Fuelling for runs, triathlon & similar - PART 1

Today we're dropping part 1 of a 2 part convo, covering some of the things we look at with our gals fuelling runs, triathlon and similar! 
Looking closely at where we see people go wrong with their nutrition when doing a full marathon, and/or building up to bigger distances and events 🫣🏃🏼‍♀️

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DISCLAIMER
The Eat Like Ruby podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or dietary advice.
The advice given in this episode is general in nature and should not be used to treat any medical conditions, health conditions, illnesses, injuries and/or any nutrition related conditions, deficiencies or similar.
This podcast is not to be used as, or in place of, medical advice or dietary advice.
Please consult your health care professional before implementing any of the advice, information or protocols discussed in this episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello fam, welcome back to the pod. I'm back today doing a little bit of a niche episode. What we're gonna look at today is predominantly like intra-training or intra-event nutrition for runners, tray athletes, and similar. We might look a little bit at like pre-training and just different types of fueling, but there is some just like cool shit that I've been talking about with my clients lately, really about like what we are consuming and how we're fueling ourselves during events or games, competitions similar. And so I feel like today I'm just gonna speak predominantly like using running as an example. But if you play any sort of sport or you do any sort of events, you could definitely just take this and apply it to your events or whatever you're doing. If you don't have an interest in this stuff, I mean feel free to leave right now. But I think this is a cool conversation because these events are getting more and more popular, which is cool. Like it's awesome, but I am just seeing so many common themes, and just people come to me and they start telling me their story, and we're gonna get into this today. Like they start telling me their story and their event history and their fueling and everything. And I have to stop myself from being like, I can cut you off right now because I know exactly what you're gonna say. I have this conversation pretty much daily at this point, and this is a cool thing because that's why I want to do a podcast about it. It is common, it is happening so much lately. So if you hear what I'm talking about today and you think like, maybe she's talking about me, or maybe this applies to me, you are so not alone. Like, there's a reason I'm bringing this to the pod, is because I'm like, wow, I'm just having this conversation on a daily basis. Just cool to have it on the pod and get it out there. So obviously, if you're not a runner or you're not doing any sort of events or sport or anything like that, like I said, this might not interest you at all, but I think we now all have mates or people at work or whatever that are doing these things. Like I said, it's getting so common. So I feel like it's um a funny convo I have with some of my girls where they'll say, like, oh, this person at my work is always talking about, you know, fat loss or running or feeling or whatever. And they're like, I just have a little ruby voice in my brain telling me that I know better. So I love that. That's awesome. So obviously, big ep today for the endurance girls, the runners, similar, but anyone or everyone can stay and listen. That's the beauty of the pod, or anyone or everyone can go. That's also the beauty of the pod. Don't say I didn't warn ya. But we're gonna get into it. And I would say this episode has really come to fruition over the last two months. During sort of May and June, is where I felt like, wow, I'm just having this conversation every day. And like I've been having this conversation for years, but it just started to become more and more common. And if we think about running events in Australia, especially looking like down the east coast, and side note, I know there's so many events these days, so I'm not just talking about specific ones, but if I think about my work, my clients, and just the way the year kind of plays out, I just end up having so many clients doing like new Samarathon or Half Marathon, which is May, then we have Brizzy in June, we have Goldie in July, we have Sunny Coast in August, we have Malvemara in October, and then there's a few others in there. I know like Lawnceston's getting more popular, New Zealand's getting more popular, we got like Cairns, Harvey Bay, there's different ones along like the New South Wales coast. There's so many, but really we tend to see kind of through the winter, like coming into winter through winter, and then out the other side, kind of that six-month window, I guess, of like March to October, give or take. It's even getting a bit longer because more and more events are popping up. But like I said, this episode just really started to come to me throughout May because I was just getting so many new clients coming to me and they were doing some or a few of these events. And like I said, just started having that same conversation every day. And really the conversation is, and this is what we're gonna break down today, but so insanely common for people to have either been running for a