All day sporting event and feeding....

Diamondmaker

Hi

This is more a nutrition question but I thought people who compete in all day events may be able to advise.

We are playing in an all day touch rugby comp this Sat. KO 8AM.

What sort of foods would people advise to eat during the day.

We will play a min of 4 games and we do expect to progress to the knock out rounds so we could be on call until the late afternoon.
Obviosuly we wont be able to have a normal feed at any point during this, so small regular eating will be the way to go. I can only see myself eating fruit or specialist energy bars...


Anyone got any advice ?

PreHydration is a given that it will be mid 20s and sunny...its always sunny here even in the dead of winter as it is now

Hanley

Don't worry about protein anyway. Carbs are the way forward. Jaffa Cakes, cereal bars, lucozade etc....

celestial

Diamondmaker wrote: »

Hi

This is more a nutrition question but I thought people who compete in all day events may be able to advise.

We are playing in an all day touch rugby comp this Sat. KO 8AM.

What sort of foods would people advise to eat during the day.

We will play a min of 4 games and we do expect to progress to the knock out rounds so we could be on call until the late afternoon.
Obviosuly we wont be able to have a normal feed at any point during this, so small regular eating will be the way to go. I can only see myself eating fruit or specialist energy bars...


Anyone got any advice ?

PreHydration is a given that it will be mid 20s and sunny...its always sunny here even in the dead of winter as it is now

Yep carb it up big style!

Prehydration - I love that Paul O Connell bull**** myth concoted to sell bottles of crappy plastic soft drink!! Not that I've anything against Paul O Connell, but you are either hydrated or you're not.

Leon11

Em I don't think it's bull**** to be honest. Wake up game day and I'll have at least 5litres of water drunk come 2.30pm.

For touch rugby you're not gonna be expending huge amounts of energy. I'd say your best bet would be to eat 3-4 jaffa cakes and drink a 1/2 litre of water at least in between games just to keep you ticking over. The most important thing is to stretch a lot during the entire day, it's the one thing that'll hold you back.

Odysseus

Leon11 wrote: »

Em I don't think it's bull**** to be honest. Wake up game day and I'll have at least 5litres of water drunk come 2.30pm.

Sh!t mate that's alot of water, I wouldn't even think of more than a sports drink or maybe two and that's if I was doing a large amount of milage. Though with saying that I would carry a three liter camelbak, though the only times I think I have use the full amount would be in the desert.

To the op as everyone is saying carbs, carbs, carbs. When I'm on the go I use instant carbo, its not bad and its as quick and easy way to get carbs into you.

hunnymonster

Odysseus is right, that is a lot of water. He is an ultrarunner so when he talks about all day exercise he means exercising all day not a couple of matches (I got excited when I read the thread title).

I don't know anything about touch rugby but assuming you are moving constantly with deep breathing (aka giving it loads) then approx 500-750 ml per hour of exercise, in addition to your normal requirements should be in order for temperatures in the 20's.

As for food, I would take the point that most of your calories need to come from carbs but if you're working hard, get some protein into you as well to prevent any damage. For these kind of days out, I quite like to make microwave flapjacks with some protein powder added. You've got the slow carbs in the oats, the fast in the honey and the protein.

Leon11

Odysseus wrote: »

Sh!t mate that's alot of water, I wouldn't even think of more than a sports drink or maybe two and that's if I was doing a large amount of milage. Though with saying that I would carry a three liter camelbak, though the only times I think I have use the full amount would be in the desert.

To the op as everyone is saying carbs, carbs, carbs. When I'm on the go I use instant carbo, its not bad and its as quick and easy way to get carbs into you.

I sweat a lot though and to be fair I'll piss it all through instantly! Something I've gotten use to and if I don't do it I don't feel right, strange I know! I'm up from 8 ish and will just knock back a pint every half hour or so till twelve. In the warm up and pre game I'll prob go through another litre or so. Anyway I'm rambling and going off topic:P

Odysseus

Leon11 wrote: »

Anyway I'm rambling and going off topic:P

Ah sure things go off topic here all the time, as long as it constructive. Cheers for the response due to my own sport I'm interested in how people keep hydrated.

Diamondmaker

celestial wrote: »

Yep carb it up big style!

Prehydration - I love that Paul O Connell bull**** myth concoted to sell bottles of crappy plastic soft drink!! Not that I've anything against Paul O Connell, but you are either hydrated or you're not.

Prehydration, to me any way... means: for my example.... as I will be playing 1st thing out of bed nearly and I dont want to be full of water, short on water or busting for a piss, I should take on litres of water the night before. This way my body will have as much as it wants 1st thing in the AM and I can just top up as I go. No BS in that, just practical?

