Fueling an Epic Mountain Race
By The Feed.
This piece is shared by Rachel Drake, a guest writer and trail runner who recently competed in the Mammoth Trail Fest. She shares her experience fighting for the podium, fueling strategy, and tips she thinks fellow athletes could learn from when the race day nerves come around.
Race morning comes and with it, the nerves. I’ve improved drastically in managing my nerves over the past couple of years, but still have to choke down my oatmeal on race morning. I’ve also found that if I don’t ruminate too hard on the task at hand, my body will take over and do what it does best. This applies to both digestion when I’m nervous on race morning and the racing itself.
For Mammoth Trail Fest last month, this meant taking intermittent gulps of my Spring Energy Blueberry Endurance meal as I got dressed, another swig before braiding my hair and some more as I applied anti chafe cream. Before I knew it, I’d consumed 310 calories and was ready to head out the door. Aside from distracting myself, another way I've found to augment race day calorie intake is to eat gels before the race. Depending on how much breakfast I’m able to take down, I’ll have a gel about 60-80 minutes prior to the race start and another about 20-30 minutes before the start. This can be done on the drive and even during your warmup. The way I see it, you’re signaling to your body that your digestive system needs to be functioning and kept online. The stress hormones associated with competition are known to do the opposite of this. If you’ve heard of “fight or flight” versus “rest and digest,” this is exactly what I’m referring to. With trail races, we somehow need to get our bodies ready to perform while simultaneously keeping our digestive system online.
The race went out HOT as expected, and I found myself in the lead for the first mile or so until I was swallowed up by a pack of about 10 incredibly strong women. I tried to use their energy to pull me along, and it worked quite well. For my hydration, I started with a calorie dense drink and switched to straight water at the halfway point. At the bottom of the main climb, I was sitting in 6th place and could see 5th and 4th every so often on switchbacks and through the trees. Since I was running so hard up this climb, I wasn’t able to consume any of my gels, but was slowly sipping on my calorie drink. I grouped up with a few of the women up ahead of me before putting a small gap on them by the top of the climb. I’d made it up to the 3rd position by the summit, and had no other decision but to go full send from there.
For my in-race nutrition, I stuck with what I’d primarily been consuming in my practice sessions. The low viscosity consistency of the Spring Energy Snack packs tend to work well for these higher octane races. I had one Orange flavor and one Acai flavor tucked into my sports bra, which I was able to take down during the descent along with some water. About halfway down the climb, 4th place had caught up with me. Usually when you get caught in a race, that’s that. You get passed and fall behind. Rather than succumbing to this, I vowed to do everything I could to hang as long as I could. I hung on to 3rd position, neck and neck with the great Anna Gibson until her blistering kick delivered the final blow with just a mile to go. Without her, I would have never gone as deep into my well of effort than I did, and for that I’m eternally grateful. To me, this is what sport is all about; elevating one another and challenging us to be the very best versions of ourselves.
In the end, not including any pre-race or start line fuel, I had about 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Retrospectively, this was quite a bit lower than what I should have aimed for (more like 80-90 grams of carbohydrates), especially in such a high intensity race at altitude where energy demand is higher. In a lot of ways I’m grateful for this relative “miss,” since it has me practicing my fueling even more fervently for the next objective, the JFK 50 mile.
Header Photo: Matt Shapiro