Are you prepared to revolutionize your performance during marathons or ultra-marathons? Our guest for this episode is Marcus Willday, the Performance Director at Torq Fitness, one of the leading endurance nutrition companies in the world... Marcus unravels fascinating insights on fueling your body to keep that energy tank from running on empty during a race.
We venture into the realm of stored carbohydrates, their rapid depletion, and strategies to maintain adequate energy levels.
Marcus sheds light on the interaction between glucose, sodium, and water, their molecular structures, and how this knowledge can help enhance your race performance. Listen as we dissect the role of a transporter protein, SGLT1, in keeping your blood fueled with carbohydrates and how this science can influence your marathon finish time.
Finally, we break down types of carbohydrates, their absorption thresholds and how exercise intensity influences carbohydrate breakdown. With Marcus' expertise, we weave through the science of fueling and recovery, timing your fuel intake, and tailoring your carbohydrate consumption to match your race goals.
This riveting podcast episode is your gateway to maximizing your endurance performance with the right fueling tactics.
You can find Marcus and the work of Torq at https://www.torqfitness.co.uk/ and on their Instagram @torqfitness
This video is a fantastic visualisation of the relationship between our stored fuel sources and taking on extra fuel during a race! https://www.torqfitness.co.uk/news/why-fuel-running-video
Thanks for being part of our running community. Keep clocking those miles, keep pushing your limits, and above all, keep finding joy in the run. See you on the next episode of Maximum Mileage Running Podcast!
JOIN OUR FREE FACEBOOK GROUP! Your support here helps to keep making content and weekly podcast episodes... in return, you will have access to fantastic discounts through our numerous partners, plus we upload lots more content and chat to help you with your running!
Thanks to all our partners at Maximum Mileage who you can get huge discounts via the Maximum Mileage Facebook Group! :
You can find more resources including the blog or enquire about having one...
Are you prepared to revolutionize your performance during marathons or ultra-marathons? Our guest for this episode is Marcus Willday, the Performance Director at Torq Fitness, one of the leading endurance nutrition companies in the world... Marcus unravels fascinating insights on fueling your body to keep that energy tank from running on empty during a race.
We venture into the realm of stored carbohydrates, their rapid depletion, and strategies to maintain adequate energy levels.
Marcus sheds light on the interaction between glucose, sodium, and water, their molecular structures, and how this knowledge can help enhance your race performance. Listen as we dissect the role of a transporter protein, SGLT1, in keeping your blood fueled with carbohydrates and how this science can influence your marathon finish time.
Finally, we break down types of carbohydrates, their absorption thresholds and how exercise intensity influences carbohydrate breakdown. With Marcus' expertise, we weave through the science of fueling and recovery, timing your fuel intake, and tailoring your carbohydrate consumption to match your race goals.
This riveting podcast episode is your gateway to maximizing your endurance performance with the right fueling tactics.
You can find Marcus and the work of Torq at https://www.torqfitness.co.uk/ and on their Instagram @torqfitness
This video is a fantastic visualisation of the relationship between our stored fuel sources and taking on extra fuel during a race! https://www.torqfitness.co.uk/news/why-fuel-running-video
Thanks for being part of our running community. Keep clocking those miles, keep pushing your limits, and above all, keep finding joy in the run. See you on the next episode of Maximum Mileage Running Podcast!
JOIN OUR FREE FACEBOOK GROUP! Your support here helps to keep making content and weekly podcast episodes... in return, you will have access to fantastic discounts through our numerous partners, plus we upload lots more content and chat to help you with your running!
Thanks to all our partners at Maximum Mileage who you can get huge discounts via the Maximum Mileage Facebook Group! :
You can find more resources including the blog or enquire about having one...
Let's start again. Okay, welcome to the Max and the Miners podcast, and on today's episode I have Marcus Will Day. Marcus, I've had the pleasure of working with for the last couple of years now, if not maybe even three years, with the talk fitness set up. I'm a massive fan of their products and I've been using them even before I became an ambassador for them and I've had the. I say I've had the pleasure of working with Marcus and his advice, along with the talk products, have been a huge part of my wedding performance and have fueled me to many ultra marathons and marathons alike, and I am delighted to have him on the show today. Marcus, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome Cheers, cheers. Nick, Thanks for having us here and yeah, I really look forward to breaking down some of the fundamentals of nutrition and giving some of the listeners some good take home nuggets that they can apply to their training and racing. So, yeah, let's get cracking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, definitely, as we were talking about before we started recording, this is such a big subject that we could go on for probably many, many, many, many episodes, and I think we will probably do more in the future. So for today's episode, though, we are going to talk about as much as possible the how we can fuel our races. I've come armed with some of the most popular questions that I get asked by my, my athletes and people I see on various Facebook groups and Instagram and that kind of thing. So, but before we dive into some of those subjects, marcus, just tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker 2:So me? I am the performance director at talk, so I'll look after all things sport, science, nutrition, podcasts, education. If any of our support athletes have any questions, they need support with regards to their nutrition, fueling, hydration, recovery, advice. I am the go to work alongside our kind of new product device, so kind of new product development team, on ensuring that. You know everything we do at talk is there to answer a performance solution.
