Nutrition to support running training: Top tips
Hi there 👋
I hope you’ve been well since my last email!
Silly Season is just about upon us, and you will probably be busy with festive celebrations and get-togethers – many of which involve large amounts of yummy food. 😋
So, I thought I’d make nutrition the focus of this newsletter; throwing in some bonus tips around how you can use the abundant Christmas calories to your advantage!
A healthy, balanced diet should be the foundation
Food not only provides energy for you to train, but also nutrients for your body to build and adapt to the training. A balanced diet that provides enough calories to meet your daily needs, and which is varied and balanced to provide all the necessary nutrients is the most important thing to get right, before considering more ‘advanced’ nutritional practices. For most endurance runners, this means:
Keeping daily calorie intake no more than 500kcals below your daily calorie needs (more on this below). If you dip below this threshold for an extended period, your body will start to suppress some bodily processes, you’ll be more likely to get ill, training quality will be negatively impacted, and you won’t adapt to training as effectively.
Aim for between 15-25% of energy intake from fat, 1.0-1.6g of protein per kg of body weight, and 5-10g of carbohydrates per kg of body weight.
Make sure half of each meal (by volume) is made up of fruits or vegetables, with the remainder being starchy carbs (rice, potato, pasta etc.), protein and fat. Fortunately, this sounds pretty close to a traditional Christmas dinner in many countries!
To estimate your calorie needs, you can use a calculator. I’d strongly recommend using one that allows you to input your % body fat (which you can determine from a set of body fat scales e.g. Tanita scales). This is because runners will generally carry more muscle and less body fat than the general population. If you click on ‘settings’ for this calculator, you can select the ‘Katch-McArdle’ equation, which allows you to input % body fat and calculate energy needs for different activity levels.
It's hard to know your calorie and macronutrient intake day to day, and I don’t recommend tracking your calorie and macronutrient intakes on a daily basis. However, it can be helpful to use something like MyFitnessPal from time to time, just to get a snapshot of what you’re eating, and how closely this aligns with your targets. It’s probably best not to do this over Christmas though, as it won’t be very typical of your usual intake 😉
For a 70kg person running 50 miles per week, the appropriate energy intake will look something like 3x substantial meals, and 3-4x ~200kcal snacks throughout the day. For a 70kg person running 30-miles per week, the daily calorie needs are actually only slightly less (roughly 250-300 kcals/day). So, cutting out one of the snacks would be about right.
Periodise your carb intake
Carbohydrates are used during running of any intensity, but they are used most rapidly during high-intensity sessions. Your body’s carbohydrate reserves can also be depleted significantly by long runs. Therefore, periodising your carbohydrate intake around these key sessions can be helpful to (i) make the sessions feel easier, (ii) allow you to hit higher intensities or do more work in your interval sessions, and (iii) allow you to recover faster from long runs. In particular you can try to:
Front-load your carbohydrate intake before a high-intensity session (leaving sufficient time for the food to digest – usually 2-4 hours is good). Planning your intervals the day after a big Christmas meal, or in the evening after an indulgent lunch can be good choices. However in the latter case, you might want to avoid overly fatty foods, since this might cause stomach issues on the run.
If you’ve received some sugary gifts like chocolate or sweets, these can be great to take with you and eat during a hard interval session or long run. Your gifts then become both functional and tasty 💪
You can plan your long runs to fall before a big meal; aiming to eat within an hour of finishing your run. This will help top-up your depleted muscle glycogen, as well as providing other important nutrients such as protein, to help repair and adapt to the training. If the timing doesn’t work out though, make sure you have a smaller carbohydrate-based snack after your long run to tide you over to your next proper meal.
Other types of training run (e.g. shorter, low-intensity runs) can benefit from being performed with less carbohydrate availability, since this may help develop your capacity to switch between carbohydrates and fats for fuel, allowing better ‘metabolic flexibility’. It’s therefore fine to do these types of run e.g. in the morning before eating, for example.
Don’t forget hydration
Losing just 2% of your body weight due to dehydration can significantly impact performance, and make sessions feel much harder. Over the Christmas period, it can be easy to become dehydrated from drinking more alcohol, and/or simply not being in a normal routine.
If you wake up and feel dehydrated (or notice your urine is darker than normal), you can rehydrate before a run rapidly by drinking fluids that contain electrolytes. Taking small, but frequent sips of this drink is also better than downing a large drink all in one go. You will retain more of the fluid if you drink little and often.
News
We have a new article on the website, which you might find useful if you want to learn more about how you can assess improvements in your running, understand your strengths and limiters, and set training zones. The article explains a concept called critical power and pace for runners, and includes links to our new critical power and pace calculators. It takes you through everything you need to know about critical power and pace, including what it is, why it’s useful, and how to test it. You can also link directly to our calculators here:
That’s it for this month. Just a reminder that we have various resources available on our website, including the complete workout library, alongside various training plans. If you need any advice on selecting a plan, or have any requests for plans you’d like to see in the store, please get in touch! I’d also love to hear about any exciting runs or events you have coming up, or any topics you’d like me to write about.
Until next month, happy running! 🏃♀️🏃
Emma