Avoid These Marathon Mistakes! Don't Hit The Wall

If you're fit, if you pace a race well, if it's a long race, the only other thing really that's going to go wrong probably is, you know, your fueling. I suppose the place to start, the most common mistake is not knowing how much energy you need to consume. So a lot of people go into a race with a very vague idea that they're going to eat when they feel hungry or they're going to, you know, eat a bit more or a bit less than they did another time, but they don't have a solid idea of the numbers required.

Before this episode starts, I have a quick favor to ask you. 75% of the people watching my YouTube channel are not subscribed. If you ever liked any of my videos, it would mean the world to me if you can actually hit that subscribe button. It really helps get the channel in front of more people. It gets our videos more often recommended, and also it helps book additional bigger guests on future episodes. Welcoming back on the podcast Andy Blow to talk more about nutrition and hydration. Andy is a sports scientist and he's the co-founder of Precision Fuel and Hydration. If I want to nerd out personally about optimizing my own nutrition and hydration for training and for racing, Andy is one of the first people that I call. Over the years, I've learned a lot from Andy and his team for my own races, such as the marathon distance, but also shorter and longer race distances. And I've seen his advice directly impact the performances of many other endurance athletes out there, including several close friends and family members. Andy was also a regular podium finisher in elite short course triathlon racing in his younger days. In this conversation, we get into the weeds about training and racing, nutrition and hydration. There's really a lot to take in over here, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I do. Andy, welcome to the Extra Mile Show. Glad you made it.

Yeah, in person this time.

Happy to be here in person. A few good beers in the jacuzzi last night. Yeah. Glad we're finally here recording again.

I'm just disappointed with the Californian weather this time around. But no, I know that's not your fault. I'm not going to hold you accountable.

Literally, the moment you landed, it's been raining. Well, we have had the most amount of rain probably in the last few decades over here. All of the local mountains are white. And so, but well, instead of the closed trails today, we'll be running road later after this.

Yeah, it's all good. I'm glad to be here.

Exactly. Let's take a deep dive, kind of a continuation of our last, our first recording. That was all about hydration. This time, a little bit more about the nutritional side of things. Can you discuss some of the common mistakes that you actually see athletes make when it comes down to fueling and some of the ways that they can prevent some of these mistakes?

Yeah, a lot of mistakes when it comes to long races and fueling, because I think if you're fit, if you pace a race well, if it's a long race, the only other thing really that's going to go wrong probably is, you know, your fueling. And so I suppose the place to start, a common mistake, the most common mistake, is not knowing how much energy you need to consume. So a lot of people go into race with a very vague idea that they're going to eat when they feel hungry, or they're going to, you know, they eat a bit more or a bit less than they did another time, but they don't have a solid idea of the numbers required.

It often depends obviously on the, the type of race distance as well, right? Let's say we take marathon distance as an example. What are some ballpark numbers? Because athletes, some of them finish a marathon in 3 hours, some of them finish it in 6 hours. So how does this— and, and for some people, like, both of them are at a high or medium intensity. Yeah. So can you give some ballpark numbers? Because I know you guys on your website have like a calculator of what is the recommended carbohydrate intake, what is the recommended calorie intake. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Yeah, we— and on this separation between carbs and calories to start with. We talk almost exclusively about carbs per hour, and there's a good reason for that, because not all calories are created equally. 1 gram of fat contains 9 calories, and 1 gram of carbohydrate or protein contains 4 calories. And we're all about, you know, the fuel that your body burns during higher intensity exercise is carbohydrate, you know, almost exclusively, or certainly predominantly. And so getting the right amount of carbohydrate— and you could take a lot of calories in if you ate block of butter in a marathon, but it's not going to help you. So I would say a good place to start is flipping the conversation with people into like grams of carbohydrate per hour, and that's the units that we, we typically prioritize. In terms of amounts, when you're doing anything which is less than about 2 hours, somewhere between kind of 30 and 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour is usually the right ballpark for most people. And that's because you've got a lot of stored carbohydrate in your muscles. It's called endogenous carbohydrate. It's stored in the form of glycogen, mainly in your muscles, but a little bit in your liver as well. And that will carry you most of the way. So what you're then doing is just, you're just topping that up and you're topping your blood sugar levels up so you don't get sort of brain fade as well. When you go beyond that 2-hour, certainly beyond the 3-hour mark, you can really eat into those glycogen stores to the point that your muscles won't function as well and you'll start, your performance will deteriorate. So then we start to see 60 grams an hour, maybe even 90. And for the really elite runners doing really long races with, um, really high intensity, 120 grams an hour. So that's the kind of— so broadly, 30 to 120 grams an hour, with most people being somewhere in the middle, and the number going up the longer and the harder the race.

It is a very common one that I see from our end, even in our running coaching program, the Personal Best Program, athletes going into a certain race thinking they're taking in enough calories. Yet when you take a closer look, how many calories or how many carbs did you really consume at that point? And even when I look at my own running performance, and we did an analysis that, uh, about that actually, when looking at the Chicago Marathon, I ran that in 2:52 and I ended up taking like, yeah, 90 grams of carbs or close to 90 grams of carbs per hour, which initially was higher than I thought that I would normally be able to handle because sometimes it's a fine line between I mean, how much can you intake? And like, you increase your risk of upset stomach as well. So it's like, it's not like you take 10 gels and that's a good thing per hour to do that, because at some point you can start feeling miserable. Yeah. So talk about that a little bit more.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think marathon running is a really interesting one to highlight because back in the day, in the, say, the, the, the '80s, the '90s, a lot of runners would run marathons on nothing. You know, and, and that was considered to be normal, and you should try and train so that you, you could resist taking any fuel in. Then obviously things started to progress, people started taking some carbohydrates in, and gradually that's gone up. And one of the reasons we were encouraged to take nothing, I think, was to minimize the risk of GI upset. It was considered that actually GI upset was a bigger risk than running out of energy. Maybe the tables have turned significantly now because research and practical experiences taught athletes that more fuel, you know, more fuel in that you can absorb and metabolize gives you more fuel for the working muscles, which means you can— you can sustain a faster pace for longer. So the, the game has shifted to learning to tolerate more carbohydrate, so gradually pushing your envelope on that. And like any physiological function, that needs training. You can't expect to go into a race and just take 3 gels an hour and feel fine with it. If you do, it's like you can't expect to go out on day 1 of marathon training and run at 6 minutes 30 per mile for 20 miles because you are not ready for it, you know. And it's the same with, with your carbohydrate intake. There'll be a tolerable amount you're comfortable taking now, and then the job in the last 8 or 10 weeks before the race is to— if that number is significantly below, say, 60 or 90 grams— is to nudge that up progressively.