Speaker 2:So you know what we mean by that is, if you find yourself exercising, training, racing, and there's an element of the product which, or a product that just isn't quite fitting the bill, we at talk will do everything that we possibly can to overcome that problem.
Speaker 2:It's from a carbohydrate ingestion perspective, whether it's from a flavor perspective, whether it's from a packaging perspective. You know we look at everything at the absolute end of the degree and break down each one of those problems to. What we aim to do is then provide perfection at the end of it. And you know, I think we've we've come a very, very long way over the course of 20 years of, you know, being very, very active in endurance sports. And you know, and I think it's probably fair to say, that as a result of that time, effort and commitment to creating performance solutions. We we are now one of the UK's and you know ever growing globally and so endurance, endurance specialist performs nutrition products. So, yeah, I think in an absolute nutshell that's kind of everything that I cover, yeah, and I think the education is important.
Speaker 1:So yeah, usually that was one of the first things ever it sort of caught my eye was the level of detail you go into on your website. You've got the whole education part of the website and you know I probably geek out on this sort of stuff. I highly recommend anybody going on the website and having having a look. But also, if you just want some really quick practical advice as well, and something I share all the time, is the two engine gauges, fuel gauges video, and I'll share that in the show notes actually, because I think that just explains marathon fueling long distance fueling really, really well how we have our glyphogen stores and are the gels that we take and the role that both of those play. But anyway, we'll get into a bit more discussion on that.
Speaker 1:So one of the biggest questions I get on my with my athletes, with the people I see on on Instagram, facebook, social media in general, is how should I feel my marathon, ultra marathon? I think we'll break down the two separately because I know they're two very different beasts. But, for example, something like a marathon, I hear all the time or a couple of jelly babies, I took a couple of jelly babies, I was fine or somebody will say to me I yeah, I just had a pocket full of jelly babies I'd like 10 of them for a whole four hour marathon, for example and I go, oh, okay, cool, and how were the last six miles for you? And I go, oh, shocking, I was dying. Well, that's because you only had six or seven jelly babies for the whole marathon. So can you talk to why that isn't quite enough? And and, yeah, let's go down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:So this is. This in itself is a huge topic, and online we have an article on how to fuel your marathon and that in itself, I think, is a three and a half thousand. It is a meaty piece of piece of advice, but to answer that question, you have to almost start at the end, and you have to. You have to start at the point as if you have completely depleted your fuel tank, as if the fuel that you have in your car is now scraping the dregs at the bottom, and we have to have an understanding of how quickly that can happen, how quickly we can burn that, that fuel tank, even from complete saturation. You know, and if we're looking to run a relatively competitive marathon, you know we could be looking at anywhere from two and a half to maybe five to five hours, maybe six hours. You know, who knows it's? Everyone's demands of what they want from a marathon are very different.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, we still have this capacity to break down our physiological fuel tank of glycogen, of stored carbohydrate, very quickly, and when I say very quickly, I'm referring to two and a half hours, relatively high exercise intensity. Okay, you know, if, if, if we want to prevent that. Well, what can we do to prevent the breakdown of that glycogen? And and we remember when, when we break down glycogen and we completely deplete our glycogen reservoir, we're only then left with one metabolic fuel source, and, and that metabolic fuel source is fat. And the trouble with fat is that it's it's whilst it's very efficient nutrient in providing lots of energy, we need a lot of time to be able to break it down as as a nutrient to provide us with energy, and so we can only do that at low exercise intensities. And so anybody who ever has bonked before or hit the wall will have noticed that their rate of perceived exertion how hard, how hard, how hard, how hard, how hard it is to do, and so their ability to produce any pace would have plummeted.
Speaker 2:And this is what we need to consider. Why has our ability to produce pace plummeted? And that's because we no longer have glycogen carbohydrate as an available fuel source allowing us to work at a moderate to high exercise intensity. We're stuck in this, like we can consider it a slow zone of breaking down fat as a fuel source, but there's nothing, there's no fuel that will allow us to inject a bit of pace. So, ultimately, if we want to run a marathon, regardless of whether we want to win the race or we want to complete the race or we want to get the best results. We want to get the best results. Regardless of whether we want to win the race or we want to complete our own battle. We still want to see a nice time on the finish board at the end, and so we want to do that in the best time as we can, and so we have to. And that's all relative to the person right.
