Heavy legs

There are lots of reasons why your legs might feel heavy during a run. They include intense strength training, or not enough, heavy shoes, not stretching after your last run, training too hard, using suboptimal footwear, overtraining, dehydration, sleep deprivation, or poor running form. Be sure to warm up, vary distances and consider massage.

There are also nutrition-related reasons why your legs might feel heavy during a run – not enough carbs and iron.

Fuelling for long runs

Have a healthy breakfast such as cereal with low fat milk or wholegrain toast with peanut butter or jam, protein pancakes, bagel, porridge/oatmeal, fruit such as banana. But be careful not to have high fibre the morning of a long run or a race.

You might consider a fuel source during key workouts or runs lasting more than an hour.

Experiment with foods such as energy bars (Cliff Bars, Lara bars, UCAN, Honey Stinger waffles), gels, jelly beans, chews, real food, 7 Summit Snacks, or fruit.

Low calorie energy drinks such as some Gatorades, etc. powder or tablet like Nuun, etc. There is some research that has found even just swishing and spitting out Gatorade gives you the same benefit.

Could also make your own energy bars and drinks.

Practice Recovery Nutrition

Nutrition is one of the most important influences on the body’s ability to absorb and adapt to training stress. The two most effective nutritional means to enhance muscle recovery are maintaining a diet that’s high in antioxidants and consuming fluids, carbohydrates, and proteins within the first hour after completing exercise.

During the 2 to 3 hours after the race, make sure to consume enough fluid to replace your body-weight losses. Replenish with some carbohydrate, protein and salt in your postface refuelling.

Fueling during races

During a race, pick your volunteer – one looking like they will be ready to hand off and a runner ahead of you won’t get it. First table can be congested but if you wait to the last table, you don’t get a second chance. Call out “water” or “Gatorade” to them and make eye contact. Pinch and pour the cup.

The night before a long run ensure your dinners are suitable such as grilled chicken or fish, your green veggies, sweet potatoes, whole grain rice and pastas.

Recovery foods too even shakes, coconut water, berries.

Just like almost every facet of running, the timing of when you should take your gels is individual.

Each runner absorbs and processes carbohydrates at a different rate – some can feel the effect within three minutes while others might take up to 15 minutes. This variation in absorption rate has to do with how efficient your stomach is at digesting carbohydrate and the type of carbohydrate you’re consuming. When running hard, your body often diverts blood away from the digestive track to help give your legs more blood (and therefore oxygen). Sometimes, your body shuts the stomach down completely while other times it just slows down. This is why it isn’t uncommon to see runners throw up fluids or gels right after ingesting them late into the race. Therefore, you want to begin taking gels relatively early into the race. By taking the gels early, your body shouldn’t be under great duress and you have a better chance of processing the sugars faster and without stomach issues. Start taking gels somewhere between 45-60 minutes, depending on how well you generally react to gels in training. Some runners like to take a gel right before the gun goes off. While there is no problem with this from a physiological standpoint, it might be better to consume a more substantial breakfast, with less simple sugars.

Because the digestion process will be slowed or halted the further you get into the race, you need to be careful not to overload your stomach. Therefore waiting about 45-60 minutes between gels before taking another one. Most runners should be closer to the 60 minute mark, especially if they have sensitive stomachs. The second reason to wait 45-60 minutes between taking gels is that you don’t want to speed too much simple sugar into your blood stream at once. Remember, the simple sugars from the energy gels will first be absorbed into your blood stream as glucose. The sugar will stay in the blood stream until absorbed by the working muscles or other organs. If you continue to pump sugar into the blood stream, you’ll suffer the same fate as your children if left alone on Halloween – sick from too much sugar.

The other aspect to keep in mind is that your digestive track is trainable like most every other part of your body. So, if you eat gels in training, particularly if you do it at set intervals that correlate to when you will take them during the race, your body will learn to keep the digestive track running and you will digest the gel more readily. This is why it’s critical you practice your exact fuelling strategy as often as possible in training.

It’s possible that your stomach might shutdown during the latter half of the race. If this happens to you and you’ve been unable to take energy gels late in the race, try eating only a small portion of the gel, but in closer intervals. For example, eat 1/4 of the packet every 20 minutes. You’ll still consume the energy you need, but you’ll give your stomach a better chance to properly digest without getting sick.

Always take energy gels with water, never alone and NEVER with Gatorade. Without water, energy gels will take longer to digest and enter the blood stream. If you take an energy gel with a sports drink, you run the risk of ingesting too much simple sugar at once.

Test out flavours and brands to see which energy gel is best for you. Not all energy gels are the same. Some are more viscous, some taste better, and each flavour can be delicious or wretched to another runner. The important thing is that you have to experiment and find something that works.