Because when you look at what's actually happening in the body, it is the digestive system that is getting compromised once you're running at a higher intensity, right? Like blood from the gut is going to the working muscles to move yourself forward. And if you never train taking in any calories in training, then race day might surprise you. And this is where indeed. So how would an athlete in your point of view go about training this? Is that in long runs starting to take it or, or higher intensity or how, how would you go about that?

Yeah, the, the best place to train it is in your longest, hardest runs, because that does two things. That trains your gut to tolerate more. It also supports you putting out better performance in those runs, so you drive more stimulus for adaptation in your training. It probably does three things, actually. You also recover faster from those runs because you don't dig yourself such a hole of glycogen depletion. So longest and hardest runs, which typically, I guess, for a marathon runner would occur once every two or three weeks in your training cycle, would be the time to really press the pedal on. Increasing your carb intake. I would also say if you're a runner who is inexperienced with eating a lot of carbohydrate, then maybe taking some gels or some sports drinks on other selected medium to long runs so that you're doing it at least once or twice every single week. Certainly in the last, I would say, 8 to 10 weeks before a race, you want to be doing it at least once a week, if not twice a week, and pushing the envelope. And, and the things with that are like, start fueling early. You won't feel like eating a gel 20 minutes into your long run, but you need to. If you're going to train yourself to do it. You're going to have to figure out the logistics of carrying these things, so get working on that. You're going to need to get used to opening them and settling on what flavor you like and eating when you're breathing really hard. All of these things, I think, are things that runners in general are not particularly comfortable with, especially if they've started with shorter distances. And the attitude that needs to change is like, we all accept running a long way is going to get uncomfortable. We accept that our feet are going to hurt, our our calves are going to burn, our knees are going to hurt, all that sort of stuff. We're not yet, all of us, ready that the fact that our stomach might feel a bit funny, and we'd expect that somehow to be magically normal. It's not going to be. You're going to push it hard, so you need to push it a little bit in training as well.

I'm so glad you brought up the part of practicing how to open a gel.

Yeah.

And towards the end of last year, I was doing a few different training runs for like my new year, beginning of the year. I was planning to run like, uh, sub-3-hour marathon, and I want to be very familiar with everything. And so one of the things was what happens when your fingers are cold and you're still trying to open a gel with your teeth. It might sound strange, but it happens. Like mile 20, 32K of a race, at that point when it's cold and rainy out, you might start experiencing different scenarios than when you're 20 minutes into a run. So yeah, I think the more we can train with that and the more we become familiar with that, it's an important one.

Yeah, it's uncovering, it's the specificity. Like you say, the temperature matters. You know, when it's hot, you're going to find harder to absorb more calories than when it's cold because of that problem around less blood flow. Because when it's hot, you get— you sweat more, you lose more fluid, and you get more blood flow to the skin. So anything you can do to simulate all of those things— we, we had, um, this was not in running so much as in triathlon, but in, in 2022, towards the end of the year, it was the World 70.3 Ironman Championships. Really cold, unseasonably cold, colder than most of the athletes were used to racing for. And we see a lot of people underfueling because they couldn't open their gels or they didn't want to drink their drink because it was too cold. So, you know, you've got to think ahead for those scenarios. And a lot of marathons will have a stable climate. You know, this is going to be like in a, in a place where we know the weather. If you're racing a spring marathon in Europe, you could experience like close to freezing temperatures, or you could experience really quite warm and humid temperatures. So you've got to have a plan for— and you've got to have tested ideally in all those different scenarios so there's no surprises on the day.

What about type of foods? Like, I want to talk about ingredients for a little bit over here, because sometimes if you do an ultra-endurance event, you're going to go out there for 12 hours, 15 hours in the mountains. You often take walk breaks and you can, you can easier take in solid foods, whereas you're running a half marathon or you're running a marathon. At that point, you like want something that's easy digestible. Can you talk about how some of the energy gels have developed over time, and even what some of the ingredients in your guys' products are that it absorbs quickly and easily in the bloodstream?

