“Hey Nancy, I’m running my first marathon tomorrow. What should I be eating?” asked the young man at the running store where I was giving a nutrition clinic.

Questions like that always stun me. This runner hadn’t thought much about nutrition, to say nothing about the importance of training his intestinal tract, as well as the heart, lungs and muscles. He was missing an essential part of a training program! If a marathoner cannot train his intestinal track to  tolerate fuel in some form before and during a marathon, he or she will be more likely to hit the wall..

As I discuss thoroughly in my Food Guide for Marathoners; Tips for Everyday Champions, runners need to fuel well the day before with a diet baed on carbs (pasta, rice, fruits, breads, vegetables). The day of the marathon, the runner wants to enjoy a tried-and-true breakfast (so as to avoid losing time in the porta-potty line), and then consume about 200 to 300 calories per hour after the  first 60 to 90 minutes. The strategy shold be to practice this during training, so the day before the marathon, you have no need to worry about what to eat to enjoy going the distance.

June 10, 2008

We’ve had a streak of hot weather here in Boston, and most endurance athletes aren’t use to it yet. Be sure to not only drink enough fluids during exercise but also add a little sodium to your pre-exercise stint in the heat if you plan to be outside for a while. The sodium helps retain the fluids in your body (as oposed to have them go in one end and out the other) and can help delay dehydration and enhance your endurance. While on a daily basis you want to monitor your sodium intake, a little extra before hot weather exercise can be a wise choice.

Some possible choices are chicken noodle soup (or any canned brothy soup), V-8 juice, salted pretzels, pickles, ham and cheese sandwich with mustard – or  any salted/salty food, before you go. This will be a change in eating patterns for health-conscious endurance athletes who cook their oatmeal without salt, rarely eat canned or processed foods, and have no salt shaker on the table.

You might lose 800 to 1,000 mg sodium per pound of sweat. (Weigh yourself pre and post exercise to figure our how many pounds of sweat you lose in an hour.) While you need not get obsessed about replacing sodium milligram for milligram, reading food labels can give you a frame of reference regarding how much you replace via foods. For example--

A quart of Gatorade offers 440 mg sodium

A can of chicken noodle soup offers 2,350 mg

Eight ounces of rrange juice has only 5 mg

Generally, if you crave salt, you should eat salt. The chapter on Repalcing Sweat Losses in my Sports Nutrition Guidebook offers more information. (See www.nancyclarkrd.com)

Enjoy that pretzel!

Nancy