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The New Rules of Marathon and Half-Marathon Nutrition
![Brian Quarton [OLD]](https://us.v-cdn.net/6029573/uploads/userpics/387/n8MFCPP8OPACX.png)
Matt Fitzgerald's new book is very good. Just a heads up. Racing Weight was horrible. This is a home run.
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So I'm glad you got something out of his book and hope it helps you out. The above is my opinion of him.
@Brenda, The most consice way for me to put it is like this. Fitzgerald takes the evidence, the scientific evidence, it's a lot, and distils it down. First you have to get lean. He has 2 guidelines to follow and I don't have to use an iphone app if I don't want to. You have to fuel your training with enough carbs and diet quality will help shed excess weight. He reviews Noakes ideas on fluid intake, "obey your thirst" and all that. He reviews High-Low training: carb restricting vs. carb supplementing your training. One controversial quote I saw was: "Research has shown that while it is not possible to train the gut to absorb more carbs on the run, most runners are able to absorb the same amount of carbs more comfortably after getting some practice." Therefore he differs from the Core Diet guys, who recommend fueling every workout. He has recommendations for which workouts to fuel and which to skip. I guess I am biased because I lean towards Fitzgerald's thinking, but I only know the Core Diet Fueling stuff from the webcast in the Wiki. Next up is the taper diet. MF recommends a fat load! Very controversial. This is followed by a carb load. Hey, you can disagree, but you better have data. I thouroughly enjoy the numbers and discussion of the studies. The cool thing is that you guys are smart enough to use this $11 book on marathon fueling overlaid on the solid, race-proven Core Diet guidelines to really sharpen up your nutrition.
Interesting... seems that the assertion is that you can condition your body to burn fat more efficiently as a fuel... how much support is there for that assertion? Realize that this is somewhat contrary to the EN approach on a couple of fronts:
The easiest way to improve your ability to oxidize fat—turn fat into energy—is to train for long hours on the trails or in the saddle at a relatively slow pace. Generally, you don’t want to go much faster than your Ironman pace if you’re trying to stimulate your fat oxidation capabilities.
Ok - long hours, slow pace, enough said.
Then there's this:
If you decide to implement these water-only rides in your training, remember that these rides are depletion sessions, which leave you drained, and should always be followed by recovery days
We do almost every workout with the next workout in mind. The idea is that you need to maximize your ability to do work in order to maximize your training response, and that means nutrition before, during, after and long after your ride. What you get for the harder work is more of everything - more capillaries, more muscle mass, more dendrites, more mitochondria - therefore more capacity to do more work.
This makes some intuitive sense to me, but the truth is I don't know that much - I'm not a nutritionist, nor a physiologist - how much evidence is there for the assertion that we can train our bodies to burn fat more efficiently by depriving it of carbs?
Agree with Russel.
In short I believe the negatives of that approach out way the positives. To do it right you need to go long and slow until depleted. Then most people will more than likely over eat later. They may have trained there body to burn more fat but they just added more fat by over eating. It will most definitely affect recovery one way or the other. I think if one could schedule 1 day per month , be good about refueling afterwards, and take a day off to recover , there maybe some benefit to this approach. But trying to squeeze it in weekly forget it. Besides I hate being hungry.
@ John... Short 1-1.5hr high intensity training sessions like in OS are only going to burn mostly carbs anyway . Your body always has that much fuel available so its not really necessary to fuel if you dont want to . So if your goal is less calories than mission accomplished but if you think your training your body to burn fat? Probably not so much.
To anyone who is working on body composition... I'm a big believer in before, during, and after fueling in order to keep yourself on your body comp goals... The idea is not to become famished, depleted,and then binge eat later.....
I have been losing a bunch of weight, but I am likely consuming the same amount of calories around my workouts, but in a different way. I take in at least 2x as many calories as I used to in the 30-50 minutes following my workouts in an attempt to refill my glycogen stores for future workouts. I also eat a lot more nuts and avocado now to take in more healthy fats and I don't count calories. I am full 100% of every day but have lost almost 10 lbs since Jan 2nd. I am 15 lbs less than I was last yr at this time and my FTP is higher and my running is much stronger. Again, n=1 and there's a good chance I run myself into a wall within the next 6 weeks, but in my 3rd OS, I figured it was worth the risk...
N=1 is great if you're trying to optimize specifically for that 1...
Recreational sugar - tons of evidence and physiological explanations for why all the sugar in our regular diet is harmful.
Gluten free - recently we're seeing reports of possible "gluten sensitivity" for people who would not be considered to have celiac.
I suspect that ten years ago you would have been considered nuts for raising wheat sensitivity as a possibility.
Also lots of evidence that food selection and timing are far more effective than calorie counting.
Mental - totally buy that a little adversity versus instant gratification is good for us as competitive racers.
Who knows where we'll land on whether one really optimizes training by having a Gu 15 minutes before and every 15 minutes during your workout. I suspect that Gu has a vested interest in proposing that schedule but I can't quite put my finger on it ...
At any rate, I'm glad your experimentation is working for you - look forward to seeing that post one day. An interesting side note is that you're saving ten bucks every time you do one of those workouts. Not significant digits in the tri game, but interesting nonetheless...
I'm now going to make myself some chocolate milk to fuel my recovery...
Something else to consider in this conversation.... As a former raw food person I used to spend a lot of time at my raw food restaurant. The guy who owns the place got me onto coconut water and coconut oil. He claimed I would be able to help my body utilize fat better as an endurance athlete. I didn't find any research to support this, but ran with it anyway. This was several years ago when I was racing ultra-marathons, specifically while training for a 100 miler. I used coconut oil on the largest organ on the body/daily(skin) and I drank only coconut water during my training runs. I had 3 long runs/week ranging from 25-35 miles over the course of 6 months in my build. My body became extremely efficient at utilizing fat for energy, so much so that I could literally run 30 miles with just a few sips of water by the end of my build.
The only caveat here is that these were LSP runs at 7:45 - 8:00min/miles. I do use fuel in anything longer than 2.5 hours as a triathlete and coconut water is a staple sometimes during and after training. The key factor is knowing that as intensity increases over the course of a HIM or IM, fuel always becomes a factor no matter how efficient your body is at utilizing fat for energy.