There are 3 key components to a race day nutrition plan and they are:fluids and sodium (which make up hydration) and carbohydrates.
Everyone will have unique, individual needs, so it is so important to develop a plan tailored to you, instead of following a generic plan.
In today’s episode I walk you through the steps I take with clients including:
– How to determine your fluid needs on race day through sweat rate testing
– How to determine sodium sweat concentration and use that to plan sodium intake each hour (link to the article I referenced in the episode: https://www.mysportscience.com/post/how-much-sodium-do-i-need)
– Carbohydrate guidelines and how to increase your gut tolerance
If you have a race coming up this spring or summer – make sure to start planning your race nutrition at least 2-3 months out from your race to allow enough time to practice it in training and tweak as needed. A race nutrition plan tailored to your needs that you can execute will increase confidence on race day, help you feel strong and energized and make sure you don’t bonk!
You can save 20% off your first order with Skratch – Use the coupon code FUELEDTRIATHLETE and use this link to ordershop.skratchlabs.com/FUELEDTRIATHLETE
Full transcript of the episode:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Fuelled Triathlete. I’m your host, Andrea. And today we’re getting into all the steps you need to do to figure out how to put together a race day nutrition plan for a long course triathlon.
So we’re talking about 70.3 distance and above, or like a half or full Ironman distance race. So nutrition is so important on these days. It’s really going to help you finish your race feeling strong, not having GI issues, not bonking and just like feeling good overall.
You don’t have to feel horrible. I know it’s a definitely a tough day, but the right nutrition is really going to support you.
So we’re going to get into the three parts to think about when you’re putting together your race, nutrition plan, the steps you need to take to be able to build a plan that’s going to be working for you and how to practice it and figure out if something’s working or not.
So we’re into the new year now. You may still be in your off season or coming out of your off season, but if you’ve got some races in spring, summer now is not too early to start thinking about your race nutrition plan. Listen to this episode, if you’ve never done a race before of this distance and you don’t know where to start when it comes to nutrition and fueling these races. Or even if you’ve done a race in the past, but you felt maybe some in some way you missed the mark, maybe had some GI issues, you bonked, you didn’t drink enough, eat enough, or if you got too hydrated or maybe in the past, you just winged it completely and you want to change out around this time.
So let’s get into it.
So there’s kind of three main parts or three steps that you want to think about when you’re building a nutrition plan for yourself. And these are fluids and sodium and both of those together make up your hydration and then there’s carbohydrates.
So first thing we want to think about is fluids. How much fluid intake am I going to need throughout this whole race? And, I would just want to kind of preface this before I get into it is that you can probably go online and find race nutrition plans. You can talk to your training partners.
You can talk to people who have done these races before, and they can tell you what they’ve done, but it’s really important to remember that you are unique. You are an individual. You’re doing maybe a different race and these people have done. So your own fluid, sodium and carbohydrate needs are going to be very dependent on you as an individual. So when it comes to fluids, the goal of fluid intake during the race is really to prevent dehydration.
So we want to prevent losing around more than 2% of your body weight. So some people may be able to tolerate a little bit more, maybe two to 3% of their body weight. So you need to kind of figure out what’s 2% of my body weight in fluid loss and how can I make sure that I’m staying on top of my fluid intake and drinking enough per hour to prevent losing more than that or losing more than two to 3% of your body weight. So again, if you go and drink the same amount than someone else has done, maybe it’s too much, maybe it’s too little fluid for you. So keep that in mind.
So the first step to this is starting to determine your sweat rate. So your sweat rate is very individual based on you and based on many other factors like climate, including the temperature, the humidity, how hard you’re working, what clothing you’re wearing. And what you want to do is figure out your sweat rate in a similar environments and temperature and a similar intensity to what you’re going to do on race day. So you want to go and do your sweat rate on the bike as well as the run.
So during the bike, during the run, you’re going to have different types of sweat rates and different fluid needs at that time.
And what you want to do is figure out your sweat rate on a couple of bike rides that are going to be again, similar intensity to what you plan to do on your race day. And if you can, a similar temperature, a similar humidity, then if you do it a couple times, you can kind of figure out on average or about how much fluid losses you have per hour. And then repeat that again for your run.
So I’ve talked in a couple episodes before about how to figure out your sweat rate, but in general, just to kind of do a quick run through of how to figure out your sweat rate. Pick that work out that you’re doing it for try to have it to be around an hour, just to kind of keep the math simple, but it can certainly be an hour and a half, two hours.