long time or gotten into running recently and be hanging around that kind of like let's say 10 to 20k mark, give or take. And what I mean by that is your quote long runs are around that mark. So maybe like 15, 16Ks, maybe up towards 20, a little bit less, maybe around 12. But very common for people to come to me, like I said, either running for a long time or getting into it recently. And we've got that kind of typical running schedule where we do a few runs during the week that are like an hour give or take, and then people tend to do a longer one on the weekend. And again, very common to be seeing that longer run sitting around that 15k mark, give or take. And then the next kind of step in that common trajectory is people then getting into the half marathons, like actually signing up to a half marathon, which makes so much sense. If you're consistently running around those distances, it makes sense to go, I'm gonna push up to that 21k mark. That's very realistic, it's reasonable, it's a cool thing to work towards, and it's awesome. If you can relate to what I just said, like this is awesome. Like I always say, there's far worse shit we could be doing with our lives. So big yes to this. But what I am seeing more and more is people doing those events and hanging around that distance and then deciding, like, yep, okay, I'm gonna go for the full Mara, which again is awesome. But this is where we tend to start to run into a fair few problems with fueling. And that's really what I want to talk about today. And like I said at the start of the app, if you play a different sport or you're more into like the triathlon scene, you can apply this to whatever you're doing. It's very common to see the same thing in the triathlon world where people dabble in either like the sprint tries and they move up to Olympic, or they're doing Olympic, they move up to half Iron Man, they're doing half Iron Man, they move up to full Iron Man. And it makes so much sense because if you work towards one of these things and then you tick it off, you're pretty much like, what's next?

unknown 6:03

Right?

SPEAKER_00 6:03

And for some people, they tick it off and they go, I'm not doing any further. That was enough for me. But very common for people to want to look at the next one and push that bit further, which is cool. But the problem that I'm so commonly seeing, and I guess this is where we're just gonna get into it, is people essentially looking at what they did for fueling with a half marrow, and then just being in that mindset, I guess, of thinking, well, I'll just do a bit more, and or even like, I'll just double it because I'm doubling the distance. And there's a fair few problems that can come up here. And I just want to say, if you were in that mindset, or you are in that mindset of thinking, well, I did XYZ for a half marrow, it makes so much sense to double it for a full because it's double the distance. That absolutely does make sense. Like, I'm not judging, I'm not shaming, but that's why I want to do the episode because that is not the way I would approach it at all. And that is definitely not the way I do approach it with my girls or I tell them to approach it. And that's really what I want to look at today. So I feel like I'm just gonna keep using that example of the half marathon and full marathon, but again, apply it to your sport, or even if you are someone who is like dabbling in 10Ks and now you've gone to 20s, or you were doing full maras and now you've gone to ultras, like apply it to wherever you're at. But definitely very common at the moment to be seeing the half marrow ticked off. Now I want to go to the full, and not understanding really what that means in terms of the fueling requirements, which is what we're gonna look at today. So we did a few episodes in the first half of this year about nutrition for running. I think we did a three-part series and they'll kind of spread out across a few weeks. So if you're new here or you haven't heard those and you're into running, I would definitely go back and listen. I'm probably gonna repeat some of the things I said in those, but I'm definitely not going to talk through like every step of nutrition for running because we've already done that. So go back and check those out if this interests you. But one thing I always want to say before we get into it is do not take what I say today as advice. I cannot stress enough. This needs to be adjusted for individuals, it needs to be trialed, it needs to be refined. There are so many things that we want to look at, and there's so many things that are almost conflicting when we're looking at nutrition for running. And we really need to look at what applies to you personally and what works for you personally. So I just cannot stress enough. I don't want people to listen to this episode and be like, oh, Ruby said for a full marathon I should do XYZ. No, I'm not saying you should do XYZ. If I don't work with you personally, I'm not telling you what to do. That is literally the point of my business and my job and why I work with people on an individual basis for this stuff, because it does need to be individualized. So, what I more so want to look at today is pointing out the things that you need to understand and be aware of and then work out how to get that personalized to you, aka maybe you gotta work with Eat Like Ruby. And so on a