Speaker 1:You know it might be something like me. I'm aiming for 240 at Manchester, but I've got people like coach who are going to be aiming for five and they're going to be super chuffed with that because that's relative, absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know, and if that person aiming for five hours can do it in 459, because they feel, you know you're going to feel over the moon with that effort, yeah, but you, you're going to have to fuel to allow that to happen. Because if we can break down carbohydrate in as little as two and a half hours, deplete carbohydrate reservoir in as little as two and a half hours, that's, you know, theoretically speaking, an hour and a half where we're plodding along in this forced slow zone because we've essentially bumped. So. So how can we overcome it? And the analogy I like to use is is almost like driving your car whilst filling it up at the same time. Yeah, nice, you know you're driving along with the fuel pump in the, in the nozzle, and you know, and away you go and you're drip feeding carbohydrate into the fuel tank whilst you're driving, and what we see is the body, the body's preferred fuel source, is glucose. We'll always, especially when we're exercising, we'll always aim to to use glucose as the fuel source first, and so, for every sports nutrition product, for every jelly baby, for every sip of energy drink that we have, we're providing the blood and the muscle with glucose, the preferred fuel source. So, in essence, we're sparing our foot, our fuel tank, and that's going to allow us to do one of two things it's going to allow us to either extend your time to exhaustion whilst running at the same pace, or it will afford you a higher pace.
Speaker 2:So we now need to look at well what is our exercise intensity? Is it low, is it moderate or high relative to ourselves? And, as a result, how is that going to have an influence on our ability to use carbohydrate as a fuel source? And how much carbohydrate are we going to use as a fuel source at those varying exercise intensities? And what we see is, as exercise intensity increases, we see a greater shift towards carbohydrate breakdown. So, in theory, if we're trying to offset our depletion of the fuel tank, our aim has to be to increase the amount of carbohydrate that we ingest per hour with increasing exercise intensity. So if we're looking to be competitive and we know our exercise intensity is going to be moderate to high, we're going to be running close to our run pace threshold. That would take me to a place where I'd start to consider I'm probably going to need to aim towards the upper limits of what we consider to be carbohydrate ingestion rates, and we know that at the minute to be somewhere between 90 and, to some elite runners, 120 grams of carbohydrate.
Speaker 1:I've seen 120 feet again 12 million more and more these days.
Speaker 2:yet, but I think for a lot of us, what we also have to remember is that, whilst there's so much knowledge out there about fueling and we know what we should be doing, there's a lot of athletes out there who know what they should be doing but aren't doing it, and that has to be step one. Step one is actually implementing the fueling into your training and racing strategy and being consistent with it.
Speaker 1:So I was going to say, because those figures of 90 to 120 grams of carbohydrate for those listening, that is a lot of carbohydrate whilst you are moving at a high intensity, like that, is a lot of work that the blood in your stomach is having to do. And if we take it back even further, I think it'd be good to just touch on how does a person get used to being able to ingest that much carbohydrate? Because we don't just turn up on race day and go right, cool, I'm going to chuck in 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour into my marathon.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and there's a number of factors that can affect that as well. So even with let's use the extreme example of 120 grams worth of carbohydrate, somebody could have trained at 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour for three to four weeks prior. They could have injected that into their really high intensity training sessions and they become comfortable with that. They can tolerate those really high carbohydrate ingestion rates. But they enter then the race or the start line dehydrated, for whatever reason. They've overlooked their hydration. To absorb one carbohydrate molecule, we need two sodium molecules and we need 260 water molecules. So if you're dehydrated and your aim is to try and consume and absorb 120 grams worth of carbohydrate per hour, but you're dehydrated and that water isn't available allowing that to happen, no matter how well trained you are at tolerating 120 grams worth of carbohydrate an hour, there simply isn't the formula needed within the gastrointestinal tract to actually allow that process to happen, and so you are almost certainly going to develop gastrointestinal distress.
Speaker 1:And this is where those porta-potties on the London mirth and come in handy right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, and so that's what happens, right.
Speaker 1:I'm well known for talking about pooping on my hot seats. Let's talk about pooping. Oh sorry, my Zoom just did something funny. Oh, it's made me put my hand up. That's weird. Let's talk about that, because that is the reality is that if you don't have that formula in you, your stomach is therefore not able to absorb those carbohydrates and therefore it has to do something with them, and therefore it's either through puking or pooping. Let's be honest, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that is the reality of the situation. You know. There is no point hiding from it. And I think this goes back to you will have heard it, we'll have heard it a thousand times I don't get on with gels. And is it really the gel that's the problem understanding what we've just discussed? Or is it something that's happening around the exercise window that means you can't tolerate the gel? And in nine times out of 10, when we speak to athletes whether it's myself, whether it's yourself when we start to break down some of the nuances surrounding nutrition, we start to realize that it may be a high fat breakfast, it may be a high fiber breakfast that's limiting the absorption of carbohydrate through the intestinal tract, that's essentially blocking our pathways to absorb that carbohydrate. It could be dehydration. And in nine times out of 10, those are the factors that means the gel gets the bad name. But the reason the gel that gets the bad name is because that's that that was the last thing that was consumed at the point of developing gastrointestinal distress.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm constantly talking to my nutritionist I work with about what I'm eating around my sessions and around my races, and it is all about reducing particularly fiber. You know, fiber, whilst is absolutely essential for overall health, around the time of a hard session or a race, Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know and this this isn't for us to sit here and discredit any of the macro or micronutrients you know for anyone that's talking. You know the macro nutrients your fats, carbohydrates, your proteins and your fiber and the one that's commonly overlooked water. Right, my volume. Water is the biggest or most consumed nutrient that we consume every single day and yet it never comes up in conversation. So you know, that's that's really interesting to bear in mind. But I think, going back to what we were just talking about, was we shouldn't muddy the water in any specific nutrient. It's important to know that they're all absolutely fundamental to health, well-being and performance to some degree. There is just time and a place as to where we choose to consume those nutrients in and around and exercising lifestyle. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So just so we can kind of help the listeners put it into practical terms, so one molecule of glucose, two molecules of sodium, 260 molecules of water. Yeah, what does that look like if it was in front of me right here? Is that, you know, 260 mils of water, you know with a pinch of salt? And what does it actually look like?
