As I stated in Part 1 of this quartet of articles, after explaining the need to monitor your heart rate and blood pressure, and to keep a training diary as a useful tool to aid your training, now I would like to examine the training factor of restoration shown in detail. As you can see from the diagram below, restoration, or resting so as to recover between training sessions, is the key to your success in long distance running. However, a great many people who train for long distance running do not realise this, train too hard, do not allow enough rest, and leave their races behind in their training.
In the first article I examined the first topic of the seven listed below, and then in the second part, the second of the seven topics, followed by the third topic in the third article. Last month I look at the fourth and sixth aspect - overtraining and psychological restoration, which are distinct but related.
So now I turn to explain the last of the seven aspects of restoration, namely, nutrition.
Aspects of restoration
1. How to aid restoration of the skeletal-muscular system
2. How to aid restoration of the cardio-respiratory system
3. How to restore the exchange process
4. What to do if you have overtrained
5. Nutrition - what food you need
6. Nurture psychological restoration
7. Lifestyle - yours!
How many calories and how often to eat
Endurance athletes need to eat up to five times a day. The daily calorific intake should be divided as follows:
Breakfast 25%
Lunch 30%
Supper 25%
The rest 20%
'The rest' should be divided equally into two or three portions e.g. a second breakfast, or an afternoon snack.
The average daily requirement for a person is 2,500, but for an endurance runner is 4500 - 5500 calories. The number of calories in the diet should be higher when you are increasing the work load, in cold weather, and in adapting to new conditions e.g. altitude.
Exercise 1: Work out how many calories you need for each meal to total 4500, 5000, and 5,500 calories a day.
Exercise 2: Search the web to find out the calorific value of the food you normally eat for your meals. Is the daily intake enough? Do you need to increase your daily intake, or even decrease it a little?
The importance of food quality
Food quality in terms of the percentage of fats, carbohydrates and proteins is very important. The optimum combination for endurance runners is:
