Endurance Sports Nutrition: learning to eat to support training and racing

The gel chosen for the competition may be right, but it cannot compensate for weeks of insufficient meals. A nutritious lunch can be great in everyday life and uncomfortable immediately before running. A drink with electrolytes can help in fluid strategy and provide virtually no fuel.

These situations show why sports nutrition requires more than classifying foods as healthy. It is necessary to understand the function that each choice will have in preparation and at the time of competing.

Endurance Sports Nutrition, by Suzanne Girard Eberle, connects these decisions. The author brings together experience as an athlete and nutritionist to explain how to sustain prolonged efforts, recover and adapt the fueling to different modalities and environments.

This series of Enduran-se Library uses the 2nd English edition, published by Human Kinetics in 2007. The articles present the teachings in Portuguese, with editorial examples and updates identified when the application of old guidelines required correction or context.

The teaching that organizes the book: nutrition is a cycle

It is common to divide food into two things: normal meals and what you take to train. The book shows that the two belong to the same process.

You start a session with the result of what you ate and drank before. During exercise, you use reserves and can add fuel. Then you need to reorganize conditions for the next task.

If this cycle works badly, the difficulty does not necessarily appear on the same day. A person can complete a training and arrive at the next one with less energy availability, accumulating a difference that he only notices later.

The practical consequence is to plan the sequence instead of evaluating each choice alone. Today's post-training is also part of tomorrow's preparation.

Three questions that cannot be confused

First: is there enough energy for work and life outside the sport? Second: is this energy accompanied by the necessary nutrients? Third: what has been chosen can be consumed and tolerated at the expected time?

A food may have variety and remain too small for demand. It can provide calories and leave important nutrients out. It may be suitable on paper and fail because the athlete cannot open the packaging, load the volume or tolerate the food during movement.

They are different problems and therefore require different solutions. Adding a capsule does not solve an absent meal; changing brands does not automatically solve an undistributed strategy.

Fuel, liquids and electrolytes are related calculations

One of the most useful applications of reading is to separate what each product delivers. Carbohydrates contributes to fueling. Liquids participate in hydration. Sodium is one of the components that need to be considered in electrolyte strategy.

A product can meet more than one of these functions, but this needs to appear on the label and quantity actually consumed.

Editorial example: one bottle contains 40 g of carbohydrates. If the athlete drinks half, count 40 g in the plane creates a difference of 20 g between intention and execution. The product is correct; the calculation is that it described an unused amount.

This way of thinking will be developed in articles on fueling and long competitions.

The book goes beyond the day of race start

The first part builds the nutritional base: daily habits, energy, body composition, distribution of food and liquids, supplements, clinical difficulties, vegetarianism and planning of meals.

The second applies these bases to different events and environments:

The durations that the author uses to group events are organizational tools. A competition does not automatically change physiology because it has crossed the editorial boundary of a chapter.

Why does an edition of 2007 need critical reading?

The book has value as construction of reasoning, but some numerical references, explanations and recommendations reflect its period. Hydration and supplements are important examples.

In this series, the text will not be a literal translation or a silent update of the work. The author's ideas will be developed in our own words. When an orientation needs updating, this will be explained and accompanied by the additional source.

A central case is hydration: the posterior consensus on hyponatremia highlights the excess of liquids as an important mechanism and makes it clear that ingesting sodium does not eliminate the risk of drinking too much. This distinction prevents transforming concern with dehydration into an order to consume as much volume as possible.

What Each Article Needs to Teach

The proposal is that the reader end up understanding a relationship and be able to use it to examine the routine itself. For example: why water and carbohydrates need different calculations; how to check a portion; why a competition with more hours requires logistics; and when a problem should not be solved only by trying another supplement.

The examples will have work situations, displacement, running, cycling training and swimming. They explain the reasoning and do not equal an individual diet.

The purpose is to give the athlete better criteria to organize the basics and discuss adjustments with the accompanying professionals. Learning nutrition, in this context, is to be able to explain why a choice makes sense and identify when it stopped working.

The first step will be to observe what happens on ordinary days. That is where the basis is built that competition products only complement.

Primary reference: EBERLE, Suzanne Girard. Endurance Sports Nutrition. 2nd ed. Human Kinetics, 2007. Preface, editorial form and general structure. Explanatory summary in our own words. Numerical examples and situations identified as editorials are from Enduran-se.

Sources for editorial updates:

• International Consensus on Exercise-associated Hyponatremia, 2015.

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