Speaker 2:Very, very good question. I mean, we are breaking this down into individual kind of molecular structure. Yeah, so you know we are talking about glucose in its molecular form. We are talking about H2O as water, as its molecular form. You know we're talking about sodium as its molecular form. So you know, that really is kind of what we're referring to.
Speaker 1:But I think what I'm sort of getting is how can I sort of go away and go right? Okay, so if not having enough water in me and sodium is contributing to gastrointestinal distress and I'm, you know, slagging off?
Speaker 2:the gel for it.
Speaker 1:How do I sort of put that into a practical thing, I think?
Speaker 2:it's always a case of, it would always be a case of considering it as the viscosity Okay. So if we put a really, really rich, if we dumped a bag of sugar into a pint glass and we only put 100 mils of water in it and we tried to mix it up, it's going to end up being a very thick, gloopy, syrupy consistency, which is, you know, if you were to pour that glass, it would pour out very, very slowly and probably in clumps, whereas if we poured the same amount of sugar and we diluted it with five litres, you know, it's then a much more free-flowing formula. Okay, you know, it's much more water-like, and so this is, I think, that, in essence, is offering a visual representation of how water availability helps to allow carbohydrate to pass from the intestine to the blood. But what I think we also need to remember is that, whilst those are the pieces that you need for that process to work, it's actually regulated by a transporter, and we're not going to go too deep with this, but I think it's important to understand it.
Speaker 2:So the transporter that sits in the intestine and passes the carbohydrate from the intestine to the bloodstream is called SGLT1, sodium glucose transporter 1. So within that transport protein, which is a protein, so it's trainable. It's all of the fundamentals that we need to draw that carbohydrate across and it's essentially we can visualise it as a spinning wheel with little cogs, a bit like a bicycle chain ring, yeah, and each of these molecules attaches itself within the gaps of the chain ring. So we have one glucose molecule enter the chain ring, we have two sodium molecules enter the chain ring and then, sitting around, the rest of the cogs would be filled with water and only until each one of those 260 water molecules is complete and saturated can that pump, can that protein do its job. Only at that point spin and pull that carbohydrate across. So hopefully that's a good visual representation and analogy of how nobody can actually see me, but I'm sat here nodding my head in total fascination.
Speaker 1:I love the way Marcus explains these kind of things because it does help to kind of, I think, put some of the pieces together, because I'm no scientist and so it is really helpful to put all those together.
Speaker 1:So I think then, when we sort of get into the point around, how do we fuel our races?
Speaker 1:So one of the biggest questions I get, or sort of discussions I have with my athletes that are doing, for example, the London marathon, you've got an aid station or a drink station every roughly three miles and for somebody who is so, here's a great example.
Speaker 1:I've got a guy who loves wearing a hydration vest, but he also loves the thought of going for a time. I think, well, if you're wearing a hydration vest, that's going to hinder your ability to chase that time, because you know if you've got a kilo or a couple of kilos around your shoulders, you're not going to be able to run as fast or as smoothly. So how do you get that hydration that you're going to need to be able to fuel that race? And I think that's a big problem that a lot of people have with something like the London marathon, particularly myself, I think. When I did my marathon PB, I think I took maybe I'd say 100 mils of water over the 2015 minutes, because you know I don't have any Kipchogi bike man. It was awesome to watch on passing bottles to me.
Speaker 1:You know. So how does, how do you know the regular marathon runners get enough water in them and perform well?
Speaker 2:So let's look at marathon runners, and I think we need to create some separation between marathon runners and ultra marathon runners. I think there's a bit of a difference. But let's look at. Let's look at marathon, and we know that dehydration limits performance at some point.
Speaker 2:We often hear 2%, a 2% I was going to say 2% is what I did and dehydration we see sometimes 3%, and yet we've seen elite marathon runners finishing the marathon 10% dehydrated and they've put in the best time of their life. And so how does that stack up? And well, what we also have to consider is the psychological stimulus. If you know that you're going to be on the best time of your life and you're an elite marathon runner, an elite race, the streets are lined with thousands and thousands of people cheering your name that's going to have some pretty big stimulus. And so is there a likelihood that actually the psychological stimulus could limit the effect of the dehydration?
