What did you wish you knew before jumping to 70.3? (Page 2)

If you were puking, it's likely you were putting more calories in your stomach than it could digest.  Eventually your body responds by hitting the purge button.

My first guess would be that you took in too many calories right after the swim without letting your HR or bloodflow settle.

When we are swimming, our bloodflow is going horizontally across our body, and mostly to our arms.  When we get out of the water, our HR tends to sky rocket because now we are pumping blood vertically throughout our body and mostly too our legs.  This drastic adjustment takes a toll on us and leaves virtually no bloodflow to be directed to our stomach for digestion. 

The common mistake people make out of the swim is that they immediately down a full bottle of sports drink or a couple of gels because they didn't get any hydration or nutrition in during the swim.  So basically all these calories are just going to sit in your stomach and can't be digested due to lack of proper bloodflow.  Then 30 minutes later, you start dumping more calories in on top of that.  Pretty soon your stomach is too far behind on digestion and you puke. 

My advice is to avoid taking in any calories for the first 20 minutes on the bike.  Give your body some time to acclimate to biking and for your HR to settle.  Water is okay, just no calories.

Whoa...did you just come out of retirement or something?

Everyone here is giving advice on nutrition, I'd just say.. keep it simple, have stuff on hand, and don't overdue. If you feel hungry, eat. I just had a bunch of Gu's on hand for the bike portion. I'd had a terrible tummyache when I woke up and couldn't eat much of a pre-race breakfast. 

So after I took off on my bike, I ended up feeling starved. So I ate a Gu, had some water.. 20 minutes later I was hungry again, ate another, drank water.. and repeated that over most of the bike course.  

You never know what might happen. There's all kinds of variables that occur pre-race and during the event. I'm not sure why one would think that they can know exactly what their calorie requirements will be on race day. Just have plenty of nutrition on hand for the bike portion.. and be flexible. 

Don't race so hard that you don't take time to listen to your body. 

During the run, there was plenty of food to eat off the course. I'm glad I replenished my salt with some of the Gatoradish type drinks. I drank and cooled off as much as I could, but I still had heat exhaustion at the end and felt pretty bad. Even though in general I do a lot of training in the heat of the day. 

The water soaked sponges during the run portion were FANTASTIC.  

I totally missed the lake water issue...LOL.

I've been reading these opinions with great interest, I'm in the early stages of training for my first HIM (August) and I'm soaking up any sensible advice offered. Thanks for the great thread, and if there are any more opinions, lets hear 'em!

I agree wholeheartedly with this.

Most of the time when nutrition is blamed the real problem was race execution relative to fitness.

IMO, the greatest difference between long course and short course racing for the average AGer is that in long course your bike ride during the race should be the easiest long ride you've done.  Your long rides during training should be at a higher RPE/HR/% of FTP (or whatever metric you use to manage intensity) than you do on race day.  This enables you to test out nutrition better, because the higher the intensity, the more likely your digestion is to shut down.  If you're able to fuel ok during higher intensity training rides than you race at, you are less likely to have GI issues on race day.  Plus, by racing at a lower intensity than you trained at, you are also more likely to set up a good run.

For the first time long course amateur, my advice is almost always "If at any point during the ride you question whether you're riding too hard, then you almost certainly are."

Read this post over and over again..... Yaz, Gman. and Don are right on the money.   All you need to know is right here.