Race-week nutrition: carb-loading and what to eat before a race

Carb-loading conjures an image of a giant pasta dinner the night before a race, eaten until you can barely move. That picture is mostly wrong. Modern loading isn't a single heroic meal — it's a deliberate one-to-three-day shift in what you eat, and overdoing it the night before mostly buys you a heavy gut, not extra fuel.

The science is well established. Well-trained runners reach maximum glycogen stores simply by eating a high-carbohydrate diet of roughly 8 to 12 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day for the final two to three days, while tapering training. No painful depletion phase is needed. Muscle storage is capped — around 600g of glycogen for a 70kg runner — so pushing past 12 g/kg just adds GI distress without usable fuel. Expect 1 to 2kg of temporary water weight; glycogen binds water, and that water releases as fuel during the race.

A few specifics worth getting right:

• Race-morning top-up. Overnight you burn liver glycogen, so eat a familiar carb-rich breakfast — roughly 1 to 4 g/kg — about 2 to 4 hours before the start. Oatmeal and banana, a bagel with honey, toast with jam: simple, low-fiber, low-fat.
• Hydrate, don't flood. Drink to thirst across race week and sip in the morning. Drowning yourself in plain water dilutes sodium and helps nothing.
• The cardinal rule: nothing new on race day. Every food, gel, and drink should have been rehearsed on your two or three longest training runs. Race morning is the worst possible time to discover a new gel disagrees with you.

What to do with this: in the final two to three days, lean your plate toward easy-to-digest carbs at 8 to 12 g/kg, taper the training, eat a practiced breakfast a few hours out, and bring only fuel your stomach already trusts.

Source: RunnersConnect