Want to know how to have your best ever race?
I’m not talking about the race where you pushed through struggles and pain and barely squeaked out a minute PR. I’m talking the race where you felt GREAT the entire race, your nutrition and hydration plan were on point, your training was strong but balanced with adequate rest, you never hit the wall, and you have enough kick left at the end to give it all you had and finish strong. Are you ready for THAT race?
This is how you get there.
The biggest thing is to start preparing BEFORE day 1 of your training plan. These are the things you want to have in place before you start adding mileage, cross training, and added stress load to your day.
Here are 4 steps toward reaching your best ever race:
Fuel Your Best Ever Race: Consume adequate calories and nutrients.
You want to be eating at your maintenance needs. This means you are getting enough calories, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats to fuel your baseline workouts and day to day activities. During training, your energy needs will increase. And before we can increase intake, we need to be at that baseline first.
RELATED: What You Should Really Know About Low Energy Availability
Train Your Best Ever Race: Plan in adequate rest.
Make sure whatever training plan you have also accounts for rest days. And if it doesn’t, add them in. Or find a new plan. If you’re a seasoned runner and do better running more days, a plan like Hanson’s with 1 day off is fine, SO LONG AS you make sure all your easy days are truly easy (think HRT easy). If you know you do better with fewer run days and some cross training, you still want to make sure to have 1-2 days completely off (walking/stretching are okay on rest days).
RELATED: Why Sleep Hygiene Is Key to a Good Night’s Sleep
Support Your Best Ever Race: Reduce stress load.
As I mentioned in this article, it’s important to do a stress audit when you start a training cycle. In order to add in the stress of training without overloading your system, look at what else in your life can change or be let go of for this season. Can you outsource groceries or meals? Can you get childcare to help out occasionally? Are there big work projects coming up that you can get extra help to manage or work on ahead of time to reduce the stress burden?
RELATED: What Is Adrenal Fatigue (and What Do You Do About It)?
Optimize Your Best Ever Race: Get lab and mineral tests done.
It is beneficial for all runners to get annual labs done, but especially so before a training cycle. If you go into training with low iron status or stressed out adrenals, it will be much harder to have the energy to push through tough or long workouts. You want to make sure your body is in prime shape BEFORE you start increasing your training. Calories and macronutrients are important, but so are micronutrients, especially for female athletes!
Blood tests are helpful, but hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA) testing can also be extremely useful at the beginning of training. Here are the top 5 things to look at:
1. Address iron status. If the iron recycling system isn’t working properly, iron can accumulate in the body and lead to inflammation and fatigue. You want to make sure you are eating adequate vitamin A and copper rich foods to support optimal iron recycling. (Check out this post and this post for more on how iron status affects training).
2. Address thyroid status. If your thyroid is functioning properly, that is a good sign you are eating enough for your activity needs. An important way to support adequate thyroid function is to ensure you’re eating enough and you’re eating every 3-4 hours starting with breakfast within an hour after waking up.
3. Address adrenal status. If your adrenals are tanked, you’re metabolism is going to slow down and you’re not going to have the energy to support your workouts. Optimal adrenal function depends on optimal mineral intake (aka electrolytes!) and adequate rest and stress management. This is also why your training plan should account for rest days and why a schedule audit is so important.
4. Address liver function. You want to make sure your detox pathways are open and able to appropriately remove toxins. We all encounter toxins in our environment, we cannot eliminate them all. Making sure that our liver can process out heavy metals and excess hormones, filter and breakdown toxins in our blood, and break down and absorb nutrients from our food will go a long way in feeling good throughout training. This may also mean decreasing or eliminating alcohol for the duration of training, to ensure the liver can do what it needs to without having to process alcohol first. (Fun fact: alcohol takes priority in the liver and gets broken down BEFORE anything else).
5. Address gut and digestion. While the liver is important for breaking down and absorbing nutrients, you also need to check your gut to ensure adequate nutrient absorption. Another important factor is immune support. 80% of your immune system lives in your gut, so without a healthy gut, you’re more susceptible to infection and illness. And since endurance training already lowers immune function to support other systems, we want to make sure that our gut is as healthy as possible to help fight anything that we encounter during a training season.
Are you starting a training season soon? I’d highly suggest considering getting an HTMA run to check each of these systems and make sure your body is ready for your best race yet! Also, if you do nothing else, start building these three habits prior to starting your training.
