How to Carb Load for an Ironman 70.3, Athletic Feats To Do Before I Die, & More
Thursday Three: Episode 20
read time 4 minutes
Here are three interesting ideas you won’t find doom scrolling.
TL;DR
Tip: How to Carb Load for an Ironman 70.3
List: Athletic Feats To Do Before I Die (Care To Join?)
App: How To Plan Your Ironman 70.3 Fueling and Hydration Strategy
How to Carb Load for an Ironman 70.3
This Sunday I'll be competing in my first half Ironman — that's a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile run.
Goes without saying but nutrition and fueling are a critical part of the event — before, during, and after the race. Common advice for triathletes — and endurance athletes in general — is to carb load prior to their event.
I’ve done a fair bit of research on carb loading, but the internet has a lot of mixed opinions and material on 1) Whether carb loading is necessary and 2) How you should do it properly. So, I reached out to my friend who manages nutrition for dozens of athletes at Princeton University to help out.
Here was her advice:
General rule of thumb, if you are carb loading for 3 days prior, 8 gm per kg body weight and consume this daily x3 days. If you’re doing 2 day carb load, do 10-12 g per kg x2 days
So for me, that comes out to around 700 grams of carbs per day for a three day load. Good thing I love carbs!
She then gave me some advice on how to get to that number.
Typically I’ll tell people round it out to an even 100 gm of carb per meal and 50 gm carb per snack. So like 2 cups of cooked rice or 2 cups of cooked pasta is about 100 gm carbs.
Also use fruit juice and sports drinks to your advantage. For instance, breakfast could be 3 eggs with 2 slices of toast (20-50 grams of carbs depending), and then you could do OJ and fruit on the side to get you to 100 gm. • also use honey and maple syrup. Granolas can be pretty dense too so a snack idea could be granola plus honey plus Greek yogurt. Dried fruit is good too — raisins and craisins.
So Rachael and I did a $350 Costco haul to load up on carbs, and then spent two hours on Sunday prepping everything.
Here was the output…
I know. It's a ton of food.
Despite doing a lot of athletic stuff in my life, this is my first time doing a formal carb load. And let me tell you, it’s nothing like the “carb load” you used to do in high school when everyone’s mom would take turns throwing pasta parties for your soccer team. Like those did ANYTHING for our performance... Sorry soccer moms…
Well. I’m going to go and consume 2,100 grams of carbs in the next 72 hours. Wish me luck!
Athletic Feats To Do Before I Die (Care To Join?)
On Sunday, I'll be competing in my first Ironman event — Ironman 70.3 Pennsylvania Happy Valley. I've been training for this thing since October 2023, and in three days, I'll be doing the damn thing.
Call me crazy — I know I am — but my head is already going to the next thing. I had some much fun going from zero to one on swimming, dipping my toe into the world of cycling, and learning a bit about fueling and hydration. But I’m curious for what is next…
I’ll be spending the rest of the summer focusing on beach volleyball, but once that season is over, I’m psyched to start chasing down my next athletic feat. Jumping into the triathlon world has opened my eyes to all the different endurance events there are out there and all the different, super cool races there are to do.
For example, there’s an olympic triathlon in Cape May, NJ called Escape the Cape where you start the race by jumping off of a boat — that’s sick!
Anyways, to keep track of these cool events I want to do one day, I created this list — Athletic feats to do before I die.
Shoot me a reply if you'd be down to train for one of these together.
Serious inquiries only.
How To Plan Your Ironman 70.3 Fueling and Hydration Strategy
The last month of my training has been a lot. Two Sundays ago I did a 3 hour 30 minute bike followed by a 60 minute run. The Sunday before that, I did a 30 minute swim followed by a 3 hour bike. These longer workouts require proper fueling and hydration.
Throughout my training I've been experimenting with a bunch of different gels, waffles, and sports drinks to see what works best for me. But what has been challenging is gauging how much of this stuff I have to consume so I don’t bonk — bonking is when your muscles run out of fuel, or glycogen, and you can't keep going.
So I headed to Reddit to see how others have dealt with this problem and found this app called Saturday. It helps you determine a fueling strategy no matter what your training is. All you have to do is select what session you need to fuel for, estimate how sweaty you're going to be on a sliding scale from not sweaty to really sweaty, plug in the nutrition you have — for me, that's been Maurten Gels, Honey Stinger Waffles, and LMNT — and then the app calculates how much nutrition you need to fuel your workout.
The best part is that it integrates with Training Peaks — the software where my training plan lives — and pulls in all my sessions into the app so I don't have to add them manually. Clutch.
I've used Saturday for my last few brick workouts — bike and run workouts — and it's been right on every time. Not once was I hungry at the end of my session — which is a tell tale sign that you are under fueled.
So if you're training for an endurance race and don't care to figure out all the science behind how much you should be fueling your body and just want something that will tell you exactly what to eat, I highly recommend giving Saturday a try.