Category Archives: Running

Marathon Week: What to Eat?

Food pyramidWhether training for a marathon, a triathlon, a 5K, or nothing at all it’s always worthwhile to set healthy eating goals. I would like to tackle the much larger topic of healthy eating over a series of posts and here will be focusing on what the best practices are with regard to meals for the final week before a marathon.

For the past nine weeks I have been averaging somewhere between 30 and 35 miles of running each week and the calories burned during those sessions adds up. On my longest runs, my Polar watch said I burned about 1800 calories so I can fully expect that running a full 26.2 miles will burn at least 2000 calories. I thought a good starting point for this post would be to learn how many calories I should be consuming. According to a basic Caloric Needs Calculator, I need around 1900 calories a day.

Doing a little math (not at all my strong suit), knowing I will burn 2000 calories on Sunday, if I want to maintain my current weight that means this week I should try to consume an extra 285 calories per day bringing my daily intake to 2185. Had I started thinking about my training diet when I started training, I probably would have followed the rule of thumb to add about 100 calories for every mile to my daily diet. Unfortunately, you can’t just randomly add calories; it’s important to know what layers of the food pyramid those calories should be coming from. If I had my way they’d all come from the tip top fats, sweets, and dairy categories.

MarathonRookie.com suggests that 65% of calories should come from good, complex carbohydrates, 10% from low fat and lean proteins, 20-25% from unsaturated fats and all balanced with plenty of vitamins, calcium, and iron. Carbohydrates provide the glycogen necessary to fuel the body through a long run so it seems that if I build up the glycogen stored in my body the week before I will have sufficient fuel to burn on race day.

Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately) I am not a calorie counter. I simply eat until I’m full and often until I’m just about stuffed. I like food, what can I say? I also know from experience and from research that it’s not smart to vary the diet too much before race day. The body gets used to processing certain foods and I have no intention of messing with that system before my first marathon. I would, however, like to identify the best balanced diet with the foods I normally eat and with the food already in my kitchen though there are plenty of good marathon recipes out there. Any special recipes or best foods you want to share?

I believe in writing this that I have figured out that my own personal marathon week diet needs to be the right percentages of the food pyramid with types of food my body is already used to. I will err on the side of adding more carbs and do my best to make sure they are complex carbs like cereal, oatmeal, wheat bread, pasta, carrots, and apples. I will also use the day before the run to “carb load” and I admit I’m looking forward to it!

And for future training, I’ll start my diet off at the beginning.

Marathon Week

CalendarThere is officially one week until my first marathon. Last week had a bit of a monkey wrench tossed in because of pain I started to experience in my IT band. I (almost) immediately switched to cross-training and extra stretching and will continue that this week. After an easy 3 miles on the treadmill today I am convinced that with another week of running rest, I should be good to go on March 1st.

My plan for the rest of this week is to put in three more days of cardio on the bike, a Pilates session, and two days of stretching and rest. I will drink a lot of water and do everything in my power to eat healthy, well balanced meals. I will need to do some research tomorrow to see what exactly those meals should consist of, but I’m pretty sure the pre-race diet doesn’t include pizza, nachos, cookies, and ice cream. Good thing I got those out of my system this weekend! Continue reading

Running Questions: Knee Know-How

Running and StretchingAt the end of a long run, the legs are inevitably tired which is to be expected. I understand the important role that the knees play in running and that they certainly carry a lot of the body’s weight and movement. Doing core exercises and strengthening and stretching the pelvis, hips, and legs will help the knees and legs remain strong during a run. Without a strong core to keep the body in a nice straight line while running, your knees will bear the brunt of any sideways movement of the body and you’ll feel the pain later.

I’m pretty cognizant of my form while running but I know that I’m not nearly as consistent as I’d like to be. Like anything, establishing and maintaining proper running form takes practice. I feel as though I have a pretty straight gait and that I’m not too wobbly while running so I believe my knees are not being asked to do much more than their normal functions. However, at the end of a long run, all I want to do is stretch my knees somehow. When I squat up and down that seems to help, but I don’t know that it’s actually stretching anything. Going up and down stairs after a long run is often a chore. I have to go slow and hold the handrails. The pain doesn’t last long but it sure is uncomfortable.

After doing some researching, talking to doctor friends, reading other blogs, forums, and articles about various types of knee pain I have self-diagnosed my knee pain to be related to my Iliotibial (IT) Band, which means it is not knee pain at all. Continue reading

The Buddy System a la Texting

BuddiesLast summer a girlfriend and I realized we were both in a work-out slump. We wanted to be exercising regularly and we knew the exercises we wanted to do (mostly running, Pilates, Yoga, and a few weight routines) and we both categorized ourselves as morning exercisers. However, we were severely lacking the motivation to actually get up and work-out. Somewhere a light bulb went off and we decided to put our cell phones’ unlimited text plans to use and thus began our version of The Buddy System.

Normally, when you think of a buddy system you imagine running side by side with a training partner, holding someone’s feet during sit-ups, or spotting a friend while she lifts weights. Though my friend and I have an equal desire to work-out, we have very different exercise routines and fitness goals and so our buddy system does not actually entail working out together. Continue reading

Running Questions: A Long Run Fuel Recipe

long_run_fuelFor the last few weeks I have been dabbling lightly with the best pre-run routine for long Sunday runs. I’m acutely aware of the need to fuel up before heading out but I’ve also become more in tune with the amount of time it takes for my body to wake up and go through its own routines.

