Insight: Nutrition

Training week 29 is over, another big weekend running in fairly warm conditions. Two weeks from now I will be staring up at an Icelandic sky having completed the first stage of the fire and ice ultra. Getting excited...

Everything is slowly coming together, I have looked into my nutrition for the week and am still missing a couple of things. It is compulsory to carry 2500Kcal each day. This is to directly replace what you burn running a marathon. Without running a marathon my recommended calorie intake on an average day is 2000Kcal. So I could be burning up to 5000Kcal each day. I will undoubtably leave a few Kgs behind in Iceland!

Ultra marathon nutrition. Yum.

Breakfast: 800Kcal porridge

Lunch: 2 x energy bars, 2 x energy gel ~700Kcal

Dinner: Military ration packs ~1000Kcal

Hydration: ~3 Litres of water mixed with energy & electrolyte powders. Although will probably drink more than this.

There are a variety of dinner options available to me each night. Chicken Panang, Tex Mex Soup, BBQ chicken and sausages are the headliners. Must also mention the instant hot chocolate sachets that I'm sneaking into the pack, I have a feeling that these little pleasures will take the edge off after a days running!

Yesterdays marathon was a hot one, and left me some awful tan lines. Only afterwards did I realise how unwise to was run in a singlet. 

"Turn the heat up high reggie, I wanna burn..."

We've almost raised £3000! Absolutely incredible, this money will pay for at least a couple of school fees for children in Kibera and will go towards building a whole new teaching block for the charity. What I've really enjoyed about working with and raising money for KIMTA is the direct and positive impact it has on the community. I'll be sure to send a few photos out of what all your kind and generous donations have gone towards. Collectively your donations will empower these children living in such a deprived and impoverished place to take control of their lives and go some way to lifting them out. 

Thanks to everyone, keep the donations coming! www.justgiving.com/fireandicekibera

In the UK we have relative poverty, where some people have less money than those living around them. This is undeniable and a real problem. But I it is important that people are able to make a distinction between what we have in our welfare society and the absolute and extreme poverty present in many areas of the world. Absolute poverty describes those whose income is less than 75p-£1.50 a day (75p being extreme). Today 40% of those living in sub-saharan Africa are defined as being in the absolute category. Although poverty in Kenya can be attributed to a range of political issues and clear social inequality, education is a power that can erode away at this imbalance and go some way to improving the well-being of many living there. So even though what we are doing for KIMTA is so small, it still is encouraging to see the funds going into the enhancement of an educational charity.

Heat exhaustion in England?

Saturday saw my tenth marathon of the summer. It happend to be the toughest so far. Around mile 22 I was hit by a wave of fatigue and nausea, making the remaining 4 miles feel a whole lot longer. At the time I couldn't understand how this could happen so deep into my training program, which started to erode the confidence in my fitness slightly. Managed to push through to the end anyway, having consumed about four litres of water, double the amount that I usually take in for that distance. Funnily enough Saturday was the aftermath of an extraordinary thunderstorm on Friday night, and the air was more humid than I can ever remember in England. This and a bit of sunshine combined to sap me of energy and at times almost forced me to stop. Good to have that in the bank going forward, if I start to feel dodgy out in Iceland then at least I'll know that I've been there before and will be able to draw on that reserve.

Sodden

 

As a result of such a draining Saturday run, I cut back the distance for my Sunday run to 18 miles. As if my mood couldn't dampen any further, I drowned in torrential downpour for the first hour of running. Again, looking back it is probably quite useful to have gotten wet and downtrodden. All useful experiences for when I need that little bit extra mentally.

My kit for the race is slowly accumulating, making the race feel very real for the first time. That and booking my flight to Iceland. Mark Topham, a good friend who is soon to finish his officer training at Sandhurst, has kindly donated a considerable amount of military ration packs along with some energy/rehydration powders of various sorts. I will be eating these for the whole week and if bought from an event nutrition company would cost well over £100, so I'm very happy about to keep the costs down without compromising on quality!

Donations continue to flood in and I have almost reached £3000, who knows how much more we can raise? Thanks to everyone for being so generous and for continuing to spread the word about my undertaking. Vincent from Kimta keeps messaging me about how happy and grateful they all are with the fundraising. I'll have a message from him shortly so he can thank you all himself. 

Link to my justgiving page is www.justgiving.com/fireandicekibera or just click here...

In other news, the half one of my front teeth fell off today while I was having lunch leaving a nice looking hole in the middle. Years of drinking Kenyan water are finally coming back to bite me (!). Only a mild case luckily, I need some fillings anyway so should probably seek out a dentist.

Flourosis: dental condition caused by overexposure to Flouride during childhood

Plenty more blogging to be done before I head out to Iceland, so please keep tuning in over the next few days and weeks! 

Only 3 more marathons left to run in training, words cannot begin to express how excited I am...

Weekend getaway to Cornwall

I spent the weekend down in Cornwall with a few friends. The reason being that one of them happens to own a VW camper. The obvious thing to do when in possession of such a vehicle is to head south-west, and so on friday night we did just that.

