Adapting Ultramarathon Nutrition for High Altitude with Meredith Terranova | KoopCast Episode 136

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is an extremely timely one because i sat down to record it the week of the hard rock 100 and in fact it is going to come out the very day before the hard rock 100 starts hopefully if i'm lucky enough and i'm tough enough i will get my third finish around that course but the real reason that this podcast is so timely is because we are starting to see a lot of the higher altitude ultras take place later in the summer and there is no bigger thing that strikes the fear into athletes hearts as these high altitude ultras and one of the reasons for that fear is because your nutrition program becomes that much more problematic at high altitude compared to moderate or at low altitudes and so to demystify this and to lay out a roadmap for how you can handle your high altitude ultras i brought on one of my favorite nutrition experts meredith terranova to the podcast today to start to set the roadmap for what you can do with your nutrition plan for these high altitude ultras and make no mistake there are some things that you

can do both in how you execute the race and also in how you train i love the way meredith presents a lot of her concepts in a very factual and pragmatic way so that athletes can immediately take hold of them and implement them into their plans and i think you will find the same throughout the course of this podcast so with that as a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here's my podcast with meredith terranova all about how to adapt your nutrition program into a high altitude situation you ready oh yes onto the actual topic onto the actual topic we're gonna have like a you're gonna take up my memory card okay i've still got 10 hours left you're not gonna make this 10 hours are you i don't have time for 10 hours i gotta call it one okay good good good all right we'll keep it under 10 hours then um so we're gonna talk about nutrition high altitude and before we get into it too much since we were just bantering about hard rock off air i think it's uh worth it to start out with all the caveats because i think this is gonna come out like literally 24 hours before hard rock actually starts so inevitably there's gonna be some person you know sitting in their airbnb or sitting in

their tent like listening to the KoopCast 24 hours before that race and go oh shit like i haven't done any of these things that they just talked about and they're going to completely upend their up upend their nutrition program and so i kind of want to start out with a few tried and true caveats that you're used to and i'm also used to as well when we have people ask about like last minute considerations so it is the summer for altitude races we've got hard rock coming up we've got high lonesome coming up also in colorado leadville coming up also in colorado but then also a number of other european races that are held at you know 6 000 to 10 000 feet or something like that and uh i think just with all the smattering of those uh higher altitude races in the late summer it makes it a really good topic of conversation although a late one so let's start out with the with the caveats if people are listening to this within close proximity of their race i'm going to start out with the first one you could throw in the next one don't dramatically change anything just based off of what we're going to say if you have a short amount of time between when you listen to this and when the race and when the races let me just put it that way because sometimes the change is more problematic than what you are actually doing and you don't know that until you have enough time to kind of like trial it out so that's my caveat from from the very beginning

for those people that are listening to this within a week of their race meredith do you want to tack onto that before we get into it um i'm gonna put it like put in your back pocket as a plan z if there's if there's a nugget you heard here that was like that's really interesting okay if your tried and true plan the plan that you have like laid out your crew has we're ready to go like just it's in your back pocket if it's there's a nugget and so if something if everything goes totally sideways you want to remember one thing just have it like it's it there it's in your back pocket you can be like oh there was this nugget i heard yesterday let me pull that out so i'll put that there like i'll let this be a plan z of like maybe something's on the table that we're talking about at an aid station and everything else has gone to crap let's try it out now okay if it's like this and i'm taking my bib off like give this a try right like if we're at the end here and things have just gone so sideways and this is totally new information yes but if you don't have time to train with anything we've talked about like again it should be thrown to a plan z it should not even be in your a b or c plan at this point if you cannot go out and train with it and i always hold to that the best thing you can do is trust your plan whatever it is even if it's totally opposite of what we're talking about

trust the plan you know take the girl that you that you know you asked to prom and take her all the way there and take her home like that's where we're going all right that's a that's a brilliant way to put it i would say if you're on plan if you're on plan z then you might as well just try anything you just you're throwing shit at the wall point anyway so anything that we say great right if it's like i'm about to pull my number off and this might get you to the next aid station and then you can problem solve further like great but if you haven't trained with it this is probably not our plan for the day okay so there are the caveats don't change anything at the very last minute unless you're in dire straits and hopefully you never get to dire straits but here's the crux of it right we're going to talk about why why nutrition is so uh confounding at altitude in some ways to try to potentially use nutrition strategies to uh to be more successful at altitude but the the one of the confounding factors here is that the altitude stimulus or the altitude stress in a lot of cases is very novel for athletes meaning they live at sea level or they might even live at a moderate altitude they don't have the opportunity to come you know out on the race course and experience what it's actually like and then they get out on the race and it's a whole different kind of kettle of fish and because of that uh because of that novelty it it just adds a

