2 days to go! Carb Loading!

We are just a few days out from our race and it's about time to start carb loading!

Mmmm...pasta!

Carb loading basically means making more than 70% of your food intake to be carbs. Kenyans eat on average 75-80% carbs in their normal diet...which makes them great for long and hard distance running! We want to make sure our bodies have enough glycogen to use on race day to make it to the finish line without hitting a wall!

If you want to get real scientific, you need to eat about 10g/kg of body weight. So I weigh 158 lbs. This is about 72 kg. This means I need to make sure in a day, I eat 720 g of carbs in one day for approximately three days.

Now this can get pretty crazy. If you know that carbs are four calories per gram of carbs, that's 2,880 calories of food! My normal calorie intake is 1,600. If I eat that much, I'm going to probably throw most of it up from feeling sick, which isn't good either. So what I focus on is making sure I hit that 70% mark in my food intake for carbs. I know I will go over my 1,600 and feel fuller, maybe a little sluggish. But I know my muscles will be primed with as many carbs as I can take.

The other pitfall is eating fat instead of eating carbs. You may think that pizza looks like tons of carbs. What you don't realize is most of that pizza is cheese, which is a fat. Fat doesn't burn the same way carbs do. So hit your carb count, but don't mistake fatty dishes for carbs!

Make sure you are also drinking lots of water! With the impending travel, stress levels (read cortisols) go up and you get dehydrated fast and don't recover from simple workouts as easy! Drink drink drink!

Yesterday's Trivia Question: The 1932 Mickey Mouse cartoon, Mickey's Revue included the introduction to what famous Disney character?
Answer: Goofy!

Today's Question: In Brave, what classic Disney / Pixar icon appears as a wooden trinket on a worktable?