It’s now less than 4 weeks to my first 100k race (http://australiadayultra.com ) and I feel I need to start to think about nutrition. I’m a big believer in the saying ‘an ultra is an eating and drinking competition with running between aid stations’. Basically it’s all about keeping the body hydrated and fuelled at all times. The fitness bit will take care of itself as I’m confident I have the foundation to complete the event. So I need to scour the internet  using google as my co-pilot and try and find the magic diet that will get me to the end of the race at a similar pace to what I started. Running an ultra it’s even more important to get the pacing right because unlike in a marathon where you hit the wall at 32k and then stumble home in an ultra you could be hitting the wall and looking at a 30k run to finish, minimum. That has got to hurt.

I posted an article last week about the human body being capable on running on just about anything and ice cream was mentioned as a possible fuel. (You should have seen Jon’s eyes light up when I mentioned this to him. It was like all his Christmas’s had come at once ! I see trouble ahead for Jon next month. He’ll probably end up spilling the ice cream all over his triathlon top, not a good look for the photos me thinks !) not totally convinced on the ice cream diet for my first 100k so have done some more digging.

I’ve attached two articles below on different approaches to the ultra diet by two greats on the ultra scene. Dean Karnazes and Scott Jurek are two of the best ultra runners on the circuit at the moment. Both have won the Badwater Ultra , considered to be the hardest ultra in the world, and both have different approaches to diet.

Myself I’m still an old fashioned carbohydrate junkie so will probably, in the short term, stick to what I know. Not to say in the near future I won’t be adapting my nutrition and when I do it’ll all be on the blog.

 

A look at the diet of Dean Karnazes, who once ran 50 marathons in 50 days and adheres to a mostly Paleo food intake.

Professional athletes don’t get to the top by accident. It takes superhuman levels of time, dedication, and focus—and that includes paying attention to what they put in their bellies. In this series, GQ takes a look at what pro athletes in different sports eat on a daily basis to perform at their best. Here’s a look at the daily diet of ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes.

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Running is the easiest sport to get into casually, because all you need are shoes and legs. As a result, there’s a lot of lore and common wisdom about the ideal runner’s diet: Everyone knows that the night before a big run—whether you’ve signed up for a 5k or a full-on marathon—you’re supposed to carbo-load on stuff like diavolo pasta, brown rice, or buckwheat pancakes.

Well… supposed to. “That’s so passé,” says Dean Karnazes.

Karnazes, 52, is an ultramarathoner who ran 350 miles—or a little less than the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco—in 80 hours and 44 minutes; completed 50 regular, 26-mile marathons in 50 days; and wrote Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner. Come September, he’ll be hosting the third annual Navarino Challenge, a marathon in Greece meant to raise awareness of childhood obesity. And in the last 20 years of professionally being someone who runs very, very far, Karnazes has transitioned to a mostly raw diet that upends a lot of conventional wisdom about what runners need to eat to perform.

On a good day I run a marathon before breakfast.

“I used to live on junk food, thinking that since you burn 30- to 40,000 calories on some of these runs, you need to get as many calories as you can no matter how you get them in.” One time, on the solo leg of a 200-mile relay run, in the middle of the night with a cell phone and a credit card, Karnazes ordered a pizza delivered to him and kept running while he ate the whole thing in a big roll.

His running times never suffered from his diet, but his daily energy levels fluctuated wildly, so he started experimenting with different foods to see how they affected his recovery time and how they made him feel. “When you push your body that hard you get a feel for what builds you up and what slows you down.”

That intuitive elimination process led him to a diet that’s pretty close to the Paleo Diet, based on the idea that humans aren’t meant to eat anything they can’t pick from a tree, pull from the ground, or kill themselves. Karnazes’s diet isn’t as bacon-heavy as most Paleo-enthusiasts. Instead it’s heavy on fruits (VERY heavy on fruits), vegetables, cold-water fish, and yogurt. If he has any meat, it’s organic, free-range bison, usually so lightly cooked that it’s practically tartare.

The absence of oatmeal and pre-run waffles may cause skepticism, but the fact that Karnazes’s diet is enough fuel to just get him through his workouts, let alone his monster runs, is a pretty strong argument for its effectiveness. When gearing up for a big run he eats 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day. He starts with a base of 3,200 calories, and then adds 300-500 calories per hour of running.