little bit of a layer of complexity because you get one shot at it you know you get one shot and you get one shot only and then if your strategies work they work and if not you're rolling to b c d and z plan as we're as we were mentioning earlier and so to get a better grasp on how these things can potentially work and what's different at altitude i think we've got to go back to the fundamentals fundamentals drive everything in physiology and if you have a strong understanding of some of these fundamental principles about how our body is stressed you can even if you don't have the opportunity to practice before training or or get that exact stimulus or get that exact stress and training you can at least theorize about what may happen and come up with interventions in advance that can help combat that so we're going to start out with the fundamentals first so i'm going to toss it over to you meredith so why from a nutrition perspective physiologically and fundamentally is going to altitude why does that make your nutrition program so much more problematic than your normal sea level 50 degree i'm going to go run in my normal environment type of training activity and i actually like went back to the research because it's easy for me to say i have this wealth of knowledge now i live at high altitude i watch these races at high altitude unfold i can even like go there i actually went back to the science and i will send

you some of the research links that i was looking at to define where our bodies kind of the base of what our body's thinking and how we even think about this so we define high altitude at 8 000 feet and then they define very high altitude at 11 5 and so i just want to kind of start with there because when we're talking about these high altitude races most of them are starting at 10 so we're in that window of when we're talking about these higher altitude races there are consideration for the five six thousand feet races but i think our focus is here's this bundle of races happening at eight plus um and so that's when we have the real body considerations because it's not just like flying into denver breathing a little heavy drink a little extra you're good to go you know our bodies utilize carbs and fluid differently at high altitude um you know and we use carbs we use carbs faster um adrenaline noradrenaline and cortisol are all increased at altitude which again these are considerations for our calorie and carb consideration and then we just have to say okay well our hydration's different our sweat rate's different our heart rate's different our urine output is different at

high altitude and so that all affects our hydration i separate the two because especially at altitude hydration and electrolyte consideration and carb consideration are two different things um both equally important but if you get dehydrated at a high altitude as with a hot race game changer game over right if you're low on carbs like you're gonna get grumpy your legs are gonna get tired you're gonna feel weak but it's not game over right like you can replenish the carbs and so i think separating out the two at altitude are so essential um and that's just kind of the base so that's the and then we haven't even talked about like a hot day at altitude you know i just watched silver rush 50 happen not a cloud in the sky it was hot that's a whole different ball game you know because people were sweating sweating at 10 000 feet at hour two into the 50 miler and then you know if you if you're running a little harder than you should be from a physiological standpoint then again we have game changer from a nutrition standpoint well and here's it's one thing to say that but it's another thing to understand

the magnitude of that of that change and it's it's hard to pinpoint some of that unless you actually do a lot of sweat testing or you actually know how many calories you're burning at various exercise intensities but the way that i describe it to people is is when we have athletes that just come into denver which is 5200 feet or colorado springs which is 6300 feet we advise that they drink one to one and a half liters extra fluid just at rest so somebody's usually drinking three or four liters of fluid a day right that's a pretty common intake intake for athletes we're having them increase that by a third or 25 just at rest just during their travel day yep and normally and not just in water water plus electrolytes water plus electrolytes don't just waterlog yourself when you get to altitude yeah and i guess my my real point with that is is even at rest the magnitude of the change in hydration that you actually need water plus electrolytes is a huge factor and most people don't expect it to actually be that big they think it's like 10 so obviously we're doubling that right doubling that 10 thing that people have in their head and then we start to move into exercise right and even if you just carry that forward to exercise okay for every unit of time you need 25 to 33 percent more hydration in quotes water plus electrolyte whatever your ratio is that starts to paint a completely different

picture to athletes when they actually come to our camps or they come up to these you know what we call moderate or even high altitudes and so my point with that whole dialogue on the hydration side is is the magnitude of change and the increases that you need across that that one just that one variable hydration is significant and it's something that we kind of we don't we don't really i don't think we recognize it as much because we think of hydration as predominantly a heat a heat thing right heat heat and then intensity is what affects it the most but when we have these big altitude shifts um that ends up being just as big if not a bigger player uh than the heat side of things and then the challenge always becomes most people have spent this because these are all summer races most people have spent their summer in heat they come to these higher altitudes the morning of those races feel cool you know because it's cold how many people when they go back and figure out why their plan unraveled think about the first two hours of their race and that they did not touch their hydration so we've got two factors now right the magnitude of the hydration change is big that trips people up and then the feeling throws them off as well it tends to be cooler and then if we go you know you go up in altitude you're typically going down in temperature that tends to throw throw

people off as well what can we say about the fuel utilization side of things i've had a number of people on my podcast they're high altitude experts that have looked at this and they've got a famous physiology lab at the top of pike's peak where they you know where they put people on uh mainly uh cycling ergometers and do graded exercise tests and study their fuel utilization and things like that how does the fuel utilization curve if we want to think about it like that in terms of percentage of carbohydrate and fats that they're burning at any particular intensity how does that actually mess people up and or change at altitude because those are kind of like two different things so we utilize more carbs at altitude so factor one is you need carbs at altitude you need 60 percent carbs at altitude so sorry low carb users you actually need more carbs now the challenges at altitude people might lose their appetite or our body's ability if your heart rate is up while you're exercising to take in the carbs is harder and so i like to go on the nibble standpoint that you need to be in this constant drip of small amounts of carbs from basically minute one that you start exercising you know and you could even be sitting let's just say you're sitting you need to be taking in carbs even if your appetite

