- [Taren] What's up triathlon trainiacs?
Triathlon Taren here, with your daily triathlon video,
where I help you become a better triathlete,
get the most out of your training and racing,
and then, hopefully translate that onto
being a awesome-er person, just in life.
Triathlon's like a gateway drug,
let's do it.
So today, in Part Two of this series
on how to figure out your ideal race nutrition strategy,
we are going to dive into how you can figure out
the number of calories that you need to be replacing
in the 20 minutes before a race,
and the course of a race.
Now, there are three primary ways that you can do this,
and I'll talk about them in order of, we'll say,
worst, most general option,
will kind of get you in the ballpark,
to bang-on, here's how many calories you're going to burn,
here's how many calories you need to replace.
The first way that you can get close
to the amount of calories that you need to replace
throughout the course of a race
is to, basically, guesstimate it.
A lot of the companies that make things like gels,
chews, bars, electrolyte fluid,
they portion everything out in increments
that make it easy for triathletes,
runners, swimmers, cyclists, everyone to,
on a regular schedule, replace the amount of
calories that they're burning.
And, as a guideline, if you took a gel or a chew,
basically one serving of about 80 to 110 calories
20 minutes before your race,
then another serving of calories
about 10 minutes into the bike,
and then, every half-hour thereafter,
through to the end of the race,
paired with a decent sip of electrolyte fluid
every five minutes, you're gonna be kind of in the ballpark.
The things that this doesn't account for, however,
is it doesn't account for any fluctuations
in weight, if you're a larger athlete,
or a much smaller athlete.
It doesn't account for fluctuations in the size
of bars, chews, gels, things like that,
the concentration of calories in the electrolyte fluid.
If any of these are wildly off of averages,
you're gonna be finding
that it's not gonna be ideally suited for you.
It's gonna get you close,
but you're gonna be off by quite a bit
because it hasn't been designed for you,
it's kind of been designed for everyone, on average.
The second way to go about figuring out
your caloric intake requirements
is to go to any of the calculators online
that you can type in, "calories burned while swimming,"
"calories burned while cycling,"
"calories burned while running," and typically,
you'll be able to put in your weight,
the amount of time that you do it,
and you'll get an indication of how many
calories you're going to burn.
There's a couple of downsides to this.
As triathletes, we're going from one
to the next to the next,
so the cumulative load of all of them together
isn't really accounted for when you're
piecing them together one after the other.
And, because you're going for such a longer period of time,
in my experience, you need a little bit more.
In addition to that, most of these calculators
really only tell you how many calories you're going to burn.
It doesn't tell you flat-out how many calories
you need to replace.
That number is right around
25% of the calories that you burn.
However, because it's not given to you,
it's not really apparent.
I might tell you,
"Hey, you need to replace
25% of the calories that you burn."
Six months from now, you may not remember
that that's it,
and you'll go to these calculators,
and they'll tell you how much you burn,
and you don't know how many you need to replace.
That's why I developed the third,
and what I think is the best, option.
I actually programmed a calculator
that accumulates all of the total load,
going from the swim, to the bike, to the run,
where you can input the race that you're doing,
how long the race is going to take,
what your weight is,
and it's going to end up giving you
a very close estimate
that I've taken from some scientific research.
Isn't all research scientific?
I was just trying to make that sound fancy,
but I read a bunch of literature on
race nutrition strategy,
and I ended up backing out and being able
to create this spreadsheet that automatically,
you put in, your specific information,
and boom!
It tells you very accurately
how many calories you're going to expel during a race,
and how many calories you need to replace during the race.
And this is the entire basis for a
starting point for figuring out
how much calories you need to take,
and when you need to take them throughout the race.
This is the starting point to it all.
Because, until you know how many calories
you, specifically, need to replace
during the course of a race,
you're just playing a guessing game.
Having that number, saying, you know what,
over the course of the two hours and 50 minutes
that I'm going to spend in this Olympic race,
I need to consume (snap) this many calories.
And then, you just have to figure out how to fit it in,
and where you want to take those calories from.
So, you can get access to that calculator
by going to
triathlontaren.com/triathlonnutritionguide.
You put your e-mail address in,
and over the course of four days,
you're going to be walked through
the entire process of calculating
how many calories you need to take in
during a race,
when you need to take them,
what types of calories and fluids
you need to be taking in
in the forms of gels, chews, bars,
electrolyte fluid, salt tabs, things like that,
and you're gonna get information on how to
customize that if there are specific circumstances
you have with digestive issues,
or different race conditions.
I think it's a phenomenal guide.
I made it,
right over there on the couch.
I thought it was really impressive.
If you're new here,
and you're aren't yet subscribed,
and you want to make sure that you don't miss Part Three
of the Race Nutrition Guide,
hit that subscribe button below,
and the notification bell,
so that you know when the video comes out.
You can also check out the entire series playlist
for this Race Nutrition series down here,
and if you just want to go on a binge-watching spree,
and see some of the best of Triathlon Taren,
you can check out our Kona Recap video here,
which I'm very fond of.
Thanks trainiacs.
I'll see you tomorrow.