similar note, I do just obviously want to point out that what I talk about today is just kind of like the general information, the general numbers. Again, we tweak this to individuals, but I'm also just gonna talk about the common things that we know and like kind of common numbers and ranges and things. And really, if I think about the work that I do with my individual clients, we kind of start with that information. Like we look at, you know, if someone's doing a marathon, we look at the evidence and the research and the sports nutrition and go, what do we actually know that tells us is good to do for a full Mara? And then we look at where are you personally at in relation to that stuff, what has worked for you, what hasn't. And that's kind of like our starting point. But then we build your individual plan from there. So I'm gonna talk about those things today, but we just want to understand that they are quite general, but it's gonna help people really understand where I think so many people are going wrong when they're increasing their distance or their time or the events that they're doing and not understanding how to increase the nutrition with it. So, one of the first things I want to point out, and I think we're definitely gonna come back to this throughout the episode, but when we look at fueling a half marrow, typically we look at consuming between 40 to 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. The thing about the half marrow these days is we've got people doing it in like 65 minutes and we've got people doing it in three hours. So, no shame, no nothing, however long it's taking you, unreal. Like you're literally running half marathons, unreal. So it's hard to kind of give too much more specifics to that, which again is why we work with individuals and look at their time. But we'll look at it today from that kind of like 90-minute to two-hour window. If a half marrow has taken someone 90 minutes to two hours, like I said before, we are looking at consuming between 40 to 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Some people can go a bit higher, which is awesome. Some people have obviously got to build up to that. Cannot stress enough, guys. I've said this before and I'll say it again. This is what I'm talking about, where you don't want to hear that and go, Rub said I should do 40 grams of carbs per hour. No, no, no. I'm saying we know that's where we want to aim for, but it can take a lot of work for people to build up to that. So definitely, definitely do not just go out and start hitting particular numbers if you don't know where you're currently at and if you haven't worked up to those numbers. But around that sort of two-hour mark, the half Mara distance, we look at 40 to 60 grams of carbs per hour. When we look at a full Mara, we look at 60 to 90. And these days, more and more, people are blowing those numbers out of the water. So many people are pushing above that 90 and going to like 100, 110. Again, cannot stress enough. Do not do that if you are not conditioned to it. You are not gonna have a good time at all. But what I really want to look at here, even if we look at those general kind of guidelines that we've known for a long time, if for a half marrow we're looking at 40 to 60 grams of carbs per hour, and for a full, we're looking at 60 to 90, we cannot just run with that scenario of oh double what I did in the half for the full, because the requirements per hour are more. So if we look at something really simple here to just explain this, let's say a half marathon did take someone two hours and then the full marathon took them four. If they were to hit the low end of those recommended carbohydrates per hour for the half marrow, if it took them two hours and they did 40 grams of carbs per hour, because we know that's the low end of the recommendation for that distance, you would consume 80 grams of carbohydrates during that event. If you then went up to the full marrow that took you four hours, and again, you hit the low end of the recommended carb intake for that event, it's 60 per hour. So you times that by four, it's gonna be 240 grams of carbs during that event. So if we look at that right there, 80 grams in the half, 240 in the full, you cannot run with that theory of I'll just double it. Because it's not enough. Because we're out there for longer, the requirement per hour gets higher. So even when we're looking at the first hour, the first hour of the half marrow and the first hour of the full marrow are going to have a different carb requirement. So that can be one of the first problems we see is people just not understanding the maths on all of that. The next probably like this next one is the most common thing that I see by far, is if people have done that half marrow and they didn't work with somebody or they just kind of like did a little bit of research or they heard a little bit about like, oh, I should probably have gels, I should probably do a bit of a carb load. It is so insanely common for people to come to me after doing one by themselves. And again, guys, like if I had a dollar for every time I'd had this conversation of me saying, Did you do a carb load? And someone literally says, either, oh like you just ate more carbs the day before, and or and then like I just had pasta for dinner. I have pasta for dinner nearly every night, and I'm not carb