Avoid These Mistakes, Don't Hit The Wall!

Hello, hello, this is Floris Gierman with my friend Andy Blow from Precision Fuel and Hydration. All right, Andy, I'm good, mate. How are you doing? Good. Andy has been on the podcast twice already. The last episode had more than 100,000 views. I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes as well. In today's conversation, we're going to cover 3 different topics. We're going to go over common mistakes around nutrition and fueling for endurance athletes. We're going to dial in how to find the right nutrition and calorie intake and hydration intake for endurance athletes, and also using caffeine as a potential benefit in some of your training. So, uh, yeah, let's go for a little run, Andy, and have a chat.

Let's do it.

All right, Andy, last time we were hanging out was actually an adventure that we did. It was an ocean swim, bike ride all the way to Mount Baldy. That was an epic adventure.

It was epic, if you say that. I remember that day well. It was, what, 14 hours we were out for?

Yeah, that was, that was surely a a long one. What was one of your favorite takeaways from that adventure? Oh, takeaways, takeaways, or, or memories.

So my number one takeaway was that these days doing 6 or 7 hours training a week does not equip you to do a 14-hour day in great shape. I enjoyed it nonetheless though. Best memory, oh, without doubt, is standing on the top of Baldy. Yes, with all the snow, the view, it was a fantastic day. It was hot on the way up, wasn't it? Oh, but when we got at the top, it felt rugged and mountainous. It's a beautiful spot. And then, but probably if I'm honest, like, favorite bit, In-N-Out Burger when we finished, because I was saying, yeah, I was so in need of a good feed.

That was a good recovery. Yeah, right there. So yeah, we'll make sure to, uh, finish editing that video and upload it in the coming months over here, so stay tuned for that. Andy, what are some of the common mistakes that you endurance athletes make around nutrition and hydration?

Yeah, the number one mistake that we see is not practicing your fueling and hydration enough in training, especially if you're doing a long race. If you're doing something like a marathon, a lot of the time your longest training runs are gonna be, you know, not long enough that you'd need tons of fuel and hydration, but on the day, you're gonna need to nail that, and if you don't practice it in training, you won't figure out how to get it right, and that'll bite you in the backside on race day. You're going to want to simulate race pace, probably not full race distance if you're training for something long like a marathon or ultra, but you're going to want to practice it predominantly on your longest runs when you've got that key session each week. But also, I think you can practice it on some of your shorter, harder runs because that allows you to get used to eating and drinking on the move, eating and drinking when you're breathing hard. Also, it's gonna help if you're trying to figure out what kind of sources of nutrition work for you. 'Cause what works for you when you're jogging really slow might not work for you at race pace. You know, solid food, for example. People can sometimes eat and chew stuff when they're moving really slowly, but when you're moving faster, you might wanna slurp down a gel or a drink.

What about hydration? Any common mistakes that you see over there?

Yeah, for sure. Big one is drinking too much, actually, in the days leading up to an event. They think they want to be well hydrated at the start, which they do, but they think the way to achieve that is to just drink loads and loads of water in the days leading up, and that is not the way to do it. You end up flushing the electrolytes out your body. You're better off drinking fairly normally, a little bit of extra fluid, but making sure that you load up on fluid with a lot of electrolytes in it the night before, and in the morning of, 'cause that's the only way to really get your body to hold on to that extra fluid.

Yeah. What type of electrolytes would work well over there? Because even within electrolytes there's different strengths, there's different types.

Yeah, you might get magnesium, potassium, calcium, whatever in sports drinks, but it's sodium that matters for hydration.

Yep.

And you're looking for over 1,000, maybe as much as 1,500 milligrams per liter of fluid if you want to prehydrate. We make one called PH1500, super popular for people as a pre-race hydrator.

Yeah, and what is the ingredients from something like that?

So we— there's two different types. You've got a source of sodium, which might be a sodium citrate or sodium carbonate, and then you'll either have ones without sugar, so like the sugar-free version, yeah, or you'll have drink mix that has some carbs, some calories with it. And there's pros and cons to using both, you know. Sometimes you want the low calorie, high electrolytes. Sometimes you want the calories and the electrolytes. So you pick, you pick the right tool for the job.

What about the third common mistake that you see, Andy? Under-fuelling.

Long training runs, long races, you know, cyclists, you see them, they always go out with a pocket full of gels and bars. Yeah, if I was on their bike runners, it's just kind of not as baked into the culture. And also the sessions aren't as long, but that doesn't mean that you don't need to fuel, because when you start fueling on a longer run, you realize you'll be so much stronger at the end and you recover so much quicker.

I think the recovery part is something that athletes forget about, right? Yeah, like it's— it really is. If you're getting to a deficit, even on a training run, the recovery is just going to take quite a bit longer, definitely.

Something you learn, like, you'll know when you're a dad and you do your long run on Sunday morning, if you don't eat enough, you can't lie on the couch in the afternoon and recover. You've got to be on it. You're taking the kids to football practice.

Oh, 100%. Whatever. So I've even experienced it when I'm underfueling, that on Mondays I would get headaches or I would get migraines, or I would just be kind of out of it on Mondays. That became like a routine.

Yeah.

