk to give it chance to digest.

Below I share what I do with my athletes ⬇️

Find 5 key foods you regularly train with and 5 you don’t often but you know work.

Plan your race nutritionally so you don’t over eat , don’t forget to eat enough and have enough calories with you for that lap or between CP’s.

Happy running.