# How to Fuel an Ironman Triathlon ft. Andy Blow | Ep 494

An episode of [Oxygenaddict Triathlon Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/951501034), 19 Jun 2024, 19 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/ea99f7d8/podcast/play/88178415/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-5-18%2F381022174-44100-2-076833f764292.mp3

Join us as Andy Blow from Precision Fuel and Hydration discusses the energy needs of Ironman athletes. Learn the differences between calories and carbohydrates, optimal intake, and the benefits of front-loading. Andy also talks about PF&H's new innovations to help Ironman athletes like the flow gel and emphasizes the importance of balancing fluids, electrolytes, and carbs. A must-listen for anybody who needs to understand their race-day nutrition needs and perform to their best. * * * * * * * * SPONSORS * * * * * * * * Like what you heard in this show? Join hundreds of other age group triathletes making the most of their limited training time, training with Team OxygenAddict! http://team.oxygenaddict.com - The most comprehensive triathlon coaching program for busy age groupers. Join the Team Oxygenaddict waiting list and be the first to find out when a space becomes available: https://team.oxygenaddict.com/waiting-list * * * * * * * * * * * * precisionfuelandhydration.com Precision Fuel & Hydration help athletes personalise their hydration and fuelling strategies for training and racing. Use the free Fuel & Hydration Planner to get a personalised race nutrition plan for your next event. And then book a free 20-minute video consultation with a member of the PF&H Athlete Support Team to refine your strategy. Listeners get 15% off their first order of fuel and electrolytes with Precision Fuel & Hydration. Simply use this link and the discount will be auto-applied at the checkout. * * * * * * * * * * * * Watch on youtube Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

## Transcript

[0:02] Hello and welcome to the Oxygenating Podcast.
[0:05] We're brought to you every week by our sponsors Precision Fuel
[0:08] and hydration.com. You can personalise your
[0:10] fuelling and hydration strategy so you perform at your best with
[0:14] 15% off your first order of electrolytes and carbohydrate
[0:17] fuel with decodeoxygen24@precisionfuelandhydration.com.
[0:22] Welcome to the show everybody. I'm your host, coach Rob Wilby,
[0:25] and every week we've been you an episode of this podcast to help
[0:29] motivate and inspire you for your triathlon goals for this
[0:32] season. Listen, a couple of quick things
[0:34] you could do for us before we jump into today's episode.
[0:37] If you do like this episode, please consider following us on
[0:41] Spotify or Apple podcasts. And also, if you're watching on
[0:44] YouTube, if you could like and subscribe, that would really
[0:47] help out the growth of the show. It helps the show get shown to
[0:51] more people by the algorithm on on the podcast players and on
[0:54] YouTube. So would really, really
[0:56] appreciate that. And secondly, if you're looking
[0:58] for help and advice with your triathlon training, please
[1:01] consider getting in touch with us.
[1:03] You can read all about what we offer at Team Oxygen, nick.com
[1:06] and then you can e-mail us at help@oxygenaddict.com or there's
[1:11] a link in the show notes to book a call with me or one of the
[1:13] coaching team. We can discuss how we can best
[1:16] help you out with your triathlon goals for this season.
[1:20] OK, Andy Blow from Precision Fuel and Hydration joins us back
[1:24] on the show. Andy, welcome back on and thanks
[1:26] very much for taking the time to come back on.
[1:28] And we really wanted today to focus on talking about fuelling
[1:32] and the way we can help athletes with 70.3 and Iron Man get to
[1:37] understand how much fuel, how much carbohydrate fuel they need
[1:41] to get through their Ironman races.
[1:43] So the first thing I thought would kick this off with is
[1:46] there's often a confusion with our athletes as the difference
[1:49] between if they buy a bar and they look at the number of
[1:53] calories that they're on the bar and then the number of actual
[1:56] grammes of carbohydrate and the calories that come from
[1:58] carbohydrates. So could you start by talking
[2:00] about the differences between those two please?
