Fuel: Nutrition and Hydration
Summary of Key Points:
Nutrition Targets: 300 calories, 500mg sodium, and 1L water per hour.
Foods I took: Honey Stinger stroopwaffles, GU gels, Clif bars, Chomps beef jerky, trail mix, jelly beans, peach rings, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
Set an eat/drink schedule and follow it: for us it was every 30 minutes, alternating between gels and waffles, and staying hydrated.
Favor Real Foods and Variety: Gels and waffles lose appeal after a while, making real food more sustainable.
Bring more calories and electrolytes than you think you’ll need
Nutrition is an incredibly important aspect of sports and especially in endurance sports. I’ve run two marathons, one in 2018 and one in 2013. And in training, people had told me you should have some gels or jelly beans along with gatorade as you go through your long runs for energy, which I did, but I never really dug into the reasons why and didn’t target any specific plan. That was a huge mistake. In both marathons, I struggled and in hindsight, I think it was because of the lack of a fueling strategy.
For this event, however, I did my research. A lot of it. I read a bunch of different articles, watched a bunch of YouTube videos and we even consulted with a nutritionist that used to work with athletes to build nutrition plans while she was working at Clif. So after all that, here’s what we ended up with as the nutrition plan:
We were shooting for the following categories, as you can see in the image above
300 calories (this was really trying to get about 50g-60g carbohydrate per hour)
500mg sodium
1 L water
We devised a pretty good system while packing which was to put together quart sized Ziploc bags that included a mix of nutrition and electrolytes for a 4 hour stretch - 4 gels, 4 waffles, 2 Liquid IV, 2 Scratch, e.g. We called them “set pieces,” though I’m not actually sure why. Scott came up with that and it stuck. “Yo, can you grab me a set piece?”
I pre-loaded one set piece in the front pockets of my vest to start the run, then every 4 hours, I would ask for a new set piece that I could use to reload, which was a great system to keep us moving and not have to get into the main pocket in my bag all the time. It was genius and it worked really well for all of us.
For food, here’s what I had:
12 Honey Stinger stroopwaffles
14 GU gels (various flavors, though the “salted” kinds tended to be better)
1 Clif bar
4 Chomps beef jerky sticks
A quart sized mix of trail mix (w/ M&Ms), cashews, pistachios, freeze dried apple chips, freeze dried bananas and candied walnuts
A bag of jelly beans and peach rings
Peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Peanut butter and honey sandwich
For breakfast the morning of I had:
2x oatmeal cups
Peanut butter on bread
Banana (and I don’t really like bananas)
For Hydration, here’s what I had:
10 Liquid IV packets
6 Scratch Labs packets
2 Tailwind packets
A baggie with about 20 Salt Stick electrolyte caps (these are great to have on you)
Takeaways:
When you train for an event like this, you try some of what you’re going to do on the day of, but since my longest training run was only 26.5 miles, which took me 4.5 hours, you don’t really get enough run time to go through the full range of items in your nutrition plan. For a training run of a few hours, it’s easy to stomach the sweet GU gels and waffles, and you really don’t need much else. That’s also about 4-6L of water, depending on where you train. When you get out there on the real run, however, and you’re going for 18 hours, what you’ll find is that your ability to stick to your nutrition plan is all over the place. I watched a bunch of videos of ultramarathons and saw people going through their aid stations eating all sorts of stuff and a couple things stand out to me in retrospect.
First, they always say “ultramarathons become eating contests,” which I understood pretty clearly and took to heart. I definitely packed more food than I needed, but the real wisdom in this statement is that it actually becomes hard to eat enough as you go for really long times because your body stops feeling hungry. This means that if you don’t force yourself to eat, you can get behind on fuel and your body will not be capable of the effort your’e trying to push. This is why people “bonk” in races. Their bodies are using carbohydrate as they are expending high levels of effort (higher zones = more carb consumption), and since your body can only store about 2,000 calories worth of carbohydrate, you eventually use that up if you don’t properly replenish.
Side note: It was an interesting thing to learn that the “mile 20 bonk” in marathons that I experienced personally, is really a simple reason. If you burn about 100 calories a mile (approx.), and your body has 2,000 calories with of carbs stored, then 20 miles of effort will consume that 2,000 calories worth of carbs and your body is left without the quick fuel it need to keep going and left to try to use other sources of energy, like fat stores.
Back to the point. In our group, we were pretty prepared for this and had a solid plan to eat every 30 minutes. My plan was to switch between gels and waffles on the 30 min cadence. And much more frequently someone would call out to the group to ensure we were getting water and electrolytes. The other thing we knew would be important, even though we had big breakfasts is that we need to eat real foods early, not just gels, to ensure our digestive systems stay awake as we get into this huge effort. There’s probably a very good scientific reason for this, but I heard it a couple times while researching, so I took it simply as good logical advice, plus we needed the calories anyway.
The second takeaway is that while this system of trying to get food every 30 minutes worked really well through most of the run, it became harder and harder to keep on a tight regimented schedule for two reasons. First, we got distracted and had stops along the way for water, and other than Evan, we didn’t have a tight 30 min timer going as the reminder. Your brain goes into a fog after a while and calculating time gets harder. The other reason it was tough was that eating gels and waffles became a real struggle. After about the first 25 miles, I didn’t want to see another gel for the rest of my life, and I almost got there with waffles too. What I learned is that having more real food in the mix on a regular cadence is really useful. This was the other thing I saw in all the ultramarathon videos at aid stations, was that they were eating such a variety of foods and it was never the same thing. They were always asking for and eating whatever sounded good to them at the time. I didn’t really notice this until after our run, but realize how key this is.
The foods that really hit the spot for me were the Chomps beef jerky sticks while we were taking our halfway rest at the North Kaibab trailhead. Also, the variety of the trail mix was great and even though all the M&Ms melted except one that I found after 17 hours, it was really nice to have all those different flavors of sweet and salty mixed together. The other thing that I would have packed way more of is peach rings. Those were AMAZING, later in the run and I only had a few. I should have brought two bags of those and left the jelly beans at home. And finally, sandwiches. I had one PB and honey and one PBJ, and what I realized is that PB and honey is not a good choice, but PBJ is amazing. The honey doesn’t soak the bread, so the PB and honey was dry and tough to get down. The jelly on the other hand, did a great job of soaking the bread and eating that one was magic after 45 miles.
And finally, the lemonade at the Phantom Ranch Canteen. The canteen is a small convenience store at the Phantom Ranch campground, which is just north of the river, about 10 miles north of Bright Angel trailhead. They also do breakfasts and dinners at the canteen by reservation for the campers there, and I’ll tell you that the smells coming from there as we approached were fantastic.
But we were there for the lemonade. They stop serving at 4pm, but we were lucky to roll in at just before 3:30pm grabbed some lemonade and took a seat. I also got a bag of potato chips which, while a bit tough to get down, were really good to get some salty carbs in me. The lemonade was amazing after 40 miles of heat and in hindsight, I should have gotten a second cup. I think it was like $7/ea. but honestly, I would have paid $20. Lesson: don’t skip the lemonade.
The key point in all of this is that nutrition is personal and what works for me might not work for you, but I would definitely consider the following:
Train with nutrition as close to what you think you’ll use out there as you can, especially for really long training sessions
Make sure you bring a variety of food, you never know what your body will crave while out there
Bring more food and more variety than you think. It’s better to have a little more than you need than too little, and you may run across other people that are in need, so it’s good to be able to help them