Before you head out for that workout, you want to do this just before you’re heading out the door so that you’ve already gone to the washroom, you’ve ate you drank. Everything you need to do before you go take off all your clothes, weigh yourself and record that number.
Then put back all your clothes on, head for that workout, come back dry yourself off as much as possible tower yourself, take your clothes off, towel the sweat off your body. If your hair is really wet, dry it off as much as you can, and then weigh yourself. And that difference in weight is going to be fluid losses.
Now, if you drank anything during that workout you want to add that fluid back on. So for example, let’s say you went out for one hour and you lost one pound. One pound is equal to 500 milliliters, approximately. So you could say that in that workout your sweat rate was 500 mls or half a liter. Now if you drank 300 mls during that one hour run.
You’re going to add that on. So your sweat rate would actually be 800 milliliters.
Keep in mind you don’t have to consume a hundred percent of your fluid losses. You don’t want to consume a hundred percent of your fluid losses or consume more than that, because then you’re going to become over hydrated, it runs the risk of hyponatremia.
You want to figure out that number that I mentioned earlier, which is your 2% body loss of fluid, because you want to try to prevent going further than that, or more than that. So let’s use an example. Okay, so 150 pound athlete. 2% of this is equal to three pounds. And one pound is about 500 milliliters.
So this is equal to 1.4 liters. So you could lose 1.4 liters of sweat over that race, that’s going to keep you under that 2% dehydration. So let’s use example. If your sweat rate then is one liter per hour, and you’re going to be racing for five hours and you want to keep those sweat losses to 1.5 liters, then that’s 700 mils per hour that you would have to drink. So let’s kind of break that down.
So. I can lose about 1.5 liters. My sweat rate is a liter per hour, and I’m going to be racing for five hours. So five hours, meaning I would lose five liters, which is if I drank nothing, I’d probably lose five liters. So that’s way too much. So let’s take, I know that I can lose 1.5. Okay. And probably be all right.
So I’m going to take five liters minus what I’m able to lose that 2%, which is 3.5. And then take that 3.5 that’s how much fluid you need to consume, and then divide that over the five hours. Which brings me to about 700 mils per hour. It’s going to be different between your bike and your run.
You probably may consume more or less fluids during one or the other depending where you have a higher sweat rate, sometimes people may have a higher sweat rate on the bike, or they can at least tolerate more fluids on the bikes when they may drink more there. So those are kind of just some things that you want to factor in and consider. But once you know about how much you need to consume per hour, then you can figure out okay
on the bike, if I need to drink 700 mils per hour. Maybe my bottles hold 700 mils, great, I need to drink three of those on my three hour bike. So break it down into about how many bottles that you would need to consume.
Okay, so for the run you may want to bring your own fluids or you may rely on the aid stations. And you just want to consider that if you are carrying your own fluids, then you can make sure you have enough and maybe a little bit easier to control, but I know definitely some of the clients that I’ve worked with, they don’t necessarily want to bring fluids with them. Now, you just want to look at a couple of things ahead of time. How far apart are the aid stations?
And do you think that you can makeup all of the fluids that you need if you are just drinking at each aid station? So I know for my self personally, I kind of learned when I did my first half iron man. The aid stations were probably on the run were about every two or two and a half kilometers. And I wasn’t someone who could tolerate taking a lot of fluids at once.
I’m someone who kind of likes to say is better off sipping them more frequently. So I found that over the half marathon when they were every two and a half kilometers, I had trouble drinking enough. I didn’t drink enough and I know next time that it would bring those with me. I know for a lot of the Ironman races, the aid stations tend to be every one mile apart, which is more like 1.6 kilometers.
So it may have been better for me to be able to keep up on my fluid losses. But you know think about yourself. Can you tolerate large amounts? Do you like to kind of sip on them when you can, or when you start to feel that you want to drink something. Do you want to maybe rely on both? So, if you carry your fluids with you, sometimes you can’t necessarily carry all the fluid that you need.
So you may want to use plan out,. I know that I have to drink these two bottles, that whole 300 mils within the first hour, and then I’m filling these up every hour.
Some tips if you are relying on the aid stations, So a gulp of fluid is about an ounce and I find maybe those like mini cups, depends how people are filling them up, but you can estimate that they keep about two ounces.
So if there’s two ounces per cup, and let’s say the re aid stations are about every one mile. So maybe you can cover six aid stations in one hour. If you took just one cup, which was two ounces you would have 12 ounces an hour, which is about one and a half cups. May not be quite enough, depending again, what your sweat rate is, what the climate is.