[2:03] Yeah. So calories is a measurement of
[2:06] how much energy is in a food product.
[2:09] And that matters, you know, overall in your diet.
[2:12] But when we're exercising, especially when you're
[2:14] exercising hard and doing something like an Iron Man, then
[2:17] you're mainly interested actually in the carbohydrate
[2:20] value. Because you can get a lot of
[2:21] calories in a product that's got a mixture of, you know, carbs,
[2:25] fats and proteins, fats and very much more energy balance than
[2:28] carbohydrate, for example. So you, you can be fooled into
[2:34] thinking that something is relatively, you know, energy
[2:36] debt will not fall into thinking it's energy dense.
[2:38] It can look very energy dense, but not be a great sports food,
[2:42] which is why we tend to talk about, you know, the grammes of
[2:45] carbohydrate as opposed to the calories.
[2:47] If you took the energy density of a block of cheese for for its
[2:52] weight, it would look, you know, fantastic from an overall
[2:54] calorie point of view. But as we all hopefully know,
[2:58] that's not going to be a great food to pull out your pocket on
[3:01] the bike ride and start chewing into because it's almost going
[3:04] to be exclusively fat. You want to get carbs in there's
[3:08] there in one gramme of carbohydrate you've got 4
[3:11] calories. So that's when you work, when
[3:16] you're working things backwards, you want to make sure that the
[3:19] foods that you're selecting are very, very carbohydrate dense,
[3:22] which is why things like energy gels, energy chews, energy bars
[3:26] that are that are specifically made for during exercise, you'll
[3:30] see them being almost exclusively carbohydrate rather
[3:32] than having much fat and protein in the.
[3:35] Yeah. And I think that's, that's
[3:36] really important because I remember being in certain
[3:40] Facebook groups and reading people's, you know, what should
[3:43] I eat on the bike during an Ironman?
[3:45] And although it is quite common for people to get, I think the
[3:49] phrase is, um, like taste, taste blind or they, they have too
[3:55] much sweet stuff during the ride and this air fancy something
[3:58] savoury. Some of the advice that I read
[4:00] in the, in the Facebook groups that were kind of people saying,
[4:02] you know, I, I love having a pork pie.
[4:05] I take a pork pie and a special needs bag or I take cocktail
[4:09] sausages was another one. Things you can buy from the
[4:11] snack section of the supermarket.
[4:13] And again, if you look at the the calorie content, there's
[4:16] plenty of calories in there, but it's a large amount of protein
[4:19] and a large amount of fat in there, which isn't really doing
[4:22] the job that you need it to do. Kamaya man race day.
[4:25] So I think it is important for athletes to look at the makeup
[4:29] of their their sports nutrition and see how much of the calories
[4:33] that's in there is coming from carbs and how much of it is also
[4:36] from the fat and the protein that's in there as well.
[4:39] Definitely. And we're seeing, we've seen in
[4:40] the last few years trend of athletes trying to and being
[4:43] able to consume more carbohydrate calories, which
[4:46] means obviously taking in more food overall.
[4:49] But that means if you're, if you are taking on things with like
[4:53] fats and proteins in which are harder and slower to digest,
[4:55] that can interfere with that. So with the with the guys and
[4:59] girls at the really sharp end of the races that we're typically
[5:02] working with, we see them essentially taking exclusively
[5:06] carbohydrates for energy and and not a lot else at the moment.
[5:10] Yeah. OK.
[5:11] So let's talk a little bit about guidelines then in terms of
[5:15] grammes of carbohydrate per hour that athletes should be looking
[5:19] to take in. What would be some rough
[5:20] guidelines and and how does that vary depending on the
[5:23] conditions, how fast they are, how hot it is, things like that?
[5:28] Yeah, there's, there are some pretty decent scientific
[5:31] guidelines out there now and a lot of research that's been done
[5:33] in this area. Typically we don't see many
[5:36] people operating for a long duration.
