Karen writes: Problem solving for upset stomach

After a poor start, last week has turned out a success.   On Friday afternoon I had my longest training ride ever, 113km, and followed it up with a pretty good19km run on Sunday morning.  Most importantly, I think I have now figured out what has been upsetting my stomach in recent months, my GP has been testing for everything from Guardia to much more sinister options…but I have done some experimenting this weekend and think I have sorted things.

Anyway, the previous weekend after the 101km ride and 20km run things weren't good, my insides felt dreadful, and I took a few days to recover.  I have felt like this before, but usually only after a big event, like the half ironman last year.   Looking back on the weekend, I had done a few things which were out of the ordinary in order to meet what I had guessed were the needs of the extended training distances.  I had taken a bottle of undiluted sports drink on the bike, and used two different types of energy supplements (bars and gels) over that 4 hours of quite hard riding.   

This weekend I had even greater distances planned, and didn’t want a repeat of the previous experience, so I did some talking and looked for advice online.  There is a heap written about stomach problems, lots of suggestions, for example see what Runners world has to say on ‘runners gut’.   Of course my Coast to Coast friend said..."ditch the V".     In looking at what to eat the day before the planned exercise, ok, I couldnt argue, I had to get rid of the V, and reduce the less digestible foods.   Then on the bikeride itself, the sports drink was replaced with water again and more of it.   I also got rid of the new, nicer flavoured energy supplements in favour of the tried and true, which I had previously given up on because I was so sick of the taste.  This taste thing is actually more important than it sounds, when you are in a long event, getting tired and battling with your mind to keep your body moving, it is a real mission to swallow something which you don’t fancy the taste of, your mouth can be dry and the stuff sticks, the taste lingers, yuck.    On the bike I also had the old favourite, white bread marmite sandwiches instead of the yummy chocolate flavoured bars, and focused on taking more water, I also stopped and stretched occasionally hoping to help blood flow.   Before the run I went back to weetbix which has been my long term pre-running breakfast but I ate it 3 hours beforehand and concentrated on again taking enough water with the supplement during the run.   Voila, longer distance, more hours on the road, no problems this time!

So I have tired legs today, but feeling much relieved that I didn’t manage to duplicate my problems of the week before, it’s a strange and seemingly endless process of fueling, adapting and learning how your body copes with the increasing workload.   I keep thinking about that old science test, if you stick a frog in hot water it dies, if you heat the water up gradually it adapts…I feel just like that frog being slowly heated up!