Don't expect success. Prepare for it.
Last week I shared my thoughts on food planning and food shopping. I really do thrive on eating well. Turning all that gorgeous fresh produce into the meals you have planned takes effort. Whether you enjoy making that effort or not will probably impact upon how often you choose to cook each week.
Typically, Fiona and I cook about four times a week and try to make four to six portions so that we have enough for that meal, along with lunch or dinner for the next day and maybe a couple of portions that can go in the freezer. We’re lucky in that we eat the same meals and share the workload. I know that not everybody is in the same boat and some families have to cater for different diets and tastes at each meal, adding to the effort required.
Food for the week:
There are a few tasks that tend to happen every evening after work in our house: the making of smoothies or fruit salad.
We both drink green smoothies most days and we have a stash of glass bottles that we reuse. Ideally you make these fresh, for immediate consumption, but we have found that making them the night before works best for us. This is food prep that needs to happen each day.
For my fruit salad I usually go for a mix of mango, pineapple, melon, blueberries and pomegranate. If all I have is melon, that will do. I top it with a mix of seeds and sometimes unsweetened coconut yogurt.
At the moment, we drink celery juice each morning and we make that fresh.
If you like to have a sweet treat, the best route you can take is to make something yourself. Of course, there are a lot of bars out there, particularly those marketed at active people, and more and more I see snacks that are vegan, gluten-free and sugar-free. However, a lot of packaged goods contain more sugar and more added fats than if you make them yourself. Fiona makes these amazing chocolate caramel squares and if we cut them up and keep them in the freezer they can last a few days (out of sight, out of mind!).
For speed, you can’t beat eating a piece of fruit. Bananas, known as nature’s power bar, are packed with carbohydrates and potassium, which supports nerve and muscle function. Carbs are fuel for our body and brain, and they account for 90% of banana calories. I tend to go for no-cook, quick and easy savoury snacks: slices of apple with peanut butter; corn cakes or rice cakes with hummus or peanut butter; or pea and avocado smash on oat cakes.
Lunches are probably my most important meal as I tend to eat my main meal at lunchtime. I often run in the evening straight after work so I rely on lunch to fuel me and make me feel strong. The better I eat at lunch, the better I am likely to feel by the following weekend.
My evening meal tends to be something simple like soup and brown bread or brown pasta with pesto stirred through. I find these easier to digest and tend to sleep better when I eat lighter food last thing at night.
Food for Running:
I highly recommend that you also start to prepare specific food for your weekly long run. Race day is not the time to find out that Scotch eggs don’t agree with you. (I’m not sure who thought that a cooked egg, surrounded by a layer of sausage meat, coated in breadcrumbs and then deep fried, was the food of champions, but I have been offered them on two separate occasions in the middle of a race, so I’m guessing they work for some runners.) Use your long runs to try out a variety of foods to see how they work while you run.
On the morning of a long run I eat porridge early. Very early. Typically, if I am going to run at 8 a.m., I get up at 6 a.m. to eat porridge and hop back into bed. It gives my body time to start digesting the oats and slow-releasing those carbs that will fuel the miles. Once my long runs exceed two hours I add food into the training. I either carry it, leave it in the car and run past it, or loop past my house.
After a lot of trial and error, mostly on race days, I made a conscious decision that during my training for the Connemara 100 race I would eat during all of my long runs and figure it out once and for all.
How many calories?
Figuring out what works best for you will stand to you on race day. You’re aiming to consume somewhere between 200 and 350 calories an hour. Your body won’t tolerate much more than that over a long period of time as you bounce up and down. What form those calories take is key. Only practice will determine what works best for you. Unfortunately, you’ll be burning a lot more than that, anything from 400 to 600 calories per hour depending on a number of factors including your metabolism and the pace you are running at. So, yes, you will have a calorie deficit by the end of the race but you can help to keep ‘bonking’ at bay by topping up your calories from early in the run with foods that sustain you.
In Phil Maffetone’s The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing I learnt about how you can use heart-rate training to help burn fat so that you are not solely reliant on carbohydrates when you run. If your interest in endurance running is focused on your health, as mine is, I would recommend picking up a copy of his book. A lot of ultra-runners fuel themselves, almost exclusively, on sports drinks, gels and bars. I tried that for a while in the early days but they didn’t agree with me. When I found that I could eat whole foods, nutritious homemade snacks like soup or dolmades, and run without an upset stomach, I chose that route. Find what works for you and test it during your training.
*Disclosure: The link to the recommended book in this post is an affiliate link. Should you choose to purchase using this link, at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.