[5:38] It's something like an Ironman on much less than what, 50
[5:42] grammes of carbohydrate per hour.
[5:44] It used to be thought that 60 grammes an hour was kind of the
[5:47] upper limit, which which faster athletes should be aiming for.
[5:51] But that in recent years has been completely blown out the
[5:53] water partly by some advances in understanding combining
[5:57] different sources of carbohydrate.
[5:59] So combining glucose and fructose rather than just using
[6:02] glucose or fructose because you can absorb more more quickly.
[6:06] And partly just, I think through honestly, athletes kind of
[6:09] experimenting and, and pushing the limits really and finding
[6:12] that the faster they're going, the the more fuel they need.
[6:15] Though it's not uncommon now to read case studies or hear about
[6:18] athletes taking 120 grammes of carbs an hour.
[6:21] I would say though, that's an aggressive amount for the
[6:24] majority of athletes. And that a a good starting point
[6:28] would be aiming for somewhere between 60 and 90 grammes of
[6:31] carbohydrate per hour. Looking at the lower end, if
[6:34] you're a bit smaller, if you're less experienced, if you're not
[6:38] moving as quickly but trying to push it upwards closer towards
[6:42] the 90 grammes, if you're someone who is moving a bit
[6:44] faster, if you've got a bit more experience, you've got a bit
[6:46] more resilience select and you you're wanting to perform more
[6:51] at your best rather than just get round.
[6:53] OK, so smaller and slower athletes more towards the 60
[6:57] gramme end, bigger and faster athletes more towards the 90
[7:01] gramme end. Is there any evidence to show
[7:04] that this is trainable as as the training progresses could people
[7:07] start lowering gradually trying to increase the amount they take
[7:10] in? Yeah, there's, there's not
[7:12] tonnes of really robust scientific evidence.
[7:15] There is a little bit of scientific evidence, but there's
[7:17] a lot of anecdotal evidence that's emerging.
[7:19] And we see it all the time in athletes that we, that we kind
[7:22] of help over a period of weeks up to an event that we can
[7:25] usually nudge up the amount of carbohydrate that they can
[7:28] tolerate. Some people's stomachs just seem
[7:30] to be really resilient and they can pretty much absorb what
[7:34] whatever they can take in quite quickly.
[7:36] Other people who are a bit more sensitive with that, they
[7:39] require a bit more of a, a slow and steady approach.
[7:42] But like with most aspects of your Physiology, you can kind of
[7:45] nudge it in the direction you want it to go if you're patient
[7:48] with it. And I would say a, really a top
[7:51] tip would be if you're starting, say six or eight weeks out for
[7:54] an event and you're, you're increasing the amount of carbs
[7:57] taking. If you are someone who's
[7:59] suffered with a bit of a dodgy stomach in the past, then try
[8:02] and keep the amount of carbohydrate taking in a big
[8:04] training session a few weeks out from the event.
[8:06] But then actually come back down again for the race.
[8:08] So that you're, you're not rolling the dice with actually
[8:12] upsetting your stomach on the day.
[8:13] But you know that you've, if you've, if you wanted to aim for
[8:17] 90 grammes, you get there in training, but you're on the edge
[8:19] of that, maybe pull it back to 75 or 80 on the race and then be
[8:24] a bit, a little bit more conservative.
[8:26] OK. Is there a difference between
[8:29] what athletes can consume and absorb on the bike and on the
[8:33] run? The attend to see a difference
[8:34] there. I think there is, there's,
[8:36] there's certainly what we see in practise as we see Ironman
[8:39] athletes, especially in 70.3, taking considerably more per
[8:44] hour on the bike than on the run.
[8:46] And I think there's several reasons for that.
