Local Elite Marathon Runner Q & A About Nutrition & Racing
#1 What do you recommend that people eat while training for a marathon?
A balanced diet based on fruit, vegetables, nuts, and grains in abundance, and meat in moderation. Prefer poultry and fish over red meat as red meat is difficult to digest. Avoid junk. A good rule of thumb… if the name of the food is trademarked do not eat it.
Learn to like healthy food and dislike unhealthy. It is natural for the body to know what is good and what is bad by taste. Overtime we often get exposed to foods that are not good for us and our sense of taste gets altered. If that has happened to you work to restore your natural healthy sense of taste. Note that different individuals process different foods differently. Thus once you have cleaned your diet of things that are obvious garbage you need to experiment with the natural foods to find out which foods work best for you and in what amounts. You can figure that out if you learn the concept of food experience that involves not only the taste while eating it, but also how you feel while digesting it, and how your body responds as you run afterwards.
Always eat to the best of your knowledge. There is a big difference between doing things to the best of your knowledge no matter what vs. doing them this way only when motivated. To borrow a chess analogy, a brilliant sequence of grandmaster quality moves can be easily ruined by one blunder.
#2 What do you recommend that people not eat while training for a marathon?
My rule of thumb is that anything that would make it too difficult or impossible to run a mile or two at my target marathon race pace within one hour of consumption is no go. That includes both the type of food and the amount.
#3 What Things should people eat the night before a race and the day of the race?
Follow your regular diet. If you cannot run a good marathon eating what you normally would within 24 hours of the race, the focus should be on correcting what you eat on a daily basis. The only issue is to make sure you are able to run the race without having to go to the bathroom.
#4 What things should people not eat the night before a race and the day of the race?
Anything that would increase the probability of a bathroom visit during the race. This should be more of an issue of timing than quality and quantity. Anything that would slow you down otherwise while running hard you do not want in your body to begin with on any day whether you are racing or not.
Sasha Pachev is a two time champion of the Top of Utah Marathon (2003, 2004), and he is the author and creator of the http://www.fastrunningblog.com/ where athletes can log their miles and have discussion with other athletes about vaious running subjects. The athletes on the blog range from top elite runners to casual runners just shooting for their first 5K. The goal of the fast runningblog is to encourage more people to enjoy running, and to track their training so that they can improve.
