Just want to share my Saturdays experience in my last race. I’m an enthusiast 35-39 AG who has never broke the under 6 barrier. My best was in January IM Pucon, with 6:00:01 (yeah) with the best physical shape of my life.
I have always think that one of the things that were slowing me down was race nutrition, or even training nutrition. I made some research trying to improve that, finding some topics in ST forum in which Dr Alex made some contributions, but always finding myself kindda confused because I have zero background in that topic.
My thing was trying to achieve 90g carbs/hour, looking for the best product out there: SiS Beta Fuel, Maurten gels, never second c90, etc. in Chile, my country, these are very expensive (US$ 7-10 each), so I used to save them for my last trainings before racing and for the race itself.
But one day, Saturday arrives.
Sugar, salt, water and, for flavour, blue Gatorade. Eventually I bought some sodium citrate. And my performance dramatically change.
Long story short, my last 70.3 was Challenge Puerto Varas, swimming in a beautiful lake, rolling hills bike (~700ish m elevation) and semi hilly run (~200 m). The second leg of the bike was very windy, so the speed was lower. Regarding all that, not only I accomplished the sub6 goal, but destroyed my former PB by almost 30 minutes! (5:31:27). The main difference was muy run, also marking a new PB for the 21K ever (even with fresh legs).
The training was almost the same, so the main difference was nutrition. And there, Saturday make a HUGE contribution not only for my performance but also for my pocket.
Now I’m starting a weight reduction phase, so I reduced the max carbs amount from 110 to 90 hour, but I’ll monitoring that. This post was to show you that if your focus is performance, improve your overall felling in training, and avoid the light minded state, Saturday will work. Period.
Thanks dr Alex for this major contribution @drAlexHarrison
Ps: English isn’t my first language, so forgive any mistake that could have been made.
I have always think that one of the things that were slowing me down was race nutrition, or even training nutrition. I made some research trying to improve that, finding some topics in ST forum in which Dr Alex made some contributions, but always finding myself kindda confused because I have zero background in that topic.
My thing was trying to achieve 90g carbs/hour, looking for the best product out there: SiS Beta Fuel, Maurten gels, never second c90, etc. in Chile, my country, these are very expensive (US$ 7-10 each), so I used to save them for my last trainings before racing and for the race itself.
But one day, Saturday arrives.
Sugar, salt, water and, for flavour, blue Gatorade. Eventually I bought some sodium citrate. And my performance dramatically change.
Long story short, my last 70.3 was Challenge Puerto Varas, swimming in a beautiful lake, rolling hills bike (~700ish m elevation) and semi hilly run (~200 m). The second leg of the bike was very windy, so the speed was lower. Regarding all that, not only I accomplished the sub6 goal, but destroyed my former PB by almost 30 minutes! (5:31:27). The main difference was muy run, also marking a new PB for the 21K ever (even with fresh legs).
The training was almost the same, so the main difference was nutrition. And there, Saturday make a HUGE contribution not only for my performance but also for my pocket.
Now I’m starting a weight reduction phase, so I reduced the max carbs amount from 110 to 90 hour, but I’ll monitoring that. This post was to show you that if your focus is performance, improve your overall felling in training, and avoid the light minded state, Saturday will work. Period.
Thanks dr Alex for this major contribution @drAlexHarrison
Ps: English isn’t my first language, so forgive any mistake that could have been made.