Olympic tri nutrition/supplementation

How long will it take you to complete the tri? Common thought is that you have 2 hours supply of glycogen stored in your muscle cells, that you need to supplement if you go further than that, to the tune of 200 calories or so per hour. Even then, I would think a gel when you get on the bike and one right before you get off, plenty of gatorade, would be sufficient

Honestly, after 1.5-2 hours of exercise, your ready fuel is depleted, and after that you need 400 cal (or so) per hour to sustain yourself. But you don't want to hit depletion, so you need to continually feed yourself. Typical nutrition strategy for a Oly:

Gel 20 min before swim start

Gel immediately following swim

During bike--20oz of water and 20oz of sports drink (gatorade is probably not enough, but you can certainly make it ok on it) with another gel at your split. If you are only drinking gatorade (not endurance grade), I'd probably have a gel every 30 min with water.

Final gel in bike-run transition

This strategy (Gatorade only) will probably net you ~800 calories.

If you have a suppliment powder with your Gatorade (and drop one of the gels) you would have 900-1000.

That's should do you, OK.

Dana

Owen,

It appears Dana has provided some good advice tho I might do a lttle less Gu. Guy at my tri store reccommends concentratred Accelerade (2-3 scoops as opposed to the norm 1) in 1 bottle and water in the other (to drink w/ the Gu). I'm thinking 2 Gu's on the bike and 1 in reserve for the run w/ a Gatorade stashed in transition. Other than that I'm gonna eat a normal bfast - cereal, banana, coffee of course about 2 hrsr b4 then maybe a Trail Mix bar 1/2 hour b4 the start. MAKE SURE YOU TRY THIS STUUF (GU/ACCERLADE) B4 RACE DAY. I and others have experienced upset stomachs on race day - Not FUN!. I'll let you know how mine goes since it's b4 yours, Mark

p.s. the guy at the tri has qualified for IM Hawaii so to me his word is gospel!!

I've done marathons on less gel than that.

Hmm... I do 4 (including the pre-race gel) for an Olympic. Only recommended another one if the only sports drink one is using is Gatorade. Is that really excessive?? I used 8 during my 1/2 IM. Ah well. They don't upset my stomach so I think I'll stick with it even so...

Best of luck to you. And as someone said before, the best way to figure out what works is thru trial and error during training.

BTW, I use Accelerade (2 scoops) for my sports drink. A bit chalky, but seems to work well for me.

D