Where I started looking more at my electrolyte intake, nutrition intake. Yeah. And dialing that in helps with that.

Well, recovery starts in the run. If you eat and drink enough, then you've got less of a deficit, recovery is faster, you can get on with the rest of life better, and your training the next day will be better. So there's no reason not to.

So underfueling, not taking in enough calories, is a very common one. How do we go about finding out what that right amount is?

Yeah, that, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it, really? And first off, I'd say probably in most cases for a lot of runners, it'll be more than you think. Um, there's some well-established science around how many calories you're going to need, or how much carbohydrate per hour is often what we talk about, um, based on how fast you're moving and how long you're going for. And those amounts can vary from as little as 20 or 30 grams of carbohydrate an hour for slower, easier efforts, right up to maybe as much as 90 or even over 100 grams per hour if you're an elite athlete doing an ultramarathon. So the range is big. Yeah, we built a fuel and hydration planner on our website where you can punch in the details about your intended run, how fast you're going, how far you're going, a little bit about yourself, the weather conditions, and it will spit out some numbers so that you can start to trial and error that in training and see how it works for you.

And this is actually a tool that a lot of members in our Personal Best Running coaching program use as well and find it very helpful. This is a tool I've personally used, and several other members too. They've realized they're not taking in enough calories, and so playing around with the calorie intake, the electrolyte intake, can make a huge difference in your training and in your race performance. At the other hand, Andy, there's a max amount you can take in too, right? Because at some point you're going to get stomach distress.

That's what a lot of runners are quite rightly a little bit afraid of. I think it's one of the reasons why people underfuel is they'd rather not suffer gut problems.

When we did our Baldy adventure, it's not just taking in gels at some point, it's taking in calories in a drinking form or taking in some chews. Yeah, just mixing it up from that perspective. Definitely.

Yeah, I think, you know, marathon is going to be all drinks and gels for sure. Short ultras, probably the same. But when you're really out there like all day long, that's when you're going to need to have a bit of food that's there for morale as well. So, and then you can just experiment with what you fancy, give it a try in training. There's no wrong answers though.

Yeah. We already made it all the way to El Segundo, Andy. I think we're going to turn around over here.

We're going to run out of footpath.

Yeah. All right. We'll turn it around.

The way we came.

Alright, running over here by the ocean and seeing a few dolphins playing in the water.

Amazing.

Absolutely. Andy, what is the right amount of caffeine to take in if you want to experiment with that on training runs and race day?

So the amount of caffeine that's optimal for performance is given as a dosage per kilogram of body weight. And it's thought that it's about 3 to 6 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight. In other words, a heavier person with more muscle mass is going to need more caffeine to get the hit. And also taking into account the pre-race dose, yeah, because unlike, say, carbohydrates, which you take in in a gel and they're in your bloodstream in a few minutes and you're using them, caffeine takes a little bit longer. It takes about 45 minutes from when you ingest it for caffeine to peak in your bloodstream. Can be up to an hour.

And that's an interesting one. I think a lot of people don't realize it could take 45 to 60 minutes to peak. And so sometimes I would take a gel with caffeine pretty close to the finish line. Yeah, but then it's not really that beneficial anymore.

No, that's good for the afterparty. In a marathon, you probably want to be taking those caffeine gels like from halfway and, and giving yourself time to really feel the benefit towards the end.

Yeah, so 3 to 6 milligrams per kilo body weight. Yeah, so for example, I am, let's say, about 72 kilos, so that would be 200 to 400. Yeah, milligrams. One coffee is about 100.

Yeah, yeah, coffees vary a lot, but as a rule of thumb, a strongish coffee is going to give you about 100 milligrams. Sports energy gels, ours give you 100. Some you'll find with only 50. Yeah, I think there are a few out there with a bit more, but 100 is a relatively standard to, to slightly punchy dose.

Athletes are sometimes concerned that caffeine intake is going to raise their heart rate a lot during racing. Can you share your thoughts on that?

Yeah, that's not something I've experienced myself, and it's not something I've come across working with athletes very often. I would say in general, unless you've seen your heart rate monitor telling you differently, that's not a major concern.

Personally, I haven't noticed it either in myself. I've heard it a few times being brought up by athletes in the coaching program, but generally speaking, I haven't seen the heart rate go up with caffeine intake. So I think that's it, made it back. We're done. How far is that?

It is exactly Uh, 9.9 kilometers. So that'll annoy a few people on Strava that we didn't quite do 10K.

There we go, we've got it. Where can people find out more about the fuel and hydration planner? That's, that's a very helpful tool.

Simple, that's right at the top of our website, precisionfuelandhydration.com, and it just says free fuel and hydration planner. Hit the link.

There you go. And one more thing that I will say is they are offering free consult calls as well. I've personally done it, several members in our Personal Best Running coaching program, and these are really a 30-minute call with one of their team members. This is not to sell you anything, this is purely to help answer some of your questions about fueling and hydration. And yeah, very helpful tool available there as well.

Yeah, so they're on the website as well. Instead of being at the top, they're down at the bottom. Book a free video call and yeah, find a slot and talk to the squad for sure.

Andy, thanks so much. We'll, uh, go for another run again soon.

Let's do it.

All righty, bye now.