[8:48] One of them is logistical, is easy to carry and eat and drink
[8:51] on the bike because you've got sections sometimes where you're
[8:54] freewheeling or you can soft pedal a little bit, you're not
[8:56] breathing as hard. We know that it's easier to
[8:59] access drinks and your girls when you're on on the bike so
[9:02] you can eat more. We, we kind of call it in house
[9:05] here, we call it front loading. So we see athletes front load
[9:08] their calorie, their carb and their hydration intake on the
[9:13] bike. And then once you get onto the
[9:15] run on a 70.3, some of the athletes are only out there just
[9:19] over an hour or you know, an hour and a half.
[9:21] And therefore the amount of time we've got to get fully depleted
[9:25] is limited. So you can kind of get away with
[9:28] a slightly more skimpy approach to your nutrition and hydration
[9:31] on the run. In Iron Man, it changes a little
[9:35] bit in the yes, we still see people eating and drinking more
[9:39] per hour generally on the bike. But the better athletes tend to
[9:44] keep a high level of intake upon the run as well because even the
[9:47] fastest athletes are out there getting close to three hours or
[9:51] between 2 1/2 and three hours on the on the run.
[9:54] So if you don't keep that level of intake up, you do run the
[9:57] risk of either hitting the wall or becoming dehydrated or
[10:00] depleted. So working on finding ways to to
[10:04] keep that level of fuelling and hydration on the run is really
[10:07] important. Now the long term lessons will
[10:10] know and and Full disclosure, I've always been a big fan of
[10:12] your products, mainly because they do the job that they're
[10:16] designed to do. I feel like they were designed
[10:17] by athletes for athletes and there's a lot of really good
[10:21] common sense going into it. So I want to give you the chance
[10:24] to talk a little bit about having solved or partly solved
[10:28] the problem of how athletes carry a lot of gels on the bike.
[10:31] Because when I started out, it was really common to see
[10:34] athletes with 681012 gels electrically taped onto the top
[10:39] tube one at a time. I'm sure you'll have seen this
[10:41] as well back in the day. Um, so talk a bit about the flow
[10:45] gel and the flow gel cap that you've got available for
[10:48] athletes, because I think that makes things much, much easier
[10:50] for them. Yeah, we like you, Rob.
[10:53] I've been doing Iron Man a long time and I used to be there
[10:56] squeezing multiple gels out into a bike bottle to try and carry
[11:00] enough energy for for all or the majority of the bike ride on its
[11:06] go. And we saw athletes he brought
[11:08] out, we had our 30 gramme gel, you know, the standardised one
[11:11] we brought out on 90 Grand joke and which is a bigger pouch,
[11:15] which we thought would be good for ASICS on the run.
[11:16] But what we saw athletes doing a lot was dumping those into bike
[11:19] bottles. And we're like, well, surely
[11:21] there needs to be a more elegant solution than this.
[11:23] So we kind of reengineered the gel to make it a bit runnier.
[11:26] So it's the same ingredients, but we've made this one called
[11:28] Flogel. It comes in a bigger pouch.
[11:30] So you've got 300 grammes of carbs.
[11:32] So that's 10 servings of a regular energy gel.
[11:35] We've made a bite bottle with a, with a slightly wider aperture
[11:38] valve and graduated marks on the side in a clear bottle, so you
[11:42] can see how much carbohydrate you've had.
[11:44] And I think for a lot of athletes, you can put what you
[11:47] know, you put a flow gel into a bike bottle and that's gonna
[11:51] cover off the majority of your of your carbs for the entire
[11:54] ride. It certainly would easily cover
[11:56] you for a 70.3. And for a lot of athletes, it's
[11:58] a compact way of carrying most of it.
[12:00] Or, you know, for an Ironman. We've also got a flask now where
[12:04] we got two different sizes of flask, so you can carry the same
[12:08] on the run. And again, if you want to be
[12:10] relatively self-sufficient, you just carry a flask or too little
[12:13] flask with the gel on the run. And then all you've got to do is
[12:16] pick up liquids from the aid stations.