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, because like you say, when you're doing longer events— so the general rule of thumb is that longer events mean lower intensities, which mean that you have the opportunity to eat more solid foods, so more real foods. And you'll probably crave some of those in a long event because it's like you're going to miss mealtimes in a long event, and you want to give your stomach something to hold on to. You want to chew something. Food, you've got to remember, is, um, well, it's obviously like a huge driver of morale, and morale gets challenged in a 15 or 20-hour event, you know. So eating something that's pleasant is part of the, the game when it comes to keeping you psychologically in, in good shape. When you're doing all the way down the other end of the spectrum, say a half or a marathon, where relatively it's a short— it's still an endurance event, but it's short— that's when liquid carbohydrates are going to be your, your friend, because they are the easiest to consume when you're breathing hard because you're not going to stop. Most people aren't going to stop running, they're going to keep drinking or eating on the move. They're very, very digestible. They move through your stomach into your gut and into your bloodstream really quickly if they're formulated well. And, and then between those two poles, you kind of start to move towards like semi-solids, which would be gels. So as races get a little bit longer, like marathons for sure, you won't see elite runners so much using gels. Like the elite guys, because they have the advantage of having a bottle, right? Yeah, and that's— that is a big advantage. They can have their own bottles. But, you know, a lot of, a lot of marathon runners will carry gels because they're a very concentrated form, and you can either take them down if it's cold. Some gels you can take with no water, some you might need to wash down with water. Then you get into kind of like gummies and chews and things like that, which is sort of more solid, but they might be good in, say, a 50K or 100K and that kind of thing. But the good thing about, say, sports drinks, gels, chews, they contain virtually nothing except simple carbohydrates, and they're and they go into your bloodstream really quickly. There's no fiber to process, there's no fats, there's no proteins to slow absorption or cause you stomach problems. It's just fuel. It's like high-octane fuel. The products that we make, for example, use a blend of two carbohydrates, which is quite common. We use glucose and fructose. And the reason for that is that as you try and take in higher amounts than 60 grams an hour, there is a sort of scientifically established benefit to having different types of carbs. If you imagine it is like, um, like the lanes in a supermarket checkout. When you go— when the glucose goes to one lane, and after, after about 60 grams an hour, that lane develops a queue because the, the receptors in the gut can no longer process carbohydrate through at that speed. So you need to open up a second line, and the second line in the gut for absorbing carbohydrate is the fructose line, and that can absorb theoretically sort of 30 or so grams of carbs an hour. So if you have a mixture of glucose and fructose in a drink or a gel, you can absorb more, more quickly. And so, and then you can hopefully oxidize that carbohydrate more quickly. So most good sports nutrition products will contain a simple mix of glucose and fructose.

There you go.

You might, you might see the glucose listed on a, on a product to say something like maltodextrin. And all maltodextrin is, is a long chain of glucose molecules packed together. So it is essentially glucose as far as the body is concerned, but it tastes a little bit less sweet.

There you go. Let's talk for a little bit about a common topic we hear, and that is cramping.

Yeah.

Can you talk to us more about how come some athletes experience cramping and what can be done to prevent this?

Yeah, if I, if I could give you a good definitive answer on that, I'd already be retired. I think I'd have made my millions because no one really knows. But that's not a very helpful answer. So it's been well studied But cramping is really elusive, partly because it is so difficult to study cramping. So we all know that cramps come at sort of weird times. They often occur in the field, in races, in hard training sessions, at times when athletes are under maximal stress load. And that makes it a really, really elusive topic to study in a lab because, A, it's difficult to reliably produce cramps, and B, it's almost like ethically difficult to put people in a situation because cramps are really painful, especially you get cramps in major muscle groups, that's muscle damage. And so you've got to— so over the years, there have been loads of theories about what causes muscle cramps. The big ones that people will know is to do with dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. There is— that was for a long time thought to be the cause of cramps. And the history of that really stems back to industrial medicine. So back in the early 1900s, you had a lot of manual laborers working on big construction projects, working in foundries and steel mills and mines and places where they were, it was very hot, they sweated, they did 8-hour shifts, and some, some of the guys— and it was usually, this was all guys— they went down with cramps. And there were some famous papers that were written around that time around— they tried to investigate this, they tried giving them more water to drink, it often didn't work. But when they gave them salted water, or they gave them beer with salt in it— of course, yeah, yeah, that, that helped a lot of people with the cramping. So it was, it was assumed that, you know, salting— the loss of salt, the loss of fluid had something to do with cramping. And the fact that it was sort of like— it was accepted as common wisdom, it was proven that that worked for— not for everyone, but for a lot of people. So for a long time, that was the theory. Then in the sort of more recent times, people started to flag the fact that actually, you know, when, when you take blood samples from people who are cramping if you can do that. When you— you don't always see electrolyte and fluid imbalances with people cramping. And sometimes you get a sprinter that cramps in a 100-meter race, or you might get cramps when you sit on a new bike for the first time, you haven't got it set up or something.

I've woken up in the middle of the night with a cramp in my calf or whatever.

Yeah, and that's probably got nothing to do with electrolyte imbalance, because unless you were in a horrible state of electrolyte imbalance or fluid loss before you started, then you've not been exercising for long enough for the that to be a factor. So that then caused a load of research looking into, okay, well, this is probably a neurological issue, you know, this is something to do with the nervous system and a misfiring. What could that be to do with? And there's loads of theories around fatigue. And as is often unfortunately the way with science, what we got is a big pendulum swing effect where it's like, it used to be dehydration and now that's all been proven wrong because it's something to do with neurological system. Yet we still, you know, I, I was an athlete who cramped a lot. I lose loads of fluid and salt in my sweat. When I put more fluid and salt back in, I stop cramping. So I have to recognize my own bias there a little bit, but I've come across enough athletes that— to realize that there is a significant proportion of people for whom electrolyte loss or imbalance is a trigger for cramping. The most up-to-date research, which is coming out of Texas with a guy called Dr. Kevin Miller, takes a very what I think is a nicely well-rounded approach at looking at cramping. And he's got this multifactorial model which he published in 2022, which looks at, you know, like 12 or 15 different things that could contribute to cramping. Electrolyte and fluid imbalance is in there, neurological issues are in there, fatigue is in there, and there's loads of others. And his suggestion is that everyone has a different personal recipe for cramping. So my recipe, my contain a lot of elements of fuel and electrolyte imbalance. Other people's might be more to do with fatigue or whatever. And so that's the direction in which the understanding is, is going. But for what it's worth, and I have to, as I say, I have to recognize my own biases and I have to put them out there, you know, I run a company that sells electrolyte products, but I do that because I was a big believer in the fact that these helped me so much by understanding it that it was worth doing. And I do think that for a lot of endurance athletes, if your cramps happen in heat, if they happen when you've been sweating for a long time, and if they happen across multiple body parts, then often that's a big red flag that your fluid and electrolyte balance is a significant contributing factor. And playing around with your sodium and fluid intake to make sure you're optimizing it is a good way to— it's a good, cheap, and safe way to figure out if that's going to help.

