4hr Marathon Fueling with gels/perpetuem solids

[Becker]

Hello,

My name is Greg Becker, and I'm new to the forum. I have been using Hammer Products for about 2 years for running during training and competition. I use gels, Perpetuem, and Recoverite.

I have had good success with gels only, for shorter events, 10k's, and half marathons. Today, as I was suggesting Hammer products to a friend that he should use for his running (he is switching from another brand), I came over to the website and noticed the new Perpetuem solids - very cool!

What I'm after is a fueling recommendation. I'm planning to run a sub 4hr marathon in March. I'm 6'2", 175lb. I've got the pre-race meal/food part squared away as far as not eating within 3hrs of the start. I'm thinking that a combination of gels, and Perpetuem solids would work well, but I'm not positive on the serving size. For workouts up to 2.5 hours thus far, I've consumed a gel every 30 minutes with good results. I'd like to get away from the multi-hr bottle of Perp if possible, I can see how it works well on a bike, but isn't quite as easy with the smaller handheld bottles that I use.

Would a gel every 30-45 minutes, along with 2-3 tablets of Perpetuem solid be appropriate? Along with the 16-24oz of water per hour? Once I settle on a fueling strategy I plan to use it for the remainder of my long runs to dial it in.

Thanks in advance for any advice.
Greg Becker

[steve-born]

Hello Greg -

Every serving of Hammer Gel contains 80-90 calories, depending on flavor. Every Perpetuem Solids wafer contains 33.3 calories.

If you were to consume 1 Hammer Gel every 30 minutes (2 per hour) + 2 Perpetuem Solids every hour that would supply you with 226 -246 calories per hour. I'm thinking that should be a perfectly acceptable amount, especially given that Perpetuem is a very concentrated fuel (with carbs, protein, and fat in it). If you feel that additional calories are necessary, that's an easily accomplished task.

I hope this helps!

Sincerely -

Steve

[PowerGoat]

Hi Greg,

Just be mindful that you do the ingestion practice during runs at the same pace that you'll be racing at (or slightly faster, to account for getting tired) so that you know you can down everything at that speed. It's fine if you take 10 seconds to walk and eat/slurp when it is time, but do make sure that you enter the feed zone at your marathon race pace before walking and doing your thing. You want to know if you can take in this volume at race pace, not at the slower pace of an easy training run. For a lot of people, that makes all the difference.

Good luck, and please let us know how this works out for you.

Byron Lane

[steve-born]

Greg -

Some very good advice (as always) from Byron, an accomplished runner/ultra runner. I agree with his suggestions 100%.

Steve

P.S. Byron, I may want you to write an article with some running-specific tips for a future edition of Endurance News. I think the runners that comprise our readership would appreciate such info so I hope you will give it consideration. We just finished putting all of the articles together for EN#74 so there's plenty of time to consider this and, assuming you'd like to do it, putting an article together for EN#75.