Shift work by itself is like fueling for a marathon – How do you fuel for your shifts while at the same time realize you’re fueling for an ACTUAL marathon?
One of the biggest questions other than “how do we find the time to train with our schedules” (we will talk about that in another post), is “what are we eating to sustain our training?” In this week’s post, we will go through a typical week of when and what we eat in relation to our workouts, during our long shifts, what we eat during our long runs, and how we stay hydrated.
Fueling properly and staying hydrated before during and after runs is essential to successful training. That being said, it’s a lot easier said than done! A few cookbooks we highly recommend and frequently use recipes from are:
Running on Veggies (blog & cookbook): https://www.runonveg.com/
Thug Kitchen: The Official Cookbook: Eat Like You Give a F*ck (https://g.co/kgs/Lr4VR7 )
To get started let’s get into a little of the science behind proper fueling. We are nurses – it needs to make sense for us to follow it! As runners/athletes, we don’t intentionally neglect our nutrition – most of it stems from a lack of understanding how much and what kind of nutrition is actually needed for the amount of prolonged activity marathon training involves. According to the Internation Society of Sports Nutrition if you are doing moderate levels of intense training two to three hours a day five to six days a week a 110-220 pound athlete may need to consume 2000-5000 calories per day in order to support that amount of activity. So what do those calories need to consist of you might ask……. Carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. The ISSN recommends 5-8gm/kg of carbs per day, 1.4-1.8 gm/kg protein per day, and fats should be about 30% of your diet when training for a marathon.
WHEN to eat:
Long run / Track workout days: From our own research and our own experience eating a small snack of carbs and protein one-two hours prior to your workout will help you complete the tough workout and give your stomach enough time to digest the food. Now your long run or tough speed workout is done when do you eat? Within 30 minutes of finishing your workout, you need a recovery snack of carbs and protein – as females, typically getting protein quicker helps with recovery. This is when your body is extremely responsive to nutrition and will use it to build lean muscle, rebuild, and repair your sore muscles. SUPER IMPORTANT! YOU ARE READY TO RECEIVE NUTRITION AND WILL USE IT FOR PERFORMANCE! During your long training runs it’s important to get in the habit of fueling during the run (especially earlier on during the run). Runners world has an article about fueling and they recommend “fuel early and often.” We stand by this motto. Eating and drinking every three miles or every 45 minutes is what works for us. At mile three you aren’t generally hungry or thirsty but staying on top of your nutrition gets you to 26 miles not feeling completely depleted.
Workday/ Easy workout day:
You might not be putting in 2-3 hours of hard work today however your body is still recovering from your hard workout days. Three nutrient dense meals and three nutrient dense snacks will ensure that you are continuing to get enough calories even on the days you might not feel you need it (trust us: you do!!). We think of our “off” days as preparation days for our hard work out days. If we are unable to hydrate or eat enough at work, this affects our workouts in the coming days. Our biggest advice to ensure you have the right foods to eat especially on those busy work days is by setting aside a day or two to meal prep. Anyone who works in healthcare can relate to rounding for five hours and wanting to scarf down the entire box of donuts in the breakroom. In the short term, your blood sugar will spike. You will feel slightly more human again for an hour or so but then your blood sugar will drop and your hunger will no longer be satisfied. Having readily available prepped snacks is a life saver. Below are two sample menu’s for our work days and off days when we aren’t putting in our hard long miles.
- Breakfast: Overnight oat’s is the easiest thing to have ready and to be able to eat at 0500. When we arrive to the hospital no telling what the day will bring so we always make sure to eat prior to arriving.
- Easy Overnight Oat Recipe: In a mason jar fill with ½ cup quaker oats, 1 tsp chia seads, 1 tsp hemp seeds, raisins, strawberries or bananas (depends what is in the fridge), ¼ cup oat milk, fill the rest with water until just above the dry ingredients, then add a dash of cinnamon and mix together. Let sit in the fridge overnight and they are ready and delicious in the morning! You can heat them up in the microwave if you want or have them cold, either is great!
- COFFEE, COFFEE, COFFFE, the day doesn’t start unless the coffee pot is prepped and brewing when that early am alarm goes off.
- Snack: Honey crisp Apple with Peanut butter
- Lunch : Is either last night’s dinner leftover’s or a large salad with all the goodies.
- Salad filled with all the goodies: Base of kale, arugula, and spinach (trader Joe’s has great mixed bags of greens). Salad filling consists of tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, beets, roasted broccoli or brussel sprouts, and either chickpeas or lentils. Anna doesn’t eat meat so she looks to get her protein from these super food salads. Lentils, chickpeas, broccoli, brussel sprouts, the list goes on and on are ALL great sources of protein. For those of you that want to change things up remember you don’t need chicken in every salad 😉 Dressing is always something easy and healthy. Olive oil , salt, pepper, and garlic powder all mixed in then a fresh lemon wedge to squeeze on top when its time to eat!
- Afternoon Snack: 13 hours shifts are long so its surprise we are starving again at four or five pm. Any non-dairy yogurt mixed with fresh berries is always a great pick me up!
