How to Prevent Stomach Issues During a Marathon

Audio Transcript

Claire: Hi everyone. This is Coach Claire, and welcome to the Runners Connect podcast.

This is episode 92, and thank you so much for joining me. We have a question from John today about marathon nutrition.

John says, “I have been getting sick in my last three marathons. My stomach shuts down and I cannot take in fluids and gels. My pace will slow to having to run/walk to finish. How do you fix stomach issues?”

That’s a very important question, John. Nutrition is what separates the marathon from shorter races, because it’s absolutely essential to fuel properly to perform well.

Just as your legs and your lungs can be trained to race well, your stomach needs to be trained as well, to be able to handle the demands of the marathon.

As you run longer and faster, your body diverts blood away from the stomach and sends it to the muscles and to the brain.

With less efficient digestion going on, whatever you put in your stomach will take longer to digest and absorb, and it might cause stomach distress and discomfort.

The more you practice running long and ingesting the amounts of fluid and fuel you plan to race with, the better your body, and your brain will adapt to digesting food on the run.

Let me put this in a different way.

I’m actually recommending that you run with a full stomach to get used to it, and it will feel terrible.

I’m not talking about eating Thanksgiving Day dinner, and leaping up from the table to go out for a jog; that’s probably a bad idea, but I want you to get used to what it’s like to run with a full stomach.

You could also be using a fuel that your body doesn’t handle very well, and this is highly individual.

Many people do just fine with a gel, every 45 minutes on the dot and others start to feel queasy from the sugar, so gels are not for everyone.

I suggest that you experiment with different kinds of carbohydrate sources. I personally have found that a starch based fuel works best for me, and I make it with regular old corn starch and you can find my recipe for that on theplantedrunner.com.

A popular commercial starch fuel is called Generation UCAN, and lots of our athletes use that with success.

I recommend you experiment and try out something else besides the sugar, gel or the maltodextrin gel that are commercially available.

You can also try a more natural food source if that sits better in your stomach. A lot of people use dates or smashed up bananas, but there’s lots of other real foods that you might be able to use as well.

Now, if you are running at a really fast pace and you can’t handle something solid, you might want to look into a liquid or a more gel like fuel.
It doesn’t have to be made of sugar, so you should look around to experimenting with different options.

The Science says that a starch based carbohydrate is absorbed more slowly than sugar, which will give you a steadier release of fuel with less stomach upsets, so you might want to try that out on your next long run.

Beyond the type of fuel, you might want to look at how you are taking it.

If you take a gel at the start line and then a gel every 45 minutes or every 5K, that goes along and then you’re taking water and maybe you’re adding some Gatorade or another sports drink, you could simply be overdoing it.

There’s a limit to how much your body can handle and based on your symptoms, you are certainly going beyond some kind of limit there.

I don’t know exactly how you’re feeling, I don’t know how much fluid you are putting into your body, but something is off here

We certainly can help you out with a custom nutrition plan at Runners Connect that could figure out precisely what’s wrong in your individual situation.

Some people have success spreading out the intake of their fuel, so they take little sips of their gel, instead of taking a gel all at once, for example.

You reap up in the gel or your fuel and you take a little bit of it, keep it in your hand while you’re running and then just take little tiny bits of it every so often, and that way you’re getting a steadier intake, instead of one big hit all at once.

Some people have good success with that.

Whatever you decide to change about how you’re feeling, make sure you only change one variable at a time, so that you can figure out exactly what went wrong.

As runners, we like to fix everything and change everything and make everything perfect, and if we change too many variables at once, we never really nail down what’s going on.

Just take one of these suggestions and try it, and then if that doesn’t work, change something else, but try not to do everything all at once on the long run, right before the marathon.

Don’t just practice your nutrition on easy runs, fuel during a hard tempo or a marathon pace workouts.

Your body reacts differently to fuel when it’s under stress than when it’s running easy, so you want to practice what you’re eating and drinking while you are under stress.

Even if your tempo run doesn’t need fuel, let’s say it’s longer than an hour and you normally don’t fuel during that type of run, go ahead and try it a couple of times or more, to get used to what it’s like running at marathon pace, or even faster while you are ingesting fluids and fuel.

Practice as often as possible until you get it right, so that you can be confident on race day that you’ve got it figured out.

Thanks for sending in your question John, and if you are listening and you want your question answered by one of the Runners Connect coaches, head on over to runnersconnect.net/daily, hit the record button and send your question over to us. We’ll answer it in a future episode.

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That’s all today and have a great run.