I’ve tried drinking coffee, not drinking coffee, not having breakfast, having light breakfast, and drinking lots of water regardless of the rest of the routine. I believe I’ve finally found something that works (thanks in part to the oatmeal suggestion from @crossn81). Part of the trick to the long run recipe is to start the day before.

Knowing ahead of time that I would be burning well over 1,000 calories on my 20 mile run, I let myself indulge a little on Saturday. In addition to high fiber banana bread for breakfast and a well-endowed PBJ sandwich for lunch with sides of carrots and dip plus a granola bar, I enjoyed some mid-afternoon hot chocolate to fulfill a sugar craving and also keep the calories flowing. Dinner was high in protein and veggies with chicken stir-fry and I downed a bowl of kettle corn popcorn while watching a chick flick later. Saturday also including drinking lots of water. The rest of the recipe? Continue reading

Fighting The Snooze Button

Snooze ButtonI recently wrote about the traveling I’d be doing and my fear of not being able to keep up with my training schedule for the mere three days I’d be out of town. I scoped out the hotel’s fitness room and mapped a run as well. Fortunately, my roommate and friend also at the show is a runner as well and was equally gung-ho about getting up and running on the first day of the boat show.

We set her travel alarm clock, my cell phone alarm clock, and I picked out a great radio station to wake up to on the room’s alarm as our last resort. You know how you wake up every hour before a flight paranoid you might sleep in and miss the flight all together? I did that with the running alarms. I was so worried that we’d sleep through them that I was up essentially all night. By the time the last alarm went off, all I could do was hit snooze. Continue reading

The Law of Layers

Cold Weather SceneI am a fairly patient and tolerable person; it takes a lot to get me riled up and I tend to like most things. There are only a couple things I truly hate: mosquitoes and being cold. I would take being hot over being cold any day. When I’m cold I feel like I can’t function, I usually scrunch my shoulders up to my ears which ends up hurting, and I’m liable to lose my usually positive spirit if I’m freezing. For these reasons, I avoided cold weather running for years.

This winter, however, I decided to buck up and power through the cold. It helped that I had set my running goals so I was already motivated. I also started reading a lot about how to properly layer and followed the blogs and tweets of runners out there in much colder climates than what we experience in Maryland. Thanks to some fabulous Christmas gifts and a mini-shopping spree of my own, I built up enough running gear that I could very easily layer up for even the coldest temps. Though the Maryland winter so far has been relatively mild I pushed myself through 30 and then 20-degrees, down into the teens, and my coldest run was in 9-degree weather. Continue reading

Want to Stay Motivated? Tell Someone

Share Your GoalsWhen I first decided I wanted to run a marathon in 2009 I set my sights on the ING NYC Marathon in November. I still have my heart set on doing that run, but I also thought it might be wise to run one sooner so that I would know what training was all about and to make sure I could do it. I knew the B&A Marathon was March 1st and because it’s local, that seemed like a good choice.

I told my husband and a couple friends that I was planning to train for the marathon and if it was just too hard I’d at least run the half marathon, a distance I’d already done so knew it was achievable. I outlined my training goal late 2008 and got started. I also recruited a training buddy and we will run the marathon together. Though we don’t train together we check in after every long run to see how we did. I told more of my family and a few more friends of my plan. By the time New Year’s Eve rolled around I blurted it out to everyone I knew and soon after I even started a blog that included my marathon proclamations. Continue reading

The Travel Hurdle

Treadmill RunningTomorrow I have a flight at the crack of dawn down to Miami for a boat show. In my previous career I traveled often for work to boat shows across the country and would be gone anywhere from five to 10 days which is plenty long enough to interrupt exercise routines. My best friend who I worked with and I always packed our work-out clothes in the hopes that we would actually use them and there were a few rare times that this actually happened. During those trips, I was not quite as focused as I am now on training so maybe a more dedicated mindset would have made a difference in my motivation to stick with a work-out routine while traveling.

I will only be in Miami for 3 days but if I’m to keep with my training schedule only one of those can be an off day. I’m mentally preparing myself to get up earlier than normal so I can hit the hotel’s treadmill before the boat show madness begins. (I would prefer to be visualizing myself running on the beach, but this will not be an option due to the hotel’s location, so treadmill it is.) Continue reading

My Running Questions: Introduction

After more than 11 years of running, I am glad to finally be grateful for how running makes me feel and for what the body can be trained to do. I’ve learned a lot from this marathon training but also from reading articles, blogs, forums, and checking in with my training partner and running friends on a regular basis. Perhaps the thing I’ve learned the most is how much I still have to learn. It goes without saying that you never stop learning, and almost every run presents me with a new question about the sport or training and I definitely enjoy discovering the answers to my questions.

question_markOne of the things that stumped during my first long runs was how tired I became soon after the run was over. I consulted a runner friend who is also in trainer training and she immediately identified for me that I was not fueling up on runs longer than an hour. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t hungry or thirsty during those runs; my body needed energy to keep going. I was sapping all my energy while running so I had nothing left to power me through the rest of the day. Her advice matches everything I’ve read since which is that on runs longer than an hour you should have water and/or gels to fuel you up. Now I know. I carry a fuel belt with me for those long runs and while a little cat nap afterward is still rewarding, I can make it through the rest of the day without needing to crawl back into bed. Continue reading