loading, right? Like, there is a very big difference between I had pasta for dinner versus I did a structured carb load. And again, no shame, no judging. This is why I want to bring all this stuff forward because it is such a common thing that I see where people do that on their own, and that is why they come to me because they're like, yeah, Rubs, like I did eat a bit more pasta, or I did eat a bit more carbs, or I played around with some gels, but I don't know what I'm doing. And like rightly so, you shouldn't really know what you're doing. Like, we don't get taught this stuff. So it makes sense that you're kind of picking up on little things maybe that you've seen on the internet or you've seen different people doing, but you don't actually fully know what's required for that event. So very common to take that approach into your first one and then realize, like, yeah, like some things might have gone okay, some things might not have. I probably need to refine this, which is really cool. Like, I love that when someone comes to me in that position because it's like you've done a half Mara in less than optimal conditions. Imagine if we optimize all those things. Let's everything go. Like, that's unreal. But if we come back to what I was saying there, especially looking at like the intra-fueling stuff, it is very common for people to have just had a little look into this stuff themselves and played around with a few little things. And when we look at that half marrow, if it's taken someone around 90 minutes up to two hours, like an hour and a half up to two hours, very common for people to say to me, either I did one, two, maybe three gels max. Like pretty rare for someone to say to me, I did three gels. Usually it's like, yep, I had one or two gels. Maybe one as I come up to that hour mark and that's it for some people, or a second one, you know, at that hour, 20, hour, 30, depending on how long it took them. And side note, guys, if you're running half marathons and you're doing more than that and you've got all this shit refined, like that's awesome. Go off. You can just use this episode as like a little bit of a checklist. Like, hell yeah, I'm in a good position. So everyone is gonna be in a bit of a different position, but this is definitely the most common one that I see. And if we just kind of skip ahead for a second here and piece together some of the things that I've said, if we look at, and I'm gonna break this down a bit more in a minute, but if we look at someone, say, doing two gels in a half marathon, and those gels had 25 grams of carbs per gel, this person's done 50 grams of carbs during that half marathon. If we go back to what I said before, if they were to aim for a full marathon and it was gonna take around that four-hour mark, we would want them to do 240 grams of carbs per hour. And again, do not take that as advice or something you should do. But if someone comes to me in this position, this is where my mind goes. My mind goes, okay, as a starting point and as our bit of a like starting guide, I am wanting to get you up around that 240 gram mark, depending on how long it's gonna take you, what times you've done in the past, what time you're aiming for, etc. But that's kind of roughly where we're heading. And the reason I want to point that out is because if we come back to the person saying, I did 225 grams of carb gels, so I've done 50 grams in the half, I'm now aiming for a full Mara. If you're in that mentality of like, I'm just gonna double it, well, you're gonna be 140 grams short, which is absolutely huge. And I might talk a little bit about the carb load stuff today as well, depends how long I yap for, but even if we think for a second about a person pairing that with a sub-optimal carb load, again, people just being in that mentality of like, oh, I'll eat a little bit more, I'll have a bowl of pasta, whatever it is. If we haven't hit the optimal carb load and then we're falling 140 grams of carbohydrate short during an event, that's gonna add up significantly against you when you're out there. And we see this so commonly, especially when people go from that half marrow to the full, and around that 30k mark, sometimes even earlier, like those high 20s, people massively hit the wall. You do not want to hit the wall with 14Ks to go. That's wild. You don't want to hit the wall at all. So it's so important to understand all this stuff, and this is why I wanted to do this episode because I think there is just a lack of real understanding, and I almost want to say like a lack of respect, and I'm not saying that to have a go at people, but I think it's a lack of, I don't even know what the word is, there's got to be a word there, but people just not truly being like, wow, I'm running a full friggin' marathon. I can't just have an extra bowl of pasta and add in a couple of gels and hope for the best. And I feel like this almost segues into a whole nother conversation that we're seeing heaps on social media lately of people just remembering that because these events have become so common, we still have to remember that they are such a big thing. I think it is so normal these days to see people running marathons that we get into that mindset of like, I might just do a marathon. It's not I might just do a marathon. Like that's such a demand on your body for the whole training block and for the event