Speaker 2:I would say yes, but then I would also couple that with well, what happens if you had that same stimulus and you weren't 10% dehydrated and you're actually only one or 2% dehydrated? Yeah, you may have broken your best time by three minutes. Could you have broken it by seven. I think that's what we need to consider whenever we're looking at some of the research, to some degree, also articles that we read on websites and in magazines. So, for a marathon runner, we have to look at well, what is it that you want to achieve? Do you know that you're a heavy sweater? You lose a lot of fluid during a race, and if that's a yes or a no, what can we do to try and overcome that problem? And my first point of critical importance would be to ensure that you go into the marathon in a really hydrated state.
Speaker 1:That's the sort of advice I give my people. First of all, you've got to be thinking about going in really well hydrated, to the point where, in the week of a marathon, we talk about carb loading. I talk about hydration loading as well. So add some more water into your diet as well as those extra carbs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And just like water is critical for absorbing carbohydrate, it's also critical for storing carbohydrate. So it's slightly off topic, but for every one gram of carbohydrate to be stored as glycogen, you need three grams of water. So this is why you can stand on the scales come race day and you look down and you're two kilos heavier and it's like, oh man, that's really going to have a big impact on my pace. I mounted around this extra two kilos but the Formula One car and the start line is full of fuel and it's going to be heavier than it is at the end, but it's not going to go anywhere if there's no fuel in the tank, and that's what we have to consider. So ensure that we're going into the race hydrated. That's going to allow us to them regulate correctly, dissipate heat from the body. It's also going to allow us to, like we spoke about, absorb that carbohydrate from the testing to the blood. It's going to maintain our cardiovascular capacity, which is absolutely fundamental to your performance. It's also going to maintain our cognitive capacity as well, our decision making.
Speaker 2:If you think about the critical importance of pacing a marathon, that's fundamentally a psychological task and a psychological regulation, and if hydration starts to become neglected, our ability to correctly pace and make decisions surrounding pacing become impaired. So you can see how nutrition has also an impact on psychology. So we've gone in hydrated. Now we need to consider, probably, what our race expected race time is going to be. We need to consider how much fluid we would typically lose per hour and we would aim to try and offset at least 2% of that, to try and prevent 2% to 3% of total body mass at the start, compared to at the end, coming from water.
Speaker 2:And we then have to take a look at our fueling opportunities and hydration opportunities. So are we planning on stopping at the race support hydration stations? Within certain races we may have the capacity for support staff, team, family, friends to pass up a bottle which we can take fluid from on the go, or we run with our own hydration packs, and so we have to look at how important the hydration is going to be to our overall performance. But what's also really interesting that we see and this is a differentiation between runners and cyclists is that cyclists have a capacity to carry a lot more fluid, whereas runners are really quite limited. Research has suggested that runners are actually better at tolerating higher exercise loads in dehydrated states compared to cyclists, because they typically train in further dehydrated states due to the fact that they can't carry as much water or fluid, and I think that's really interesting in itself, especially for somebody coming from one sport maybe to another.
Speaker 2:Is that just because you could tolerate X intensity in one sport, as you make that transition, it may be harder to do so? So hydration is key to performance and I think trying to limit dehydration where possible does have to be at the forefront of our mind, because, whilst we're unsure as to exactly at what point percentage dehydrated dehydration impacts performance, we know that the physiological markers that are regulated by good hydration are impacted as a result of dehydration. That's it. That's what we need to do. We need to ensure that these systems have all the tools that they need to run effectively. Just like a business needs X amount of staff to run, the body needs X amount of water to run.
Speaker 1:So what you're telling me is that my strategy of only having 100mls over the course of three hours is a poor one.
Speaker 2:I mean there's probably room for improvement.
Speaker 1:I think it's that old adage of I want to perform the best I can, so I don't want to have any points in my race where something is slowing me down. So I think it's getting that balance right, isn't it?
Speaker 2:And I think the balance is more difficult in the shorter races, ie the marathons over ultra-marathon. If, for example, we sweat, for easy maths, at 1000mls, one litre an hour, so that's what's leaving our body. And our ultra-marathon is seven hours, eight hours, and we're only ever ingesting 500mls of fluid every hour. One hour on hour, that's a 500mls deficit. For the first two or three hours we may not notice the effects of the dehydration setting in, but I've worked with so many athletes and it's almost at exactly the same point. Somewhere between three and a half and four and a half hours, they say I've been fueling at 90g of carbohydrate per hour. My fueling is spot on, but my ability to produce power has just disappeared and I cannot work out for the life of me what that is.
Speaker 2:So we look at their fueling, we look at their breakfast, we look at their recovery, we look at their training load and everything marries up to what should be a theoretically good performance. And then we look at the hydration and we look at how much fluid they've been consuming over the course of the last eight hours of their race. And it's microscopic because they're concerned about carrying the extra weight, which of course you don't want to be doing over the course of eight hours, but at three and a half hours they're already starting to see a decrement in performance. So their pace drops for the course of the next five hours, let's say, and I can almost guarantee, that the additional weight carried by the athlete that would have a better impact on their physiological performance would by far offset the pace that they would lose by becoming dehydrated. And I've seen that firsthand. By adjusting the amount of fluids and increasing the amount of fluids per hour has significantly improved performance in ultra endurance events plus four hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I 100% agree with that.
