Carb load mode

...in which I (almost) bite off more than I can chew

I love food, as anybody that's ever had the misfortune to sit with me as I masticate my way through a meal can tell you. It's one of the reasons I chose Slimming World when I decided to lose weight; any diet that tries to severely restrict what I eat would be doomed to failure.

So the "carb loading" phase of marathon training, in which you load the body with carbs for 2 - 3 days in order to ensure you have the fuel reserves to run 26 miles, ought to be easy. I mean, it's just eating, right? How hard can it be?

In fact I'm finding it heavy going; 90 - 95% of the calories I need to eat for these 3 days apparently need to come from carbs, and I need to eat around 570g of carbs per day (based on 8g of carbs per kg bodyweight). That doesn't sound like a lot, until you start looking at how many carbs are actually in food; a tin of baked beans has about 52g, a baked potato has about 50, a banana has 30.

100g of cooked pasta has around 75g of carbs in, but even I would struggle to eat enough pasta (about 750g) in a day to get up to the required carbs, so a lot of stuff that I don't usually eat at all has been consumed in the last 2 days.

I actually sat down and worked out how many carbs I needed, and did a plan for 3 days. (I think I may have too much time on my hands). It basically consists of 3 carb-heavy meals and 3 snacks per day, and by the afternoon snack I am already feeling quite full; by the evening snack (2 bagels with jam) I'm generally so stuffed that it's a major effort to finish it. (That said, my previous life as a human eating machine has stood me in good stead).

Anyway, that's obviously a bit of a first world problem. I'm not really whining (or at least not trying to!) but it's interesting that a bit of the training that you'd expect to be pleasurable (or at least more fun than running 20+ miles) is actually a lot harder than it sounds.

Oh yes, here's the marathon countdown. Now that's a scary picture...

The Final Countdown...

...da-da daa-daa, da-da da-da daaaa etc.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist. Actually, not sorry at all).

The countdown that Runkeeper has for the time to the marathon currently looks like this at the time of writing:

This is somewhere between exciting and scary. In some ways, I'm really looking forward to it; the atmosphere at these events is usually really positive and exciting, and this time I know I've done pretty much everything I can to prepare properly so I'm hoping for a decent time (for a first-time marathon runner).

In other ways, I'm a bit apprehensive; however prepared you are, running 26.2 miles is hard. It's 4 miles further than I've ever run before, and after 22 I was utterly exhausted.  

With that said, I didn't eat enough beforehand for the 22 miles and the weather was hellish; the weather for Sunday is looking a lot better, which I'm very relieved about (10mph wind, overcast but not raining). 

I've already done my meal plan for the next 3 days; it has to be said it's not particularly Slimming World friendly, but then the goal is to store as much energy (as glycogen) in my body as possible, which means eating carbs and lots of them. Apparently I should expect to put 3 - 4lb on over the next 3 days and then burn it all off during the race.

I'm still (slightly) above my target range, but I will get back there sooner or later. At the moment I know I'm drinking too much wine and still having too many snacks; it would be great if I was back at target at Monday's weigh-in, but realistically that probably won't happen.