Sometimes when I look at athletes coming through, through like the finish line I see some of them having a lot of salt marks all over their shirt. If they're wearing a black shirt, you might start seeing, like, entire lines of, of sweat, like, in the face dried up, whereas others don't have that that much. So that, that's like a topic we can talk about more.

Yeah.

As far as for, like, the sweat rates and any of those kind of things, can you high-level talk through, like, the sweat differences between athletes? And, like, I'm really excited today. We're gonna go into the lab and actually I get sweat tested?

Yeah, we're going to test your sweat today. So the physiology of sweating— sweat comes from your blood plasma, and your blood plasma is very salty, 3,600 milligrams of sodium in every liter of sweat. Now that doesn't mean you lose 3,600 milligrams per liter of sodium in your sweat, because your sweat glands reclaim some of that sodium, but different people reclaim different amounts. So I learned about this the hard way as an athlete because I'm a salty sweater. So I'm one of the guys that you just described with the salt rings, and I'll lose about 1,800 milligrams of sodium in a liter of sweat. We see some athletes losing 200 milligrams per liter, you know, and the average is about 8 or 9, about 900 or 1,000 milligrams per liter. So somewhere— so I'm sort of double average. The test we'll do on you today will tell us roughly where you sit on that spectrum, and that's a really important number to understand if you're doing long hot races because it enables you to start to calibrate the amount of sodium you might need to take in. But the other factor you need to know as well is your sweat rate, because obviously you could have really concentrated salty sweat, but if you don't sweat much, your net salt and fluid losses are going to be low. Mine— I'm— I've got the unfortunate distinction of having high sweat sodium and a really high sweat rate. So this is why it— for me, racing in Kona or somewhere like that was brutal, because I was just losing so much body fluid and so much salt I couldn't keep up with the losses. And we test athletes, we've tested tested thousands, tens of thousands of athletes now, and we've seen this broad range in sweat sodium between 200 and over 2,000 milligrams a liter. And the sweat rate is even broader. It's like, you know, a high sweat rate for some people can be as little as 500 milliliters, or about 16 ounces an hour. On the higher end, we've seen athletes using 3 or 4 liters per hour, which is like— I don't even know what that is in ounces.

Are those the, the taller people?

The— sometimes, but not always. Like, we work with an Aussie triathlete, um, who is probably shorter than me. I'm 5'9", he's probably like 5'8", 5'7", like not a big guy, but he sweats 2.5, 3 liters an hour easily.

That is insane.

Yeah, yeah.

And he—

we have a case study from him on our website. We have multiple case studies from him because he needs to drink an insane amount of fluid and salt when he does an Ironman to stay hydrated. So he will drink 1.5 liters an hour hour with about 2,000 milligrams of sodium per liter, which is an insane amount of fluid and sodium. But if he doesn't do that, he ends up in the medical tent, and, and he's learned the hard way on that. So that doesn't mean that more fluid and more salt is good for everyone, but it does mean that understanding your individual losses becomes increasingly important as you progress in your running towards longer and hotter events. Like, it doesn't really matter over a half marathon so much. You, you're not out there long enough to create such a big fluid deficit. Even if, even if I'm a big heavy salty sweater, I used to do half marathons on nil by mouth basically, or close to it. I think nowadays if I was coming at it from an angle with a little bit more knowledge, I'd potentially take some carbs during a half marathon, a little bit, but I still don't feel like I would need to rehydrate if I went into it well hydrated. Totally different story when you get to marathon or ultra though, especially in the heat. And that's when it becomes a race to train your stomach as much as it does your legs.

Yeah, that's, that's so many different directions we can take this in. One part that I find eye-opening to see right now is that more and more doctors are starting to talk about electrolyte deficiency too. There's some Variety of doctors with quite some Instagram followings too. I see every, every 1 out of 10 posts, they're starting to talk about electrolyte and magnesium deficiencies or whatnot. Can you talk through some of the, what are some of the symptoms? Because it's not just for athletic performance, even, even during the day for sleep. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

So electrolytes are minerals that are dissolved in your body's fluids and they carry an electrical charge. So you've got things like sodium, which we've talked about, potassium, magnesium, calcium, They, they're in different quantities in the body and they perform different roles. So calcium is very involved with muscular contractions. Sodium and potassium are to do with fluid balance outside the cells and inside the cells, cellular communication, nerve impulses. So they're critical. So if your electrolytes, any one or all of them, get put out of whack by dilution, if you drink too much plain water, or by sweating or diarrhea and you lose a lot of them, then your fundamentally your homeostatic balance is out of whack, and that then just leads to a cascade of very general problems. You know, so you certainly will feel cognitive impairment and just feel lousy. You might get muscular spasms and weakness. You might just feel lethargic. And, and so it's kind of— I guess the best word to describe it would be like a feeling of malaise and low energy and just it's, it's not necessarily— there will be specific symptoms related to specific electrolyte deficiencies. So if you're low in potassium, we've seen it with athletes in long races who've become what's called hypokalemic, uh, and they get tingling hands. And again, you can even have heart arrhythmias with electrolyte, you know, potassium imbalances. Sodium deficit, you definitely feel foggy-headed and, you know, like thirsty, but you can't quench your thirst with water. Salt tastes fantastic. So there's all these symptoms, and I I think there's a whole load of reasons why different people suffer with— might suffer with electrolyte imbalances, but the biggest one with athletes usually has got to do with not in some way meeting their sweat losses and then not recovering properly after big training sessions.

So well said. My dad, he is quite a sweater. I don't know if he's a salty sweater, I assume he is, but he experienced quite a few migraines, and we noticed sometimes that was also if he would come visit from Amsterdam here in Los Angeles, and I'm used to the heat. He's not.