Speaker 1:A fairly simple strategy I employ with my ultra runners is most of them are going to be carrying two 500ml bottles on them, some perhaps a bladder with maybe one and a half litres on it.
Speaker 1:You generally got anywhere between six and 10 miles between age stations on most ultra marathon, which for most people is somewhere between one and 90 minutes, maybe two hours for a 10 mile gap between age stations. And my advice is they left your bottles at every age station and finish them before you get to the next one. Maybe finish them and if you haven't finished them, open the lids and before you give it to the, or you fill it up or you give it to one of the age station volunteers to fill your bottle up neck what's left in there. Okay, if it's a huge amount, maybe not neck it, because then you might be having a lot of sloshy water in you for the next hour or so. But keep drinking Every time you watch beeps for a kilometre or a mile, have a good sip of water so that by the time you get to that next age station you've pretty much depleted all of your water and you can fill it back up again.
Speaker 2:And you raise a good point there with one of the reasons why athletes will avoid carrying water is the sensation of water and electrolytes. I'm talking about water for the ease of kind of fluid purport, but of course it would typically be a carbohydrate and electrolyte solution if we effect it. But let's talk about fluids and the reason athletes would typically avoid or runners would typically avoid carrying large volumes of fluid and ingesting large volumes of fluid is because of that sensation of sloshing around in the stomach. It is uncomfortable, but this is where training the gut starts to come.
Speaker 1:really, I was just going to say we get back to the training bit and you're practicing all of this stuff. You can train the gut. I say it all the time. You can train the gut just as much as a muscle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And there was one time of year where probably all of us to some degree trained the gut without us even realizing, and it's when we slightly overindulged at Christmas. Christmas dinner's deep over the course of three days, because you've had to go and see various relatives and you've had a Christmas dinner at each, and the first one is quite hard to consume. It's always started and mounted upon the plate, isn't it? And Yannan keeps giving you more and more food to eat. And then you go to your next relatives the next day and actually the second Christmas dinner isn't that hard to consume and you start to get three or four of these in and actually tucking away at Christmas dinner is no longer a challenge.
Speaker 2:And sitting inside the stomach are stretch receptors and those can be trained to tolerate a larger volume. So if we know we're heading out to marathon desibbs, for example, where we know fluid ingestion rate and the ability to drink large volumes of fluid whilst exercising is going to be not just critically important to exercise performance but critically important to survival, we have to be able to tolerate these larger fluid ingestion rates and we can do that simply by consuming more volume. We could do that by consuming more water whilst training, more fluids whilst training to train the stomach to essentially carry more volume, and it's amazing how quickly the stomach will adapt within the course of two to three weeks of simply increasing fluid ingestion rates throughout our training sessions, we should see an improvement in stomach comfort throughout that training period. So if you think how long it takes you to knock 30, 40 seconds off your 5K or whatever that might be special pace, it can take a long time, but two weeks for a relatively significant training adaptation for me is a really short period of time.
Speaker 1:And a really cheap one. It's not like this is something super expensive and we have to go out buying the newest and latest tech. It's literally drink more water, folks, and make sure you are taking plenty of water with you on your training runs. I love that Christmas dinner analogy. I'm going to be using that all the time. That is absolutely amazing. You are right, the first one is a nightmare, and then the next day well, not a nightmare because it's delicious.
Speaker 1:but then you spend the rest of the day feeling groggy and you're barely making it to the Emmerdale Christmas special. This is it. But the next day you're like, right, okay, round two, here we go. And then, frankie, buy New Year's Eve. You're still eating turkey curries, turkey pies and all sorts of stuff because of all the turkey that's still left over and you're not thinking twice about knocking back an entire package for a rush after a diet. I love that. I think that's a great analogy.
Speaker 1:In the time we have left, I'm going to fire a few quick ones at you, and I think this is where some of the more practical elements, because it's been awesome to really get to understand more about the science of feeling and presumably the role of hydration, because I know it's super important, but I think a lot of people listening will will not realize just how important hydration is to performance, because carbs are put on the pedestal. Carbs are king and water is life. Staying there, certainly, employee. Let's go back to the carb side of things, though. Talk. You guys recommend 90g per hour. We've already established that 90g per hour is a lot.
Speaker 1:Me personally, with my athletes that aren't quite used to ingestion that amount we do start off with. Let's go with one gel per hour. That in talk terms is a 30g carbohydrate gel. We do that on an easy run and then we progress, then to 60 and then we get up to 90 where we can. I say that where we can because some people I coach they literally cannot go up to the 90 amount. One of the things I've read in the past is a good guide is one gram of carbohydrate per kilo of body weight. Would you agree with that? One of the questions I got thrown at me a little while ago was I've got a runner who's in the 50 kilo range and then I've got a runner who's in the 100 kilo range. Is 90g the same for the 50 kilo? This was a female versus a 100 kilo male.