itself. So that's why I say I feel like there can be that bit of a lack of understanding and lack of respect for what we are really asking the body to do. Like I said, during a training block, but also during the event itself. And like always, guys, I'm I'm not shaming, I'm not judging. I'm saying this to bring people's awareness to it. Like I want people to think, yeah, wow, I am doing a marathon. First of all, think like I am doing a marathon. That's friggin' gnarly. Like social media and the world in 2026 has just completely normalized it. So it's like, oh, she's just doing a marathon. No, she's doing a freaking marathon. Like, let's go. So make sure you're acknowledging that and like applauding yourself for what you're doing. But then that next step is being like, okay, yep, I have acknowledged I'm doing something huge. I have to get a bit more serious about what is really required to pull this off. To pull it off well, obviously, like my mind straight away goes to a place of like, if I'm gonna dedicate time to a marathon, I want to do it well, right? Like, well for me. I'm not saying we have to go out and win it, we have to hit break records, but you wanna do your best. You don't want to dedicate three, six, twelve months of your life to a marathon and half arse it. Because, like, what's the point? But then even if someone doesn't really want to do it well, you still don't want to suffer hugely out there. So it's just important to understand all this stuff. I've gone off on a bit of a tangent. I'm gonna bring it back. So if we come back to what I was saying there, where if people have been dabbling in like let's say two gels during a half marathon, if we then start to actually run the numbers and do all the maths, very common, and I'll talk about the details of this in a second, but very common to realize okay, for a full Mara, I'm gonna need to do like eight, maybe ten, maybe twelve gels. So look at that right there. I did two in the half, I probably need to do ten in the full. And the reason for this is because we probably underfueled the half. If we've only done two and it's ended up being about 25 grams of carbs per hour, we have underfueled that half. And then when we come over to the full, we know that the carb requirements per hour are higher. So it's not only a matter of doubling it, we need to go further than that. So that's why we find people in this position of being like, okay, great, you've done two. We need to actually get you up to eight. And there's a couple of little things coming into my mind when I'm saying all this. First one is we're probably gonna have people sitting there going, I don't really like doing gels, I'm not doing gels, I'm doing other things. That is something I wanted to talk about today. I'm having a look at the clock. Yeah, we're gonna be here a while, guys, but that is something I wanted to talk about today. We obviously don't have to do gels, but I'm going to read out something that I posted on Instagram the other day. I did a post about this, it went off. It got a lot of people just being like, wow, I didn't understand all of this. And that's kind of what made me be like, yeah, we do actually need to do a whole episode on this. So in this post, I said, we don't have to consume energy gels, but if we think about that stat of wanting to consume 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour during a full Mara, to do this through food would require you to consume either 16 LCM bars, 25 lolly snakes, eight bananas, seven bottles of Power Aid, five full bagels, or three packets of dried mango. So if we just think for a second about the practicality of carrying five full bagels and eating five full bagels while you're while you're Running a marathon. We're not talking about pre, we're not talking about carbows. We are talking about while you are out there pounding the pavement, one foot in front of the other. Hang on a second. I carried more than a packet of bagels. Packet of bagels has four. You're doing five because you didn't want to do jabs. So really are we gonna carry this? Are we going to eat this? And you do see people say things like, oh my god, I want to do 25 lollysnakes. Any serious runner straight away goes, No effing way am I consuming 25 lolly snakes. Anyone who like you always get those smart ass comments of like, I want to do 25 lollysnakes, go off, mate. If you want to eat 25 lollysakes, go to a kid's birthday party. Don't run a full marathon. And that's not to say, guys, like this is a whole nother conversation. That's not to say we can't factor in some lollies or some, you know, power aid. I'm looking at all these foods here. Sometimes the dried mango people like to do. There's things on this list that are very impractical. You're not gonna carry bananas and eat them during a marathon. You're gonna carry five full bagels, 16 LCM bars, right? But if we look at something like the lollysnakes, again, any serious runner or anyone who has run a marathon knows that you are not actually gonna carry and consume 25 lollysnakes. But you might consume some in place of a gel. So even if we think for a second about somebody, let's say we calculated on the type of gels someone's using, and I'm gonna talk about that in a second. Let's say we calculated that for the gels they're using and the number of carbs we want them to hit for the full event, they need to do