Last weekend I ran Cape Town Marathon and it made me think of three tips that I think are pretty important to get to the finish line in one piece:
- Stick to your planned pace and don’t go off too fast! There is a very fine line in marathon running between nailing your goal time and blowing up. Trust me I have done both and the latter hurts…a lot! You should have been practicing your marathon pace in training and have honed it come race day. Don’t get to that start line and think, you know what I think I can actually go off faster than I have trained for. Start at your target pace and if with 10km ish to go you still feel good that is when to ramp things up.
- Fuel early and fuel often! When people say they have ‘hit the wall’ this is their body running out of glycogen. Think of it as a car running out of petrol it starts to chuck and slow down. This is exactly what is happening inside your body but you can avoid this by fueling with the right amount of Carbohydrate. Aim for a minimum of 60g carb/hr and if you can get it up to 90g carb/hr even better. But please practice this in training to work out how much carbohydrate you can tolerate. Your stomach is like any other muscle in the body you need to train it and the more carbs you can get into your system the better.
- Lube up! Chafe sucks. I didn’t nail this last weekend and I was in a world of pain from 21km. I find that I chafe walking to the shops so smearing myself is anti chafe before a race is a must and I hate it when I forget a spot…like I did last weekend.. Here are three that I use: Ass Magic, Body Glide and Squirrels Nut Butter.