My Fueling Plan for the Honolulu Marathon + My Fueling Favorites
Last weekend my husband and I ran the Honolulu Marathon.
This has always been a bucket list race for me and I’m so excited we finally got the opportunity to run it. Since we knew the weather was going to be hot and humid I knew we had to lock in on our fueling if we wanted to have as good of an experience as possible. The last 6 miles of the race were tough for me but I’m so thankful that I put as much of an emphasis on fueling as I did because I was able to keep up a pretty steady pace even though my legs felt like jello.
Below are all the details of how I fueled before and during Honolulu!
For the 3 days before the marathon I followed Featherstone Nutrition’s guidance for the carb load and aimed to get in about 8g of carbs per kg of body weight. For me that came out to a goal of 455g each day. When all was said and done I hit closer to 500g of carbs each day. I shared a day of carb-load eats on IG here if you want to check out what that looked like.
On race morning I had breakfast 2 hours out from the start of the race. This consisted of a Kodiak Cake Flapjack Power Cup, a banana and a cup of black coffee. I’ve been loving these Power Cups because they have almost 40g of carbs AND a good amount of sodium and potassium which is great for before a run! Totals for breakfast was 65g of carbs + 200mg of sodium.
Now getting into the race itself:
I started the race with a 12oz handheld water bottle filled with Skratch Labs Super-High Carb Mix. I drank this over the first hour – taking in about 4oz every 20 minutes. I also took a Salt Stick Tablet 40 minutes in. This brought my totals for the first hour to 100g of carbs + 615mg of sodium. I had planned to front load my carb intake since my stomach handles fuel the best at the beginning of the run and using this strategy worked out really well for me. It also enabled me to get in 12oz of fluid in that first hour which I think was crucial in such a hot and humid race.
I LOVE the Super-High Carb Mix and if I had personalized bottles in the race I would’ve used that exclusively, but logistically that just wasn’t possible since I would’ve had to bring almost 36oz of fluid to have a sufficient amount of carbs. So after the first hour I started incorporating Neversecond Gels as well. I had a NeverSecond Gel 90 minutes into the race + a 5oz bottle of SHCM 2 hours in (I had that in this small handheld water bottle that I stashed in my sports bra). Salt Stick Tablets at 1:10 and 1:40 brought my totals for hour 2 to 72g of carbs + 797mg of sodium.
Hour 3 was all about surviving! I took a Neversecond Gel at 2:30 as well as 2 Salt Stick Tablets at 2:10 and 2:40. I also took some Gatorade off the course in the last 30 minutes in hopes that a little extra sugar would perk me up a bit.
My total for the final hour was 30g of carbs + 630mg of sodium. Bringing my averages for the race to 67g of carbs + 680mg of sodium per hour.
As someone who has never really nailed the fueling before or during a marathon I’m really proud of how I did during this race. There are definitely things to improve and I would love to figure out how to lean on Skratch’s SHCM more because it just goes down so easy! Another thing I would love to experiment with is adding caffeine to my race day fueling – I’ve just had bad experiences in the past and was afraid to mess with it this time around.
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Sharing this is not meant to be prescriptive, I’m simply sharing what I did in one race and the products I’m liking. While this post does contain affiliate links, all thoughts and opinions about products shared are my own.