Three Long Sessions Where My Fueling Failed (and What I Changed)

Session 1 - 24 July, Kilcock back roads, 1h50 long run

I went out on the back roads around Kilcock for a 1h50 long run. The mistake happened before I laced my shoes. I had eaten a heavy dinner roughly two hours before starting. By the time I was forty-odd minutes in, my gut was shut down. I nearly vomited mid-session and could not get my Precision Hydration drink mix into me - which meant the carbs and electrolytes I had planned to take on board were just sitting in a bottle on my belt.

The lesson on dinner timing is the obvious one: two hours is not enough buffer for a heavy meal before a long run. The blood my gut needed to finish digesting was the same blood my legs were now asking for. Something had to give and on that day it was the gut that lost. Once it shuts down, mid-session fueling becomes impossible. You cannot fix a digestion problem with a sip of mix.

My new rule: a real meal goes in at least 3-4 hours before a long run. Anything closer than that has to be small and familiar - oats, a banana, toast and honey. Nothing heavy, nothing new.

Session 2 - 14 August, Rosslare, 3x4-minute reps

The plan was four reps of four minutes hard with recoveries between. I got three done and pulled the plug. The legs were not there. Heart rate was where it should have been on paper, but the power was missing and so was the willingness to dig for the fourth one. This was not a recovery problem. It was a fuel problem - I had not eaten enough going into the session.

A hard interval session is glycogen-hungry in a way an easy long run is not. If the tank is low when I start, I do not get to the end of the prescribed work, full stop. Cutting from four reps to three was the right call in the moment - grinding out a junk fourth rep would have cost me the next two days of training too. But it was also the kind of session loss that is entirely preventable if you treat the day before as part of the session.

What I changed: the day before any quality session, I lift the baseline carb intake. Not race-week carb-loading; just a deliberate extra portion at lunch and dinner so I start the next morning with a full tank rather than scraping the bottom.

Session 3 - 24 August, LSR after squats and deadlifts

Long slow run, the day after I had squatted and deadlifted - roughly twelve hours between the last lift and the first kilometre. I knew it was a marginal call going in. By the time I was out the door I knew it was a bad combo.

The legs were heavy from the first step. Pace was off. There was no snap, no rhythm. What I was doing was practising running on dead legs - which has its place in race-specific weeks - but on a general aerobic day it just meant a slow, ugly session that did not build what an LSR is supposed to build.

Twelve hours is not enough recovery between a heavy lower-body lift and a long slow run. The session became a fatigue-management exercise rather than aerobic training. My fix: lifts get moved to 24+ hours before an LSR. Same total work in the week, just sequenced so each session can do the job it was prescribed to do.

The pattern I see across all three

Different sessions, different mistakes, same underlying issue: the window before the session decides what I get out of it. Dinner timing, carb intake the day before, hours of recovery from lifts - none of those are during-session levers. They are pre-session levers, and they matter more than what I can do with a gel or a sip of drink mix once I am out the door.

One-line distillation: fueling and recovery windows before the session matter more than fueling during it.

What I changed

• Real meals now go in at least 3-4 hours before a long run. Anything closer is small, familiar, and low-residue.
• Lifts move to 24+ hours before an LSR. Twelve hours was too tight.
• The day before a quality session, baseline carb intake is deliberately lifted - extra portion at lunch and dinner.
• If the gut shuts down mid-session, I treat it as a pre-session failure to diagnose, not a hydration product to swap.

For how I extend the same thinking to longer events, the race-day fueling plan covers the meal-timing and carb-loading sequence I use for half and full distance.