[12:19] Talk to us a little bit about athletes needing to balance the
[12:22] need of calories and hydration and electrolytes.
[12:26] How should they be approaching this?
[12:29] I think the main thing the the the main thing to establish
[12:33] first of all is getting to know what we call your numbers.
[12:36] So you need three things when you're doing these events.
[12:38] You need water, you need salts and you need carbs and knowing
[12:43] how much fluid, how much sodium, how much carbohydrate you need
[12:47] per hour is, is the starting point.
[12:49] And then when you write, you know, you work out your strategy
[12:52] and you plan. It's about making sure you're
[12:54] getting roughly those right ratios and, and you can start to
[12:59] then look at the products you've got available on how you're
[13:01] going to do that through the race.
[13:03] We with longer races, the one of the reasons that we put our with
[13:07] Ironman races in Europe, we've put our pH thousand products on
[13:11] the course with the one with no calories in it is that in long
[13:15] races we find it's helpful to do what we call decouple.
[13:18] You're fuelling from your hydration.
[13:20] What we mean by that is in a short race you can put carbs,
[13:25] electrolytes, fluids all in one bottle.
[13:27] So kind of a traditional sports drinks with some some carbs or
[13:31] electrolytes and some water. You drink that and you get a bit
[13:34] of everything you need. It's very quick and simple to
[13:36] get it down job done in a in a Long Island race.
[13:41] If you you're gonna need a fairly steady amount of carbs
[13:44] every hour. But if it gets hotter through
[13:46] the day or if you sweat rate goes up or you just feeling more
[13:48] dehydrated, you might need to dramatically increase the amount
[13:51] that you drink. But you don't need to
[13:53] dramatically increase the amount of calories and carbs you're
[13:55] taking on. So if all you've got are bottles
[13:59] of sports drink and you're just trying to drink those down to
[14:01] quench your thirst, you're going to end up really overdoing the
[14:04] carbs and probably feeling quite sick.
[14:06] Whereas if you keep those three things separate.
[14:09] So if you keep your fluency electrolytes in your bottle and
[14:12] you're taking another bottle or you're taking girls out your
[14:14] pocket for energy, then by decoupling those, you can make
[14:18] sure that, yeah, you keep your cards at, let's say, a steady 75
[14:21] grammes an hour. But your fluid can go up and
[14:24] down as you need it to. And although we see other
[14:27] strategies that work, that's a really safe and simple strategy
[14:31] to adhere to, especially if you're kind of a novice or first
[14:34] time I'm an athlete. Fantastic.
[14:37] And you've mentioned there, you guys are now the official
[14:39] hydration partner of Iron Man events in Europe, which means
[14:43] that the pH 1000 bottles are out there on course for people to
[14:46] get ready, made-up. If people want to do some more
[14:50] research, learn about their own sweat rates, and in fact talk to
[14:54] you guys as experts about building their own strategy for
[14:57] hydration and their calorie intake.
[15:00] And I know you've got the offer to have a free call with experts
[15:04] at Precision Fuel and Hydration. You just want to talk a little
[15:07] bit about that and how people can find out about it.
[15:09] Yeah, that that was something that was born what feels like
[15:14] quite a few years now, ago now, out of COVID, when we couldn't
[15:17] go to events because we used to love going to events and talking
[15:19] to athletes about their fuel and hydration strategy.
[15:22] I think that's how we met you, Robert and Bolton one year.
[15:26] You know, we were. That's right.
[15:27] Yeah, right. Testing.
[15:28] And you came in a sweat test. We chatted to about your
[15:30] strategy and that was how we got to know what athletes were doing
[15:33] and how we could help them. And when COVID came along, we
[15:36] couldn't, we were due to go to the London Marathon.
[15:38] We couldn't go. And we said, right, what we're
[15:40] going to do is we're going to put these chats.