is diminished at altitude knowing that you're burning more carbs just living and being at altitude that being said though when we're thinking about exercise so we're thinking about you came up you're about to do this important race the challenge is people start the race and again it's cold they feel great they don't take anything in and then they panic and then they take all these carbs in or all this fuel in and your gut can't handle it and because again your heart rate is elevated your body's working harder and so people get into this really horrible cycle especially during races where we're working harder and then we're over fueling in these segments and so it's like same amount of fuel if not needing even a little bit more but you have to spread it out differently so it's like a totally different ball game so some of these gels that are 250 350 calories it's like no go no man that should take you 90 minutes to get down especially also if there's fat and there's protein in there because our body's utilizing fat and protein differently at high altitude the carbohydrate shift is a little bit of a double-edged sword right because we know at altitude as a percentage of the whole you're going to be burning and therefore

need to replace more carbohydrates yes yet it's harder to ingest more carbohydrates because typically your exercise intensity is higher and that's gonna that's gonna limit the carbohydrate absorption is just how hard you're you know how hard you're exercising and it's going to move blood away from the stomach and into the into the working muscles and then you add on then you add on to the fact that the penalties that you pay for some of the mistakes that you make like you just mentioned taking big carbohydrate dumps like kind of all at once or big food dumps all at once are magnified because of all of those factors because because of the altitude and because the intensity is a little bit higher the things that you could get away with at sea level taking in 60 grams of carbohydrate at once or your 250 calorie gel kind of all in one shot you can't get away with those at altitude because the physiological floor that you're exercising at is so much higher right you can't come you can't bring that intensity back down in the same fashion that you could at sea level and therefore free up your body's resources and so when i look of look at all that i the the kind of the issue that that that starts to come to play is this one of compounding variables that are worth more than the sum of their parts it's the intensity variable it's the altitude variable it's the dehydration variable which which that confounds the carbohydrate absorption as well you get all of those kind of going at the same time

and they become more problematic than any single one of those would when you're at sea level or exercising at a different intensity 100 but i also think one of the biggest you know aside from this it's cool i don't eat the first two hours also a lot of these race scenarios people feel really good until they don't right and they go out too fast until they can't and so they say i feel really good my heart rate wasn't through the roof whatever but it's like at 10 000 feet or at 8 000 feet even if your heart rate isn't through the roof you are working harder and so then the processing of your fuel you know i was talking to a number of people after the 50 and they're like oh i felt great at the beginning but yet i couldn't eat after mile 19 and it's like okay but how fast were you running in those first 19 miles well this is why you couldn't eat after mile 19 your body was working too hard you were taking in your fuel but your gut was shut down because your body was working too hard and you weren't able to process fuel after mile 19 and then by time you're walking and you've slowed down to get your heart rate down again to your point the other three things have already gone you know have already fallen away your eating's fallen away you're probably dehydrated you probably didn't drink you probably weren't

taking care of your electrolytes you've unfolded everything so i think phase one to altitude respect is going slow uh this is coming from a nutrition expert by the way like the nutrition expert is focused on effort first and foremost as a side as a side from some sort of magic nutrition intervention absolutely because how do we process our nutrition the best especially when you're thinking about a long race for a 5k sure have your heart beating through your mouth like great you don't have to take in any fuel for a 5k but if you think you're going to go out for nine plus hours and you know you need to fuel for nine plus hours at high altitude well the key to success is starting out slow enough that you can process all your fuel and so i think yes so i think if we're having what's your number one thing and so mr hard rock person who's listening start out slow enough so you can take in all your fuel that you've planned to take in for the race well once again so here here because here becomes the ultimate how do you manipulate this because you know when you go to altitude you're going to have to change a number of different things but at least something at least one thing right and that's the that's we didn't talk about this beforehand but that's the advice that i always give to athletes is first off you have to modulate your effort and then we can look at modulating

somehow the nutrition plan but it's kind of in that order because the effort acts as like the key in the doorway right to for everything else to actually work you can manipulate your nutrition like seven ways from sunday but if you're still pinned the entire time that's only uh you know that's going to be a that's going to be a very short runway that you that you kind of that you end up with and so many people get confused by their effort at altitude because it's so especially when they're coming up from sea level because it is so much different and you mentioned these parameters of of your heart rate is a lot different but also in my experience the pace is so much different and not just a little bit it's almost like the hydration it's so dramatically different that the athletes that are used to training at sea level they know all their paces they can go run around you know i lived in you know i grew up in dallas texas i ran around white rock lake the entire time and i always knew i could run seven minute and thirty seven minute and thirty second miles around that lake the entire time i go to leadville at 10 000 feet and i can run nine and a half minute miles maybe 10 minute miles if i'm you know really being honest with myself that dramatic of a change it it messes with people's heads when they go out and they see it because it's not that you know on the flat sections flat sections a flat section and so the ability to modulate things based off of effort and not be too pretentious about your pace and you got to kind of throw a heart rate out the window when the changes are that dramatic i think is absolutely critical and for these types of races you can't go too easy at the beginning

