Hey guys, welcome back to snack cast. Welcome back. Today we are continuing the series on, what if you want to do an actual road race a 5k 10k Half Marathon? So today is pre-race prep. Probably the week, the week before the race. What to pay attention to, what to have on your radar.
The first and most obvious is how do you handle your workouts. You will want to taper down. Most of your workout plans will have some sort of taper if they don’t you need to plug that in yourself. You don’t want to be sore on race day. If you didn’t follow the workout plan to a tee, you’re going to be much more inclined to go, I need to exercise the day before. That’s crap there’s no cramming. So literally two to three days before probably more like four days before should be your final actual exercise as far as the plan. You should probably move into more of you want to stay moving. You don’t want to just go dormant. But you can do different types of exercises. You can do sit-ups or push-ups or walk. Even a mild walk right but you don’t want to be doing full-blown exercises leading up to the day of the event. So the morning of we’ll talk about that. There’s something you can do on the morning of but nutrition. Food.
I know a guy that went and had chicken wings the night before an Iron Man and beer if you can believe that. That’s a good idea. Lots of beer. I mean, pitchers and pitchers and lots of really bad food the night before, six months of training down the tubes but you finished? I did I finished that was the most important part but yeah, it wasn’t my best day for the viewer. What did you learn? No alcohol the day before? Absolutely. The food I probably could have still done okay, but absolutely no alcohol the day before like zero, and really more than just the day before right? It takes the average person a couple of days to recover from any kind of alcohol. I think the jury’s out on what people call carb loading, it’s my opinion and take that for what it’s worth. You don’t need large amounts of pasta even though they all have pasta dinner the night before. Eat normal meals, eat what you normally would eat just don’t go crazy. Your body has days and weeks of stored-up energy the fact that you need to go and dip into sugar the day of is ridiculous. So those are probably the two harder not even hard but more complex things to figure out because for everyone the food the body accepts and tolerates and performs well under is a little bit different. The rest of it’s probably more kind of checklist stuff.
The route. Your typical 5K route isn’t going to be as big of a deal. It can be once you get into 10k or heaven forbid you’re doing a triathlon of any sort of distance. I have a true story for the viewers. So Kevin and I did the Rock and Roll half along with our wives and a bunch of other people. We did the Rock and Roll half in St. Pete some odd years ago. And I think it was 37 degrees the morning of we were freezing before the race started. It was Florida cold for you northerners That’s cold. Yeah, yeah, that’s cold down here especially when you’re in shorts and a running jacket. So anyways, they start the race and they route us into town first. So the buildings were blocking the sun when it came out. You started to warm up right and cool. Off the jacket went and if you’ve never done a road race and you wear a jacket, you throw it off on the side of the road and it’s gone forever. It’s Aaron Hernandez. A lot of times they pick it up and they will donate it to charity, that type of stuff. So anyways, the second half of the route they took us out by the waterfront and the wind picked up, bones freezing cold. It was brutal. It was a hard finish. So, the point is, look at the route, check your weather kind of have a game plan. The same thing can be like if you do any type of sprint triathlon or anything that you’re on your bike, you’re typically moving fast and the routes have barricades, maybe the cones aren’t set up properly. I’ve taken a wrong turn before on a bike and you lose seconds, even a minute or so when you realize that you’re on the wrong course. Yeah, well, some of us are less concerned about time and more concerned about finishing, not dying.
So a couple of checklist items. Parking, know where you’re gonna park. Have a plan, know who you’re meeting, meet-up locations, and when (in the race or post-race).. You want to know how am I going to connect with the people that I came with? And then probably last but not least, if there’s a packet pickup How do you handle that? Oh, you would definitely want to do that the night before the last thing you’d want to do is try to find packet pickup the morning of. Sit in line with all the other people who didn’t do packet pickup the night before. Sometimes we’ll do packet pick-up two or three days in advance. Bigger races usually have an Expo and it’s kind of part of the fun. Checking out weird Bluetooth everything, nutrition bars you never heard of, free stuff, it’s cool. Emotionally sikes you up for what you’re about to face.
So anything else you want to touch on? No, I think that leading boobs or any Vaseline. We can probably leave that for the day of stuff that you want to prepare for chasing Body Glide. Body Glide could be at pack packet pickup especially if it’s like a foot walk or you know fit niche or one of those guys you’ll want to touch on. We’ll touch on that next episode we’ll do a day of what to expect. How to plan for it. Sounds like fun. That’s all today. Questions, comments, concerns, or criticisms email us at Snackcast@yes.fit. We appreciate you tuning in. Stay moving.