[15:42] We're gonna offer these chats out online for free to athletes
[15:45] and we put them out online. We didn't cap the numbers and I
[15:49] think we got about 75 video calls booked in the first few
[15:52] days. So we had to put, it was like an
[15:53] all hands thing. We got everyone in the company
[15:55] was was doing this for a week and it's just kind of carried
[15:58] on. And now we've actually built a
[15:59] squad. We've got sports scientist,
[16:01] nutritionist, we've got athletes who are all in this squad.
[16:04] And if you go to our website, go to the footer and book a free
[16:07] video call, you can talk to one of those humans.
[16:10] You get 20 minute slot talk to whatever you you talk to them
[16:14] about anything to do with your fuelling and hydration.
[16:16] They're there to help. They're going to try and sell
[16:17] you anything, they are just keen to help you figure out this
[16:22] piece of the racing puzzle. So I'd say if you've got
[16:25] lingering questions about what to do in an Iron Man, book a
[16:29] call and talk to them. If you're not, if the for you,
[16:32] that's a bit of a big first step.
[16:33] If you don't want to talk to someone about it.
[16:35] Yeah, but you wanna do some more research, if you go to the top
[16:38] menu bar on our website, we've got a free fuel and hydration
[16:40] planner that helps spit out those 3 numbers for you.
[16:43] You know, the carbs, the fluid and sodium you're likely to
[16:46] need. We've got knowledge hub with
[16:47] loads of blogs in there. And we've also got under the
[16:50] athletes tab, we've got athlete case studies.
[16:52] So you can go and look at case studies where we've broken down
[16:55] what did so and so, eat and drink to finish an Iron Man and
[16:59] you can kind of look at those for inspiration.
[17:01] The resources on the. Nice one.
[17:04] All right, Andy, thank you very much for coming.
[17:06] And I think that'll have helped athletes out loads with with
[17:09] learning the basics of what they're going to need in terms
[17:11] of both calories and grammes of electrolytes for their races for
[17:17] this year. So listeners can look out for
[17:19] the PFH products out on course at Ironman branded races in
[17:23] Europe this year. Yeah, and.
[17:24] Some of the team running around with our stripey hats on
[17:27] shouting at people going to be good.
[17:29] Fantastic. Thanks very much for your time,
[17:31] Andy. Thanks, Rob.
[17:33] OK, then that brings us to the end of this week's episode.
[17:37] So here are some discount codes and deals for you.
[17:39] I've got Precision Fuel and hydration.com.
[17:42] Use the code Oxygen 24 for 15% off your first electrolyte
[17:46] order. And over at teamoxygenaddict.com
[17:49] I think we've got the most comprehensive triathlon coaching
[17:52] programme for busy age groupers. If you've enjoyed what you've
[17:55] heard today and the advice has helped you out, well, great
[17:58] stuff. I hope that's helped put some of
[18:00] your fears at rest. And I know from some of the
[18:02] calls we've had, it's helping raise the right questions in the
[18:05] minds of people as to whether their current coaching
[18:09] relationship is working for them.
[18:11] If you're looking for a change or if you're looking for high
[18:13] quality, proven coaching for Ironman or 70.3 track on this
[18:17] year, you can just check out the details of our coaching packages
[18:20] on our website at teamoxygenaddict.com.
[18:23] And then if you're interested, there's a link in the show notes
[18:26] below. You can join our waiting list
[18:28] and you'll be notified if a slot becomes available and at that
[18:32] point you'll have a chance to book poor with those and see if
[18:34] you'd be a good fit for joining the team.
[18:36] So although we don't have slots available at the moment, we'll
[18:39] make those call appointments available to people as and when
[18:43] we do have athletes who end their coaching packages during
[18:47] the season if and when that happens.
[18:49] So remember there's links in the show notes so you don't have to
[18:52] remember them. Till next week.
[18:53] Have a great safe training and racing week.
[18:56] I'm coach Rob Wilby and you've been listening to the Oxygen
[18:58] Addict podcast. See ya.

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