it's just it's almost unless you're trying to unless you know you're going to scrape the cutoffs and then you've got to take some risks that's a different kind of i think that's a different intensity or effort proposition with those athletes but if you're in reasonable enough shape but even for them their hydration and electrolytes are key and then getting in really small amounts of carbs regularly knowing that they're taking that risk so you know not to throw a friend under the bus but he had a pierogi plan for the 50 miler and quite frankly he's going to be chasing the cutoffs at the beginning part of leadville probably shouldn't be eating his pierogies while he's running a little outside of himself early um you know and and he lives in leadville so this is somebody who is acclimated to the altitude it still matters so the pierogies that they're going to have at kroger's canteen that i'm going to encounter in a week's time not even a week's time four or five days time but you're pretty deep into the race then you're pretty deep 40 40 balls of the race yeah i'll nibble them on the way down right but you're in take a baggie put them in you know don't eat 10 of them i mean that's the thing is your whole nutrition plan is not pierogies for you know from kroger's canteen true um so it's it's being smart about if you're taking that risk of needing to be a little quicker early of then you know dipping more into that anaerobic nutrition plan of hey my gut's

gonna be shut down i know this because my heart rate might be a little higher so let me lean more into sips of gels some chews you know more of that higher carb easier to process stuff then let me have sandwiches okay let me let me try to encapsulate this a little bit meredith so phase one is controlling your effort or phase one phase one let's let's let's uh encapsulate the problem a little bit how to have a good nutrition plan at altitude right so phase one is to make sure your effort is at the appropriate level for you and right and we're not talking about mile 90 if at mile 90 you want to be inappropriate with your effort go for it go for it absolutely phase two would be focused on the hydration absolutely because it's so dramatic and it's one of those keys as i mentioned earlier that opens the door for the rest of your nutrition plan to work would phase three be taking whatever you would normally do let's just say it's 250 calories an hour and just dividing it into smaller chunks throughout the course of the race okay 100 it should be and you know i i steal this from ian charman i paced him at leadville one year we called it the nibble you know he would go into aid stations and on the course nibbles he eats nibbles of food he never was having huge chunks of food at once and so

i've stolen it ever since taking little nibbles of food and it should be consistent you know again you have to change your brain when you're training to get into that nibble routine because if in training you only eat every 90 minutes or every hour when you stop at your car when you stop at a gas station then that's the routine your body's on that's the routine your brain's on even if you take in less fuel during training which a lot of people do you can still adopt the same habits of nibbles you can still get your body in the routine so if you're not at altitude you can still get yourself into that routine you know i have one client training in texas she went to a gas station and she drank a huge coke she ate all the food i'm so proud of her i would have been even more proud if she had put stuff in a baggie and taken it with her and kind of kept working with it you know as she was continuing going because that's where you want to be in practice because especially if in these high altitude races you're also now using poles which you weren't training with before if you're not in the routine of i eat this frequently i do this my body's i need to do this the minute you put poles in your hand game over you're not going to go into your pack and grab your food you're never going to do any of that

it's all factored into there well and the poles compound the calorie dump right because most people they'll like look for an opportune time to get out of their poles because they're using straps or the leaky you know shark gloves or whatever they're called and that takes time you got to kind of like think about when am i going to you know get out of my poles and reach into my pack what most people want to do is grab their 200 calorie dump and then just take it all in at once and then get back in their poles and that reinforces this negative cycle of too many calories kind of all at once this is this kind of like when i when i hear the nibble nibble sip sip philosophy which i heard first heard from stacy sims who's been on this on this podcast as well um i always think that choose the chewable products regardless of what brand you have an affiliation with that's the most pragmatic piece of nutrition or the most conducive piece of nutrition to that type program because you can take in like literally a 15 or 20 calorie chunk at once and then you can take in another one or you can take in all six of them and just hold six in your mouth and then eat one and then 10 minutes later suck down another one and then 10 minutes later like suck down another one like i've done that and i've seen athletes do that as well outside of just taking like little small bits of food is there any what can like what direction can you have you actually given athletes to try to accomplish that and try to avoid the bigger dumps well and i always talk about

like free bagging stuff into little piece like don't just have a bar cut the bar into six pieces you know you can also if you're really good about the baggie and you have it in front you can have the baggie and your poles together right like you can pull that out and then how annoying is it that it's in your hand and as you consume the food the baggie gets smaller so you can have it in your hand you know even the goose or the chews can squish up in your hand in a baggie or candy or whatever that thing is as you're holding the poles so it can just literally be part of the program for you um it just is again making it part of your routine if it's something you've not trained to do you're never going to do it it's also being very conscientious of where you have things and how you have like your bottles if your hose if you have all your nutrition in a bladder and the hose is like behind you and wrapped around you are never going to drink it if you have the two little bottle things close to your face guess what you're going to drink them you know you're going to turn your head and you're going to drink and so it's even the logistic of how you have your bottles packed is so important right it just it comes down to just making things so easy and already you know taking the two hours before a race to cut up things in the proper portion that they need to be in