Energy use is massive. 7 aside there is no space for resting you are on the go for the whole game so energy expense is huge, full tilt 10 - 50 m sprints all game. The level here is far superior to what I played at home and with the high heat and sun to boot I know ill want to be recharged....

No real good suggestion however on what to eat. Jaffa cakes sound like the go though and bananas and water melon is my thinking at this point. Wait til the summer games come and its the same but at 30 deg with humidity !

kevpants

Odysseus wrote: »

Sh!t mate that's alot of water, I wouldn't even think of more than a sports drink or maybe two and that's if I was doing a large amount of milage. Though with saying that I would carry a three liter camelbak, though the only times I think I have use the full amount would be in the desert.

To the op as everyone is saying carbs, carbs, carbs. When I'm on the go I use instant carbo, its not bad and its as quick and easy way to get carbs into you.

Would you take on extra salt as well Odysseus? Interested to know since I'm sure you must lose alot through your sweat when Ultrarunning.

Diamondmaker

kevpants wrote: »

Would you take on extra salt as well Odysseus? Interested to know since I'm sure you must lose alot through your sweat when Ultrarunning.

Thats the reasoning behind the sodium potassium sciency thingys in the Powerade type drinks.......

What does alack of slat lead too, for example with prolonged exposure and no salt top ups only water?

Roper

We have similar problems as tournaments in our game can go on all day. Some guys bring bags of nuts and stuff like that but the one thing I've stuck with over the years is the auld reliable Jaffa Cake. It ain't let me down yet!

Roper

Diamondmaker wrote: »

Thats the reasoning behind the sodium potassium sciency thingys in the Powerade type drinks.......

What does alack of slat lead too, for example with prolonged exposure and no salt top ups only water?

Stomach cramps at worst, muscle cramps at best. The salts help your body absorb the water faster.

You could make your own sports drink very easily and for about 10% of the price. Plus you could make it in quantity and be the most popular man on the park. Bananas are high in potassium and are said to aid with cramp.

Odysseus

kevpants wrote: »

Would you take on extra salt as well Odysseus? Interested to know since I'm sure you must lose alot through your sweat when Ultrarunning.

It depends on the distance, the terrain and of course the temp. If needed I use dioralyte replaces everything I need. I go by the general rule "if its yellow and brown your water is down, if its clear and bright your waters right":)

Odysseus

Just as a point of interest Roper I think you were talking about too much salt. I read about a girl a few years back, I think it was in the trans 333 she took on board too much rehydrate and ended up dehydrating herself. I can't remember if she needed an IV but it messed up her race a tad.

Roper

Odysseus wrote: »

Just as a point of interest Roper I think you were talking about too much salt. I read about a girl a few years back, I think it was in the trans 333 she took on board too much rehydrate and ended up dehydrating herself. I can't remember if she needed an IV but it messed up her race a tad.

I read an article about bodybuilders a while back on the same subject, saying that people should use water first after extreme dehydration. Apparently you could end up seriously dead by putting salt in at extreme levels of dehydration. That includes dialoryte and the like.

I'll have a trawl around for it but as far as I remember it was something to do with the liver's ability to deal with salt when it's been starved of water for too long.

Odysseus

Sorry Roper misread your post, I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning. Your right it takes a lot longer for your body to get rehydrated again.

Roper

Well in that case I think I've misread your post!

Odysseus

Roper wrote: »

I read an article about bodybuilders a while back on the same subject, saying that people should use water first after extreme dehydration. Apparently you could end up seriously dead by putting salt in at extreme levels of dehydration. That includes dialoryte and the like.

I'll have a trawl around for it but as far as I remember it was something to do with the liver's ability to deal with salt when it's been starved of water for too long.

Cheers I would be interested if you can put a link up. Most runners carry their own water, I use a 3lt camelbak. Really only use rehydrate after the race as an aid. I actually perfer sports drinks they tast nicer but you don't get many of the in the desert;)

Roper

Sorry if this is OT mods. Seamus I had a look around and found this which might be of interest but I can't find the dialoryte one. I'll keep hunting!

New York Times
April 14, 2005
Study Cautions Runners to Limit Their Water Intake
By GINA KOLATA

After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk.

An increasing number of athletes - marathon runners, triathletes and even hikers in the Grand Canyon - are severely diluting their blood by drinking too much water or too many sports drinks, with some falling gravely ill and even dying, the doctors say.

New research on runners in the Boston Marathon, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, confirms the problem and shows how serious it is.

The research involved 488 runners in the 2002 marathon. The runners gave blood samples before and after the race. While most were fine, 13 percent of them - or 62 - drank so much that they had hyponatremia, or abnormally low blood sodium levels. Three had levels so low that they were in danger of dying.