So you may need to plan for say, having, you had two cups per aid station, that’s about four ounces, four times 6 24 ounces which is going to be about three cups of fluid. So again, maybe more or less, but you can start to kind of plan it out that way.
Eight ounces is going to be one cup of fluid or about 250 mils of fluid.
It’s good to kind of figure out a little bit earlier so that when you have some of those key sessions within that month or two months prior to your race, you can start putting together a plan, start to really figure out what you’re going to do on race day and trial it out as best as you can
so the second part that we’re looking at is going to be sodium. So when I talk about fluid losses, that’s kind of just really considering how much water, how much fluid you’re losing it. Doesn’t take into consider electrolytes. So I focus in on sodium and sodium losses because that’s really what’s been shown in research as something that we need to replace, or we need to be thinking about for hydration. There’s other electrolytes like magnesium and potassium, but we don’t quite lose these in such high amounts as sodium.
When it comes to sodium, unlike your sweat losses, your sweat rate, which can really vary , you could sometimes lose half a liter an hour, you can sometimes lose a liter an hour.
It really just depends on that type of workout that you’re doing or the environment that you’re in. When it comes to sodium, you typically have the same sodium sweat concentration. It doesn’t fluctuate quite as much. The sodium sweat concentration is how much sodium is going to be in one litre of your sweat.
So on average, it’s about 200 to 2000 milligrams of sodium. In one liter of sweat. That’s the range. And then on average it’s about 900 milligrams of sodium per one liter. So if you fit into the average, if you lost a liter of sweat per hour and yeah, you lost 900 milligrams of sodium. If you, your sweat rate was half a liter an hour, and you’re still in that average, then you would lose 450 milligrams of sodium because you had a lower sweat rate.
So that’s the same concentration, but if you sweat a different amount, it’s going to adjust up or down.
How though, can you actually figure out how much sodium you lose per hours. So there are certain sweat patches that you can use during workouts that can give you kind of an approximation of how much sodium you’re losing per liter of sweat.
The one I’ve used with my clients is called H drop. The ones that have used it have really enjoyed it and it tells them about how much sodium, I think, as well as also potassium how much you’re losing. What’s your sodium sweat concentration, and then how much you lose in a particular workout. There’s different ways you can estimate am I a salty sweater or am I not so salty sweater?
So, that the range is 200-2000mg average is 900. You may be higher than average if you’re someone who finds that you have a lot of white streaks on your clothing, when you sweat, you have a lot of maybe white marks on your face, which indicates some sodium. You find your sweat tastes very salty.
If it gets into your eyes, it’s going to burn your eyes. These can be some indications that you may have a higher sodium sweat concentration. Maybe you don’t experience this type of thing and you don’t find that you have some of these kinds of symptoms . Another symptom might be that you feel like you crave salts after a workout, or sometimes you get a headache . if you don’t really have that, you may be a below or lower than average.
So there’s been some research done to kind of figure out how much sodium do you need to replace.
And it isn’t that you need to always replace a hundred percent of your sodium sweat losses, just like we don’t need to replace a hundred percent of our sweat losses. We don’t necessarily need to replace a hundred percent of our sodium. And what is even the reason for replacing sodium? So one, we want to help kind of maintain that, balance of sodium concentration in the blood. If it gets too low, then this can cause hyponatremia, which can have a number of negative consequences. Sometimes if you’re consuming too much sodium, that can lead to some more GI issues. So we want to maintain that sodium balance. If we’re consuming some sodium with our fluids there are some benefits there because it can help us drink more.
If we’re just having to drink water all day, kind of plain, probably won’t be drinking as much as if there’s some sodium. . When you have sodium with that fluid helps you retain those fluids better.
We talked earlier about your sodium sweat losses and how much you need to replace. The longer you are exercising, basically the closer to your sweat rate that you’re drinking to prevent that 2% dehydration. Because let’s say your sweat rate is a litre per hour.