so you can literally just grab and go you know even if that means that you have baggies with like two little pieces in it and you have four different baggies but you grab them from those baggies and being very well equipped with all of that do you have a guy post on like the morsels that they're trying to condense things down to if you want to put it in like a calorie perspective i really like them to be in like the 20 to 30 calorie bite you know i i think that's easy to get down i also think even if you've been feeling unwell or things are getting tough putting in 20 calories of something that can like literally melt in your mouth to the point of some of the chews like you can suck them down to really where they kind of just melt in your mouth you know um there are some bars that are like so nice that they just kind of like you could sit it in your mouth for a little bit pick something you know a bag of pretzels probably not a great situation because they're dry and they require a lot of work to go with them right it's like you're going to chew a pretzel one it's not a lot of calories chew a pretzel then you've got to be conscientious about drinking so you're not choking you know if you start choking your heart rate goes up it's like all those things happen so you have to think through your foods you may love pretzels this just may not be the scenario for them okay so we've got all we've got this like whole host of things i'm like i'm glad that we got this

down into three steps right phase one is the effort phase two is hydration and phase three is little chunks neat little three step you know three point plan there yeah um so that's what that that is if you're going into hard rock this weekend or tomorrow if you're listening to this on thursday when it's released or high lonesome the week after that or whatever else you you've got a plan and you need to adapt it which i think is i think that's practical for most people because they're kind of deep into the summer there's limited times to practice these nutrition things and stuff like that but races like leadville or wasatch are far enough in the future and august early september that now we have the time the athletes the athletes doing those races they have the time to actually prepare for it in advance whoa what a novel concept so so let's if you haven't already been amazing if you're already like ahead of the curve and already been practicing exactly exactly kudos to you most people are trying to cram it in at the last minute but let's put ourselves in the shoes of consulting with those athletes that have four to six weeks to get prepared for these events and we know that the altitude stress is going to be novel for them it's going to be kind of a different thing for them what things should they be focusing on in training so that they are better equipped once they get out to altitude and it's not such a shock to their system i think one is just truly being prepared with your plan and a plan that's right for altitude so i

have one client who's actually doing leadville and he had decided about a month ago that he loved savory foods peanut butter wraps bars like really rice balls all the things but solely savory foods so he threw out like the whole idea of having gels and shoes and i finally said to him and he did a 50 miler and he surprise surprise got totally sick of the peanut butter everything got super dry and i said well let's magnify this let's think forward to what this feels like at altitude realistically at altitude when your heart heart rate is up and kind of to what we've been talking about simpler nutrition easier to absorb new carbohydrates less fat is going to be easier to practice with even if your brain says i love savory foods you can sprinkle in the savory foods but not have heavy foods you know when we all think of kind of putting in savory foods into our nutrition plan they end up being a little bit fat heavy they end up being oftentimes peanut butter break based and to my earlier point protein and fat are utilized differently at high altitude we need carbs you know first we need a little bit of fat we need a little bit of protein but if you're eating two tablespoons of peanut butter every 90 minutes

you can't utilize like you're not utilizing that and it will sit like a brick in your stomach and then if you miss the step on hydration the lucky thing is most people who are coming from lower altitudes are in the heat of summer and are in this incredible heat wave and so practicing their hydration and electrolytes is actually totally not an issue right like i think they have a higher level intake pretty nailed down when they come to altitude it's just saying hey that all that good stuff you were doing in the heat when it's 30 degrees 40 degrees cooler you still need to be doing it just like it were a hot day because also quite frankly a 60 degree day at 10 000 feet is the equivalent to being in an 85 degree day at no altitude from a hydration perspective from a hydration perspective and if that unwinds while you're racing then the carbs you know like the nausea like pick your thing everything starts unwinding together but for the athletes that that train at sea level that are coming up to altitude it almost seems like they're the the only training adjustment that you're advising that they're making is just to get into the same habits that they are going to experience during the race absolutely i almost think this is like a little bit of like a mountain bike problem you know you work

in bike athletes and you look at the course and you're like okay well you can take in fuel here here and here and here and here because that's when you can take your hands off the bars or whatever it's almost the same thing right you're just planning for things not not in in terms of the spacing but you're planning for the logistics and you're training you're training for the logistics and you're getting an athlete accustomed to the logistics during the training process right and it and you don't want to make it so complex you know the stress of the altitude is its own little complexity i feel like you know like people that's a piece of the puzzle right like that's enough and so it's like make this plan really so simple that the complexity of the altitude is just kind of like the thing that you're going to then the other side of that is to your point of when you think of a mountain bike athlete is also thinking about the course now you can't think about the course in your training unless you have hills and mountains and all of that or a trade or if you want to be on a tread glued to a treadmill you know mimicking what you're doing but also thinking of how you're going to fuel you know when we talk about this making sure you're not overeating is also being very respectful of the timing so if you're heading into a long climb again you might be hiking it and so you're like that's the time to eat but your heart rate might be elevated because the climb might be really hard you also don't want to get to the top