The runners who developed the problem tended to be slower, taking more than four hours to finish the course. That gave them plenty of time to drink copious amounts of liquid. And drink they did, an average of three liters, or about 13 cups of water or of a sports drink, so much that they actually gained weight during the race.

The risks to athletes from drinking too much liquid have worried doctors and race directors for several years. As more slow runners entered long races, doctors began seeing athletes stumbling into medical tents, nauseated, groggy, barely coherent and with their blood severely diluted. Some died on the spot.

In 2003, U.S.A. Track & Field, the national governing body for track and field, long-distance running and race walking, changed its guidelines to warn against the practice.

Marathon doctors say the new study offers the first documentation of the problem.

"Before this study, we suspected there was a problem," said Dr. Marvin Adner, the medical director of the Boston Marathon, which is next Monday. "But this proves it."

Hyponatremia is entirely preventable, Dr. Adner and others said. During intense exercise the kidneys cannot excrete excess water. As people keep drinking, the extra water moves into their cells, including brain cells. The engorged brain cells, with no room to expand, press against the skull and can compress the brain stem, which controls vital functions like breathing. The result can be fatal.

But the marathon runners were simply following what has long been the conventional advice given to athletes: Avoid dehydration at all costs.

"Drink ahead of your thirst," was the mantra.

Doctors and sports drink companies "made dehydration a medical illness that was to be feared," said Dr. Tim Noakes, a hyponatremia expert at the University of Cape Town.

"Everyone becomes dehydrated when they race," Dr. Noakes said. "But I have not found one death in an athlete from dehydration in a competitive race in the whole history of running. Not one. Not even a case of illness."

On the other hand, he said, he knows of people who have sickened and died from drinking too much.

Hyponatremia can be treated, Dr. Noakes said. A small volume of a highly concentrated salt solution is given intravenously and can save a patient's life by pulling water out of swollen brain cells.

But, he said, doctors and emergency workers often assume that the problem is dehydration and give intravenous fluids, sometimes killing the patient. He and others advise testing the salt concentration of the athlete's blood before treatment.

For their part, runners can estimate how much they should drink by weighing themselves before and after long training runs to see how much they lose - and thus how much water they should replace.

But they can also follow what Dr. Paul D. Thompson calls "a rough rule of thumb."

Dr. Thompson, a cardiologist at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut and a marathon runner, advises runners to drink while they are moving.

"If you stop and drink a couple of cups, you are overdoing it," he said.

Dr. Adner said athletes also should be careful after a race. "Don't start chugging down water," he said.

Instead, he advised runners to wait until they began to urinate, a sign the body is no longer retaining water.

The paper's lead author, Dr. Christopher S. D. Almond, of Children's Hospital, said he first heard of hyponatremia in 2001 when a cyclist drank so much on a ride from New York to Boston that she had a seizure. She eventually recovered.

Dr. Almond and his colleagues decided to investigate how prevalent hyponatremia really was.

Until recently, the condition was all but unheard of because endurance events like marathons and triathlons were populated almost entirely by fast athletes who did not have time to drink too much.

"Elite athletes are not drinking much, and they never have," Dr. Noakes said.

The lead female marathon runner in the Athens Olympics, running in 97-degree heat drank just 30 seconds of the entire race.

In the 2002 Boston Marathon, said Dr. Arthur Siegel, of the Boston Marathon's medical team and the chief of internal medicine at Harvard's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., the hyponatremia problem "hit us like a cannon shot" in 2002.

That year, a 28-year-old woman reached Heartbreak Hill, at Mile 20, after five hours of running and drinking sports drinks. She struggled to the top. Feeling terrible and assuming she was dehydrated, she chugged 16 ounces of the liquid.

"She collapsed within minutes," Dr. Siegel said.

She was later declared brain dead. Her blood sodium level was dangerously low, at 113 micromoles per liter of blood. (Hyponatremia starts at sodium levels below 135 micromoles, when brain swelling can cause confusion and grogginess. Levels below 120 can be fatal.)

No one has died since in the Boston Marathon, but there have been near misses there, with 7 cases of hyponatremia in 2003 and 11 last year, and deaths elsewhere, Dr. Siegel said. He added that those were just the cases among runners who came to medical tents seeking help.

In a letter, also in the journal, doctors describe 14 runners in the 2003 London Marathon with hyponatremia who waited more than four hours on average before going to a hospital. Some were lucid after the race, but none remembered completing it.

That sort of delay worries Dr. Siegel. "The bottom line is, it's a very prevalent problem out there, and crossing the edge from being dazed and confused to having a seizure is very tricky and can happen very, very fast," he said.