- Dinner: The key to consistently eating healthy for us is it to keep it interesting but also not too complex. Somedays we have the energy to make an overly complex healthy dinner but let’s be honest no one feels like doing that every night of the week. Here is one of our favorite easy go to dinners.
- Fish tacos: Tilapia is a great white flakey fish that tastes great! To cook the tilapia sprinkle some season salt & pepper on top and bake @ 350 for 10-12 minutes depending on the size of your fish filet. After the fish is cooked squeeze some fresh lime overtop and its ready to go. Thats the hardest part of this recipe. You can make it super easy and buy pre made pico de gallo and pre made guacamole from your local grocery store. Whatever your preference of taco shell go with it! A great option is corn tortillas, super easy to throw them in a pan with a little water and just like that they taste like are freshly made! Keeping with the theme of easy, healthy, and delicious a good pairing with the tacos is a yummy coleslaw. Trader Joes has a pre cut coleslaw mix that is the best! For a dressing instead of the standard mayo (unhealthy dressing) use this https://pin.it/6Po96Ip recipe from Pinterest.
- After dinner snack: Berries, oranges, grapes , any fruit is a great way to satisfy that post dinner sweat tooth.
- Ways to get easy carbs: If you feel like you’re struggling keeping up with intake, another way to fuel is making a few cups of white or brown rice in the beginning of the week to add to your protein or vegetables and expand your meals. Rice can be boring but it’s an amazing carb – easy on the stomach as well! Sometimes we will also add chopped fresh herbs to the rice to spice it up as well (basil, cilantro, dill, parsley). And a little rice goes a long way!
Long run or Track work out day:
- PRE RUN Breakfast: The over night oats discussed early are a go to. Oats are a great meal pre long run or track workout. Probably the most important thing about oats is they are very easy on the stomach! The next best thing is oats have a high soluble fiber content, they are high in complex carbs, are a good source of protein AND have a low glycemic index! What does that mean? It means they provide a sustained release of energy into the bloodstream during your run!
- POST RUN breakfast/it’s probably lunchtime: Gut-Healthy Brown rice bowl with Kimchi and egg. This recipe can be found in the cook book Running on Veggies by Lottie Bildirici. Not only is it delicious and easy to make, but the kimchi helps improve your gut health and improve your immune system. Running on Veggies: Plant-Powered Recipes for Fueling and Feeling Your Best: Bildirici, Lottie: 9780593231715: Amazon.com: Books We can’t recommend this book enough!
- Afternoon Snack: If you want to keep it simple, Go with the honeycrisp apple and peanut butter again. Besides the fact that honeycrips apples are amazing and who doesn’t love peanut butter, they are a great source of nutrition for any athlete. Apples contain natural carbohydrates and peanut butter is a great source of fat, combined they work together to help you recover from your run and help you control your hunger throughout the day.
- Dinner: Dinner can be any version of carbs/ fats/ proteins. Its important to eat real food during this journey! We are all busy and don’t have a lot of time. On the theme of keeping it simple, a sheet pan chicken with vegetables is SUPER easy and is also a yummy leftover. This one pan chicken is our go-to. If you don’t have sumac, don’t sweat it – you can sub sumac for lemon juice! https://www.cookinglight.com/recipes/sumac-chicken-cauliflower-carrots
What to eat while you’re running:
We already discussed how we follow the rule of eating every three miles/45 minutes and hydrating every 15 minutes, but what are we eating at that time! To start eat whatever your stomach can handle. This is why your training runs are so important – anything you read will tell you this is the time to experiment – NOT race day. Here is a list of our snacks during our runs:
- Stingers gels
- Peanut butter sandwich
- Apple Sauce pouches
HYDRATION DURING LONG RUNS:
We can’t stress the importance of hydration enough. Hydrate early and often. You will absolutely hit the marathon wall if you don’t do it. Our rule of thumb: take a couple of sips of electrolyte enhanced water every 15 minutes. This works for us – you’ll figure out what works for you. Highly recommend investing in a vest that will hold water bottles/hydration pack. We use this one:
It’s perfect – holds your phone, holds your snacks and it doesn’t cause too much chaffing. Nuun and OSMO are our go to electrolyte additives (you have probably seen us advertise them before). So worth it to buy!
HYDRATING AT WORK (the biggest challenge!!!!)
This should be simple right? It’s the hardest part. There’s so many reasons why this is hard and all nurses know it – you never have time to pee so you don’t want to hydrate too much at work. You forget when you’re immersed in your day. Also, we are in and out of patient rooms constantly and out at the work station and so we’re constantly losing our water bottles! Just try to do the best you can – ideally, you should be taking in 2-3L of hydration (half can be food). Chia seeds are a great way to keep hydrated from food. Some days, this will be impossible (we know, we’ve been there) but making it a priority will actually make you feel better, you’ll think better, and you’ll train better.
Workouts for the week: 3 easy miles, 4 easy miles, 7 miles with intervals (2 miles easy, 8x400s, 2 miles easy), 0-3 easy miles, 4 miles with hills, 10 mile with 4 miles at tempo/10k pace (3 miles easy, 4 tempo, 3 easy). 28-31 miles total
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That’s my fish taco recipe! For the dressing I used apple cider vinegar, honey, Dijon, salt and pepper.