of the climb and say well now i'm going to eat because i can run on the downhill because also your heart rate might be elevated because you decide to run harder on the downhill there's more jostling jostling again the blood's going to all your muscles away from your stomach you know how many people get into the twin lakes aid station after having run downhill oh crew i'm so happy to see you eat a you know have a picnic then have to climb steep climb heart rate elevates and puke at the top of the hill there's probably a puke spot at the at the top of the twin lakes crime climb it's not there yet because there have been no races there but i'm sure it's there at the end of august and i'm sure and to the point of high lonesome like pick your course you know high lonesome wasatch there's all these long climbs followed by these nice descents and you have to be very respectful that you don't overeat toward the top of the climb and then oh i just want to be well fueled because i'm about to start running well yes but again little bits of fuel so that you're not overloaded when you're descending here's my counterpoint to that though is like i because i used to prescribe some sort of timing with respect to okay you want to you know time your calories here because you know you're going to run there and you can't eat your calories here and stuff like that i kind of just have taken that out of the

mix because it's another thing that athlete has to think about and i just say listen just spread all your calories out as evenly as possible just try to just try to keep it as absolutely as simple as possible because the total amount of calories is going to be what drives everything and the simplicity ends up driving the total amount of calories that's the only like i said that's that's the wrinkle that i've added recently to this whole timing planning is i kind of like de-emphasize that especially for athletes that are coming up to altitude for maybe the first time if they're really used to it then we can move with the timing right but if they're not i'm just like listen just try to spread it out as much as you can but i also add to that if you're climbing because most of the steepest climbs in any race maybe the steepest segments 10 to 20 minutes right like you're not steepest climb ever for an hour yeah so for 20 minutes if you feel like your heart is up in your mouth don't put fuel just drink right like so avoid the double negative totally like if you feel like if you feel like you're on a really steep segment and that's either up or down just make sure you're drinking like it's okay again effort hydration carbs like if we're keeping that order as our map if your effort is so high not even

like i'm working so hard because i'm overworking it's like it's just that steep and and it's hard just drink like keep it calm go the pace you need to go and know that when it flattens out you can throw chew in your mouth or you can throw a little nibble of food in your mouth i'm with i'm with you there you're avoiding the double negative as opposed to trying to find the most optimal time to eat absolutely absolutely i'm totally on board with you on that one yeah and i think that's just letting also letting the course you know let the course lead the way right it's like this is the course you're running let it let it be part of your plan no and let it be part of your plan right like allow the course to also be part of your plan it is part of also doing your homework of being aware where the steepest segments are so you can say hey this is probably a good transition time for me to again not have a peanut butter wrap during this segment you know not have in my mind that i must eat a peanut butter wrap during this segment yeah you know this would be a good time for me to just have some gels and some chews available for this segment or be heavier on my liquid nutrition during this segment of the race you know knowing like that's okay too yeah i'm i'm with you on that strategy avoiding avoiding the double negative going back to what can you do to prepare

here's here's the thing that i'll throw into the mix as a coach is to get as fit as possible because fitness is at a premium at altitude and all too often we tend to neglect fitness at the expense of doing some sort of other intervention i want to sleep in an altitude tent or i want to do this or i want to go to that or whatever like your fitness is so exposed at altitude because that physiological floor that i mentioned earlier is so much higher at altitude than it is at sea level that it almost puts you kind of have to like double down on all of your training going into it because it catalyzes the rest of the nutrition i agree with that i also really throw into that being well rested and taking in the fuel you need to recover from the training that's necessary to be prepared in other words don't skimp on your recovery don't skip on your protein you know getting your body do not come in to a high altitude situation depleted you know i have seen people really fight to be in this oh my gosh i'm climbing up the mountains i want to be as light as possible well here's the little thing about that if you're as light as you've ever been and you've been really restricting yourself and you have no reserves in your body and your nutrition plan

falls a little bit the challenge becomes you have no reserves in your body and so you have again to our double negative you have not prepared your body to be really in a positive frame for whatever the race is going to throw at you from a nutrition standpoint um and so i mean aside from all the other reasons we need to be healthy i think coming up into an altitude situation where you know even or very hot weather race i think we saw it play out a little bit at western states is people who just didn't have a reserve when things kind of unfolded you know and i wasn't there but i was watching and following they literally had no reserves left you know like their bodies were at their limit yes they were the fittest they've ever been going to race day but then when the nutrition plan fell apart a little bit there was nothing left in reserve for their body yeah we see this a lot where people want to try to lose weight in advance of the race and they use their heavy training periods as the catalyst for that because the caloric output is a lot higher and that ends up being a double negative for for two reasons is one those reserves get eaten up but also you blunt the adaptive process so it's like all this work that you've done you know training you're training 20 hours a week or you increase your volume by 20 percent or whatever like whatever training catalyst you're using during

