Grizzly Ultra Marathon

Ahead of her chilly ultra, Becki started her race well by topping up with a PF 30 Gel just before she set off. She used a variety of fuel sources throughout, including PF 30 Gels and PF 30 Chews, she also took some of her carbohydrates in liquid form using drink mix to avoid experiencing flavour fatigue. While this strategy placed her overall intake close to the 60-90g/h recommendations for a race of this intensity, it dropped off significantly during the race. Becki frontloaded a lot of her intake, taking ~73g/h for the first two hours before it tailed off to only ~20g/h in the last 2.5 hours. This would sit below the carbohydrate target we would suggest. At a moderate intensity of exercise, the carbohydrate stores in your muscles and liver only last around 90 minutes to 2 hours. That’s why topping up regularly throughout a long race is crucial in providing your body a steady supply of fuel to keep you running well over this much longer duration. Doing some gut training by aiming to fuel throughout her long training sessions, would improve Becki’s ability to take on carbohydrates consistently during races, allowing her to keep hitting fuel targets during the second half and therefore avoid the ‘heavy legs’ feeling she experienced.

Despite Becki’s subjective feedback, the numbers show she kept on top of her fluid intake and landed within the science based recommendations for a race in these environmental conditions. In the cold, your body doesn’t need to sweat as much to control core body temperature, so her fluid losses would have been much lower than during her previous 50km in Lavaredo. Doing sweat rate testing in training, across different conditions and intensities would help Becki predict how much fluid she needs to replace in future races to eliminate some of the guess work.

The main suggestion we have to improve Becki’s hydration strategy going forward is based on her electrolyte intake. She hasn’t had a Sweat Test yet, but we know from conducting thousands that the average losses are ~991 milligrams of sodium per litre of sweat. Becki replaced less than half of this (454mg/L) throughout the race using her carb and electrolyte mix. By adding PH 1000, or Electrolyte Capsules to her strategy she’s likely to replace a greater proportion of her losses and reap the benefits of a well dialled hydration strategy during her events.