Avoiding Jet Lag on Race Day

Audio Transcript

Coach Dylan: Hey Runners Connect fans and friends. Welcome to another episode of Run to the Top Extra Kick podcast.

Thank you all for joining me as I answer your submitted questions on anything training, racing, injury prevention, and everything else that helps you get closer to reaching your goals.

Today we have a great question from Heine.

Heine: Hi, exalted coaches and stewards of great wisdom. I’m a long-time member and I’m heading over to Oktoberfest for the Berlin marathon.

It will be the first time I will be traveling across time zones and I believe this is like an eight-hour difference.

What advice can you give me to make some adjustments, so that I don’t mess my sleeping time when I’m supposed to be at the marathon?

Keep up the excellent advice. I’m trying not to miss any podcast and thanks for the hard work.

Dylan: Thank you so much Heine for submitting your question today and for tuning in to us. We really appreciate your support.

Heine’s question revolves around travelling for a marathon race through different time zones. In your case, you’re traveling in an eight-hour difference time zone which is a lot for most of us.

But for a lot of us, we don’t get to go into OKtober Fest either so you’re lucky. I’m sure the Berlin Marathon, which is a huge race and a major marathon, is going to be awesome.

It’s one of my goal races that I would love to run at some point in my life. I would love to visit the country and run the race.

It seems like a great atmosphere of pancake flat course. Who doesn’t love to run first time, right?

I wish you the best of luck and I hope you keep us in tune with how you end up doing.

To get on to this question, not a lot of people know what to do when it comes to switching time zones, and not a lot of people have experience with going through different time zones, and feeling fresh on race day.

The first tip may seem obvious, but it’s really not.

If you can get there at least a week before, maybe three to five days at the least, that’s going to give you the better chance to recover from that jet lag that you’re going to experience and really get your rhythms back in check.

If we can get there three, five days before, have a nice easy run, a day or two before, get back into the swing of things, get clicking again, get your sleep schedule right, I think you would be in good shape when it comes to race day.

However not all of us have that sort of luxury.

The first thing you need to do is, if you only have a couple of days is to focus on your hydration and your nutrition.

Practice getting your body used to eating the foods at that time zone.

If you can do that, then we will most likely not have the same digestive issues when it comes to racing that early in the morning or that late in the afternoon, which I would be accustomed to.

I don’t know about you, but I handle my runs a lot better in the morning rather than the afternoon. Same thing goes at night.

If I do runs at night, my stomach is just not used to it and yours may not be either.

You might be a morning runner or you might be an afternoon runner, I’m not sure but these are questions you need to be asking yourself.

You need to ask yourself these questions because we don’t want to have any mishaps on race day.

We want everything to flow perfectly. That’s why we put in the training and the work. We want things to flow like it should.

Nutrition is big especially in the marathon because if you’re out there for two, three, four, five hours, however long you’re out there, you’re out there for a long time and you need to replenish yourself.

Hydration is huge refueling, whether it’s gels, solid foods, carbohydrate drink, you need to get used to taking that at those certain times, so that whenever that race is coming up, you need to start getting used to taking that stuff in regularly, the time before your race.

If you can, try to get runs in at the time that you’re going to be running at.

If you’re going to different time zones and maybe have to run eight o’clock at night, you have to run eight o’clock at night.

That way, when you do go over and say you’ll only have a day or to recover, your body is used to running at that time.

As many of you know, our bodies will fall into rhythms, for example, I typically don’t feel good on Thursdays and that’s usually from a Tuesday workout.

But Wednesday and Friday I usually feel pretty good and typically from weekend to week out, it’s relatively the same.

I go in a cyclical manner. Monday maybe it’s an easy run I will feel OK but Tuesday usually pretty good because it’s a workout and it goes like that.

A body gets used to running at certain times of the day and if you switch things up, it feels awkward and I’m sure many of you have experienced this.

It just doesn’t feel right so if you can really knock that out, prior to race day, we’re going to be more prepared when we come to the race whether it’s nutrition, or time of day.

In terms of sleep, my best advice to you would be to practice at home.

If you have the time and your schedule allows for it, you should try to get to bed early or later, and try to get your body on that time zone so that you can be ready when race day comes around.

You want your body to be primed and our bodies are very cyclical. We get used to things and our bodies are prepared at certain times during the day.

We’re more likely to be morning or night runners if we have always been morning or night runners.

If you can get a couple weeks of that, although even a week we’ll be fine. Just getting that on your legs, you’re going to be in good shape and I think you’ll be more ready and prepared.

Kind of really driving this home but we want to create like an agenda.

You need to knock it all out, check those boxes, get good sleep, get good nutrition, do everything you can to be prepared if this is absolutely what you want to do.

If you really want to get the best out yourself, you have to be overly prepared and be prepared for the worst.