during this time when you're under fueling during that time as well you're blunting the adaptive process which is the thing that you're seeking during the intensified training load which is like the ultimate irony of ironies i also have this this is a sneaking suspicion i'm going to emphasize that point deliberately that if you're skimping particularly on your in workout calories during that time frame you also do yourself a disservice because you kind of detrain the gut and there's been this theory going around for a while that seems to be more and more plausible the more research comes out about it that the gut is a trainable organ in terms of the amount of foodstuffs that it can handle you know you think joy chestnut eating however many hot dogs he has to eat to win nathan's hot dog eating championship every year but not only the musculature being adaptable in terms of how much food stuff it can handle but also the chemistry in inside of it in terms of how it can transport all those nutrients from the stomach and the small intestine into your bloodstream and into your muscles and i think that going through that process and deliberately withholding calories or unintentionally in a lot of cases just because the workload is so high there there's a detraining effect that actually happens because of that that does the athlete a disservice once the race starts to roll around 100 and the sports nutritionists at martin actually they'll i've talked to them and it's not even

about that product per se it's about who they work with and that is the biggest thing they push is that all of their athletes are training with their fuel so part of their training is just as essential that they are taking their bottles with their fuel and so they are not skimping they are constantly training their guts again it's not a this is the product the magical product it's they're saying well they believe it's the magical product but they're also saying we are sending our elite athletes kipchoge who they use as an example he trains with his fuel every time he does a run i mean if we can't follow that example like what are we doing well i think cyclists are really good about that i will say um cyclists are better about taking their bottles with their fuel and doing a better job with that um runners historically are not you know and like i said it is okay to say to yourself like i'm going to take a little bit less than maybe my race requirement i think there should always be race simulation training where you are actually utilizing the number that you're you think you should be using but it's okay to use a little less as long as you get on the routine of this is how frequently i need to be taking a bite in or this in so that your body is used to taking this in at this interval if we you know

it's just like i'm sure it's a muscle memory thing if you're used to grabbing in your pack for a nibble then you're used to grabbing for it you don't need a watch timer to do that yeah i mean i still just come back to there's an i i just feel there's an adaptive process in addition to the habit form formation that you were that you were just talking about that when you know whether it's you know i use a 10 okay you're doing 250 calories an hour you want to go up to 275 great you want to go down to 225 great that's kind of immaterial in the whole in the whole scheme of things just like it would be with any other training variable you go up or down 10 and it kind of comes out in the wash i just it's it's one of those things where i try to have athletes is now is apparently a common theme during this podcast avoid the double negative where you're having these big intensified training loads and you're intentionally trying to lose weight at the same time by by specifically cutting out the exercise calories you end up doing more harm than good and all this you end up taking just a big risk with that intensified training load for no reward because you've blunted the adaptive process and screwed up all the habits one two you create a really dangerous daily nutrition so we are in as we should be we should we should separate our training racing nutrition from our daily nutrition they're two separate things 100 if you are not taking in fuel so if you go out for a two hour two and a half hour run and you are not fueling you will finish starving and then if you skimp afterward

or you run the risk of overeating afterward because you were starving and so it's like the best thing you can do is separate out the two take care of your run i always like to say take care of your run that means eat on a long run eat before you're ready during your run take your recovery after your run then it's so easy to just flow into normal eating the rest of the day but if you've done none of that you can have the best intentions in the world but if you are physiologically starving there is no way you're gonna just go back to normal healthy eating after you work out and so if somebody's trying to lose a couple of pounds it should never happen when you're taking care of your workout and this has nothing it has everything to do with altitude it actually just has everything to do with training um you know but it's you should never be trying to lose weight during your workout ever the whole package of your workout is never the time when you should be trying to lose weight here i mean 100 period you should be taking care of those workouts because by taking care of those workouts the full package of taking care of that workout your body is getting everything it needs to perform which again if we're on limited time what do we want we want it like when we get to go run we want to feel good and we want it to be enjoyable that's fuel

then we want to be able to recover after that's the package so that should never occur during training here in my opinion in my opinion no that's fine you're the guest you can offer up as many opinions as you want to that that then floats to when we go to altitude when we have less of an appetite if you're used to taking care of those workouts if you're only there for four days your body is used to getting in what it needs and so it can translate so beautifully to when you go to a race or in even if your race isn't at altitude but a high stress situation yeah you can just translate that every time which you know races are stressful altitude or not but i think what we're kind of getting down to is the things that you can do in training is get to the fit line as start as possible and try to to try to develop the same habits that you're going to have during the race during the training process outside of those two heavy hitters everything else kind of takes care of itself and then you usually end up doing more harm than good with any of the other manipulations that you're trying to do whether it's a weight loss manipulation or you know what kind of whatever it is i really do think that if you get the habits correct and then train you're 99 of the way there yeah and i do want to say one

