How To Eat During Half Ironman

Hey, I'm Ben Greenfield, and in an upcoming article or an article that you may have read recently in Lava magazine, I talked about long course fueling. And I wanted to show you some of your options specifically for a half ironman event and a good, clean way to set up your bike. Because when you're racing a half ironman, there is a certain amount of attention that needs to be paid to aerodynamics and also the ability to eat easy to digest fuels, because you're going to be maintaining a higher intensity during a half ironman event than you are, say, during an ironman. And it is kind of weird in that you're going at a fairly long distance, but also at a pretty brisk pace. And so you need to choose fuels that are easy to digest. You're not going to be carrying a lot of bars and solid foods and things like that on the bike. So basically, you've got your bike set up here. And one of the things that I gave you in terms of an option on the bike for long course fueling, would be to just have.

Your down tube water bottle. And this would be in a case where you're on a really technical course and you find yourself having to sit up a lot, be out of the aero position. Any type of aerodynamic mounted hydration system is not going to work out too well for you in that case. So that's where something like a down tube comes in handy. The other area where a down tube comes in handy is sometimes you can take a water bottle and you can literally put it in here, but instead of putting water in it, you can literally put like gels and stuff like into your water bottle and carry them on your down tube and then have your actual fluids out on your aero tube. Now, some of the options for aero tube fueling.

One would be, for example.

This XLAB Torpedo. And what this thing does is it actually fixes to your aero bars here. And then what you'll do is you'll take a water bottle. You can see I've got my clean bottle here. I don't know if you guys have seen these, but they actually fixed. That's kind of cool. They unscrew on the bottom so you can clean them. How cool is that? Anyways, though.

You take your bottle, you put it in here, and this thing you can fix via zip ties in between your aero bars and it works really, really well. This is from a wind tunnel perspective, the most aerodynamic way to carry your fluids. So you can carry water here and refill this as you get to aid stations with the water bottle that you get from aid stations and then you would carry in addition to your fluid here, your fuel down here. If you didn't want to actually use something like this on your aero bars, you could use one of these, which is a traditional mounted aero bar bottle that goes like this. And a straw kind of sticks up out of here. Obviously bigger, a little less aerodynamic, but it's an option and you feel that from the front. A little less fumbling that has to go on with something like that. Now I mentioned that you could keep your fuel on the down tube. This is something that I've actually talked about on my blog before and shown some pictures of. But what I have here is this is a profile design water bottle. And what I've done is taken the mount for this, put it into here, and you can mount this on your down tube instead of a water bottle. And I'll actually stuff this little section right in here with gels and literally carry this as like a gel canoe. Just be careful with this option on like bumpy courses. I don't like to use this on bumpy courses because stuff can come out of here. But on a nice smooth, flat course, this is a really good solution to use. So those are some of your options for the bike. But basically the plan for the bike is you keep it simple. You keep your fluids like your water out here, or if you're mixing carbs in, like using a fluid based powder, you keep that out there, put a little bit extra fluid or a little bit extra fuel on the down tube or even just like stuffed into your jersey pocket. Super clean setup for a half ironman triathlon. It works really well. The other thing in terms of the actual run is that in the article I talk about how during a half ironman run, as much as you can get away with, you just want to grab stuff from the aid station, not be fumbling and carrying a lot in your hands. But if you've got a stomach that requires that you actually use your own fuels, you know, let's say you're intolerant to what's being offered out there on the course, you've got options. You can literally like mix what you need in a flask. This is really all you'd need in terms of the amount of fuel that you need for a half ironman. You don't even need to use a full on fuel belt, but you can just run holding one of these flasks or you can hold it like that. Actually holding one of these flasks. You can tell. I don't use one, but I own one just in case. But you'd fill this with your gel or with your concentrated sport drink and use something like this as an option. This is typically something that you'd use more often for an Ironman event. But if you really want a double flask for a half Ironman event, you can actually use one of these. You can put fluid in here, fluid in here, or gel in here, and gel in here, and set out that way. This would be an option in a course that really doesn't have a lot of aid stations where you're going to have to be fairly self sustained. But in most cases, you won't need these type of options until you get up something like an Ironman distance. And in most cases for half, you're pretty much fueling fairly minimally during the run. And I talk about why in the article at Lava magazine. So that's the basics of half Ironman bike fueling and run fueling setup. Just wanted to kind of show you visually a few of the options that are out there. And you can find any of this stuff at various triathlon stores and sporting goods stores in terms of the bike mounts and stuff like that. So I hope that helps. I'm Ben Greenfield, signing out.