His only real meals are yogurt at breakfast, sometimes flavored with oregano, often with fruit and nuts, and a very large dinner of salad, vegetables, and fish or bison. Most of his carbohydrates come from fruit, which Karnazes eats throughout the day whenever he’s hungry (“I think the notion of three meals a day is rubbish”). And—surprise!—he’s hungry often.

“On a good day I run a marathon before breakfast,” he says, starting off with nothing more than coffee and flax milk. After the three-and-a-half to four-hour run, he waits over half an hour to eat anything else, letting his body adjust to powering itself just on fat reserves.

The rest of the day is constant motion. Not only are there several modified high intensity Navy SEAL workouts (push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, dips, and burpees) and eight to 12 miles of sprinting up hills and jogging back down, but Karnazes rarely sits. His office space is designed to work at standing-level and he’s rocking on the balls of his feet all the time, never letting his legs rest. He is almost physically incapable of staying still.

Like a hummingbird? I wonder aloud.

“Kind of like a shark,” he says.

Pre-morning run
Coffee with flax milk

Post-morning run
Greek-style yogurt (full fat, no sugar added) with cashews, banana and blackberries

Eaten over the course of the day
Apples
Pears
Oranges

Food and hydration for long runs
Nut butter
Unflavored coconut water

Dinner
Large mixed green salad with avocado, olive oil, ground ginger and turmeric
Raw beets
Cooked sweet potato (the one vegetable eaten cooked)
Wild-caught sashimi grade salmon

Dessert
Greek-style yogurt (full fat, no sugar added), topped with olive oil and Himalayan blue sea salt

This Man Ran the Entire Appalachian Trail in 46 Days. Here’s What He Ate Along the Way

In a sport that already dances on the fringe of society, ultrarunner Scott Jurek is a true rarity. As one of the athletes who helped make ultramarathons—any race longer than 26.2 miles—mainstream (well, more mainstream), Jurek has smoked the competition in some of the world’s most punishing trail and mountain races. Not only did he take home the win at the prestigious Western States 100-miler seven years in a row, he also set a course record in 2005 for the Badwater 135, an epic 135-mile race through Death Valley—and it was 130°. In July, he completed a run across the entire Appalachian Trail, breaking the speed record by over three hours. He finished in 46 days, eight hours, and seven minutes.

On top of all this, Jurek also happens to be an accomplished home cook and vegan—he shared his story and favorite recipes in his book, Eat and Run. The plant-based diet, he says, has contributed to his success as a runner, allowing him faster recovery times and better endurance on the trail. So, with all this in mind, we were curious to chat with Jurek about how he eats on the run (heh, heh), what foods fueled his AT record, and what he likes to cook at home.

What’s your morning routine?
I exercise before eating in the morning, unless I’m doing some huge, six- to eight-hour run. I don’t need coffee or caffeine to wake up, so I’m more of a tea or yerba mate-type person. I do enjoy a good cup of coffee or espresso when I’m out with friends. For breakfast, I’m really into green drinks, so I might do barley grass, or blend greens into my smoothie—something as simple as kale, arugula, or spinach. If I have spirulinaor chlorella on hand, I’ll put those in, too. I make sure to replace the carbohydrates I lost on my run with banana, frozen pineapple, or frozen mango, and then I’ll mix it up with whatever berries I have. I use brown rice and pea protein for my protein powder, and I also incorporate 7 Sources, which is an essential fatty-acid blended oil. Sometimes I’ll throw in coconut or avocado.

One thing that’s misconstrued about a plant-based diet is that it’s all just fruit and nuts. People assume that you can’t get full off a plant-based diet, but it really comes down to the amount of food you eat, and getting enough healthy fats. I’m one of these people that likes to eat. That’s the beauty of a plant-based diet; unless you’re eating junk food, you get to eat a lot.

