Where’s the peanut butter?!

Carbo-loading is a process runners use to crank up their glucose stores in advance of a race. I promise I’ll try to make this exciting but you probably know right now whether or not you want to continue reading. And if you want to cut to the chase, click here…

This is useful because you’ll fuel your body during endurance exercise with glycogen (the body’s synthesized form of glucose) or, after you’ve mostly used up your glycogen supply, fat. Basically it goes something like glycogen is far more readily usable as an energy source but once it’s used up you have to switch to fat and when that happens, you’ve hit the runner’s “wall” or “bonked” and though I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it personally, I hear it totally sucks. So you want to have a good supply of glycogen to fuel your exercise as far as possible (it’s also important to get replenish your energy during and after exercise, of course). Your body generally doesn’t need to store huge amounts of this energy source, though, so it doesn’t and marathoners tend to run out (typically around mile 20 or so - again this all based on what I’ve read).

So endurance athletes commonly try to crank up their body’s storage of glycogen in advance of a big competition to stay stronger as long as possible and this is done by carbo-loading, but how do you do that?

First, you don’t do it by eating a giant bowl of fettuccine alfredo immediately before a run. For starters it’s full of fat. It also won’t be usable energy at all during the race. Finally, that’s just eating a bunch of carbohydrates, which isn’t a bad idea but isn’t increasing your body’s ability to store carbohydrates and glycogen, which is what carbo-loading is about. If you do, you might wind up like Michael Scott:

There are a couple older approaches to do carbo-loading that involve about a week of paying close attention to your workout schedule and diet and taking in fewer than normal carbs in the first half of the week and then bumping up the rate for the three days before the race (moderately or extremely, depending on which plan you’re following). Doing this triggers a carbohydrate retention response that significantly increases your glycogen storage capacity, but it has the downside of taking days and forcing you to have a totally wonky diet leading up to a big competition.

Performance Nutrition for Runners, which I’ve previously called awesome, outlines a newer approach - the Western Australia carbo-loading method that I plan on trying before Portland (aside: the book’s author has an article on the approaches but I feel imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and a great way to learn so I’ll keep typing). It’s basically two steps all done in a single day and can yield a 90% muscle glycogen storage improvement.

1. The morning of the day before the race, you do a very brief high intensity workout (about 2:30 at 1 mile pace followed by a 30 second sprint).
2. Then you consume 12 grams of carbs per kilogram of lean body mass over the next 24 hours.

For me this comes out to over 800 grams of carbohydrates, which sounds pretty tough but basically you add a ton of Ensure and Endurox R4 to your diet and you’re rockin! A little over a week from now I’ll be able to report back with how it went.