nine gels. You might look at that and go, I'm gonna do seven and four lolly snakes, because some people just like to break up the gels, get some actual like chewing, some mass, some texture outside of the gels. So I'm not saying that these foods can't be used, but again, like any serious runner listening is just going, no way, no way am I consuming something like that because the chewing can be very annoying when you're out there running. And like I said, some people like to bring that in a little bit. Let's say you were gonna do, and I'm just literally pulling this out of my ass, so don't take this as a race day plan, but let's say you're gonna do like three gels, you know, over every 20 minutes or half an hour or whatever, and then when we come to that like fourth window, you do two lolly snakes, and you're like, oh, this is just nice little break from the gels, get to chew a little bit, like it just breaks up those gels. Then we go back to another three gels, maybe another two lollies. That was like similar to that, are plans that some people do like to implement. But there is obviously a line of like how much am I carrying, how much am I chewing? And that's where things like the gels and the drink mixes are just so much more convenient. And so to kind of tie up my point there, like I was saying, we don't have to consume gels, but really what you want to do, and again, this is exactly what I do with my clients, is we run the numbers and we get an idea of like roughly how long is this gonna take you, and roughly what does that mean in terms of carbohydrates that we're gonna aim for for this full event. Then we do the mass, you know, if we think, okay, we want this person to have 300 grams of carbs. We work out what gels they're doing, and then we literally just converse and go, how do you feel about the gels? Are you happy to pound seven of them? Are you happy to pound 10 of them, depending on what ones you're doing? Would you want to break them up? It's very common for people who are serious about this stuff and really gunning for specific paces and times, etc., to simply want to do the gels because it's so convenient, it's so easy. It's like I'm not wasting my time working out what hour I'm at, what food I'm doing, trying to get it out of my pockets or my belts or whatever, trying to chew it, trying to make sure I get some water with it. Like anyone who is gunning for those serious paces and serious times is just defaulting to something like gels or drinks mixes because it's just simple, convenient, easy. And it's like, I want to give the nutrition side of this as little thought as possible. And side note, this is where I come in because then I have to be like, well, guys, we have to give it some thought, right? You can't give it no thought. But you want that process on the day to be as simple as possible because that's not where you want your brain power to go. So there is obviously a lot to that conversation. There's no exact one way to do it. But when we're looking at a full marathon, if someone said, I don't want to do gels, you'd really, really want to make sure this person is happy to carry their own carb drink mixes and they need to be some pretty strong mixes to hit those numbers. If someone said to me, Rub's like, I want to run a full Mara on food, like fuel it all on food, think about all those things I just said you're gonna have to carry. Like you're gonna have a mission on your hands here. And so then that actually segues into something that I keep saying in there, I want to come back to. If we think about carrying things and then actually, like I said, getting them out of pockets, getting them out of belts, and consuming them, this is where I think something that is so underrated or like not thought about enough is the actual amount of carbs in the gel that you're personally doing. If we look at gels, I mean, side note, like we've got massive gels right now. If we just segue for a second, if anyone who has seen on Instagram, when Shaq does the Sunny Crows Full Mara, which is about two, three weeks away right now, start of August, we have been training him to do one 300 gram of carb gel. It is, it's like a big, like a bigger version of like the yogurt pouches, like YoPro and Chibani. It's like a big one of them and has 300 grams of carbs in it. So that's kind of crazy, not crazy, but like most people aren't doing that. Most people are doing the smaller ones. So I'm gonna speak predominantly in regards to those smaller ones. But if we look at kind of like a typical smaller gel, the carb content of them can really be anything from like 20 up to 40, is pretty common. Some are a little bit less, some are a little bit more, but very common to be in that 20 to 40 gram window, in terms of that's how many grams of carbohydrates is in one of those gels. And so many brands will have different variations of this, like different sizes. And this is what I'm saying is so important to understand. And I don't think people give this anywhere near enough thought. If we look at something like Pure is a good example, I'm trying to think of another one. I think cis, maybe, don't quote me, but so common for them to have one gel that's maybe got like low 20s, like 22 grams of carbs, and then another one that has like up in the 30s. And even if we look at the Instagram post that I did, I pointed this out with the pure ones. They