There was a day when going on a long run meant chucking a Snickers bar in your pocket and hoping for water along the way. Those days are over. Fueling for an has become as instrumental as training itself, with athletes spending months figuring out the perfect formula of , and to keep them from the .
That approach is precisely what David Roche credits with his over the weekend. The Boulder runner took to to share the gory details of how he ran the brutal race in 15:26:34, shaving 16 minutes off Matt Carpenter's 2005 time in his first-ever 100-mile race on the high-altitude Colorado course. The science of training might have come a long way in the last 19 years, but there's no getting around the fact that Carpenter makes a formidable opponent – he had one of the highest readings ever recorded when he tested at the Olympic Training Center in 1990.
So for starters, Roche realized he had to pick up the pace. "My plan was to run every step of the course, as close to aerobic threshold as I could, going into Zone 3 when I had to on climbs," writes Roche. As we explain in our article on , Zone 3 is sometimes called "race pace", and is considered moderate intensity, but it's not usually a zone you'd try to sustain for 100 miles.
In order to do that, Roche knew he needed carbs. A lot of them. "I’d have to slurp carbs like my life depended on it, since my glycogen burn rate would be high.
" According to Roche, he consumed 500+ calories per hour for the entire 15.5 hours, which entaile.