And we calculated that 150 pound person can lose a 1.5 liters per hour before becoming 2% dehydrated. So if you’re running an hour, they don’t necessarily need to drink. They’re going to lose a litre. They’re not losing over that 1.5 liters. If they ran at two hours and didn’t drink anything, they could become dehydrated because they’re going to lose two liters. And they don’t want to lose more than 1.5. But they don’t necessarily need to drink quite as much. You know, even if they drank a cup an hour, or 250ml per hour., And they drank 500ml total over that two hours they’re still good. But as they went to a four hour run, And they would lose four liters over the four hours so they need to drink a little bit more and closer to their sweat rate then a shorter distance. So I’m going to kind of link an article that I find really helpful for explaining this because sometimes , it’s easier to see kind of these pictures. . But basically, research has shown if your fluid intake is going to be less than 70% of your sweat losses, meaning, if one litre is your sweat rate and you’re drinking. 70% or less. So under 700 mils per hour, then your blood sodium will actually rise and you don’t necessarily need to take a specific quantity. To prevent low sodium. However, once your fluid intake increases , when it becomes 70 to 80% of your sweat losses, then depending on your sodium, sweat concentration, you’re going to want to add some sodium. So if you are a heavy sweater and you’re replacing 70 to 80% of your fluid losses, then you’re going to want to replace 30 to 65% of your sodium bosses. If you’re a less than average, sweater, you can add salt, but you don’t necessarily need to have a certain amount. And then if your fluid intake is 90% or more of your sweat losses, so really ultra endurance events, then you want to replace more of your sodium losses. So if you’re that high salty sweater, you’re going to want to replace 70 to 85% of your sodium losses. And then if you’re not so much of that salty sweater, you’re going to still replace, but about 30 to 40%.
So there’s kind of different targets. And so that’s why, when, you know what your sweat rate is, how much of your sweat rate you’re drinking, what your sodium concentration is, then you can start to kind of figure out how much you need. So a lot of different kinds of calculations and stuff. This is something I’ve done for many of my clients in their races. And if you find that, you know, you don’t want to have to do all this yourself, you’d rather have someone put together a plan for you. Then send me a message, email me, and you can learn more about the work that I do and kind of the help that I have people. That I do with people to making the race day plan. I start working with clients a couple months before the race. We start to figure all this out, put together race plans that they can trial and then we tweak them as needed. If you’re using this as a trial, maybe start with consuming at least around 500 milligrams of sodium per hour in your plan and see how you feel after that. Sometimes you might need a thousand milligrams for our even more.
For a lot of us who maybe need to consume extra sodium, depending on the sports product you’re using, the sports drink that we’re using, they may not actually have enough sodium that you need. I find a lot of gels, don’t tend to have quite as much,
there are some that have higher sodium, so you may need to use salt tabs. I do have some clients who add their own sodium to their sports drinks. So we just use extra table salt, or you can purchase sodium citrate, which is a little easier on the stomach. And you can add your own sodium to your bottles. You can use your own electrolyte beverages.
I really like the Relyte electrolyte drinks, they have flavored and unflavored, and you can add those to your sports drinks. To really figure out how much sodium you are taking in per hour is looking at the fluids that you’re drinking on the bike, add up if you’re taking any gels, any foods, chews and you can figure out how much sodium you’re taking per hour from all of that. And then what you may need to add on, on top of it.
So that’s sodium. So hydration is key though. Keep in mind, you want to be drinking enough during the race, not too much, not too little, but enough to prevent that dehydration. Because when you’re dehydrated, there’s kind of a lot of negative side effects that can come with that. Everything’s going to feel a lot more harder, you have a higher rate of perceived exertion, your heart rates higher.
Now talking about carbohydrates though. So carbohydrates is that third piece to your race plan, and you want to make sure that you can consume enough carbs. This is a one part that I find is so important with that trial before, because generally speaking, I know some of us are maybe not used to consuming high amounts of carbs while training and you need to give your gut some time to be able to adjust to that.
When it comes to half full distance iron man, I would say the bike carbs per hour, aiming for around 90 to 120 grams of carbs. 60 grams of carbs at the very minimum for half Ironman and maybe about 75 grams of carbs at a minimum on a full iron man. So, if you look at kind of the research, I it would suggest more like the 90 to 120 grams.
One 20 is high. So you really need to make sure that you have tried this out. You practiced it.
On the bike, you can usually tolerate more carbs per hour than on the run, because you’re stomach isn’t moving around, sloshing around quite as much now the run, 60 to 90 grams of cars per hour, if you can tolerate more, awesome.
I would say for kind of that half iron man, maybe 45 grams of carbs at a minimum. Really, it depends again, individualized. If you can tolerate to keep within these range of these guidelines of what’s recommended, you’re going to prevent yourself from bonking, you’re going to have a lot more energy, sustained energy. You’re going to feel better through the race, but again, only if you can tolerate that. If you haven’t done these amounts of carbs in training, and then you try to do it on a race day where your heart rate’s higher, you’re more nervous, all that kind of stuff, you may be at risk of GI issues. So you want to use you’re training to really figure out where am I getting these carbs from? What do I like to consume? So I had a podcast episode a couple ones back about, should you use gels, chews ,real food, sports drinks. On a half full Ironman, I would say you probably want to use a combination of things. So I have clients who have used a mix. They have incorporated some food into the mix. I have clients who have used mostly liquids along with some gels, some bars. So there’s lots of different ways that you can do it. So definitely the fluids, make sure the fluids that you’re drinking have carbohydrates in there because you’re going to be taking in fluids anyway. When you have the fluids with the sodium and the carbs you’re going to, they’re going to be more hydrating.
