Respect The Sustenance

As it is nutrition month on the Bug, I thought this deserved another posting:...

I have sent my entry in for the next series of Britain’s Got talent. I can’t sing, can’t dance, in fact I have no real talent at all. But from what I’ve seen, that doesn’t matter unless you want to actually win the contest.

I saw the man in a previous series, who’s alleged ‘talent’ was that he would break the world record for eating the most Ferrero Rocher chocolates in one minute. If you watched it you’ll know that he was rubbish. He just sat there and managed only four! Or was it three! It made such an impact I can’t even remember.

But the more I thought about it; all he did wrong was the showmanship.

I intend to take his act, and run with it. Literally!

I plan, not only to break the Ferrero Rocher eating world record, but to do it whilst running on a treadmill. I can just imagine Amanda Holden welling up with tears as I stuff in the FIFTH chocolate whilst gasping for breath, my feet slapping and the machine whirring away dramatically.

In the semi-final I’ll set the treadmill on fire and swap the Ferrero’s for After Eights. (You need to up your game to get to the final!)

Chocolate and running! What could be better?

Which brings us to the question: what should one eat for running (when not trying to gate-crash the Royal Variety Performance)?

Perhaps we should look to the animal world for answers. If you want speed then surely the Cheetah is the ultimate aspiration. With a sprint speed of 70 mph it would be breaking the 100metre finishing tape before Usain Bolt was half way down the track. Assuming he hadn’t been disqualified for a false start, of course.

The main food of the cheetah is the Thompson’s gazelle. I’ve not seen any on the meat counter at Tesco, but maybe you could pick some up from your local farmer’s market. (Although ‘Thompson’s Gazelle’ is almost-nearly-sort-of an anagram of ‘hot meat feast pizza’, so I might try those).

However, as it has a maximum running time of less than a minute before exhaustion sets in, we’d all beat the Cheetah over modest running distances, like 5K.

At the other end of the distance spectrum is the Swift. You’ll see them here in summer, performing their aerobatics. They fly in from southern Africa, and after a couple of months turn round and fly back.

OK, so this bird doesn’t exactly run, but what an endurance machine! Swifts fly about 500 miles every day, and young swifts may never land for three years, and they do everything in flight (yes, everything!). That’s half a million miles, non-stop!

Swift food is insects. Again, we have a problem. Insects aren’t hard to come by. It’s just that you’d need so many of them. The swift is an airborne ‘hoover’, and has no difficulty catching enough to eat. Even if we left the bathroom light on and the window open all night we’d still barely gather enough daddy-longlegs to spread on a slice of toast.

I regularly (unintentionally) graze on clouds of flies and midges whilst running through the woods in an evening, but I don’t notice my energy stores being replenished.

But we humans require a more varied diet, and need to eat more regularly than the cheetah and less often than the swift.

Nutrition, and eating the right stuff to sustain our athletic efforts sometimes appears complicated, but it needn’t’ be.

Our bodies store carbohydrates, in the form of glycogen, to use a fuel for endurance exercise. When we run efficiently we mainly use a combination of carbohydrate and fat as fuels, and the relative amounts of each vary with the intensity of the exercise.

Glycogen stores will typically last ninety minutes to two hours, depending on how hard you run.

If you plan to run for longer than this, you need to pace yourself, and start slowly to use fat as a fuel source. That doesn’t mean you need to ‘lard-up’ beforehand by eating fat. Even tissue-eating, emaciated Super Models have enough fat stores to fuel several marathons.

 After exercise we need to refill our glycogen stores (with carbohydrate) and make new tissue and repair damage (with protein).

There’s a tendency to overcomplicate the eating thing, and get blinded by unnecessary science in the false belief that we need ‘cutting edge’ nutrition to get us through our next run. But in truth, it’s best to remember the basics.

Stick to a few simple rules and you’ll be properly nourished for your running, and you’ll feel great:

Choose the least processed foods you can, especially the carbohydrates. And try and cook for yourself rather than use the take-away or fast food outlet.

Get ‘back to nature’, and eat a variety of different coloured fruit and vegetables.

Protein is important, and the fewer the legs on the source of the protein, the better. So fish, turkey and chicken are ideal.

Fat isn’t a four-letter-word. Go for sources of essential fatty acids, and not saturated fat. They are called ‘essential’ because our bodies need them but can’t make them, so they have to come from diet. Oily fish, nuts, seeds and olive oil are good examples.

Eat breakfast every day, eat something every three or four hours, and keep well hydrated.

Don’t waste your workout by skipping the post-run snack or meal. It’s vital to eat a mix of carbohydrate and protein as soon as you can after your run to kick-start recovery for maximum gains. Something as simple as chocolate milk is an ideal recovery drink.

And don’t forget the occasional treat.

A healthy diet won’t just sustain your running, but has been shown to help in injury prevention and healing, and will aid weight loss if that is your goal.

So fire up the treadmill, pass me the Ferrero Rocher, and hope I don’t get three X’s from the judges.

Respect the sustenance.