Yeah.

We'd go to the local mountains for a hike for a few hours, and all of a sudden the next day you would notice having a migraine. Or even myself after some harder workouts, longer workouts, when I wasn't paying much attention to it, very often I had the following day a headache.

Yeah.

In the morning, I often had a Monday morning headache. I'm like, this is odd.

And it wasn't until I started playing around with electrolytes more I was like, "Ah, actually having to take on purpose more electrolytes in and that all of a sudden went away." Yeah, we've had that common feedback to our athlete support team is that if people balance their electrolytes better with some electrolytes before or during or after, whatever is appropriate before a hard training session, headaches can go away, which is, you know, it's not always the way, it's not foolproof, but if it's electrolyte and fluid deficiency that's causing it, then yeah, that's going solve the problem immediately.

So we'll talk more about the separate tests you can get done, like the actual lab test and with the machines that you guys have developed. We'll talk more about that later. But for anyone listening, if they would like to do like a test to get a— your online test to get an idea of what is their sweat rate.

Yeah, there's two things to do there really. We have an online test, which is probably the second part of the process really. That, that is a thing where you can put some data in about yourself and it will give you a recommendation on, on how much fluid and electrolyte you might need for a given activity in given environmental conditions. One of the really useful inputs to put into that— you can estimate your sweat rate by just saying I have a low sweat rate or a moderate or high or very high, but it's actually really quite easy for you to put an objective number in there by measuring your sweat rate. So if you weigh yourself before a training session session, hopefully naked, so that you've got no weight of the clothes because they will absorb sweat. And, and then you weigh yourself afterwards, having again taken your clothes off, towel down. The difference in those two weights, if you haven't drunk anything in that session, is going to be how much sweat you've lost. And we have a spreadsheet that you can download from our website. So if you do drink some stuff or whatever, if you're doing a long session, you can punch all the numbers in, it will spit out a sweat rate for you. And so working out your own sweat rate and seeing what that looks like at different intensities in different conditions— I would say if you can do, you know, 6, 8, 10 sweat tests in a variety of conditions, different durations of activity, different intensities, whatever, then you get a really good idea of what your sweat rate is. And then you can use our online tools more effectively to then give you an idea of how much fluid, how much sodium you might want to replace. Race.

That is good, and I'll make sure to link to that down in the, in the video here too. So in different weather conditions, we sometimes notice that you're sweating more, you might need to hydrate more.

Yeah.

What about actual nutritional intake? Does that change, like, when you run a race or you, you ride in the cold versus in a much hotter, humid climate?

Yeah, Yeah, so I suppose the short answer is that your nutrition intake, if we define that as the amount of fuel that you need, grams of carbohydrate per hour, that isn't going to vary very much at all in different weather conditions. It doesn't mean that the challenges don't change, but if you need 90 grams of carb an hour for the activity that you're doing in temperate conditions, you're going to need about 90 grams of carbs in cold conditions, and you're going to need about 90 grams of carbs in hot and humid conditions. Conditions. The challenge— the difference is that it's probably— there's a, there's a sort of a window of temperature in the middle which you're used to. So that might be lower for some people if you live in a cold place, or higher for others if you live in a warm place. But there's going to be a comfort zone where eating and drinking is going to feel easy because you're just used to it and you're not under undue stress from that environment. Below a certain temperature, there's loads of practical considerations that come in, like some foods that you might have used. I, I I made a massive mistake in one race once. I was using Power Bars, and you remember the Power Bars? Like, they were like, uh, yeah, they, they were good if you needed to take a filling out of one of your teeth or something. And I, I was using them and it was cold and they went so hard that I couldn't chew them. You know, you literally— I could not eat them, they were so hard. So there are like practical challenges you need to worry about. That's why I like using liquids and gels in the cold, because they tend to be unaffected by temperature, really. You'll also maybe like, if you've got to take gloves off to eat, if you, if you can't, you're fumbling to open packets, you might just not feel like eating as much. But you have to be disciplined and like get the calories in because that's what's going to fuel your activity. So having a strategy where you've kind of can cope with the cold conditions is a really good idea. If you don't like eating in really cold conditions, make a more concentrated sports drink because you don't need as much liquid, you don't need as much electrolyte probably, but you do need the carbs. So, you know, double mix your carbohydrate and can try that in training and see how you get on. Go all the way up to— I think the most challenging conditions personally are hot and humid. That's when you're— yeah, that's when you feel the lousiest. And again, you can feel nauseated by eating more. You're going to have to drink a high volume of fluid because you're losing so much sweat. You're going to need plenty of sodium with that. And alongside that, it can be tempting to drink a lot more carbohydrate drinks or whatever, but I would say that's where you need to want to separate out and start to eat more calories in the forms of gels or chews or whatever, because the volume of liquid is so high. If you just put liquid carbs in, you risk overwhelming the gut and making yourself feel sick. So having something a little bit more solid, if you can do it in those conditions, is a really good idea. But fundamentally, do your numbers change? Not dramatically.

That's good to know. One, like, going back, um, to the cold point you made earlier, I've had it in cold race conditions and cold training runs where some gels from some companies tend to become really hard.

Yes.

Kind of similar thing where your fluid gels that is in warm conditions, very soft, becomes a chew.

Yes.

And if you're not familiar with that, it becomes very challenging indeed. And the one part I like about your guys' gel, so I, I've been using Precision Hydration gels for the past 18 or like 12 months. How long have you guys been doing that now?

Yeah, probably a year and a half.

Yeah. Cause you sent me some initial samples. I tested them. I provided some feedback and like, I've been using that since you guys launched it pretty much. The part that I like there a lot is that it is liquid, that you don't need it with an aid station.

Yeah.

Because with some of them, if you have to time it always around an aid station, you have to time it every, whatever, 2 miles, 3K, or some of them are even further apart. Whereas now you can take the gel and easily down it without having any water access.

