Friday 2 August 2013

Montane Lakeland 50 2013 - Food

Runners obsess about food and drink. Sometimes they make this sound more important by talking about "nutrition" and "hydration" "strategies", but it does come down to food and drink.

We had a plan, a strategy, perhaps even a philosophy about food and drink for the 50, based on experience of eating and drinking in marathons and in training; but even so, at the point of starting the 50 we had never covered more than 30 miles in a single session, so whatever we did was purely experimental.

The plan was simple; eat lots of food, often. Since we weren't going super fast we decided to take quite bulky real food, and chose not to rely on the food at checkpoints. Apart from water, when we set off we could have done the route entirely self supported (at least in terms of food, we may well have got lost!).

The real food versus sports / energy drinks / bars / gels discussion was straightforward. Most of those things seem to make me feel sick if I eat them in quantity, or in isolation for any period of time. I'm starting to think that although sports drinks and gels give me a short term boost (in a fast half marathon, for example), they tend to make me crash shortly afterwards, and from experience of very hot marathons, I am fairly convinced that the very high sugar concentrations actually prevent my stomach from absorbing water. So, we were expecting to be out for 14 hours or more, so no sports drinks, gels or bars. Easy.

What to take instead? First of all, we were required to take emergency food we didn't intend to eat, so I bagged up a big lump of shop bought marzipan and a handful of dates and dried apricots and hid them in the bottom of the rucksacks. For an emergency boost equivalent to a gel, we took a pouch of banana baby food (essentially, just mashed banana - very expensive mashed banana, but easy to carry). Apart from that, we took the following:

Cheese and pickle sandwiches
Home made flapjack - the Dan Lepard halva ones with figs and pecans
Chocolate and sea salt sticky rice and oat balls (recipe from Feed Zone Portables by Biju Thomas )
Dates and dried apricots
Salted boiled potatoes
Salted almonds
Nuun electrolyte tablets
Water

Yes, I realise that was a lot to carry, but we wanted to be sure that we had what worked. Having a choice meant we didn't need to eat anything we didn't fancy, or eat all the same thing until it caused a problem, and if something plainly wasn't working, we could have something else. And nutritionally it seemed to cover all of the bases; slow release carbs, fast carbs, protein, fat, salt...

Of the things in the list, we ate some of everything, and all of the rice balls and flapjack, most of the dried fruit and quite a lot of the sandwiches and almonds. The potatoes might have been a bit of a mistake, they were nice, but a bit messy and fiddly to get at, and too heavy. The salty almonds were great, and encouraged me to drink more; I was definitely dehydrated as a result of the hot climb out of Fusedale.

I also ate and drank a few things from the checkpoints; a flapjack and a fig roll at Howtown, a cup of tea at Mardale Head, more tea and a couple of bits of apple (delicious; quite a revelation) at Kentmere, tea and a cheese sandwich at Ambleside, tea and a bit of bread at Chapel Stile, and finally more tea at Tilberthwaite.


At the end, all I really wanted was a cup of tea and the remaining cheese sandwich.

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