As an ultrarunner, your caloric needs are different from the average athlete. Can you tell us about that?
When I’m training to come out on top and win races, I’ll need 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day. But someone who’s newer to running—say, training for a marathon or triathlon—might not need that many. The key thing is you have to eat while you’re running; you burn through the glycogen [a form of glucose that is easily processed] as you exercise. Marathoners can squeak by with a gel or two, although I think they’d have better results eating more often. But when they move on to their first ultra—say, a 50K—they spend more time on the trail. More time on the trail means more calories. It really comes down to your brain and nervous system needing those carbohydrates. You have to find the type of food that’s easiest for you to digest, consume 25 grams of carbohydrates every 20 to 30 minutes, then wash it down with plenty of water and electrolytes. It’s based on body weight, though, so larger individuals need more calories per hour than somebody who’s smaller. It’s not a blanket recommendation!

When I race, I’m eating a lot of “sports food” that’s carbohydrate-dense, like gels and energy chews. One of the cool things I worked on with Clif during the last year was something called Organic Energy Food. It’s basically food in a pouch that’s blended to a consistency that’s easy to get down. There are even savory flavors like pizza and sweet potato.

On your longest races, you’re actually eating while running. How does that work?
People are shocked (and competitors are jealous) that I can eat a burrito at seven- or eight-minute-per-mile pace. It does take practice, but getting solid or real food down is so important. It’s about trial and error, though. In Eat and Run, I wrote about how I tried to drink straight olive oil during a training run before my first 100-miler. I hardly knew what I was doing, and I was like, “Well, olive oil’s this amazing food and I’m gonna need a lot of calories, so why wouldn’t I drink that on my run?” I ended up with extreme nausea, basically just puking in the bushes.

You lost a lot of weight during your Appalachian Trail run. How much were you eating?
I was on the trail for 13, 14 hours a day at first—and then, later, it became 16, 18 hours a day. Sometimes 20. I was getting less and less sleep, and my metabolism was just raging. I needed to consume 7,000 calories or more a day. A lot of that—around 3,000—of that was in Clif products. Jenny would supplement that with sandwiches or toast drenched in olive oil. Sometimes she’d get me hash browns or greasy home fries from a local diner. Or, after eating pasta with olive oil and vegan sausage, I would down a whole pint of coconut milk ice cream and it didn’t even make a dent. But my time was so limited, the question I’d have to ask was: “Do I spend more time on the trail or more time sleeping?” [Jurek’s wife and friends drove their van along the trail as he ran, and he slept there after logging his miles.] I know it looks shocking, but it’s the nature of activities like this. People might think, “Oh these crazy runners…” but I missed cooking so much.

I weighed around 173 going into the trail. I’m 6’2” and, as a larger individual, could afford to lose some of that. People were surprised I lost almost 20 pounds, especially when they saw pictures, but unfortunately that’s just what happens. The body is trying to get all the calories it can, and when you’re sleep deprived and put these huge stresses on your body, it goes after every little calorie it can get—even the muscles you’re not using. My body started cannibalizing itself a little bit, but that’s where the recovery comes in.

What was the first thing you cooked at home?
I think it was the Swedish pancakes. Well, the day before we had made a huge salad from the farmers’ market. I hadn’t been to a market all season, so being able to pick all these amazing vegetables, fresh here in Colorado, was so great.

Hikers and locals brought you food along the way, right?
Yes, some did. This one family from Pennsylvania brought us fresh fruit and meat substitutes, and it was amazing because we were having a hard time to find things I could eat at small grocery stores. Somebody delivered me two boxes of cinnamon rolls and caramel rolls from Vegan Treats based out of Pennsylvania. Just amazing. One individual brought me avocado maki and vegan pizza, which I was really craving. He hiked up a crazy technical trail for three miles to deliver these random foods. That was one cool thing about the AT. Even though it’s in a remote location, it’s a really social environment. It’s kind of amazing sharing that experience with people.

You mention in your book that you used food to woo your wife Jenny. How’d you do it?
Jenny was a typical female bachelor. She had basically condiments and frozen veggie burgers; very “cereal-for-dinner” type girl. I’m a big believer that food is the way to a woman’s heart, so it was pretty easy to woo her. Food was so integral to my family—with our garden, and hunting wild game and fishing growing up—and it was fun to share that with Jenny. She had never seen that side of me; she had always just seen me as this quirky ultrarunner.

Any parting words?
So many people think cooking has to be this exquisite, elaborate process, but it’s really about just getting in there. It’s about not being afraid to try things. My mom would say, “If you can read, you can cook.” As an athlete, I pay a lot of attention to how I fuel my body…but it’s also just really fun.