If we prepare for the worst and it ends up being good, it’s even greater because we’re prepared for it to be so hard and so difficult but yet, we cruised right through it and we crushed it.

When it comes to performance and jetlag, research usually puts it between one percent and ten percent, where most of the bigger, more promising research studies usually put it around one percent, and one percent is not a lot if you think about it.

But it can add up to about a minute or two in the marathon, a couple of minutes in and for some of us, that could be a B.Q. or that could be getting a P.R. or that could be whatever goal It is for you.

You don’t want to be a minute or two slow if you could have been a minute or two faster.

To add to this, we have to do everything we possibly can; everything that we can control. Don’t worry about the things you can’t control and focus on the things that you can – that’s my mantra.

If you arrive in Berlin and it’s 2:00 p.m. and you’re tired, I think you should try to stay up until at least eight or nine, or whatever time you’re going to go to bed on race day and start sleeping then.

That way, if you’re there a couple days before that, your body gets a little more used to it.

Get more light in the mornings and get your exercise in the morning as well.

Make sure you get your morning caffeine and do everything you normally would and try to reset; it’s a hard reset on your body. That’s what we’re really looking for.

While it’s going to be really acute and really fast, if you can get there a couple days before or two days before; however long you’re going to be there, if we can just hard reset our body and get our body used to it, then we’re going to be readier on race day.

It’s important if you have a flight and you decide that you’re going to go run the middle of the day in Berlin, I think you should probably get your run in, prior to your flight.

That way you’re not running the whole day.

You want to get used to running at the same time of the day, really harping on being prepared for the race and the conditions, and the time, in comparison to what you’re facing right now.

It’s going be a long flight as well, so getting some exercise off the flight and making sure that if you get there late, you’re not just going right to bed although it might be good to go right to bed.

It’s good to kind of loosen up those legs especially if you only have a day or two.

Get some energy through nutrition, and hydration but take a walk too. Take a quick jog – something that will loosen up the leg and get the blood flowing before you head to bed but don’t get a full run in.

You want to focus on doing what you can to make it as ideal to race conditions as possible.

But an easy walk, check out some places, shake things up a little bit, because it’s a long flight, depending on where you’re coming from and we want to make sure that we’re prepared and our legs aren’t too hung over.

Lastly, another suggestion that I can give to you, is to focus on your diet and I was saying that you should focus on your nutrition and make sure you’re getting adequate food but I want to go into that just a bit further.

We want to make sure that we have high carb low protein at night.

That tends to be the combination that makes us a little bit tired and in the morning, we want to go with higher protein levels. That way, it kind of wakes us up.

So higher carb, lower protein once you get there at night. That’s pretty much a staple for running food right there.

Go get your spaghetti and meatballs or whatever it’s going to be; whatever your pre-race is, I’m sure that’s going to fit in perfectly.

Make sure that we’re still staying on top and eating the foods that we normally eat. No new things – don’t introduce anything different and try not to make things too different.

We still want to keep everything the same but we just want to alter that in terms of time.

When you get there, make sure that you don’t go and get something crazy that’s going to make you sick or nauseous.

We still want to continue what we’ve been practicing for such a long time.

I hope I cleared things up a little bit for you, but from this podcast and this question, I think it just comes down to how many days you’re going to have prior.

If you’ve got a week or three to five days, you’re in good shape and you won’t have any decline in performance.

As long as you get to bed at the right time and you’re hydrating and you’re doing everything correct.

But if you don’t have that you have to work with it and a lot of us have to work with it.

A lot of us can make it happen; we can get three to four days off of work or a week or however many days we can get but we can work with that and that’s fine.

You’re not going to lose that much in performance, if you even do, you don’t have to lose anything.

If we really knock it out the week before, and get ingrained and just practice, that’s really all it takes and we can just refine, but we just want to make it as similar to conditions in race day as possible.

I hope these cleared things up for you.

I was just trying a few things and you should start getting your body used to it once the race starts coming around the corner, because that’s the best thing you can do.

Focus on what you can control. If you can control it, you might as well control it because that’s you will get your best performance on race day.

Thank you so much for submitting your question today. I really enjoyed answering it.

These are the same questions that I had to ask myself when I’m traveling, and these are things that I’ve not done well with and I’ve had athletes who haven’t done well with.

We really have to knock it out. I’ll give an example. I went to San Diego and I ran a race and I absolutely bombed and I didn’t do any of things that I just preached.

I didn’t try any of it and I paid for it and I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.

Sometimes we live and learn but it’s best to learn before we have to live in our past. If we can affect that in our future, let’s do it.

For those of you listening that want to have your question answered by one of the Runners Connect coaches, head over to runnersconnect.net/daily and click the record button to send your question.

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