Tag Archives: Swimming

Gels or Sports Drink?

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Gels or Sports Drink?

When I race, should I choose gels or sports drinks? Or a combination of both?

During a race of 90 minutes or more glycogen levels need to be topped up on a regular basis or they’ll become depleted, you’ll run out of steam and you’ll ‘bonk’ or ‘hit the wall’. Drinking water is not enough! You’ll need to rapidly replenish depleted muscle glycogen and restore body salts lost through sweat. That’s why we have to take on board gels and sports drinks. Unfortunately, most of them are disgusting, unpalatable and sickly…that’s because they’re more or less pure glucose, designed to be digested as quickly as possible. Using homemade sports drinks in training is fine, but this is usually an impractical solution for racing. The only option is to try out different brands to find one you can stomach.

With the ongoing success of FuelSmart for Race Day, I’m frequently asked whether it’s best to top up these glycogen levels with gels or with sports drinks during triathlon, half-marathon and marathon endurance training and races, and whether there is any difference between them.

Discover your ideal personal strategy.

Firstly and most importantly, what works for you is unlikely to work for your fellow competitor! You need to practice different strategies in training to discover what will suit you and your physiology best. Whether you choose gels, sports drink or a combo depends more on your personal preference than on any performance advantage.

Download the FuelSmart Series

Optimise your performance with Go Faster Food FuelSmart.


Nutritionally-formulated meal plans and delicious recipes to help you go further, faster.

FuelSmart for Race Day

Gels – don’t forget to wash them down with water

Gels, designed to be rapidly digested to replenish muscle glycogen as quickly as possible, provide between 20-30 grams of carbohydrate.  Your body requires 30-60 grams of carbohydrate per hour, depending on workout intensity, so you’d need 2-3 gels per hour. Each gel must be washed down with plenty of water, for good hydration and for the effective absorption of the gel.

 What about Sports Drinks?

Sports drinks are essentially gels with water, providing you ‘two for one’: hydration and carbohydrates. 500 ml typically contains between 30-45 grams carbohydrate, so you would need around 600 ml per hour, again depending on your workout.

Try a Gel/Sports Drink Combo to minimise Gastrointestinal discomfort

If, like me, you find sports drinks and gels too sickly-sticky, and water boring, try my combo method which maintains good hydration, body salt and glycogen levels.; a gel every 30-40 minutes, washed down with a 50% diluted sports drink. You never know, it might work for you!

Don’t forget electrolytes and protein

For best performance and recovery, choose a gel or sports drink which also contains protein and electrolytes; this helps prevent muscle damage and replaces lost body salts.

Solids can be kinder to the stomach

Overconsumption of gels and sports drinks can leave your gut feeling extremely uncomfortable.  Energy bars, dried fruit, marmite, cheese or honey sandwiches, bananas and rice balls can be kinder to the stomach and many cyclists find it more pleasant and effective to eat these on the bike. Solids on the bike works for triathletes and ironman competitors, followed by sports drink and/or gels on the run to minimise gastrointestinal discomfort.

If you suffer GI problems, keep it simple!

Your stomach comes under all sorts of stress during endurance events. Many competitors suffer gastrointestinal problems. The more gunk you put inside you the likelihood is that the more uncomfortable your stomach will feel! 

Practice different options in training to discover what is comfortable for you as an individual.

Cod wrapped in parma ham with lemony basil salsa

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Just a quick post about the most delicious, healthy and, most importantly, FAST, 10-minute supper we had tonight. An excellent training meal, cod is an really good, tasty and low fat source of protein. I served it with potatoes in their skins, crushed with a little olive oil and fresh spinach with a little nutmeg and crème fraiche:

Serves 4

  • 4 fillets of line-caught cod
  • 8 slices of parma ham
  • 30g basil leaves
  • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • dessert spoon capers
  • zest of a lemon plus a little lemon juice
  1. Heat the oven to 200C.
  2. Lay 3 basil leaves onto each cod fillet and season with a little salt and black pepper
  3. Wrap two slices of parma ham around each cod fillet.
  4. Lay the fillets in a baking dish, drizzle with a tbsp olive oil.
  5. Bake in the oven for about 10 minutes until the cod is just cooked through and the parma ham begins to crisp up.
  6. Meanwhile finely chop a handful of basil and the capers. Put this into a small bowl and mix in the lemon zest, a squeeze of lemon juice and another tbsp or two of extra virgin olive oil.
  7. Serve the cod fillets with the basil/caper/lemon zest mix drizzled over.

