How to Eat Before Running a Cross Country Race

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Peter with Expert Village and today I want to talk to you about competitive cross country running. Alright in this section I'm going to talk to you about a diet. As far as dieting for as you're running as a competitive cross country runner. What you're going to want to do is there's multiple things you can do. Every time you run during the week out of the three days you don't want to eat anything too heavy because you don't want that to come back up. You want to eat something light, has a few carbs. And when it comes to carbs, usually you know you've got your simple and your complex carbs. Your simple carbs are your starches so anything like white bread or that has just flour in it. Your complex carbs are going to be more like your oatmeal, you can have a banana, you can have an apple, you can have cottage cheese, you can have yogurt, anything like that. And the reason why it's considered complex is because your body is going to digest it throughout the remaining of your jog or your run and you're going to use that for the rest of the three miles, or five miles, or seven miles. Unlike a simple start if you just take in like bread there's really nothing that your body can actually take out of it and it just stores as fat, so it's basically a waste. Another thing too, what you want to do is maybe the night before you run, so let's say your run is on a Saturday for example. Friday you ran, that night what you might want to do is I don't know if a lot of you have heard about this, maybe take in quite a bit of pasta. And the only reason why that is because you have quite a few carbs as energy for that day of the run or you can also do it as well as that day of the run maybe an hour and a half or an hour before so that you have that thirty minutes for your body to take in the food. Actually, it takes about twenty minutes for your food to actually process and digest anything. For those of you that eat big meals and sometimes your stomach hurts later is because your body takes twenty minutes from the second you put the food in your mouth to actually hit your brain telling you that you're full or that you've eaten too much. And that's what you do as dieting. And a lot of times too after running, you want to maybe do like a banana. It has potassium in it that helps you from being really sore the next day as well. And any type of juices grapefruit juice, apply juice. That's really good insulin for your body. You're body just reacts chemically very well with it and that allows you to be a little bit more competitive and have little bit more of an edge."