Boston Marathon directors want to educate runners not to drink so much, Dr. Siegel said. They also suggest that runners write their weights on their bibs at the start of the race. If they feel ill, they could be weighed again. Anyone who gains weight almost certainly has hyponatremia.

"Instead of waiting until they collapse and then testing their sodium, maybe we can nip it in the bud," Dr. Siegel said.

Roper

Not the one I was thinking of but interesting:
http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/sports-nutrition-information-about-energy-drinks-35888

and a counter argument of sorts:
http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/0411.htm

hunnymonster

Hyper/hypoatremia are both potentially serious problems but people should get to know their own bodies in training and this will really help them get the best out of their sports.

A while back when I was fairly new to running, I weighted myself before and after long runs in different weather conditions. I found I was pretty good at drinking the right amount to maintain my weight and for me in typical irish conditions this is only about 400 ml / hour while running and a bit less while cycling. It's difficult to measure with swimming because I have such long hair which holds a lot of water.

In Ireland I would only add electrolytes after about 4 hours of pretty intensive exercise and then I would probably take a nuun tablet every hour or so because at that stage I would also be eating some solids and these most likely also have salts in them. In hot climates, I would start taking the nuun from the start of long sessions but again, about 1 an hour along with food.

Odysseus' pee test is perfect but not always practical for a girl squatting in a field (or is it just me lacks the balance to look down when in a deep squat?) but I do know my body at this stage. If I am caked in salt and blotchy then I know to take electrolytes. If my skin is tight and itchy then I need water.

Diamondmaker

Roper wrote: »

Stomach cramps at worst, muscle cramps at best. The salts help your body absorb the water faster.

You could make your own sports drink very easily and for about 10% of the price. Plus you could make it in quantity and be the most popular man on the park. Bananas are high in potassium and are said to aid with cramp.

unny I actually saw this on a Blue Peter type show...

Take cordial water and salt and voila....You can buy Power and gatorade here in concentrate powder form. 6 euro worth makes 12 litres. How cheap is that!?

Is that available at home yet or still rip off Ireland ?!?!

Odysseus

Cheers thanks Roper, I will have a look at the other two links later. Interesting but I'm not too sure that I would agree will it all. I think it is a case of "know thyself", as hunnymonster said. That would be the most important thing for me, I check in with myself regularly during long distances.

Hunnymonster the advantages of being a male eh Seriously over the years I can't believe how many times I have typed stuff here about p!ssing. I guess I have some pre-oedipal issues still to be worked out.

I'm the same here I really only use dioralyte after really long sessions or if I'm doing heat training where I really would loss a lot of water quite quickly.

Roper

Odysseus wrote: »

Cheers thanks Roper, I will have a look at the other two links later. Interesting but I'm not too sure that I would agree will it all. I think it is a case of "know thyself", as hunnymonster said. That would be the most important thing for me, I check in with myself regularly during long distances.

as it happens I agree with sections in both! Like you said interesting reading but very contradictory. I have a friend who did a 24 hour endurance race (kayaking) a few years back and collapsed at hour 14 or so, which was unusual because he and his partner had come second the year before in the same race. The doctor on the scene immediately diagnosed overhydration, hyponatremia without too much investigation. He came home and developed a flu within a day which his own doc said was probably the cause. I think it really depends on what paper your event doctor has read recently.

Roper

Diamondmaker wrote: »

unny I actually saw this on a Blue Peter type show...

Take cordial water and salt and voila....You can buy Power and gatorade here in concentrate powder form. 6 euro worth makes 12 litres. How cheap is that!?

Is that available at home yet or still rip off Ireland ?!?!

Better again, use fruit squash concentrate (MiWadi), 200ml, Water, 800ml, and a pinch of salt. hey presto!

Odysseus

Roper wrote: »

as it happens I agree with sections in both! Like you said interesting reading but very contradictory. I have a friend who did a 24 hour endurance race (kayaking) a few years back and collapsed at hour 14 or so, which was unusual because he and his partner had come second the year before in the same race. The doctor on the scene immediately diagnosed overhydration, hyponatremia without too much investigation. He came home and developed a flu within a day which his own doc said was probably the cause. I think it really depends on what paper your event doctor has read recently.

Having quickly read them all now, I have to agree, there where some things I was going yeah and others not too sure. It can be confusing trying to work your way through it.

I'm already a tad weary of "the latest research" that type of stuff generally tells me that I make my living by practicing an out of date form of psychotherapy.

I think sometimes its just a case of people trying to get published and make a name for themselves. Its really a case of trying to find what works for your own body.