 

Inspiration for a dreary February morning

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Mark Cooper of runwithmark.com, planning 50 marathons in 56 days

Mark Cooper planning 50 marathons in 56 days

Be inspired!

I’m getting loads of really encouraging comments about my chickpea, sweet potato and spinach soup – one of my favourites too, and brilliant for a Monday night’s supper if you’re into making stock out of the leftover bones from you Sunday roast!

Being involved involved in the world of endurance sports can make you feel really rather humble. I thought my running a couple of marathons a year, plus the odd fell run, cross country escapade and canoeing down rivers was pretty active….but then I come across people who make my pursuits sound really quite pedestrian (excuse the pun…). What fuels their desire to push themselves to the very extreme, not just physically but mentally too? I would love to know! Take a look at their websites:

  • Jonathan Bradshaw – training to swim the Atlantic! How wrinkly is his skin going to be? He likes to load up with my butternut squash risotto
  • Mark Cooper – training to run 50 marathons in 56 days – that’s 1300 miles apparently (!), running from Amsterdam to Barcelona, and he wants to do each marathon in under 4 hours! Unbelievable – he’s looking for sponsorship and raising money for charity so take a look and support him if you can…find him on twitter
  • Steve Blethyn – walking from Glasgow to Reading in 10 days (that’s 2 marathons a day for 10 days), he’s on twitter too, he’s quite a life force
  • Charlotte Thompson – amazing mother of 4 who took up running only recently and ran 5 marathons in 5 consecutive days last year, finishing with the London Marathon which she rand in 3:52! She’s now a top running coach and major motivator for anyone looking for some inspiration. Pretty amazing…well, she’s just plain awesome. And she loves my flapjacks!

So if, like me, you’re looking out the window at the howling wind and the cold, drizzly rain, and wondering whether you can really muster up enough energy to do you run/bike ride/walk/whatever is your thing, then maybe we should take a little inspiration from these people, get out there and just get on with it….we know we’ll feel fantastic for it afterwards…and we’ll have earned a the right to a delicious supper in the process!

Orbana Healthy Energy Drink

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A lovely lady called Annabel Lee at a new start-up sports nutrition venture called Orbana very kindly sent me some samples of their new energy drink to try out. Many of my followers will know that I am not one to get enthused by commercial sports nutrition products, all of which seem to claim that their product will be your answer to improved performance/recovery because of its unique blend of carbohydrate, minerals, protein etc etc. I find that most of these drinks and gels wither play havoc with my stomach or make me gag. They also tend to leave a sweet and sickly artificial taste in your mouth. I am much happier with the home made variety – you know exactly what is in it and it usually tastes better. Lots of recipes in my book, Go Faster Food for these…

Sometimes there is no alternative to a commercial drink – Why is that?

  1. It’s what’s on offer during races and it is always advisable to train using what you are going to be drinking during the race. I remember learning that lesson at my first ever marathon – New York – drinking for the first time some kind of green concoction provided at the drnks stations (Gatorade, I think)…..well, needless to say that my stomach said “no way mate!” and over 5 minutes were wasted sitting on portaloos along the course!! Not nice. No, not at all nice.
  2. There is a limit to the amount of carbohydrate your body can store, so you will need to keep your carbohydrate stores  topped up during any endurance over about 90 minutes, no matter how well you have carbo-loaded beforehand. Your body will also work better with a steady intake of important vitamins, minerals, electrolytes etc to prevent a decrease in performance, fatigue and cramping. Commercial products claim to contain what we need in right proportion.
  3. It is sometimes just simply more convenient to use something pre-prepared – for training at work or when you are travelling, for instance.

So what did I think of Orbana, healthy energy?

In a nutshell – IT’s LOVELY and IT WORKS!!!

Handy little bottle

First of all, it is very different to any other sports drink I have come across. It comes in a little bottle containing just powder to which you then add water. This keeps the ingredients fresh – the vitamins and amino acids lose their potency over time. This bottle is easy to run with if you have small hands and of course, very light if you are travelling with it. You can also buy Orbana as a powder and then add it to your own sports bottle – it is more economical to buy it in this way and I will probably take this option to use for my marathon training.

Sports drink, energy drink, hydration drink, recovery drink and fruit drink all-in-one

A true “superdrink” then! Take a look at what is in it – http://www.orbana.com/inside.html – Orbana is packed with energy, B vitamins, antioxidants, branched-chain amino acids, minerals and electrolytes….and per 100ml contains 9.3g complex carbohydrate and 5.4g simple sugars, which is more than leading brands of more sickly-tasting sports drinks.