Excess. Yeah.

And like, that made a big difference for me there too.

Like, yeah, I agree. I use them on my long runs back in the UK, often without a drink. And they're not technically actually not a liquid, they're a— they are a jelly. They're kind of set. So we use pectin to semi-set the gel, and that stops it being too syrupy and stops it being too sticky. So that's, uh, that's a byproduct of the, the way that we make them. But it was one that we flagged in testing as being really helpful. It was like, if you can create a gel which you don't need a lot of liquid with— because some gels are very much like a sticky paste, or some are like a syrup, and they either burn on the way down, you need to wash them away, or they just get clagged up in your mouth. And yeah, hopefully we've found a sweet spot in the middle where it's, it's digestible and also no flavor in it. Yeah, it's just clear, it's got no additional stuff in there. So we, we have a lot of people tell us it tastes like banana, or it tastes like, uh, honey, or it tastes like— but I can assure you it's got flavor in it at all. It's what your brain tells you. It's just sweet.

That's the best though. I feel like sometimes you can go overboard with these flavors and I think especially once you're a few gels in, like you want as little like taste and flavor to it. Yeah. The other part that I've been experimenting with is, and it actually worked out really well, I was always trying to find the right way to carry salt pills while running and being able to take in enough electrolytes.

Electrolytes.

And so for my rule of thumb, it was I would take one salt pill an hour. Like if I, if I well prehydrate with electrolytes, like evening before, morning of, then on race day, about once an hour, if it's a cold temperature, I would take a salt pill.

Yeah.

And then when it's a hot, hot race, I would take it twice an hour. What I actually ended up starting to do was just tape one salt pill with a little piece of paint tape to every single gel.

Yeah.

And then when I would get the gel out, like, I would always be able to find one that had a salt pill on it.

Yeah.

I would decide, do I need a salt pill right now or not? Do I want it? And that, that made a big difference for me of having easy accessible, because I've been there again, like cold fingers trying to fumble.

Yeah, yeah.

Trying to get your salt pill out of the little bag or it getting wet or getting all over it.

So yeah, no, that's, that's actually a really good idea. That's not one I've heard before as well. I've heard a lot of different tactics, but I'm going to, I'm going to remember that one. The other The other thing that we do as well with the salt pills that we make, they come in— they're called electrolyte capsules. They come in a blister pack, you know, like with a foil backing. So the other thing you can do is snip a series, and then you just have to pop them out and they stay dry. Because obviously the problem with a lot of salt capsules is you sweat on them or it rains, they just dissolve and you get a mushy mess of salt in your pocket.

Exactly, exactly. Tell me more about side aches that runners sometimes experience. Like in particular runners in the earlier stages of the running journey. Like sometimes I notice it when I run with my kids. Sometimes I notice it when I'm running with some people who are just getting into running, but even sometimes experienced runners experience like some discomfort. Like what is actually causing that and what are some of the things you can do to prevent that?

Yeah, it's an area that's not been studied. It's quite common and it's not been studied as much as you might think. It should be considering how common it is. So I think I've seen a statistic where it's somewhere between like 15 and 25% of runners will report side stitches in races if they do a survey, and that's a high percentage of people struggling with something. Um, the, the honest answer is I don't think there's one cause, and, and I think a lot of issues get lumped into one. So breaking it down, like, we know that a lot of people have this association between eating eating, drinking too soon before exercise, and that causing some abdominal discomfort. Whether that is a true stitch or a side pain, or whether that's just gastrointestinal upset of some sort, is hard to say. But I definitely think there's an association with people eating and drinking and not giving themselves enough time. Now, some people— I'm someone who can eat just before I go for a run. I've never had a problem with it particularly. I know that other people are really sensitive to it, and they, they need to give themselves longer time. So I think the obvious— getting the obvious one out the way first of all, it's like if you, you have to experiment with the time that you fuel and hydrate before exercise to try and minimize the risk of it. Outside of that though, I think that's kind of when you get like more of a stomach pain. There's definitely what I would describe as more of a muscular or ligament type pain, which can be very sharp and stabbing. And there's lots of different theories about what that might be. One big ones is that it might be to do with the mechanical movement and stress. Because running— where you get a lot of stitches in running, you don't necessarily get them in swimming or cycling so much. And also, one of the theories is that the mechanical bouncing and you, you're putting stress on the ligaments.

I hadn't even thought of that one.

Yeah, because, because we— a lot of people will ride bikes just as high intensity for just as long a period of time or longer and not ever get it. So is there something in the movement? Like, it seems, it seems logical. So there's theories around that. There's also theories around low blood flow to the musculature of the diaphragm and the, the intercostal muscles. And, and again, that all kind of could— that all feels like it could be plausible. Unpicking what your particular problem with it is requires a little bit more investigation, I think. And your point about less experienced runners experiencing this problem more is almost certainly just due to specificity of training. You know, certainly when you're your musculature is not used to breathing really hard for an extended period of time and suffering this bouncing up and down. So maybe that's just the weak link for—

I think the timing one you mentioned is a big one of this as well. And sometimes this comes up in our running coaching program where we analyze like, all right, what is it that you have done before your run, during your run, after your run? And we often talk about the importance of journaling and surely starting to write down what did you eat the night before, what did you eat the morning of? What did you eat? Like, how far in advance did you eat? What did you eat as well?

Yeah. Look for trends.

Exactly. Because once again, even if you take, maybe you take protein and fats and it might respond different than when you take like a bowl of oats or, and so starting to write some of that down. Yeah. I think another big one that I'm noticing is, so that is in training, but then even on race day, sometimes people like have to wake up 3 hours before to eat.

Yeah.

But I've also seen the mistake being made, for example, in the Boston Marathon or the, or the New York Marathon where you have to travel for a long time to the start line and you don't start until a little bit later.

Yeah.

