 It’s the time of the year when a lot of us are doing runs and rides in cooler conditions. You may not be losing much fluid through perspiration, but cold, dry air can still dehydrate you very quickly. Depending on how cold the weather is, it can be quite uncomfortable to try and drink from a water-bottle. Your fingers may even be too cold to squeeze the bottle effectively. In cases like that, it is very important to drink more than you would like before and after the workout.
If you’re extremely hard-core and ride in temperatures where your water bottle actually freezes, the best thing to do is mix a slightly stronger than normal drink – First Endurance EFS, for example. The sugars and electrolytes will not only help keep you hydrated and topped up calorically, but the solution will keep the fluid drinkable. Then again, they make some pretty darn good indoor trainers nowadays!
So, the next time you’re out riding or running in cold weather and you start feeling a little lethargic, think about the fluids you’ve taken in; it’s possible you could be running on empty. Your body needs to be hydrated in order to function at its optimal level. If there isn’t enough liquid in your body, essential functions like circulation don’t go as smoothly as they should. Proper hydration will also help regulate body temperature and keep you in a good mood. If you haven’t been drinking enough water, you can feel tired, cranky, or irritable. You might even imagine that you’re hungry, when your body is actually craving is water.
Continue reading Remember to hydrate when it’s cold
 There are various approaches to fueling your body for an Ironman. We’ve tried them all. From consuming solid foods, liquid meal replacements, taking GasX, using chocolate bars, gummy bears, gels, protein drinks, chicken soup WITH noodles. We’ve tried it all.
Finally, in our last two Ironman events we’ve settled on something that really works for us. Perhaps with time we’ll have to adjust again, but right now we’re golden. Keeping in mind, however, that we’re finishing the event in 8.5-9.5 hours. We’d be interested to hear what others are doing, perhaps those of you looking at the 12-17hr range. That would be a long time to use liquid nutrition so perhaps you find a bit of solid food is what you need. Let us know in the comments!
Regardless of what you ‘eat’ during your race day, there are still some important points to keep in mind.
-Keep track of the calories you put down. 500 calories per hour would be a lot, even for a very large athlete. The lighter you are, the less you’ll need.
-Make sure you’re not taking in too many calories relative to the amount of plain water you consume. Sports drinks have calories too, so be careful what you use to ‘wash down’ your gels.
-Depending on your effort level for the day, you don’t need to take in any fat or protein. This may be different for the 12hr + athlete. In order for you body to process fat and protein into usable calories while exercising you have to be going quite easy. Stick to Carbohydrates (sugars) while putting out a bit of effort.
Anyway, here’s what we do, and it works very well for us.
Continue reading Ironman Nutrition
 Over the past winter and spring we’ve been playing around with a gluten free diet: going completely gluten free for a few weeks then consuming gluten to see if it really makes a difference. The answer: Yes, but more so in some cases than in others. Turns out that Heather is quite sensitive to gluten and instantly notices basic discomfort from increased bloating, gastric distress, and diarrhea. Those symptoms indicate a lack of nutrient absorption as well and she feels more energetic on a gluten free diet. Trevor, however, isn’t that sensitive to gluten but likes to avoid it race week to limit any potential affects that it may have on his digestion.
If you have any un-explained GI issues, or even just find that you have to take bathroom breaks rather frequently during or right after long runs, it can be useful to try going gluten free. Try two weeks without gluten (you’ll be surprised how frequently it crops up), and then re-introduce pastas and breads (basically anything at all to do with wheat) in the third week. Make some notes in a food log about how you feel and see if there are any changes in your digestion when you consume gluten again. If it doesn’t bother you, then great, but if it does, you can take steps to eliminate a dietary stress to your system. Training and racing is hard on your body – the food you eat shouldn’t be!
Other food items to consider knocking off the shopping list for race week:
Dairy: Consider swapping for Almond milk if you need that bowl of cereal or glass of milk – a bit higher in sugar content, but it’s a great vegetarian source of calcium, protein, carbohydrates.
Peanut Butter: I think we’d all be surprised by the number of people in the world that have a very mild allergy to peanuts. You may not feel it, or even think you have it, but we like to scratch it off the list for a week or so before our ‘A’ race just in case there’s some underlying energy affect. Almond butter, sunflower seed butter, or cashew butter are great alternates.
