The current sports science recommendations suggest 60-90g of carbohydrate per hour for endurance events taking longer than 3 hours.

This is based on our physiology, with regards to glucose and fructose receptor sites within the human body. So ideally you would take 60g of glucose and 30g of fructose an hour to support your training and prevent your glycogen stores from becoming depleted.

However, in reality, this figure varies considerably from individual to individual and often depends on genetics, gender, gut training, your environment and also the temperature.

From a professional perspective, I would recommend trial and error to start building up your own unique fuelling strategy. This also extends to preference of fuel type. Personally, I prefer real food, like bars, bagels, salted potatoes for as long as possible and then tend to move onto more easily digestible products such as gels, chews and drinks towards the end.

Top tip: start fuelling early, within the first 20-30 minutes and ensure regular fuelling from this point onwards. 

In general, you will actually be fueling the training for this maximum effort, rather than the focus on the effort itself. Training for such an event tends to involve a lot of repeated high intensity sprints within an endurance framework; think 10 x 400m with 90s recovery. So this repeated sprint action will start to deplete glycogen stores. In order to train your system to be able to maintain maximum pace for 7 minutes, the key is going to be the fuelling and recovery around training.

So you should be working on ensuring carbohydrate availability, especially around these training sessions, with good recovery of carbohydrate and protein immediately after. When it comes to your event, my advice would be to ensure that you have fuelled with sufficient easily digestible carbohydrate, for example, bagel, weetabix or even a carb drink and bar, 2 hours prior.

Before working out, it is key to ensure you have some sort of fuel. For those who have more time, good breakfast options include porridge. I like to top mine with stewed apple cooked with ginger and mixed spice. Or a bagel with peanut butter and banana. For those that need to be out and about early, some ideas include a hot cross bun, fruit smoothie or fruit yoghurt and banana, but always make sure you refuel with a balanced breakfast. Eggs and toast are a great option.

I love curry - it is generally eaten after a long run or hard day of training. This is my favourite and go to recipe:

Probiotics are foods or supplements that contain live microorganisms intended to maintain or improve our normal microflora in the body. Prebiotics are foods which are typically high fibre such as vegetables, pulses, wholegrains that act as food for this microflora within our gut.

Prebiotics can help to improve the balance of these microorganisms. A Healthy gut microbiome has been linked to many positive associations with both our physical and mental health. Check out the Veloforte Cappo protein shake, containing gut healthy prebiotics.

LCHF approaches have been popular in endurance sports for some time. They work on the theory that when we do endurance sport, we do not have sufficient glycogen storage to support maintaining a moderate to high intensity for more than 90-120 minutes.

Thus, if we can improve our ability to use more fat for fuel, then we have big stores within our body that we can tap into, meaning we are less reliant on carbohydrate for fuel. 

This phenomenon is actually known as “training low” but the science has been misinterpreted with individuals, who don;t fully understand the science, actually advocating a full low carbohydrate, high fat approach.

A study by Mata et al demonstrated some key findings around a LCHF approach:

While there is evidence that “training low” that is is a carbohydrate depleted state, can result in some adaptive responses – this needs to be monitored:

• Should only be sessions completed close to or below the first ventilatory threshold (VT1) and generally no longer than 60 minutes. 
• Training low does not mean overall low carbohydrate, for full adaptation, overall CHO intakes are still high but the timing is manipulated.
• Chronic low CHO (>3 weeks) will have negative consequences on health and performance

Indeed Louise Burke concluded that those who follow a LCHF approach actually reduce their economy which has a negative consequence on performance. Additionally, you become less efficient at using carbohydrate for fuel, which means during race conditions, you may find it difficult to tolerate carbohydrate fuel.