I've found that it's basically impossible for me to digest anything beyond simple carbohydates on a long run.
For anything longer than about an hour I'll take a sports drink like Gatorade and/or GU Gels with me. For a typical 2 hour/13 mile training run, I'll go through 100 calories of Gatorade and 100 calories of the GU.
Although going low is an obvious issue, there's also a less obvious problem- it's easy to go high during a very long event. The issue is that if you're not producing enough insulin you can end up with blood sugar that won't go to the muscles because the muscles aren't getting their insulin signal. This happened to me during the last 6 miles of my marathon back in December- my blood sugar was way above normal just after the race even though my muscles felt very weak.
no subject
For anything longer than about an hour I'll take a sports drink like Gatorade and/or GU Gels with me. For a typical 2 hour/13 mile training run, I'll go through 100 calories of Gatorade and 100 calories of the GU.
Although going low is an obvious issue, there's also a less obvious problem- it's easy to go high during a very long event. The issue is that if you're not producing enough insulin you can end up with blood sugar that won't go to the muscles because the muscles aren't getting their insulin signal. This happened to me during the last 6 miles of my marathon back in December- my blood sugar was way above normal just after the race even though my muscles felt very weak.