What should I eat?

Of all the questions a runner might ask before a marathon, half-marathon, or even a 5k, this is probably the most common. And it’s not easy to find an answer. There is a lot of conflicting advice in the running community, which has led to several very popular misconceptions.

For example, eating a big spaghetti dinner the night before your run will not make you faster. Proper pre-race nutrition should begin much earlier. Here’s an outline for the days leading up to the race, and the morning of:

One Week before the Race

Over the weeks or months of training, you craved plenty of protein, fats, and carbs. Now, even though your mileage has tapered, your hunger probably hasn’t.

Feed it. Now is a bad time to deprive yourself of anything. Your body is trying to reconstruct and re-energize itself. It needs nutrition; without it, you’ll likely continue to break down, resulting in sickness, fatigue, and even injury.

Three Days before the Race

This is when the well-known (and very enjoyable) “carb-loading” should begin. Carbohydrate-rich food like bread, rice, potatoes, and pasta should make up about 65-75% of your diet for the next few days. All those carbs turn into glycogen—the fuel your body uses on longer runs—which is stored for the race.

Carb-loading comes with some weight gain. Don’t let this psyche you out. Carbohydrates make your body retain more water, so you may gain up to 4 pounds in water weight before the race. It shouldn’t hurt your performance; on the contrary, more water will help you run.

Night before the Race

Most runners agree that your last big meal should be at least 12 hours before the race. If your race starts at 7:00 am, make sure you’ve eaten dinner by 7:00 pm the night before. And no matter how good the blackened oyster livers may sound, now isn’t the time to try anything exotic.

Pasta is great fuel, but only in moderate amounts and with some chicken or fish or broccoli mixed in. Tomorrow, when you’re standing on the starting line, your stomach will feel lighter and you more energized.

Morning of the Race

Your last meal should take place about three hours before the race itself. Wake up early if necessary to make sure you have time to digest. Few things will mess up a good race as quickly as an upset stomach.

As for what you should eat, try a small meal that’s low in fiber and fat. This meal should also give a lot of energy but without spiking your bloodsugar levels. The best foods contain complex carbohydrates with a low glycemic index. For example:

Sweet potatoes

Carrots

Cereal (avoid sugar and fiber)

Oatmeal (look for steel-cut or sugar-free)

Broccoli

Sourdough bread

These foods are packed with energy—lasting energy—and they won’t sit in your stomach during the race.

After all, with all the concerns you may have on race day, why worry about your stomach? Follow this easy outline, and you shouldn’t have to.

What excellent timing.

Over the past week, two very inspiring stories have made their way to me. The first is about Sami Stoner, an Ohio cross-country runner who almost didn’t get to race. The second details the training regimen of Simon Wheatcroft, who’s preparing for his first ultra marathon.

Though these athletes, and their struggles, are unique, they’ve had to overcome the same handicap. Sami Stoner and Simon Wheatcroft are both blind.

To discover their stories now seems felicitous because tomorrow holds the Philadelphia chapter of Visionwalk. I’ll be walking with my own wife, a marathoner and year-round runner. Like Sami, she suffers from Stargardt’s, a juvenile form of macular degeneration.

Having watched Mrs. Turtlerunner adapt to her deteriorating vision, I felt personally affected by these stories; Simon and Sami, like my wife, refuse to let their handicap keep them from the sport they love. But the hope they’ve inspired isn’t just for those affected by vision disorders, or runners, or even athletes. When they run, they demonstrate an ability inherent in all of us.

They deny limitation.

(If you would like to help fight vision disorders, please consider donating to The Foundation Fighting Blindness)

On Saturday, I finished the hardest run of my life.

I thought I had Trails4Tails in the bag. After all, I had done a 50-miler last summer, and that had been okay. It hurt—don’t get me wrong—but the first 35 miles of The Lone Ranger Ultra had been effortless. So how hard could a 40 miler be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out. Here’s my breakdown, lap-by-lap.

Lap 1 (miles 1-8)

I wanted to use my first lap to learn the course—but I wasn’t going to take the walking tour. So I went out with the top few runners. These guys were veteran trailblazers, and I must have stood out from the pack, clambering as I was over roots.

The trail led us to a slick wooden bridge and, following the other runners’ lead, I hopped diagonally onto it. My worn-out road shoes (another distinguishing feature) barely touched the surface before swinging into the air again, somewhere over my shoulders.

My fall banged me up a bit, but what’s remarkable is the reaction of the other runners, each of the top three racers stopped to make sure I was okay.

Lap 2 (miles 9-16)

I don’t remember much of this lap. There was a pain in my calf, which had started with my fall on the bridge and seemed to get worse with each mile. The knee on the same leg, which seems to have an aversion to ultras, also began bugging me. My body, used to road runs, was not adapting well to the trail.

Lap 3 (miles 17-24)

My knee was bad enough at this point to change my form. I know how foolish it is to favor one leg for over 20 miles, but the alternative was a DNF. Hence, when the inevitable happened and I tweaked the Hamstring on my other leg, there was no surprise mixed with my chagrin.

Lap 4 (miles 25-32)

This was the most frustrating lap. I was barely out of breath, but the fear of injury kept me from moving faster. My left hamstring was bulging oddly; it felt like a pain-filled brick had been planted behind my knee. My right knee had gotten better, but lifting it made my groin spasm. I seemed to kick every root, and each instance was punctuated with an embarrassing, womanly gasp.

Lap 5 (miles 32-40)

Now I was hobbling. The other runners had reappeared; some blew by, but most walked and cheered me on as I crawled past. I did some walking myself on this lap; a 30-meter downhill which, stiff-legged as I was, threatened to take me out of the race if I ran it.

Out of the 18 people who did the full race, I finished 7th. I’m humbled, but pleased; just getting to the finish line was hard enough for me.

Yesterday morning, I plotted out and ran 26.2 miles. It’ll be my longest run ’till the Trails4Tails Ultra Marathon, so I made it a good-luck-training-marathon.

The run itself was quite enjoyable, and it presents an opportunity to show off my newest toy: a Garmin Forerunner 410. My darling wife gave it to me as a wedding present, and it’s made my runs just a little happier ever since. The real fun part, though, is analyzing the data afterwards. Behold:

This is the most general breakdown of my run. Rest assured that I could offer you– mile per mile– my elevation gained or lost, calories burnt, best/worst/average pace, and tons of other stuff you don’t care about.

Or I could skip to the coolest part:

It compares the elevation of the terrain I cross (green) with my speed (blue). Pretty cool, eh?

For readers of The Oatmeal, this may come as a surprise. It certainly did to me:

Matthew Inman, the hilarious tech nerd behind The Oatmeal’s comics, is apparently a running nerd as well. And not only that– in spite of his portly avatar, he’s an ultra marathoner. He wrote about his experience in the White River Ultra here (Thanks Chris, for pointing this out).

Welcome to the fold, Matthew.

Bonus: One of The Oatmeal’s long-term readers offers some lovely parenting advice.