That people start to get hungry again. Yeah. And then last minute start to have to eat more again before they start the race. So there's, there's a lot to it there. Yeah.

I think if you're going to eat before the race, you know, closer to it, then it's more about sports drinks, energy gels, kind of really easily digestible stuff, low mass, you know, and high, high carbohydrates. Um, yeah, and it— and I guess the— yeah, well, your point about journaling is a huge one, and that, that for me goes beyond Stitch and things like that, because if you do that, that is this— that is this— that is the key to understanding how your body responds to all of these different things. So I think that's a really good point. We've actually got a blog on our website all about side stitches, and it talks about some of the research and things. So we've touched on a few of those things, but if you're able to link to that, then yeah, people can read a little bit more on there. I would say it's one of those things, even now, isn't it? I don't get side stitches very often at all, but occasionally you do. And it's just the thing people want to know is like, if it happens, like, what am I going to do about it? And I would say that almost certainly the only thing that you can is like slow your pace for a short while, relax your breathing. Some people find that lifting their arms and stretching the sides a little bit helps. And stay calm, relax, you know, and it will probably pass. Like, it doesn't always, and that can be annoying, but there's not a lot of other remedial action you can take when it's happening. You've just got to chill. And I think the anxiety and stress of racing, the You know, that's why I say you— I think calming down is not a bad thing. It's difficult to do in the heat of the moment, but if you can think to yourself, like, take some deep breaths, chill out, walk a little bit, or slow the pace right down, elevate your arms, and just sort of work your way through it. Stay positive. You know, you might be— yeah, you're going to lose time for sure, but you can minimize that and you don't have to give up. That's a big thing.

That is so well said, that part right there. To add to that sometimes when we are at the later stages of a race and we tense up, we're tight, we notice our breathing might become a little bit more shallow, the shoulders start going up, and indeed just telling yourself, like, instead of pushing harder, actually relax more, and then everything starts to calm down, the body, like the whole sympathetic nervous system relaxes more and you're actually able to move faster forward.

In long races especially, you can have literally miraculous turnarounds. I've had them in, in long races. Oh yeah, yeah. I've been at the end of the bike section of an Ironman ready to give up and then literally ran my fastest Ironman marathon because I, I honestly— I don't mind admitting this— I ran out of the transition to start the run only because there's friends and family there cheering you on and you don't feel like you cannot give up in front of those people, I thought, I'll get a mile down the road and see, you know, and then I'll be out of here. And then a mile down the road, I actually started to feel a bit better. And then 7 miles in, I'm like passing loads of people. And but by the end, I've had the best Ironman marathon ever. So never, never— it's not over till it's over.

So glad you brought that up. And I've had similar experiences where I absolutely thought I can no longer continue, and somehow you're able to look at what can I control, what are those things that I can do, like you were talking about, like, take in— like, maybe drink a little bit of water, slow down that pace, focus on the breathing. If needed, sometimes take in some calories.

Yeah.

And then at that point, all of a sudden, like, sometimes your brain just needs some more energy too.

Yeah.

And like, the brain plays a big role in your determination of whether you're going to succeed or not. And if you can just fuel the brain again— yeah, that's a, that's a big one. Those are fun though. Like, once you have gone over the hill and like you lies, like, um, like you're, you're down and I don't know how this is going to end, and all of a sudden you get that second wind again, or even a third wind if it's like a longer race. Like, that's fantastic.

I always— this is getting into the more philosophical side of things, but I always feel like a really long race is, is a very good metaphor for how your life often plays out. Like, when it's really, really good, it's great, and it— but it's never going to stay really, really good the whole time. And when you get to like the rock bottom, when you feel really, really bad, it's probably not going to be any any worse, and the chances are it's going to get better again. And you have to learn to, like, ride that out. And I think for shorter races, it's often a bit more— the margins are a bit tighter. And, you know, if you have a bad 5K, at 3K, if you're starting to die, you know, it could be that you're just in for a bad last 2K. That's, that's the nature of it. But long stuff, you know, certainly, like, stay positive, relax, calm down, and, like, amazing things happen. Especially because in a long race, 95% of your competitors will slow down horrifically towards the end. So if you can be the phoenix from the ashes and come through, then you're going to do well.

The amount of energy you get when you have still some gas left in the tank, you're able to pick up the pace, or at least not drop off the pace, but let's stand alone, even run fast towards the finish. Just passing people alone will give you energy.

Around you. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I raced a long swim-run race last year with a— and it's a pairs race that you race with a partner. The guy that invited me to race with him is a very experienced endurance athlete, and we both are in our mid-40s now, so past, definitely past our prime. We've both got young families, running businesses. So on paper, there was no way we should have done particularly well in the race. And both of us have done this race numerous times. The first time I did it was mid-30s. And objectively, I've gone into that race way fitter before, but both of us started steadily in this event. We kept— stayed positive. We ate and drank a lot. We didn't let anything faze us. We were a good comp— we were a good psychological complement to each other, and we smashed through and did our best ever time on the, on the thing. And I wholly put that down to the psychological and attitudinal side that we took into that race, dealing with the adversity of like— it wasn't wasn't side stitches in that race, it was like foot blisters and things like that. But you just, you learn to roll with it. And I wish that, like a lot of athletes, if I could go back and tell my 25-year-old self and have his horsepower and my attitude now, maybe I'd have done it a little bit better.

Yeah, the, the experience part and the mental component there plays a big role. And this is where we often do see athletes in the 40s, 50s, 60s or even 70s run some of their best times because all of a sudden they go about it differently.

Yeah, absolutely. If you— especially if you're a late starter, you've got a lot of headroom to improve. If you're taking it and, and say on the nutrition and hydration side, you've got a lot to learn. And if you can learn that relatively in a, in a short space of time and then apply it over a lot of races, that's a big advantage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, Andy, can you tell us a little bit more about the hydration difference between men and women, and also the nutritional difference between men and women?