It is difficult to tell without trialling the drink for weeks, but the couple of long runs I have done with this drink have been really good ones! No fatigue, feeling light on my feet, finishing as strong as when I started.

It tastes nice!!!!

I have to admit that it tastes really quite pleasant – a nice citrus flavour, clean and fresh with a bit of a tang and certainly not too sweet. What I like about Orbana is that you can get your fix of nutrients and then top your hydration requirement with plain water.

Sustained energy release – helps delay fatigue for up to 2 hours.

Really high in complex carbohydrates, Orbana gives you a steady release of energy without the spike or crash that you can get with other very high Glycaemic Index drinks and gels. Yet it still contains some simple sugars to top up depleting glycogen stores quickly during a long endurance session/race.

No bloated feeling and no loo stops…

Luckily Orbana has not give me the usual violent reaction that other drinks can give me….

And….it’s good for you!

Orbana has no artificial sweeteners, preservatives, colours or caffeine and is drug, stimulant and contaminant free.

I will definitely be using  Orbana again.

BEST (Bristol English Channel Swim Team)

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BEST (Bristol English Channel Swim Team)

I’ve been given the great privilege of helping out on the foodie front for BEST (Bristol English Channel Swim Team), a totally inspirational group of 11-12 year olds who are training to be the youngest ever relay team to cross the English Channel.

Anyone feeling disillusioned with the youth of today should take a look at the BEST website. These kids are phenomenal! 11 year-old Lewis decided that he would like more than anything to swim the English Channel and the idea blossomed from here – his parents took him seriously and established a superb professional team to take this initial idea to a whole new level. This team includes head coach and GB swim team physiotherapist, Penny Porter,  assistant coach, Chris Eynon, who won the 2007 British Long Distance Swimming Association Lake Windermere 17.5km Championships and was part of a successful English Channel relay at the age of 16, plus a highly professional medical and safety team.

The swim across the Channel is planned to take place on 17th August, weather permitting, and will take anything from 12.5 to 15 hours. The 6 children, selected from over 40 hopefuls, each have to swim for an hour at a time in choppy, cold, cold water (15-17 C) with jellyfish, floating debris of a dubious nature, cross channel ferries and possible hypothermia to content with. They will not be wearing wetsuits! – just one hat, goggles, basic swimsuit and grease…. Between each swim they must then wait for 5 hours in a tiny fishing boat until their turn to swim comes around again.

I am still getting my head around what they are going to fuel themselves with in this boat as there will be very minimal cooking facilities on board – perhaps even just a kettle.

I gave the children a talk about nutrition on Saturday. It is going to have to be an important part of the children’s training to eat properly over the next 8 months, and integral to their well-being and ultimately their overall performance – they will be training six days a week, and that’s on top of all their school work, not to mention their school sport and the fact that they will all be going through major growth phases! They will also have several cold water/open water training weekends so that they can acclimatise their bodies to low temperatures. Tough and busy kids!

Not surprisingly for such go-getting kids, they appear to be good eaters and understand the importance of following a balanced training diet. I think that encouraging them to eat well is not going to be fun, rather than an uphill struggle. Even the boy who refuses to eat fruit had a little taste of the strawberry smoothie I whizzed up for them after the talk – I have never seen a kilo of strawberries disappear before my eyes quite so quickly as it did on Saturday!

Click here for the recipe for  Stawberry Mint Vitamin Rush.

For more delicious smoothie recipes, see my book Go Faster Food.

Ironstruck

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IRONSTRUCK

I’ve just put up a new link on Go Faster Food for the most amazing site - Ironstruck. Ironstruck is a website for anyone interested in Ironman, whether you’re a coach,  a pro-triathlete or just about to embark on “the ultimate challenge” – your first Ironman.

Ironstruck is really rather inspirational – it takes the philosophy that each one of us is capable of great things and that it is up to us to take control of our lives, believe in ourselves and go for it – you only get one shot in life so you may as well make the most of it!

“Doing is the key and not necessarily how fast or how far”

Ray Fauteux, Ironstruck’s creator, covers everything you need to know about the Ironman – and he certainly knows his stuff – he’s written at least five books on the subject! Click here for his bookstore

If you think you need a little motivation or if you are just a little curious about what it takes to be an Ironman, then look no further than Ironstruck…