Feeding the furnace: Hill training nutrition

After doing tedious amounts of research on the Internet in regards to nutrition for hill training and mountain marathons, I've found that most work on a ratio of 80 percent effective nutrition and 20 percent effective training.

The main aim of my hill training has been to build the strength, endurance and conditioning of my leg muscles, to do this I have implied a tough training program (to follow on this blog shortly) which results in the production of small micro tears in my leg muscles. When these micro tears repair, they grow back stronger and generally bigger. This only occurs when you provide your muscles with the building blocks to repair themselves i.e. protein, carbohydrates and vitamins.

When training for endurance there is an optimum ratio of 3:1 carbohydrates: protein. These come in the form of supplement powders or pre-made shakes. I use 'For Goodness Shakes' and 'Sport in Science REGO' simply because I don't suffer from delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) the day after training (due to the supplements providing the correct nutrition for muscle repair), and they are the only supplements that actually taste like real food!! Although this is what I use it is solely down to personal preference along with what works best with your body.

Supplementation is great when you train hard and need all the help you can get, but I'm a big believer in getting as much nutrition from regular food as is possible, therefore I focus a lot of time into preparing very nutritious, high calorie and healthy food.

To achieve this I operate on the basis of eating a high calorie breakfast consisting of whole grains, protein and fruit, a lunch rich in carbohydrates, fruit, veg and protein ( e.g. chicken and vegetable soup with a fruit smoothie), and a dinner rich in all the important of the above. Snacks consist of fruit, carbohydrates and protein, personally I prefer a fruit and veg smoothie with some protein and carbohydrate supplement powder added.

This is the basis that i operate on for my nutrition and is not professional advice. Professional recommendations should always be sort after from a GP and nutritionist before embarking on a nutritional program.

55 Km, 2 Days, The Omm!! Training: part 1

So after two years of wanting to get in on some of this overnight mountain marathon action, me and a buddy of mine have forked out the £110 and entered Class B of the 2012 Original Mountain Marathon in the Howgills, Lake District.

Immediately I knew I was going to need hours on the ground combined with leg burning hill sessions if I were to stand a chance of bagging a decent position within the 55km, 10 hour course. But, not only is a trip to the Lake District massively time consuming, but it would also set me back about £60 so i chucked in the Salomon Speedcross 3's and my Haglofs Endo Jacket, met up with my race partner and we headed up to the infamous training ground for the British Army's elite: The Brecon Beacons!

Our first session was to say the least, a little unorthodox! We set out at 9pm from my house and were ready to run by 10:45pm from the car park at the Gospel Pass in the Black Mountains. Our plan was to run up over Lord Herefords Knob to the path junction, and down to the Grwyne Fawr Reservoir, where I heard from the National Park that there was a small bothy located nearby. Knowing that there was a bothy we decided to leave the tent in the car and just spend the night there, BIG MISTAKE......

In standard welsh mountain conditions we arrived at where we believed to be the site of the bothy, after searching through every sheep shelter and building on the map near the reservoir we realised we were going to have to "Man Up" and run out of the valley we had just descended into, and back up to Gospel Pass to the car (roughly 12km away). 

So after a quick chuckle at how stupid and rushed we had been we chucked a Clif Bar and a SIS Go gel down our necks along with a good dose of pride, and off we went into the welsh fog and horizontal rain. After a bit of 'escape and evasion' from farmers with spotlights, tricky descents down overgrown steep ground and wind chilled legs, we made it back to the car at an antisocial 2:30am.

Once in the warmth of my dry house we both agreed that was the most epic, but definitely the best training session we had ever had, plus we learnt some extremely important lessons from it:

1. Always take a bivi or survival so you can spend the night out
2. Get an exact grid reference for the bothy!
3. And most importantly: NEVER EVER LOSE YOUR SENSE OF HUMOUR!

Now as much as i hate to admit, our pride was later taken by a colleague of my race partner who told us that the bothy IS THERE, it just isn't on the map! #!!!!Always get a grid reference!!!!