Race Fuelling Starts Days Before the Gun and Ends Days After the Finish
Before he was my client, a runner I now coach did a 62 kilometre ultra event. He got through the race, went home, and four days later collapsed in Coles.
At the hospital, his doctor asked him a simple question: what was your fuelling plan? He had no answer to give, because there was no plan. He had spent months training for the distance, and the fuelling never made it onto the page at all. That collapse, and that unanswerable question, are how he ended up working with me. We have been building the answer together ever since.
His story is an extreme one, but the gap behind it shows up in nearly every runner I meet. The training plan is measured to the kilometre. The nutrition plan is a big bowl of pasta the night before and hope.
Why the night-before carb up stops working
That pasta dinner does have a real job. It tops up your glycogen stores, which is the carbohydrate your muscles and liver hold ready to burn. For shorter races, that is genuinely enough, because a well fuelled body carries roughly 90 minutes of hard running in the tank.
The problem arrives when your race runs longer than the tank does. Past that point, no single meal can carry you, no matter how big the bowl was. You have to keep putting fuel in while you race, which is called intra-race fuelling: carbohydrate taken at a planned rate per hour, from sources you have tested, rehearsed in training so your gut can absorb it at race effort. Alongside it sits hydration, because you are also losing fluid and electrolytes, sodium above all, every kilometre you run. Losing too much of either slows you down first and becomes a health problem after that, and a Queensland race morning shortens that timeline considerably.
Every one of those pieces is a number, and the numbers change with the duration and intensity of the event in front of you. A parkrun, a half marathon and an ultra are effectively three different sports as far as your fuelling is concerned. This is exactly what my ultra client is learning now, and watching the penny drop has been one of my favourite parts of coaching him. The approach that gets you through a fast 5km has almost nothing to do with the approach that gets you safely through 62.
A real plan is about a week wide
For long events, the fuelling plan starts three or four days before the start line, and it ends three or four days after the finish. That second half is the part that surprises people, and it is precisely where my client came unstuck. He got through his 62 kilometres. The collapse came four days later, in a part of the plan he did not know existed.
A long race leaves you with drained glycogen, disrupted fluid and electrolyte balance, and muscle damage that needs repairing. All of that gets rebuilt deliberately, over several days, with carbohydrate, fluid, sodium and protein doing specific jobs on a schedule. It happens while normal life resumes around you, which is exactly why it needs to be written down. Finishing the race does not finish the job.
I sweat test my runners
Hydration is where good race plans most often fall apart, because most runners guess. Sweat rate vary enormously between athletes, so I run sweat testing as part of prep. Once I know what an athlete actually loses in an hour, in the conditions they will race in, fluid and electrolytes stop being a guess and become a number on the plan. It is a small piece of work that removes an enormous amount of risk.
What bodybuilding taught me about race day
My other sport is physique competition. I am a natural figure competitor, and comp prep coaching lives or dies on one skill: manipulating carbohydrate, fluid and sodium precisely enough that an athlete peaks on one exact day.
Let me be clear about what transfers, because I do not peak a runner the way I peak a physique athlete. On stage, the target is how you look: muscles full, no excess fluid, everything timed to a ten minute window under lights. On a start line, the target is how you perform: glycogen stores full, fluid and electrolyte levels right for the conditions, a gut that will cooperate for the hours ahead. Different targets, built with the same levers. The precision itself is what crosses over. Physique sport taught me to treat one day on a calendar as an engineering problem, to move carbohydrate, fluid and sodium around deliberately, and to rehearse the whole sequence before it counts. Running culture is superb on mileage and technique. That peak-day precision is the piece it rarely sees, and my runners get the benefit of it.
Where that client is now
His doctor has him restricted to half marathons for now, and within that limit he is flying. He treats his fuelling with the same seriousness as his running. He is in the gym doing strength work, which he openly hates, but now refuses to skip, because he can feel what it does for his running. Every race on his calendar gets the fuelling strategy that matches its distance and intensity. The result so far: PBs at parkrun and a PB over his most recent 21 kilometres, all on a medically restricted program.
Same runner. Same legs. The difference is the plan around them.
If you have a race on the calendar
I build race fuelling plans early and rehearse them in training, with sweat testing as part of prep. If you are chasing a time or a distance, book a free Kickstarter call and tell me what you are training for.
