With Coach Kelvin, offering Online Running Coaching for We Run and the We Run Virtual Running Club, and 1:1 Running Coach for Leeds and surrounding areas.
A Quick Reminder About Long Run Hydration and Nutrition
In this video, I wanted to do a quick reminder about long run hydration and nutrition. I’d also like to include workouts in this as well. You know, if a run’s got a lot of intensity and maybe it’s just over an hour – or even just an hour – it’s probably still wise to add some hydration and nutrition into that run.
What Counts as a Long Run?
When we say a long run, I’m thinking of anything over about 1 hour and 20 minutes. We need to take hydration and fuel whilst we’re running.
These are just sort of base figures. For some people it may be a little bit more, some a little bit less – towards the higher or lower ends of these ranges.
Hydration Basics for Long Runs
For hydration, we want to be taking between 400 and 600 millilitres per hour, with 1,000 milligrams of sodium per litre.
Sodium does a lot of things. It helps with the absorption of fluid, but it also helps glucose cross the intestinal wall and into cells so that it can be used as fuel.
Quite often, when we hear about people struggling to take nutrition on board during long runs, most of the time those runners are actually dehydrated. So the nutrition’s not really going down because of dehydration, rather than because of the nutrition itself.
Fuelling with Carbs – Not Fats or Protein
On a run over about an hour and 20 minutes, fuel-wise, we want to be taking somewhere in the region of 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour – from simple sugars.
While we’re actually running, we don’t really metabolise any exogenous (external) sources of fat and protein. We’re mostly burning the fat that’s already stored.
Any fat and protein taken during training can actually slow down gastric emptying. Sometimes people will say, “Oh, I tried to eat this big lump of flapjack and it just felt like it stuck here.” That’s because the stomach isn’t emptying into the small intestine, where the absorption starts to happen.
Train Like You Race
If we’re fuelling our training well, it leads to incremental gains over months and years that result in better performance. So we need to make sure we’re fuelling not just our races well, but also our training runs.
If you’ve got any questions, please let me know.
And for now – happy running!