Yeah, that's one we get asked quite a lot because there are some assumptions that things might be significantly different. And honestly, it's— there might be some small differences, especially say with, uh, women and the menstrual cycle. They have— their hormonal balance affects fluid and salt balance in the body a little bit, and there are papers that have been written about this. And we actually dissected that in a very detail blog to have a look at. And the summary of all of that was that really, whilst there might be some small differences, the biggest differences come from the factors that would affect both men and women. So in other words, like the total sweat losses you have, for instance, for hydration. So although the highest sweating men, the men who sweat the most and lose the most fluid and salt, sweat more than the highest sweating women, it's not like all men sweat more than all women. It's a bit like height, you know, the tallest men tend to be taller than the tallest women, but you go in the middle of the curve and you've got some women that are taller than men and vice versa. So what I'm trying to say with all of that is that really fluid balance is a function with athletes mainly of sweat losses, and sweat losses are going to be as a trend higher in men, especially bigger men, than women. But if you're, if you're a female athlete that is, that has a high sweat rate and lose a lot of salt, you should still be replacing a lot in the same way that a man losing the same amounts would. If I looked at a spreadsheet of data which didn't tell me the gender of someone and told me their sweat heart rate and sodium loss, I could give them an idea of what they need to drink based on that information alone. I don't need to know if that's a man or a woman's data, if that all makes sense. Yeah, that does.

What about the nutritional side of things? Calorie intake, carbohydrate intake?

Kind of similar, I think, in the sense that, you know, the bigger men have bigger muscle mass and produce more power and energy and use more energy than the bigger women. But when we look at our case studies, say for endurance athletes, men and women doing exactly the same events, women are taking very similar amounts of carbohydrate to men. Even like some— and some of the faster, smaller female elite athletes are taking more carbohydrate an hour than some of the mid-pack large guys because they're training that and they can get a competitive advantage from taking more in. So as a general rule, there's a bit of a skewing towards like bigger, faster athletes doing longer events taking more carbs in. But the— and, and if you— and I think if you took the averages at the moment, there is a small difference, a small significant difference that men on average will take a bit more carbohydrate per hour than women. But I don't think it's that big of a difference. Again, you've got to look at energy output, you've got to look at how much you can tolerate and really try to maximize that for you as an individual.

Well said. You guys have so many well-written articles on your website, like I think last time I checked, there were more than 100 on there on the topics of nutrition and hydration, and I'll make sure to link to that. Where can people find out more about you guys?

The best place to start is precisionfuelandhydration.com, the website. The knowledge hub is where all of our blogs are. We've obviously got case studies on there under the athlete pages, the shop if people want to browse and have a look at the products. We're also on all the usual social medias, you know, like Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. We post information on there, so we're easy to find by by searching for Precision Fuel and Hydration. And honestly, we're a small team, but we're very engaged with people that want to talk to us. So you can book free video calls with the team, you can contact us. The easiest way is just hello@precisionfuelandhydration.com via email, or fill in a contact form on the site, and we'd love to talk to you.

Some of our ambassadors from PATH projects have actually reached out to you guys and have set up some of those consulting calls too. And you guys really took the time like jumped on a phone call, went through their situation, and did a personalized recommendation on what would be ideal for them.

Yeah, yeah, we're passionate about that because that's the missing link in sports nutrition. There are a load of great products out there, none of them are magic despite what people will tell you. It's how you use them in your situation. It's getting the right amount of carbs, fluid, and salt into your body at the right time, and that's what we want to help athletes to understand.

That was spot on. In closing over here, do you have any last thoughts thoughts, any recommendations for athletes looking to become a stronger, healthier, happier athlete?

I'm going to pick up on one thing that you said and re-emphasize it, which is journaling, recording the data. Not enough athletes do that. Loads of us do our run, upload it to Strava, we get whatever data the watch throws out. We don't record what we ate, what we drank, how we felt, all that kind of stuff. Simply going through that process, if you're trying to learn and iterate iterate is incredibly powerful. Because yeah, you've got to do supporting reading, you can have a consultancy call with us and figure out your calorie, your carb, and your fluid, and your salt requirements. If you don't record that and then map it against how that makes you feel and perform, you are going to struggle to iterate going forward. So I think, you know, that is the best tip.

That is very well said. And it's interesting because it has been brought up by Eliud Kipchoge, by Kilian Jornet, by, by many different different podcast athletes, probably half the amount of athletes that I've spoken to in one way or another mentioned to, to us that that is a powerful tool that just seems to really work, seems to dial in all of the different aspects of training.

Oh yeah, I, I think it, I think it does two things. There's the physical record that you can go back through, and it's the mindfulness of them making you think about what you're, what you're doing in that situation. Otherwise you do it in a mindless way and you can't remember Absolutely.

Andy, thank you so much. And let's go over to Lauren's place and let's start getting a sweat test going.

Yeah, excited to get that underway. Definitely.

More about that soon. Thank you for watching. Andy was kind enough to provide a 10% discount code for the Extramile community on all Precision Fuel and Hydration products. That is code FLO10. I've been training and racing racing with their gels with caffeine and without caffeine for a while now. Even in the Chicago Marathon 2022, I used their product, and I'll make sure to link to the case study below too that actually has a full breakdown of what I exactly consumed before and during the race there. This year I will be racing the Berlin Marathon. It's going to be a group shakeout run for that, so make to keep an eye out on the announcements for that. And also in November, I'm going to be running the Revel Marathon in Big Bear, and I'm going to be using these same Precision Fuel and Hydration gels as well over there. The 10% discount code is available at visit.pfandh.com/flow10. That is visit www.pfandh.com/flow10. And links to all of the different resources, the fueling calculator, the Chicago Marathon case study, and several of these other tools mentioned can be found in the description below. Thanks so much for watching and have fun out there on your runs. Bye now!