Speaker 2:This is a really good question and it comes from an evolution of the science. The evolution of the science came from, to start with, looking at ingesting carbohydrate at all as a fuel source. That carbohydrate was glucose only. It would be the equivalent of glucose jelly babies. You name it Glucose only carbohydrate sources. What we started to see was there were these recommendations, just like you said, of one gram of glucose per kilogram of body weight. For those under around 66 kilos, they could tolerate one gram of glucose per hour really efficiently and effectively. Those athletes then who started to move into 80, 90, 100 kilos were consuming one gram per kilo of glucose per hour. Gi distress was starting to set in relatively quickly. We were thinking what is going on here? Why are we seeing this discrepancy between the lighter guys being able to tolerate it and the heavier guys not being able to tolerate it? It came back to exactly the SGLT1 transporter that we spoke about before, sodium transporter 1.
Speaker 2:Research then understood and realised that there was a limit as to how much carbohydrate this glucose only transporter could pull across from the intestine to the blood per hour, and that was 60 grams. If you're a 60 kilo athlete and you're consuming 60 grams of glucose per hour at one gram per minute. Yes, you will probably tolerate that absolutely fine, because the glucose transporter is at saturation. It's at a saturation threshold Same as below that. You'll probably tolerate that just fine. But if you're a 100 kilo athlete consuming one gram a minute, 100 grams of glucose, you're essentially 40 grams above the glucose saturation threshold per hour. That 40 grams is backing up in the gut and it has nowhere to go. You are going to essentially create gastrointestinal distress.
Speaker 2:Now what happens? How do we overcome this? Let's look at some different types of carbohydrate. We experimented with a whole load of different carbohydrate sources and we ended up with fructose. Fructose was the key in getting us from this 60 gram threshold up to 90 grams.
Speaker 2:What we started to see is that when we combine glucose with fructose at a 2 to 1 ratio, for example, at 90 grams of carbohydrate an hour, 60 is coming from glucose and 30 is coming from fructose.
Speaker 2:It allows us to absorb and to utilize and to burn up to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour. We now move away from the threshold or the understanding of one gram per kilogram per hour to actually understanding that each intestinal transporter has its own thresholds. The glucose transporter is saturated at 60 grams per hour and the fructose transporter is still being understood a little bit more, but we know that could be somewhere between 30 and a bit like glucose, once trained 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour as well. This is why we're starting to see the potential hourly threshold moving from 90, maybe up to 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour, and that's as a result of not glucose being able to absorb more, but fructose being able to absorb more. That's where there's a bit of a crossover in the science and we're starting to see now less of grams per kilogram of carbohydrate per hour, but actually looking at the different intestinal transporters and where their own threshold sits to allow us to identify how much we can absorb per hour.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. That's super interesting stuff and that sort of clears up the question around. If we can only ingest 60 grams of glucose per hour, how are we getting ourselves to 120? Because we're adding fructose, not because we're trying to train our gut to take more glucose. Right, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, brilliant yeah.
Speaker 1:Excellent, I think, in terms of the amount of glycogen that we can carry in our bodies, is good for. And again, there's a figure that you've mentioned today that's slightly different to a figure that I've heard in the past, which is 90 minutes. You've mentioned two and a half hours worth of glucose. Is that sort of a window consideration, depending on the level of intensity, or are we going to be yeah?
Speaker 2:Exercise intensity will determine how much carbohydrate we break down per minute, and so there's always going to be a bit of a range, because one it's going to it will depend on how much carbohydrate we had to start with.
Speaker 2:Are we at absolute, at the point of running? Let's say, for example, if we timed somebody to run a full glycogen depletion, how long is it going to take to burn this tank of fuel, just like driving your car hard, of course, if you start at 90% or 100%, there's potentially 10% more or less time and of course, the harder you drive your car, the more fuel you burn per minute. So, once again, that has an impact on how quickly we're going to break down this reservoir of glycogen. So, yeah, 90 minutes at super high exercise intensity, really hard intervals with limited recovery, hey, yeah, especially if you're very good and you do a lot of training around threshold and the body is well trained in breaking down carbohydrate as a fuel source, then yeah, absolutely. I think 90 minutes could certainly be achievable. Back off the intensity a little bit, you know. Obviously, as we back off the intensity, we back off grams of carbohydrate being burnt per hour and as a result, we in theory extend time to exhaustion.
