Give yourself a week before race day to focus on carb-loading. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play By practicing, you’ll essentially prepare your gut for the future heavy carb load and get a preview of what the feeling of increased muscle glycogen stores may be like carbohydrates attract water, and many athletes report that carb-loading makes them feel a bit stiffer, which is another reason why a shake-out run the day before is helpful. But a practice run is not necessarily a bad idea if your schedule allows. If you want to experiment in advance, you can carb-load the day before a long run, but it won’t quite be the same since you’ll only be fueling 24 hours out, and you won’t have the benefit of rest and taper. To carb-load properly for the race, you will be tapering in the days and weeks beforehand. This practice of tapering plus adding fuel to those muscles basically helps you load the body’s fuel tank (muscle glycogen capacity) so that when the starting gun goes off, your muscles are fully loaded and your stomach doesn’t need to be stuffed. Instead, begin reducing your training load while slowly increasing your carb intake. Luckily, this is no longer the case, and there’s no need to restrict carb intake. Things to keep in mind when thinking about carb-oading:įirst off, it was once thought that in order to carb-load properly, you had to severely restrict your carb intake and up your protein-fat intake in the weekdays leading up to race day, then switch to carbs two days before the race while ignoring protein and fat. Here are some simple tips to keep in mind to get to the starting line properly fueled and confident. At this point, you’ve likely ironed out your pre-race and mid-race fueling, but you might still be wondering exactly how to carb-load in the days leading up to the big event. Whether you are in training for a late spring marathon or gearing up for this week’s Boston Marathon, the subject of fueling has probably come across your mind. This week, thousands of runners are focused on one thing: tackling a marathon.
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