Sunday, September 29, 2013

a nice sort of fatigue

Yesterday was a lazy day.  I slept in too late for a long run, and decided to save my energy for today:

3:10 hours, including three loops (56, 57, 57 minutes).  I had hoped to do a fourth, but my husband joined us during the third and it was already above 20C by that point and, etc, etc, excuses, it was a luxury to finish the loop with him and walk home with him.  I was tired and not entirely satisfied with my fueling.

I recently bought a gel flask: $8, thank you, Amazon.   GU gels have been working well for me these past few years--they're gluten free and have umpteen flavours (right now I'm on an orange kick, but just have blackberry left)...unfortunately, I've gotten a bit tired of gels in general.  They're too sweet.

So was the homemade gel recipe I tried: honey, molasses, salt.  Not enough salt.   The sweetness was beginning to overwhelm my stomach during the third loop.  Maybe it would also help to have a bit of citrus, or maybe vinegar.  Something sour.   I need to tinker.  At any rate, the gel flask was already better than gels because I could take smaller portions whenever I wanted--maybe that's what had led to my downfall--but it's nicer to take small bits instead of an entire gel, or even 1/2 a gel, at once.

Time for homemade gel adjustments!  And time for one of my favourite post-long run meals: noodles with fresh tomato and olive oil and an obscene amount of salt but, hey, I sweat lots and my blood pressure has tested about 90/60 for umpteen years.

2 comments:

Fran said...

Jealous! A 3-hr run is a wonderful luxury. Suzanne from the run club used to bring a little bag of fresh dates as an alternate fuel source.

cs said...

Hmm, I might try those...I get turned off dried sweet fruit after a while, but maybe some dates wouldn't go amiss after a few hours. Thanks!