Speaker 1:So, off the back of that, the second part of the question is how early should I start taking things like my gels or drinking my carbohydrate solution? I mean, let's sort of come back to the marathon scenario. You know the amount of people like here go alright, I took my first gel at 20 miles. I'm like great, did that sort you out for the last six miles? No, it didn't. It's, actually, whilst you know, gluteinos, fructose, that 2 to 1 ratio that you guys use, whilst it does get into your system quickly, we're not talking like 20 seconds, we're talking more, like you know, 15 to 20 minutes for to get through the trap that the gut is testing into the bloodstream, starting to work.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, you know we're talking, we are talking, we are talking minutes and I would say, to be honest, that's probably towards the upper end. But you know, let's use the example of a dehydrated runner that would have an impact on absorption time for sure, you know. So if that runner, like you mentioned there, consumes that gel at that point in the race, at 20 miles, they've not neglected hydration as well. Yeah, absolutely, you know that is going to have an impact on the rate of which we consider to be gastric emptying. But you know, yeah, we're generally talking, we're talking minutes and I think we want to start fueling before we feel the effects of the fuel. Okay, so, if anybody has ever noticed the effect of fueling and they've gone, man, that gel was a pick me up. I'm really, really glad I took that gel. I felt fantastic after it.
Speaker 2:You've left it too late, because what we've seen now is we've actually started to see blood glucose drop off, and when we see blood glucose drop off, we see performance start to drop off. But once we've taken that gel, we've suddenly seen a rise back to baseline and where our blood glucose should be, and with that comes improved performance. So our goal is to try and keep blood glucose stable. We don't really want to be seeing these kind of big peaks and troughs. If we can fuel consistently and we never start to see the significant reduction and drop off in blood glucose, then we can.
Speaker 2:You know, we can suggest, as long as hydration is a D2 as well, that in theory there should be no reason as to why performance should drop off bar at that point. Muscular fatigue so respectable in relationship, we should if we're fueling at 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour. That's where we want to start for our marathon training. Let's fuel every half an hour, from the word go. Let's not leave it to the last hour of your training run. Let's get the fuel in, let's make it available, let's get the most out of the training session.
Speaker 1:That's what I say to my athletes leave it like that. If we're going for that, let's say it is our 60 grams and we're talking about that every 60 grams an hour. The question I usually get is when should I start? From half an hour Then when we get to race day, and if we're going for 90 grams per hour, then when do I start On 20 minutes? Because we're going to take one every 20 minutes.
Speaker 1:It is really interesting because 99 times out of 100, the reaction I get is holy shit, that's a lot of gels. Yes, it is. It is a lot. If you're running a four hour marathon and that four hour marathon is, let's say, 90% of your threshold, then that is a lot of gels. You are going to want to think about portability. Where are you going to put those gels? That is a consideration that you need to have. That is the reality. That's where I come back to, all the way back to the beginning of this episode, those two jelly babies that you think you need for your marathon. That isn't enough, people. How much is in two jelly babies?
Speaker 2:Maybe eight grams Absolutely. I can't say I've ever actually broken it down. But I might do after this I think I did look.
Speaker 1:One day I jumped on my fitness power one and I think it literally is something like three or four grams of sugar is in a jelly baby. When somebody says, yeah, I'd like two or three for that, but they totally bonked. When you consider we're talking about the potential for 270, 360 grams of carbohydrates for your entire marathon, that is an astonishing number compared to two jelly babies?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I appreciate we're getting close on time, but it's a really good topic to bring up. We look at training and nutrition and how it's important to train with the nutrition Not just from a practical and an understanding your fueling regime perspective, but actually looking at how we get in the most from our training sessions. If we have a three hour training run and halfway through that run our pace significantly drops off because we neglect fueling, we've done less work than if we've done the same three hour run and our pace has remained constant. At the end of the constant run, where our pace hasn't dropped off at the end of it, we've done a greater amount of work. And with work comes a training stress and with a training stress becomes an adaptation. If we can train harder by fueling better, we get a better training response.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we recover better as well. I talk about this all the time that if you're fueling, your recovery starts during the run itself. The way you're fueling and if you fuel yourself better, you will perform better and you will therefore come out of it with better recovery. Last one from me before we go, and another one that's hugely asked all the time I think we've covered it, but do we take our gel by time or by the amount of miles we've run? Because the amount of people are going? Oh, I took the gel at between miles. I will ask great if you run the six minute miles, but if Jimmy over here is running 12 minute miles and he does it at between miles, he's probably missing a window, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for me it is time always by time, 100%. We have our long, we have our goal, we have our time goal, we have our pace goal. We know how that's going to have an impact on the amount of carbohydrate that we want to consume. We break that down and we go okay. If I need to consume X amount of carbohydrate and I need to fuel consistently, I divide that by the amount of minutes, slash hours, and that gives me a fueling target of how much I need to consume, whether it's one fueling product every 20, 30, maybe even 40 minutes or every hour. So yeah, absolutely always by time.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, marcus, I've absolutely loved this, and some of the takeaways I think for anybody listening to this today is think about how you fuel your training. If gels are the devils work to you, maybe think about starting off nice and easy 30 grams per hour. Make sure that you're concentrating on your hydration as well, and build up over time and then, when you think about you know what are your race goals. You need to be thinking more towards the 90 gram per hour mark. A couple of jelly babies is not going to do it bugs. Marcus, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Nick.
Speaker 1:We will go down another rabbit hole one day, I'm sure, because there was plenty more to talk about. Thank you, marcus, brilliant. Thank you, guys, no-transcript.