Food

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During that first run I wanted to vomit, but I knew evacuating the bean burrito I had just eaten would not bring the satisfaction that I desired. I simply had to exercise gastroenterological restraint. When I was in high school, it was not uncommon during rowing practices to dig so deep that I would step off the erg and stuff my head in a trash can. Vomiting from pure effort was something with which I was familiar if not entirely comfortable. However this was something entirely different. I was trying to teach my body to digest a meal while on a long run, and the outcome looked unfavorable. The human body is astonishing. Somehow it is capable of assessing priority in ways that our cognitive self cannot. The digestion of food requires increased blood flow to the stomach. However when muscles and lungs are stressed through intense aerobic exercise, blood also needs to be pushed to these areas as well. Decreased blood flow leads to a buildup of lactic acid, which is the result of the body burning fuel anaerobically. The body needs to prioritize: digest food or oxygenate muscles. The desire to vomit comes from the body’s realization that oxygen is a more immediate need than food.

This brings us to a fundamental problem with running long distances. On a short afternoon run, the body is able to access available stores of energy to supply the fuel needed to go for about an hour. As you push beyond an hour and a half of intense exercise, the body becomes less and less capable of fueling the muscle’s needs, and the athlete starts to lose their strength and stamina. When running a half marathon, one might be able to get by with the carbohydrates provided by a sports drink. As one pushes into the three hour mark, it becomes necessary to supplement the liquid fuel with something solid. The various energy gels on the market are quite popular for this. For myself, I find that there is a discernable pickup within ten minutes of taking down a gel. However, they don’t have the lasting power one needs. Forty minutes to an hour is about all you will get from one. When running my marathons, I found that I would take four to five gels in the course of the three hour and fifteen minute race. As you push out beyond marathon distances and times though, gels and sports drinks are no longer enough.

One needs to eat food to replenish the energy being burned during these very long and intense bouts of exercise. One of the first times that I experienced this first hand was climbing Denali in Alaska. If you visualize the human body as a steam engine, then I would have been dumping wheelbarrows full of coal on the fire. I consumed on average of five or six thousand calories a day. This included mugs of hot chocolate with tablespoons of butter after huge dinners to fuel the fire for the night. As we moved higher and higher, though, it became harder and harder to eat. The nausea resulted from the lack of oxygen. Our bodies were deciding that blood to the brain was more important that blood for digestion.

During the course of a marathon I would burn about 3,800 calories. Over the course of the 50 mile ultra-marathon I expect to burn about 7,500 calories. This is on top of the 2,500 calories men of my age normally expend during the course of a day. This raises some major issues. For example if I would to try use energy gels to provide the necessary calories, I would need to eat 83 of them: nine an hour or about one every six minutes. This all brings us back to the initial idea, which was figure out a way to literally stomach eating while exercising at a strenuous rate. During the ultra I was going to have to be able to stomach PB&J sandwiches, pretzels, M&Ms, and baked potato chunks dunked in salt. This was going to be the only way to ingest the necessary amount of calories.

Perhaps it was stupid to try and start with a black bean burrito, but why not go big? If I could handle that, then anything else would be easier. Besides, with blood being diverted from my brain to my stomach, I was relieved of having to think about the stupidity of it all anyways.