Timing Mealtime

Balancing when to eat and when to run can be tough. And that’s not just because if you work during normal business hours, then you’re probably running when most people are eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner. No, what I’m talking about here is learning how to schedule your runs so that your most recent meal doesn’t come back for a second tasting 15 minutes into your run.
This is one of those areas where you’re going to have to experiment to find what works best for you. I know some runners who can polish off a lumberjack’s breakfast seconds before heading out the door for a morning run and others who swear that they’ll have troubled stomachs their entire run if they eat the slightest morsel within several hours of training. There’s not much you can do about where you fall on the rockgut scale. When in doubt, err on the side of caution.
At a race in Japan once, I startled all the runners near me by popping a potato in my mouth just minutes before the start. I had a few stomach problems during that race, but knew that my opponents were completely psyched out. I won.
On the flip side, there’s also great variation among runners concerning how soon they eat after a run. Some runners step in the door and start munching; others don’t feel hungry for hours. This amount of time is going to be different even for individual runners from run to run—when it’s hot and you finish your run dehydrated and overheated, you’re probably not going to be as immediately hungry as on a 50-degree day. The harder you run, the more time you’ll probably want to allow before your next meal. Again, experiment to see what works for you. But here’s an important finding from the exercise science labs: If you consume some carbohydrate (it can be in solid or liquid form) within the first 30 minutes of the end of your run, your muscles will absorb those carbohydrates three times as fast as before your run. Although the rate at which they refuel slows some after those first 30 minutes, your muscles remain extra receptive for the first 90 minutes after a run.
What’s going on here? Think of your muscles as sponges. Following a run, they’re “drier” than at any other time. Just as a dry sponge greedily gobbles water more quickly than a moist sponge, so too do your muscles most want to be refilled when you’ve just depleted some of their stockpiles.
Why does this absorption matter? Because the gains that you make in your running that allow you to progress occur during the recovery phase following a run. By getting some carbs into your system soon after finishing your run, you therefore speed the recovery process. You’ll feel better on your next run, and you’ll be better able to nail each of your workouts and progress closer to your goal rate.
Carb refueling is especially important after longer-than-usual runs. Many times, when runners are dragging several hours or even the day after a long run, it’s because they waited too long to restock their muscles. As I said, some runners just don’t feel like eating any time near after finishing a run. That’s OK, but even they would feel better from run to run if they got in the habit of getting a minimal amount of carbs in. Keep in mind that I’m talking about only 100 to 200 calories in the first hour or so. That’s a bagel or a couple of pieces of fruit. If you have a super-sensitive system, liquid carbs are fine (and they’ll also help you to get in the important habit of drinking soon after your run). That can mean a sport drink or some diluted fruit juice. Diet sodas don’t count because they contain no calories, and therefore, no carbs.

Popping Pills: Vitamins and Other Supplements for Runners

Bee pollen, ginseng, beta carotene, chromium, brewer’s yeast—the list of wonder substances that are supposedly going to dramatically improve your health and performance is endless. We Americans are always looking for that magic pill that’s going to help us lose weight, feel great, have more energy, and, what the hey, why not have it prevent baldness and improve our sex lives at the same time. But the truth is that you can’t eat your way to being fit any more than you can eat your way to a college degree or a successful career. These achievements all take a lot of steady, hard, and sometimes not terribly exciting work. Yet the nutritional supplement industry, to the tune of more than $4 billion a year, has somehow convinced people that health and fitness can be achieved differently.

Vitamins and other supplements are often marketed as energy boosters or some such vague claim. Problem is, vitamins and minerals don’t provide energy. Food does. More specifically, the calories in food do. Only foods and drinks that contain calories provide energy.
What do vitamins and minerals do, then? Vitamins are like your body’s spark plugs—they are catalysts to reactions within your body. Minerals are elements that form and regulate the body. If your car wasn’t firing properly, you might get the spark plugs fixed. But once you got your spark plugs up to normal operating level, you wouldn’t throw four more under the hood and expect your car to run better. You would just be wasting your money with your misunderstanding of what keeps your car moving down the road day after day. Same thing goes for taking vitamins beyond the base level needed for good health. No studies have found increased performance in runners who take megadoses compared to runners who have a normal intake. In fact, no studies have shown increased performance caused by any of these kinds of supplements, be they vitamins, minerals, or substances not even recognized as necessary for normal human functioning, such as bee pollen. The right nutrition for good performance is pretty much the same as it is for good health, regardless of your level of activity.

Most nutritionists would say that it’s OK to take a daily multivitamin as a sort of health insurance, but even that shouldn’t be necessary if you regularly eat a wide variety of healthful foods. Vitamins and minerals from food are always better than the same substances from pills. When you get vitamins and minerals from food, you’re more likely to regularly be eating properly. For example, getting enough vitamin C from your diet means that you’re eating a decent amount of fresh fruits and vegetables. Having to meet your vitamin C needs with a pill means that you’re going to be hurting in other areas nutritionally, such as fiber and other disease-protective substances best found in food. Knowing all this information, I still find myself nearly getting hoodwinked once in a while by some smooth talker who promises the key to feeling great. The idea that taking pill X will solve all of your problems is just so appealing. When you hear claims like this, try not to be bamboozled. Claims for any nutritional supplement are almost always bogus if any of the following apply:

• The salesperson creates a nutritional need and then shows how his product fills it. ➤ The product’s manufacturers are portrayed as being persecuted by the Food and Drug Administration and other reputable, mainstream providers of nutrition information.
• The salesperson says that you’re nutritionally deficient without having detailed records of your normal eating habits.
• You’re told that it will make you lose weight without you having to exercise regularly and consume fewer calories.

Be especially skeptical about products that bear celebrity endorsements. These celebrities are almost always being paid to say what the manufacturers of the products want them to.