I saw it as a great opportunity to get some valuable training done in a fresh and exciting environment. Managed to bang out another couple of marathons back-to-back which is great news. My current summer marathon tally stands at nine, and if I can avoid illness/injury I will have run thirteen before the start of the race. I now know at least that I can do two marathons in a row and not feel too grim afterwards, which is vital seeing as though in a month i'll be halfway through the event having run three on the bounce. Scary stuff.

I'm kind of hoping that the excitement of being in Iceland and being involved in such an event will carry me over the line. There is no doubt that there will come a point where my body is screaming NO and I'll have to politely ignore it and run it into the ground. Once this is over I certainly won't be running these distances for a considerable amount of time.

Instead of writing about how my runs went over the weekend, and since I am drifting through various states of perpetual tiredness, I've decided instead to throw up a few photos courtesy of my trusty GoPro.

As always, thanks for all the support. I sure appreciate it and I know for a fact that a large number of kids in Kibera do too. Donations have a very real and positive effect on their lives and aspirations so please keep giving and spreading the word!

https://www.justgiving.com/fireandicekibera/

Here are a selection of pictures from my runs in Cornwall...

Sandpaper stories and Sebastian Coe didn’t run down hills.

 Ran two marathons back to back this weekend, and I can really feel it. I’m absolutely physically and mentally drained. One wouldn’t expect the latter to be much of a factor while running but any long distance runner would agree with me that finishing a long run is largely mind over matter. You’re body is TELLING you to stop because it’s tired and your hurting, for which I don’t blame it for but you cast this aside and regrettably run your body into the ground. The ability of the brain to warn you when you’re over exerting yourself is probably a big factor in how homo sapiens is around today rather than just a collection fossilised remains deep underground somewhere in East Africa. Mind can most certainly overcome these pain signals (to a certain extent) and get you over the line in such cases!

I’ve found that podcasts will be my savior on these long distances. Because the motion of running for such a period of time becomes intensely repetitive, you can really just switch of and listen to something without breaking focus. Suddenly you’ve been running two hours and you’ve hardly noticed. Run and learn at the same time, what an absolute steal! Listened to a documentary about the Indian partition today, so have come out with some enlightening historical knowledge that I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise!

You’re probably wondering why the title of this post is what it is and I’ll briefly elucidate that now. While doing an evening run on Thursday, I was finishing up with some hill training whereby I would ascend and descend a fairly steep slope a number of times. In the field in which I was traversing up and down there lay a rotund man reading a magazine and consuming what could well have been sausage rolls (or some similar pastry-based treat). Every time I passed him, which would have been once a minute, he was chomping down yet another sausage roll. He must have got though about 12 of them all the while I was traipsing back and forth. As I was descending for the last time, he got up and decided to enlighten me with some information that he clearly must have thought would be useful. That, or he was trying to show off his superior knowledge of training and/or running. Spitting out crumbs, he mumbled in my direction “ I used to know Seb Coe mate. And he told me that he didn’t run down hills, only up them…because it’s bad for you to run down hills”. That was it. I didn’t have the heart to manufacture a worthy response to this and replied with “Yep, thanks”. I wish I had taken the time and politely had a chat with Mr. S. Roll about this truly profound bit of wisdom he had bestowed upon me. Not surprised that he “used” to know Seb.

1.    I’m not Seb Coe.

2.    Running down hills isn’t any worse for you than running is in general on all leg muscle and all associated joints.

3.    Maybe if you spent less time eating sausage rolls and reading the Sun, and more time running yourself then I would take your point a bit more seriously.

I could go on with a list of things I should have said but we get the point!

In other news, I have been in further correspondence with the race organizer and he has granted me some great advice. Seeing as though he has run over thirty 250km events I am taking note of most things he has eluded to me so far.

I asked him about blister prevention, it having not been a problem for me in the seven marathons I have run in recent weeks (I still can’t believe that I’ve run that much). He replied saying that he hasn’t dealt with a single blister in the thirty plus ultras he has completed by keeping up the following regime while training:

“Blisters, again, of the 30 or so 250km events I have done, never had a blister, even when most people have, foot preparation, simple sanding pad from Body shop about £2, sand all hard skin off 2 or 3 times a week, moisturise morning and night, people who have had lots of blisters have followed that advise and have reduced or even stopped blisters in this type of event, during the event clean and moisturize the  feet after every day, attend to any problems if they occur, dont ignore them…”

No chance am I sanding my feet three times a week! Maybe once, can you imagine what a normal human being would think if they walked in as I was frantically sand-papering my feet? If that weren’t enough for this well-intentioned person to ring up the local asylum asking that they come and collect me, they would then see me proceed to dunk both of these ‘well sanded’ feet in an industrial tub of moisturiser, smiling all the while.

I’ll only be sanding once a week…at a push.

Apologies for that! I thought it was some interesting insight into daily life of an ultra-runner.

Thanks again to all you kind and generous souls for donating money to the charity (KIMTA ) that I am raising money for, really does make tortuous weekends like this worth it. If you haven’t read much about the charity then I wrote a short piece about them early on in this blog which some of you may have not read but sums up basically what the charity is about.

The link for donating and supporting KIMTA can be found at www.justgiving.com/fireandicekibera.

Please keep donating, about £2500 raised thus far (£2000 through the website) which is amazing but I would love to raise close to £4000 now that I have passed my initial target!