September 15, 2023 - Gut Training

 My thoughts are a bit focused on CIM at the moment. The race is just over 11 weeks away, and I'm entering the heart of training for race day. High Five By 55 still bounces around in my head pretty much constantly, yet CIM dominates the thought process.

And I am planning to pull out pretty much all the stops for CIM. High volume training. Really sharp intensity work. Finding just the right shoes and other gear. Working on my sleep habits. A focus on day-to-day nutrition and a touch of weight management. And I'm going to try something new I've not done before, very deliberate gut training.

It's not that I haven't practiced with race day nutrition in the past. I absolutely make it a habit to use my race day nutrition in a few long training runs. But this time I'm going a step further. I'm going to work to train my gut to be able to handle consuming a much higher level of carbohydrates during the race than I ever have in the past.

I'm going to target taking in about 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour on race day. That will be three Maurten gels plus the carbohydrates in the on-course Nuun Endurance drink. In the past, I've used one gel about every 45 minutes. So this represents a significant increase in carbohydrate intake. Both the research and anecdotal evidence seems to suggest this much higher carbohydrate intake is ideal for running a marathon, even in excess of 90 grams per hour. I've seen it suggested to even target as high as 120 grams per hour. I have no idea how one would carry enough nutrition with them to reach that number, however.

If I tried to do that right now, I would have huge gastrointestinal issues. Simply put, I'd need to poop during the run. Probably more than once. Having to take bathroom breaks is definitely not the way for me to hit 2:4X. To hit that target, I'll need to have everything go right on race day with no wasted time including no potty breaks. So I'm going to follow a protocol to train my gut to be able to handle that much carbohydrate intake while running at pace.

And it begins today. Today I will be running a 14 mile tempo run. And the tempo run lines up perfectly to start this gut training and nutritional practice. The run includes 3 repetitions of 3 miles each run at around marathon pace followed by 1 mile easy jogging. Each of those 3 mile repetitions will take me about 20 minutes. So I'll be able to eat a gel between each repetition and supplement with the drink in my handheld during the repetition. I expect to have a very unhappy tummy later tonight and spend way too much time in the water closet. It's gonna be fun!

I'll be doing something similar to this at least once per week from now until CIM. Sometimes in a target pace tempo run. And at other times on the Sunday long run. Irrespective of when, the idea will be to regularly expose my gastrointestinal system to this really massive hit of carbohydrates while at relatively high effort to slowly build its ability to process the calories efficiently.

And I would expect that this training will ultimately help me on my pursuit of High Five 100. Nutrition has been my big nemesis in ultramarathons. For anything beyond a 50K, I have never figured out how to do the nutrition well. No matter what I've tried, I've encountered failure. So I will likely keep up this practice of very deliberate nutrition practice and gut training well beyond CIM.

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