Touchy subject, right? As we understand more about our health and well-being and associate it with our day-to-day lifestyle, it seems to be more of a personal and private topic. I respect that and actually think our attitude towards our nutrition is something that’s trending in the right direction. Anything that we are more acutely aware of does become more personal, so this isn’t a bad thing.
However, as a coach I do think it’s part of my responsibility to understand nutrition and be able to inform my athletes about it to some degree, like I would on training regimens, racing strategies, injury maintenance/prevention and so on. And much like my lack of any advanced degrees or formal education in those topics, I also don’t have those credentials in nutrition.
But what I do have is 55 years of eating experience... and in my current state of well-being, I would deem that as a successful career of eating! There have been some questionable moments along the way and there have definitely been some questionable foods I’ve eaten along the way, too, but as witness to this article, I am alive and well and feel I have this eating thing down pretty good.
Let me also make the claim that I would regard myself as an active person. I exercise an adequate amount and understand that most successful exercise plans have both a cardiovascular component and a resistance training component.
So along with a very lengthy span of eating and exercising, and the fact that I’ve chosen to be a coach and eating and exercising are both very important parts of coaching, I feel I’ve got some working knowledge from my own research on nutrition in relation to endurance sports. At least enough to be a nominally respectable amateur sleuth to the ongoing mystery of how we should fuel ourselves for endurance sports.
Well, what is the high school cross country runner to do about nutrition in the interest of becoming a more successful runner? Unfortunately, I won’t be able to give you the most ideal meal plan for that goal because I don’t think one universal, perfect meal plan exists.
So instead of fabricating a season-long meal plan for you, let’s define some big words with, hopefully, a laymen’s definition for a simple understanding of how they benefit your training and performances.
But first, a note. Striving to improve the quality of the foods you eat can have a positive impact on your running. However, all the improvements in quality in the world won't matter if you aren't eating enough quantity. As a teenage runner, it's a whole lot easier to underfuel than overfuel, and underfueling is detrimental to performance as well as dangerous to your overall health. If you have specific questions about nutrition, or suspect you need more help to really dial things in, talk to your coach, a doctor, or a nutritionist.
Okay, let's get into the basic building blocks of nutrition, with a focus on what runners need.
Macronutrients: Think of the stuff that gives you energy.
- Carbohydrates: This is fuel for the training. It’s what you’ll take in the most of and what gets used the most and the quickest by your body for energy.
- Protein: Keeps muscles (the things that move you) strong and helps them repair. This may be what most high school distance runners take in the least, but it should be a definitive #2 amongst the macronutrients.
- Fat: Probably the most vilified aspect of the American diet. However, its 9 calories (energy) per gram -- compared to 3 per gram for carbs and protein -- along with being a catalyst for essential hormone (testosterone and estrogen) creation and vitamin absorption (A, D, E, and K), makes fat more friend than foe.
Electrolytes: Think of the “electricity” that starts everything up.
- All six (sodium, magnesium, calcium, bicarbonate, chloride, and potassium) of these minerals are important parts of the electrical charge your body needs for all your organs to function the best way they can, under the stress you put on them as an endurance athlete. A few of them are present in most energy/sports drinks, but most don’t have all of them. Some specific electrolyte replacement drinks, i.e. Nuun, Gu, LMNT, etc. have most if not all six of the needed electrolytes.
The Current Cool Stuff: Think of the nutrients on the cellular/molecular level that makes the stuff up above utilized the best.
- Nomio: While being the name brand, specifically, Nomio’s main ingredient is a compound called isothiocyanates (ITC). Broccoli has it. But I’ll spare you the post-graduate chemistry lesson and tell you that ITCs promote antioxidant development. Antioxidants are what prevent oxidative stress by “giving” free radicals the electron they’re looking for so they don’t take it from the healthy cells you’ve worked so hard to create through your training. You ask what free radicals are? Pretty much, they're what cause a lot of our health issues, aside from also destroying nitric oxide (see below) and clogging our blood vessel walls (also see below).
- Beet Juice: Has nitrates which your body converts into nitric oxide which expands your blood vessels. Blood vessels are the highways oxygen passes through to get to your muscles. Wider highways equal more oxygen passing through them.
- Sodium Bicarbonate: Yes, it is a combination of two of the electrolytes. It’s just baking soda. It’s also a very potent nutrient with several benefits. But in the world of endurance sports, it acts as a buffer (prevents and/or delays) lactic acid build-up in our muscles. Lactic acid is the stuff that makes us bonk. When more of it is passing through your blood vessels (you’re beyond your lactate threshold) than is oxygen, you’ve got a very limited amount of time left at that effort.
You want those big wide blood vessels (expanded by the beet juice) to have the healthy blood cells (protected by the ITC) travel to your lungs, heart, and legs (organs maintained by electrolytes and energized by macronutrients) more so than lactic acid (prevented and/or delayed by bicarb).
But what should you eat? Again, that's personal. Ideally, you're eating fresh fruits and veggies; some good sources of complete protein (fish, eggs, dairy, meat, tofu, or some combo of legumes and whole grains, which complement each other's amino acid makeup to make a complete protein); more fat from things like nut butter or olive oil than from fast food; and whole grains at least some of the time. I know you're tired of hearing this by now, but everybody's ideal nutritional plan looks different. Try different foods, see what agrees with you.
All in all, on any given morning of a cross country meet, I’ll see my athletes all eating different things. Heck, my three boys all ate different things. So, the nutrition mystery may not be solved by what to eat or what not to eat in the 24 hours prior to a meet as much as it may be what are you taking in day-in and day-out.
The human body doesn’t work as well as we think when we “surprise” it with some type of superfood 30 minutes before you race. It’s foreign and unknown and your body won’t be tricked into using it for quick energy like you may want it to. But implementing a diet consistent with long distance running on a daily basis will not just benefit training, recovery, preventive maintenance, but also help you realize that 30 minutes before a race you may not need a superfood as you’ve done all the right things in the days and weeks leading up to that moment. Confidence come from the evidence you get from doing all the right things for a long period of time. Not the “just before” stuff.
As I close this article, I don’t know if I’ve confused, angered, helped, or just blathered on about nutrition. If I’ve done any of those, then it’s been par for the course on most discussions of nutrition. It’s touchy, confusing, and controversial and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. But do know that it is as important as your training and recovery... and that it's just confusing enough that we often default to training harder or resting more instead of doing the work required to gain more knowledge on how we fuel ourselves.
Yeah, us distance runners kind of think we’re bulletproof when it comes to proper nutrition. But as hard as our training is and as well as we rest our bodies, do know this: you can’t outrun a bad diet.
Keep up the great work Kansas and see you on the course.
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Touchy subject, right? As we understand more about our health and well-being and associate it with our day-to-day lifestyle, it seems to be more of a personal and private topic. I respect that and actually think our attitude towards our nutrition is something that’s trending in the right direction. Anything that we are more acutely aware of does become more personal, so this isn’t a bad thing.
However, as a coach I do think it’s part of my responsibility to understand nutrition and be able to inform my athletes about it to some degree, like I would on training regimens, racing strategies, injury maintenance/prevention and so on. And much like my lack of any advanced degrees or formal education in those topics, I also don’t have those credentials in nutrition.