have two different variations where one has 23 grams of carbs and the other one has 30. So many people would hear that and think it's only seven grams. Like it doesn't really matter. But when we think about someone doing 10 gels with a seven gram difference in every gel, that's a 70 gram difference. Come back to all those numbers we were dropping before. If we want a person to aim for 240 grams of carbs for a full Mara, if you were to opt for those smaller gels, you're gonna need to do something like 12 of them. Whereas if you go for that one that's slightly bigger, you're gonna need to do like eight in this scenario that we're talking about with all these numbers that we're talking about. Again, don't take that as advice. But this is why I think it is so important for people to understand that because come back to what we were saying before about actually carrying these things, consuming these things, working out, you know, like we tend to then look at this and go, if we're gonna do X amount of gels over X amount of hours, that's one gel, either like every 5K's or every 25 minutes, however, we want to divvy it up for this person. But we do want to make sure we're aware of this and we have a good understanding of this. And like anything, this will probably segue into a whole nother convo, but like anything, we want to make sure we have that understanding and awareness early on. It is so much more common than people think. And if you can relate to this, I'm not talking about one individual person here. I see this all the time. Where people realize really close to their event, oh my god, I've actually been doing the smaller ones, not the bigger ones. So they might just be Googling or looking at, like, you know, if we use Pua as that example, how many grams of carbs in a Pure gel? If Google just pops up with 30, you're like, yep, okay, cool, I've been doing five of them, so that's 150 grams. People then realize a few weeks or a few months later, like, oh my god, no, I've been doing the smaller ones. And again, in regard to one gel, it's not that much smaller, but if you've just lost seven to eight grams of carbs per gel, and for some other brands it's even bigger, well, now you're like, oh, I thought I was doing 150 grams, I've actually been doing 100. Again, big difference and big differences that start to really add up when we get deep into that full marrow. Like I said, people come up to that 30k mark and they really hit the wall, and then you're left there going, I've got 12Ks to go and I'm done. This is where so much of this shit is gonna either add up for or against you. And that's why it's so important to understand it. And the biggest thing I think people need to realize and be aware of is like you want to understand all of this with enough time to build on it and work with it. You don't want to be looking at this shit four weeks out from a marathon. You literally just do not have enough time. And if I just come back to that Instagram post um that I've been talking about, if I read, like I'm gonna read the first slide that I put on there and it kind of just summarizes everything we've just spoken about. For most people, when we look at fueling a full marathon, we aim to consume between 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour. If we look at the low end of that 60 grams and a marathon taking someone four hours, that's 240 grams of carbohydrates. If you're an elite runner who's hitting around that three-hour mark, you're probably also keen to push up over the 60 gram mark. So you could still be looking around a 240 gram total overall. And again, obviously, guys, give or take this to you, your needs, your time, etc. But really, we're looking like up over that 200 and then up into the like 300s. If you're using a gel that has 20 something grams of carbs in it, you're going to be looking at consuming about 10 gels during that event. Give or take, depending on the exact gels, your exact carb target, and your exact time. It's so common for people to come to me a few months out from their first marathon, having previously done a half marathon where they consumed one to three gels or less. So we're then looking at bridging that gap and getting you from two to ten. And so that comes back to what I was just saying there. You need time to bridge that gap. Really think about it. The best way for people to think about this is like a running block. Use your nutrition or view your nutrition like a nutrition block alongside that run. And what I mean by that is if you are gonna do, let's say someone's doing Melbourne Marathon in October and they're sitting there right now and they're about to start like a 12-week block into that, you might be at a point where you've done the half marrow or maybe you've done, you know, up in the 25s, 30ks, whatever it is, and you're like, okay, cool, I'm gonna use this 12-week block to get me from where I currently am to the full Mara distance. If I can currently run 25 or I can currently run 21, I am using this training block to gradually build me from that point to 42Ks. You literally want to look at your nutrition the exact same way. If I'm currently doing two to three gels and I know that on race day I'm gonna need to do 8, 10, 12, whatever it is, I need to build that up over time. And we've spoken in those running episodes earlier this year about training the gut and