thing to the altitude tent just because you made a mention to that you know where we talked about that necessary for more hydration if you're spending time in an altitude tent you need to treat your body like you're at altitude yeah i think one mistake people make and i don't know this because i actually don't work with a lot of people who utilize an altitude tent but i i imagine one mistake people make is they're probably perpetually dehydrated yeah when they're sleeping in an altitude tent and again that hampers recovery that hampers training it's kind of you know it ends up just being a vicious cycle and i think that that's something important to consider if you're somebody who's in an altitude tent right now make sure that your hydration is following as though you are at altitude interestingly enough this is just more banter we'll get back we'll wrap up the practical points just after this but in my observation altitude using an altitude tent as an intervention has is just getting less and less popular like we just don't see it as much anymore and i think it has entirely to do with all of the fantastic education that we have around that training intervention that can say this is how much you could potentially benefit this is how much you could potentially harm here are the things to look for and more people because of that whole education ecosystem because of everything that's kind of like come out in the last 15 years or so more where people are ruling it out as an intervention because

they look at the entire landscape and go man if it's only worth this much then i might as well just train or you know if it's problematic i can't sleep in it or kind of whatever it is it's certainly not the like magic bullet that everybody thought it was 10 or 15 years ago where i mean you would you would be hard pressed to find an elite athlete that did not have an altitude tent or have at least have access to one during critical training uh during critical training phases and now it's just it's it's just more of a rarity yeah and again no opinion on an altitude tent um if you're in texas and you're utilizing one make sure you have good air conditioning uh that's all i have to say yeah worst sleep i ever had was because we had a terrible air conditioner at the time and i think it was like 85 degrees in there it's tough so just make sure that you have like everything you need to support again hydration make a cool room like all the things you need to support the other parts of your training that are actually very important is the good rest the good recovery the good hydration so and i just want to say that because there are people i'm sure utilizing those and so you just want to make sure that you're you're getting the most out of it yeah it can be effective but you got to have the right physiological setup going into it and you have to arrange the training correctly and you have to pay attention to all these other things otherwise it's like one up one down pretty pretty easily i can see that okay so i promised everybody we'll come back to the practical

pieces of this let's wrap it up right so we're in altitude season and uh we determined we we came up with a three-point plan this is going to go really well on some sort of uh uh some sort of infographic that i'm going to come up with to accompany the podcast and the first part of the plan is control your effort at altitude that becomes even more important second part is to make sure that you have your hydration and sometimes that's dramatic we're going to use 30 ish percent 20 30 percent you okay with that mayor yes okay 20 30 increase in your hydration not just water hydration total uh with electrolytes and uh the third piece of that is to take everything that you're considering taking in in smaller chunks absolutely any caveats to that meredith um i would say just being mindful of the type of food um as always know what's in know what's in what you're taking and then pay attention to your course of when the food you're taking in makes the most sense the great thing about all of that is if people don't deviate from it that's really not going to screw them up yeah like i was afraid of that when with the timing of this podcast as we mentioned during the caveats but really those three things maybe the effort piece if they're chasing cutoffs and they just get too far behind but really that's not going to i don't think that that's a dramatic enough change for anybody to really epically screw it up no and we didn't lay out some very specific plan that somebody will rewrite their plan for

tomorrow or next week or whenever it is well unless they're planning on having a whole pizza at your a or something like that then you're just taking your whole pizza and you're hiking up engineer pass with it i mean cut it again cut it in small pieces put it in a baggie i'm all for it perfect all right we're gonna leave it at that mary that was great uh really quickly where i'm gonna have leave links to the show notes obviously with all this stuff but where can people find out more about you um eating and living healthy.com or sunshine mare 23 on instagram what's up with their instagram handle by the way where did that come from sunshine i love the sunshine and so um and 23 is the date of our anniversary so that's yes um yeah i love i think i i used to have a blog that said sunshine makes me happy oh there you go great backstory i never knew that that yeah that's kind of that's all me yes all the vitamin d all right ma'am well i'll see you in silverton and uh thanks for coming on the podcast again thanks for having me on all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to meredith for coming back on the podcast as a repeat offender i hope everybody listening really took to heart some of the very simple steps that meredith and i laid out throughout the course of this podcast on how to adapt your

nutrition program into these high altitude situations and i think that they were simple enough to where you can use them right away without any sort of pre-planning not that you shouldn't because you you should always try your nutrition program out in training before you get to the race and if you took away anything make sure that you are doing that if anything just to set the habits that you are going to use on race day thank you folks for listening to the podcast today you hardcore listeners will remember last week i gave everybody a promo code to get a free book from my website with no strings attached to commemorate 1 million downloads of this podcast those books came and went i completely ran out of them i ran out of everything all the packaging and everything that i had in my house where i ship all these books from thank you guys i'm incredibly grateful and humbled at the at the response to those if you didn't get a book you can still buy one on amazon it's like 20 bucks right now 22 it's really not that expensive if i gave you a free book and you like it a lot or if you somehow want to absorb the information in a little bit of a different format you can go and get a hold of the audio book it's one credit on audible it doesn't cost you hardly anything if you have an audible subscription and it's a really awesome format to listen to on your runs and it accompanies the book in quite a fantastic way but irrespective of whether you got a book for free or you purchased

it beforehand thank you thank you thank you to all the listeners out there once again i never thought that i'd reach a million downloads in 10 or 20 years of doing this podcast moreover just a few short years of doing it so thank you to all the listeners out there and as always we will see you out on the trails