High fiber items: We’ve never really bothered to alter this much on race week, but do be aware of taking in more than you’re used to. Avocados are very high in fiber, blackberries, raspberries and prunes as well. And of course the high fiber cereals and muffins you may like to snack on.
Continue reading Gluten Free
And the winner is – Kendall. We used a random number generator on Random.org to pick one of the 20 comments. Kendall’s comment was number 14, and therefore the winner of a jug of Ultragen by First Endurance. We will send you an email directly, but please go have a look at the First Endurance website and pick your favorite flavor of Ultragen Recovery Drink.
Thank you all for sharing your favorite swim workouts. Have a look through if you ever need some new ideas in the water.
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 Want a the chance to win a FREE container of Ultragen by First Endurance? You can enter the draw with two simple steps:
#1: Make sure you’re a member of the Ironmantriathlontips email list.
Continue reading Win Ultragen by First Endurance
We can all benefit from maintaining good eating habits on our easy, rest- days as well as through the hard training days. Don’t fall into the trap of (too often) rewarding yourself with junk food because you “deserve it”. Your body really deserves high quality nutrients, and those rest [...]
 This winter has been the winter of a complete nutrition revamp for us (Heather and Trevor Wurtele – coauthors of all posts on the IMTT site). Some race issues that were slowly becoming a trend (in a bad way) had to be changed.
This post is not about all the factors that affect your race nutrition, just the nutrition itself. Specifically, the concentration and dilution of your carbohydrate intake. Okay, we’ll mention a couple issues first. Adequate training being the number one concern – if you haven’t done the work you will fall apart before the finish line, regardless of what you eat. Issue number 2: Pacing. Simply put, know your limits. 50% of the ‘nutrition’ issues in a race are actually pacing issues. You’ve gone too hard on the bike in order to keep up with stronger cyclists, then blow up half way through the run. There’s a reason why more men fall apart at the end of race than do women…and it’s not because woman are tougher, it’s because most are better at controlling their ego on the bike.
With respect to ACTUAL nutrition issues, here’s what we’ve found after talking to many ‘people in the know’. First off, be wary of anything containing complex Fat or Protein (as opposed to nice, easy to digest, amino acids and cabohydrates) making their way into your stomach during the race. Calories from those sources are very hard to breakdown efficiently and can cause some intestinal shut down once the intensity (on the run) picks up. If your race intensity is low enough, you can most likely digest fat/protein properly without adverse affects to your performance. So, if you plan on walking the entire marathon or half marathon, go for it! The other item to consider (as if there were only two!) is how you dilute the carbohydrates you take in. Most drink mixes out there give you a suggested serving like 1 scoop per 12 Oz. TURNS OUT, there’s a reason for that!!! Wow. On our First Endurance EFS drink for example, they say exactly that (1 scoop per 12 Oz), and because they’ve done their research they know that this the optimal dilution for our bodies to process those carbohydrates without leaching water from our cells – therefore keeping you hydrated and fueled properly over an endurance event.
If we look at that EFS drink label a bit further: 1 scoop has 24 grams of carbohydrate. Convert the Oz. to ml (not sure why the United States must use both the metric and imperial system on their labels, seems kinda ridiculous) which gives you 355 ml.
Continue reading Cabohydrates and Endurance Sport
 When it comes to having an occasional beer while in training, you probably are not doing yourself any harm. In fact, you could be doing yourself some good!! (as long as you are adequately hydrated). As per an article on www.allaboutbeer.com – If an “average” 12 ounce bottle of beer sported a Nutrition Facts label, this is what it would tell you:
Beer contains 150 calories.
Beer has no fat
Beer has no cholesterol
Beer is caffeine free
Beer contains no nitrate
Beer contains 1 gram of protein and 13 grams of carbohydrates
Beer contains significant amounts of magnesium, selenium, potassium, phosphorus, and biotin
Beer is chock full of the B vitamins (as anyone who has taken brewer’s yeast as a B supplement already knows), with impressive amounts of B3 (niacin), B5 (pantothenic acid), B6 (pyridoxin), and B9 (folate), with smaller amounts of B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B12 inotisol and choline.
Beer is 92 percent water
The key is having ‘A’ beer, as in one! Or perhaps choosing a non-alcoholic variety like O’douls. The time to avoid the brewskie is when you’re dehydrated, need to stay hydrated, or looking to lose weight. Though beer has no fat, it is one of the most readily available fuels that your body could use as energy, therefore causing your body to convert and store all the other carbohydrates in your system as fat!
Continue reading Beer and your training
 We’ve learned this lesson for the second time recently, it’s worth paying attention to and one we won’t forget again.
Not all energy gels are created equal. 100 calories of this product, is not the same as 100 calories as that product…at least as far as your body’s ability to absorb and digest those calories is concerned. The carbohydrates are still there, but your body may reject that particular type of sugar so having more than one option could save your day. We have had much better success with carbohydrate products that have multiple types of sugar.
For example, some gels have only Long Chain Maltodextrin. Great if your body wants it, but not too helpful if it doesn’t. Other sugars to look for in gel products are; Ribose, Dextrose, Trehalose, and Fructose. Some types of sugar i.e. fructose have anecdotal evidence showing that they cause digestive upset, but everyone’s stomach seems to respond differently (especially with the stress and intensity of a race situation). We’ve had bad bonks, and bad GI issues with single sugar gels.
Popular gel contents:
PowerBar Gel: Maltodextrin, Fructose
Hammer Gel: Maltodextrin
Carbo Pro 1200: Ribose, Dextrose, Trehalose, Maltodextrin
Gu: Maltodextrin, Fructose
CarbBoom: Maltodextrin, fruit puree
Clif Shot: Brown Rice Syrup, some flavors have fruit puree
Continue reading Pay attention to energy gel sugar types
 An Ironman is a long day, that is for sure. Even the best are out there for at least 8hrs. Most seem to come in around 10-14, then the survival group, out there exercising for 15+ hours. It’s next to impossible to account for everything that’s going to happen on race day when you’re dealing with that amount of time. Even 8 hours is a ridiculously long training day. Here are some things to ponder.
Hunger at mile 90 of the bike, what should I do? Getting hungry at mile 90 of the bike is not a good sign, it generally means you’ve undershot your calorie intake and have some catching up to do. How are you going to do that before getting off your bike and running a marathon? Answer: slow down so your heart rate lowers and you can digest properly, take in a bunch of food and gradually get the pace back up. Ideally you would catch that problem before mile 90 as it can often be hard to eat at that point of a race.
What happens if you can’t eat solid food anymore? You need calories, so what is your plan going to be on race day? Can you drink Coke for the remaining distance? Are gels your weapon of choice? Can you force a banana down? Have your answer ready as best you can so you know how to deal with the problem.
Continue reading Think your way through it
 Today’s post is a long but Heather the science geek wanted to shed a little light on all of this antioxidant stuff that we hear about and give a bit more in-depth background to support the take home message: eating plant-based whole foods, not relying on antioxidant supplements, is paramount to your recovery and will help you soak up all those hard Ironman training sessions.
A paradox in metabolism is that while the vast majority of complex life requires oxygen for its existence, oxygen is a highly reactive molecule can damage living organisms by producing reactive oxygen species (ROSs – nasty things like the RUSs in the Princess Bride). ROSs are highly reactive ions or small molecules that have unpaired valence shell electrons. Huh? what? Basically they are just hyped up molecules that have all this energy and want to react with stuff so they grab at anything… say lipids in the membranes of your mitochondria. Enough unquenched, super excited, ROSs nipping at things and you can get cell death. Because of this, organisms contain a complex network of antioxidant metabolites and enzymes that work together to prevent oxidative damage to cellular components like DNA, proteins and lipids. Reducing agents, (I’m double-O-carotene) like Beta Carotene and vitamin C neutralize ROS’s and prevent them from causing damage – “leave that cell membrane alone, it’s me your after!”
In general, antioxidant systems either prevent too many nasty ROSs from being formed, or remove them before they can damage vital components of the cell. However, just like all ‘zee Russians’ aren’t bad guys in Bond films – some reactive oxygen species do have useful functions in cells, such as signaling. The function of antioxidant systems is not to remove oxidants entirely, but instead to keep them at an optimum level.
Continue reading Exercise and oxidative stress – get your antioxidants from whole foods
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About this site:
These triathlon and endurance sport related tips have been compiled by Heather and Trevor Wurtele over the years of their progression from working age-groupers to full time professional triathletes. Heather is now a 4 time Ironman Champion and top 10 World Championship finisher. Trevor has an Ironman PR of 8:22 and a 2:51 Ironman marathon.
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