conditioning the gut. And this is exactly what we're looking at. The exact same way you're gonna condition your legs and your body and your cardiovascular system and your heart and your lungs and the way you're gonna condition everything in your body to build up and be able to run 42Ks on race day, you want to literally condition and build your gut to be able to tolerate the nutrition that you want it to do on that day as well. And this is where when I'm working with someone, I'm thinking, okay, what is ideal race day? Like if we look at you, your time, everything we know about you, what is our ideal, optimal race day plan? And then we reverse from there and go, okay, if that's where we want to get to, where are you at right now? How much time do we have between those two things to gradually build on that and get you from where you currently are to where you want to be? And so if we use a really easy example for that, again, let's say someone comes to me and they're currently dabbling in those like 20, low 20k runs and they're doing a full marathon in 12 weeks. Again, so many of my girls are gonna be sitting there going, yeah, well, I'm doing this with Ruby right now, or I've done this with Ruby before. But you're gonna be looking at a training program that is gonna, you know, gradually build. You're gonna hit like a 24k run and then a 26, and then you're gonna start hitting the 30s and the low 30s. And we literally look at nutrition with that and go, in this run, we wanna bring in the next gel. In this run, we want to trial the carbload. In this run, we want to trial this. We're gonna sit on four gels for a few runs and get your gut conditioned to that, and then we're gonna go to five gels, and then we're gonna go to six. Like whatever it is that we're doing for you, we're not sitting there right now going, you're currently doing two. We want you to do 10. So when you run this weekend, go and do 10. That's going to hit your system so hard. That is like a person saying, I'm currently running 20Ks, I want to run 42, so I'll do 42 this weekend. Any runner really needs to piece this together and just think the same way I am gradually chipping away at building my distance. I also need to gradually chip away at building my gut tolerance and my race day plan. And there's a few other things, there's actually a lot of other things we look at here. We've spoken a little bit recently about that ratio of different carb types in the gels. So we can have gels that are predominantly glucose-based, we can have that ratio of glucose to fructose. Again, this is stuff that we got to look at for an individual and like where all of that sits for you. But that just kind of backs up the point that we do need to trial things. We need to trial amounts, but we also need to trial types. We're gonna have people that need to get different ratios of carbs. We're gonna have people that have like FODMAP issues. If you don't know what that means, it probably just means you don't have them. But there'll be people that are like, yeah, that's me. And so that definitely becomes a factor, especially when we're looking at gels or carbs in general at this volume. And so there's so many different gels out there these days. And different ones are just gonna suit different people depending on their needs, but you need time to work that out and to trial different things. You need to know what you're looking for as well. Like, I have this conversation, like I said, with people every day where their kind of knowledge or their the extent of their thoughts around gels were just like, yeah, I'll do a couple of gels during my long runs. And then it's like when we start to look at ingredients, ratios, amounts, timing, all of these different things, it there's so much more to it. And even if I um I'm gonna read like the last slide in that Instagram post because this is something I was about to say. This um slide says, like I said, it's so common for people to come to me a few months out from their first full marathon, having previously done a half marathon where they consumed one to three gels or less. The carbohydrate needs for a half marath are typically around 40 to 60 grams of carbs per hour. This means people can usually get away with throwing back a couple of gels, not need to think about the ratio or the other ingredients slash nutrients in the gel and have a fairly successful event. But if the full marathon is going to take you more than double the time and the carb requirements per hour are higher, again, you're looking at moving from two gels up to eight plus. This is a huge increase for your gut, a gut that is also experiencing reduced blood flow because you're running a damn marathon. This is why it is crucial that alongside preparing and conditioning your body to transition from the half marathon to the full, you prepare and condition your gut and nutrition protocols at the same time. I actually feel like I have so much more to say, guys. So I think I'm gonna make this a two parter. I'm gonna stop right now and just go straight into part two. So we will drop that in the very next episode. Because, like I said, there's there's a million things flooding into my brain, and I'm looking at my timer here and I'm like, you gotta wrap this up, Rubes. But just try and shut me up. I will be back in the very next episode, keeping this combo going. Thank you so much.