Week 32: Mommy, My tummy hurts

When you train for a sprint distance race, there are said to be 5 segments you need to consider.  The swim, bike, and run, of course.  And T1 and T2.  In the sprint distance races are won or lost in transition.

In training long, I could care less about being fast in transition.  I’m not going to dilly dally and get my hair and makeup done, but I’m not going to rush either.  But there is a new beast to tackle for Ironman training and it is nutrition.

You get a taste of this (pardon the pun) when you do an Olympic.  It becomes more pressing during a half ironman. Of course I have only done the first 2 parts of a 70.3 so I don’t truly know the whole feeling.  Hoping this changes as I am planning on doing Augusta employing my walk/run strategy.

The race reports I have read have listed nutrition issues as one of the main reasons someone has a meltdown during their Ironman.  Too much food.  Too little food.  Too little salt, too little water or too much water.  I’m not a scientist or nutrionist and I’m not sure even that would help me.

What will help?  Trying things out during training and racing.  To train my stomach to accept food and water while exercising.  Figure out what works and what doesn’t.

But what happens when I use the same nutrition 2 weekends in a row…Gulf Coast and REV3 and have 2 different results?  Then I have to look at what I ate for breakfast that day…what I had for dinner the nights leading up to the event.

And I’m starting to wonder if sometimes your body can accept the conditions, the stress, the nutrition.  And some days it just can’t.  I have heard athletes who actually go eat a meal they know will upset their stomach and then go run 15 miles just to get used to the feeling of racing while sick. 

Recently while reading Velonews, a cycling mag, I saw that some of the pros eat a mixture of white rice and eggs for breakfast.  I like this idea and will be trying it out.  I know those two foods work well for me.  The rice being a quickly digested “sugary” food and the eggs containing protein and fat.

The only thing I have consistently heard is that overeating during an Ironman will surely make me puke.  And not drinking enough water with the appropriate amount of salt (for me) will dehydrate me.  And possibly kill me.  So what I’m hearing is go lighter on the food and heavier on the water and get the salt correct.  When I started at Georgia Tech, my major was chemistry.  Perhaps I should have stayed with that.

So all of this thinking about food and keeping it in  your tummy brings me back to when I was 13 years old and ate Carnation Instant Breakfast in Strawberry Flavor every day before school.  One time I ate it while I was sick and had a fever.  The outcome was not pleasant and it did not stay down.  I have not been able to eat strawberry flavored items for years.  A friend recently gave me a tub of Recoverite.  Yep….strawberry flavored.  I can assure you the training has begun. ;)