You can use bars or you may want to incorporate some food in there too. If you’re going to use food, I’d probably use it on the bike that’s where that tolerance is better and foods could be a banana, it could be peanut butter and jam or peanut butter and honey sandwich that you’ve cut up into pieces, potatoes, it can be those peanut butter pretzels. Mostly have those foods be carbohydrate containing, easy to digest. Not super high in fat and protein, but there could be a little bit. Of those in there.
If you are someone who wants to rely on what’s on the race course, then make sure that you use that in your training. So the Ironman races have gels. So I wouldn’t suggest training with honey stingers or something else this whole time and then going to the race and trying to use Maurtens.. You want to practice in your training what you’re going to use on race day.
So, this is also why I mentioned in the off season, you have a little bit more flexibility in terms of what kind of products you can use, if you use food or not. But as you’re getting in that kind of at least month or two, before your race training, fuel your workouts with what you wanted to on race day.
, if you’re new to fueling with carbs and you’re like, oh, how am I going to get to 90 grams of carbs per hour? I can barely do 30. So just up it gradually so up at about 10 to 20 grams of carbs per hour, each week. . Let’s say you do a two hour ride and you can usually tolerate 60 grams of carbs in total or 30 grams of carbs. Per hour. I do that once week.
And then the next week let’s add an extra 20 grams of carbs, an extra 10 grams of carbs for an hour. That’s like adding an extra gel. And then the next week. Ideally you start this early enough, so that by the time it comes to planning your trial of your race nutrition you can tolerate that amount .
The point of kind of creating a race nutrition plan early enough, so you can practice it so you can feel, confident in it and confident on race day that you can stick to your fueling plan and you know it’s gonna work and it’s gonna help you feel good.
So once you’ve kind of figured that out, you know, basically, you know, how much fluid you need, how much sodium need your carbs and how much you want to have per hour.
I kinda like to, for my clients, look at the whole day, the bike and the run and per hour, what do we need to make sure that we consume. Is it one bottle fluid, half bottle fluid, 1.5. We get on the bike, do we want to have a gel or do we have it 15 minutes in, break it into these maybe 15, 30 minute intervals of what you need to consume. And set alarms, if you need to on your watch or your bike computer some of my clients will do to help them remember because sometimes a race can be very technical or you start to kind of forget to drink and you fall behind. Staying on top of your fluids is really important. Early on the bike is a good time to consume a little bit higher carbs. Stay on top of your carb needs so that you come to the bike feeling a little bit more fresh. We don’t want to fall behind on those stuff, especially on the bike, because it’s going to make that run more difficult. Long distance triathlon you’re going to pick . Fluid on, on the course or you may have a bag where you’re going to kind of store your nutrition. So just kind of keep that in mind. You may not necessarily keep, be able to keep everything on you, but you do have these bags that you can pick up on the race course at certain times.
Okay. So this is getting longer than most of my usual episodes. So I want to end it here. To summarize, these are the three parts that we’re thinking of when we’re creating a race nutrition plan. We’re thinking of how much fluid we need, how much sodium and how much carbohydrates. And then once we know that we can start to plan out, okay, when do I need to consume these?
How much do I need to consume per hour? If you find that you want some support with that, you want some help creating a race nutrition plan, you want some coaching to get you ready for your race fill an application in the show notes, to learn more about coaching with me. I’ve worked with a lot of clients to get ready for their half and full Ironman.
So I’ve got some more information I want to share about race nutrition in some upcoming podcasts. I want to talk about how to avoid these GI issues that can happen during a race, how to avoid things like cramping, runner’s trots, how to avoid bonking.
So stay tuned as we are getting closer to race season, we’re going to be talking about more of this stuff. And I love to hear from you guys. If you have anything that you want to learn about on the podcast. Follow me on Instagram @andreadietitian.
Thanks so much for listening today, and if you can, I would totally appreciate it if you can share this with your fellow triathletes and with your training buddies, that would be mean a lot to me, or give us a rating and review just to help more people, find the podcast. So thanks so much and have a great day.