eating before a 20k tt

whoawhoa said:

Eating the day before. How much? I don't race till around 6 p.m., and the race is less than 30 minutes, so should I top off my glycogen stores or not?

If it were me, I would do my normal thing the day before, then have a nice pasta for lunch... about an hour or more before the race have a bagel or something else like a power bar or two. Use some energy drink to hydrate, and you are ready to hammer.

whoawhoa said:

Eating the day before. How much? I don't race till around 6 p.m., and the race is less than 30 minutes, so should I top off my glycogen stores or not?

30 minutes is not long enough for fuel availability to be a limiter of performance. You won't need to make any significant changes to your regular eating habits to perform well in this event: assuming you are eating a high carbohydrate diet and/or have not depleted your glycogen stores the day before.

Smartt/RST said:

30 minutes is not long enough for fuel availability to be a limiter of performance. You won't need to make any significant changes to your regular eating habits to perform well in this event: assuming you are eating a high carbohydrate diet and/or have not depleted your glycogen stores the day before.

Thanks for the help. I'll also be racing again the next day, though it will also be an even of less than an hour. What should I do to replenish after the tt? Just a normal high-carb dinner?

Yes - eat pasta for lunch and only a little carbo meal with no fat no less than 2 hours before the start 3 hours if possible. Drink 250m of sports drink on the line.

For recovery, eat high glycemic carbohydrate like rice and some low fat protein like fish. - 80% carb 20% protein.

Go Well Jay.

whoawhoa said:

Thanks for the help. I'll also be racing again the next day, though it will also be an even of less than an hour. What should I do to replenish after the tt? Just a normal high-carb dinner?

Recovery workouts aside, you should always make a point of getting carbs into your system the moment you get off the bike (well, at least within 30min). You'll want to eat 1g of carbs for every kg of body weight, and while secondary in importance, a small amount of protein is fine too. As an example, if you weight 150 lbs, which is 68 kg, you could combine a sports drink with a carbohydrate snack to equal ~60g of carbs: 10-15g of protein would be fine, but the availability of carbohyrate immediately after exercise is of primary concern. High glycemic carbs can help (but are not totally critical) to insure that your body gets the energy it needs asap.