I wanted to share the major changes I had to make to the Ironman nutrition plan I used during last year's race. So I briefly summarized what I used last year but I was very detailed on what I used this year. Yes people, I'm a wordy son of a gun so very detailed means extremely detailed! I will not go too deep into all of the weeks of trial and error experimentation I had to endure to finally find what worked for me. During those weeks, I was getting stressed out about finding what would work. I finally discovered that my biggest issue was caused by early muscle fatigue due to insufficient sodium intake! I also wanted to provide the details of the race plan I used during this year's Ironman Florida (IMFL). I wanted to share all of this information to contribute to the triathlon community since I have learned so much from the community over the last 2.5 years.
The information I provided below can help more than just triathletes doing Ironman. It could be slightly modified for half-ironman length races. For half-ironman races, the fats that were included in my bike nutrition may possibly not be needed since it is a higher intensity, shorter race. People doing century bike rides could easily follow the bike nutrition I used this year. For sprint and Olympic length triathlons, the plan I discuss below is not applicable! In those short races, simple sugars rule. If you feel any of the information provided below is useful to you, please take heart and consider donating to my Move Your Feet for Loeys-Dietz fundraiser on Crowdrise's website that helps support LDSF.
The nutrition and hydration plan I used last year during IMFL (see my 2013 race report) failed miserably early in this year's Ironman training. I was dying during my long training days as I mentioned in my 2014 IMFL Race Report. Looking back at my 2013 training and race, I most likely was not taking in enough
(see my post on the re-engineered plan I used for 2014 Ironman Florida)
When I started eating low carb high fat (LCHF), I was avoiding sugars and grains as if my life depended on it. I trained and raced all of 2013 trying not to use sugars. Prior to switching to LCHF, I was using the typical sugary stuff that was not much different from what most people use. For me, the sugary stuff was always too sweet on long training days except when I used a custom formula from Infinit Nutrition. With the custom formula, you can dial up calories, add/reduce this or that, but the best part was you can set the flavor down to near nothing!
So, what the heck was I supposed to do for nutrition if I could not use sugars and trying to avoid products with wheat and dairy?
When I started eating a low carbohydrate high fat (LCHF) diet, I noticed that my athletic performance started to improve once my body made the transition to burning fat over carbs as its fuel source. I had also started Zone 2 training about two or three weeks after I changed my diet. During the first 10 days or so of switching to LCHF, I was extremely sluggish. Not only was my body moving slowly, so was my brain. The sluggishness subsided and the performance improvement started becoming noticeable within a month. I also noticed that my legs did not get the same burning sensations it did when I ran at the faster paces and that my recovery time was cut down substantially! A few podcasts I heard during that time discussed how others eating LCHF had also seen athletic performance gains and had faster recovery times. This totally intrigued me!
The title of a recent post says it all about my past training methods, Training Like A Dummy... At the time, I did not know any better. I pushed hard each and every session. Over the next two to three years, I improved my training methods. On November 3rd, 2012, I signed up for Ironman Florida. Therefore, I had to figure out the best way to train quickly. I only had one year to go from a nervous newbie triathlete to a confident well-trained triathlete by November 2nd 2013. I wanted to not only survive Ironman Florida training but to also comfortably finish the 140.6 miles on race day. In order to keep this blog post from being overwhelming long, I broke it up into two posts. This post provides a little history as to why I trained in Zone 2. The next post will cover more detailed information about determining heart rate training zones.
