Lessons From Mooseman: Pass The Salt

Last Thursday I met with Lauren to discuss where my nutrition plan went wrong during the Mooseman Half Ironman; here's what we found out:

1 - Too much protein for dinner the night before the race; the red meat I had with my pasta was too hard to digest, causing my early morning blood sugars to be very unstable. For Placid I'll be having regular whole wheat pasta with turkey meat balls. The combination of Barilla Protein Plus Pasta and Ground Beef was a really bad idea.

2 - I need to have about 40 more grams of carbs in my Pre-race nutrition, and some additional protein (currently at 14 g she wants me at 20 to 25 g). Protein helps delay the absorption of carbohydrates, the additional grams of protein will help my body more naturally maintain a blood sugar of 150 to 160 rather than having the peaks and valleys I experienced at Mooseman.

3 - Add some protein to pre-swim nutrition for bs stabilization. I'm still working on my pre-swim nutrition as OWS is vastly different from pool swimming; currently my pre-swim bottle has 2 scoops carbo pro and 2 scoops cytomax, replacing one of the scoops of cytomax with pro-formance should help maintain a healthier sugar level.

4 - I lost three pounds during a 70 degree morning run on Wednesday. This tests out to my needing 75 oz of water/ hour!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's not going to happen - just too much fluid for someone my height and weight to take in but Lauren thinks I can handle 64 oz per hour. That means the 5 bottles of water I took in during the bike leg weren't even close to fulfilling my hydration needs.

*****5 - Salt, salt, salt and more salt - I tested out to need 2,500 to 3,000 mg of salt/ hour my sports mix only had about 1,500 mg of sodium on the bike and 1,100 on the run; after 3 hours on the bike I had only taken in 3,000 mg of salt when I needed 7,500 to 9,000 mg (probably closer to 9,000 in that heat), in total on the run I only took in 2,000 mg of salt when I needed 5,000 to 6,000 mg; so in total I had a salt deficit between 7,500 and 10,000 mg! Lauren hooked me up with a product only available to nutritionists that has 710 mg of salt per serving; the Succeed tablets I was using had only half that amount of salt per serving.

I was able to put the nutrition plan to test this past weekend. Friday called for a continuous swim of an hour, Saturday for a 100 mile bike ride and Sunday for a 13 mile run. The new plan led to no blood sugar issues, no cramping, quicker recovery and less fatigue during the workouts!!!! Additionally, I mapped out my nutrition needs for each workout rather than trying to do all the math in my head. By mapping out exactly what I needed to ingest per hour forced my nutrition to be a point of major concentration for all my workouts.