If you’re a fan of endurance challenges and outright physical feats – Mathew Pritchard and his 100k challenge is your guy.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks and haven’t heard. Mathew Pritchard is attempting to complete 30 half Ironman distance triathlons over 30 consecutive days this month aiming to raise £100, 000 for charity. That’s a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile cycle, and 13.1 mile run every day through March!

As you can imagine with such a feat, proper training and nutrition is very important. We’ll look at discussing the training at a later date, but figured today we could speak briefly about the nutrition involved in a challenge like this. To help us out, our team Dietitian Ash Pigott has provided some numbers to help us realize and comprehend just how much work Pritch is doing each day.

Throughout his challenge, she expects that he would be burning roughly 10,000-12,000 kcal/day (around 5 times more than the average man), 1000g carbohydrates/day (equivalent of 66 slices of bread!) and 120-150g protein/day.

So what do you eat for a challenge like that?
Here’s a brief look into the nutrition of someone taking on such a challenge:

• Firstly on waking in the morning, one needs to make sure their muscles are full of energy prior to exercise. This means no rolling out of bed and into the pool, but making sure you get a good breakfast. A really good pre-exercise meal would be a big bowl of porridge, dried fruit and some high protein yoghurt.
• Ideally then, during each event, one should be trying to get about 60-90g of carbs per hour of exercise to keep their energy levels up (equivalent to 12-18 jelly babies per hour). This means getting used to eating while exercising, which takes some training in and of itself.
• After each event then, one should be having a high carbohydrate, high protein, low fat food (e.g. Nesquik milkshake) within 20 minutes, followed by a high protein, high carbohydrate meal (e.g. spaghetti bolognaise) within 1-2 hours. These recovery steps will help replenish and repair those depleted muscles in preparation for the following day!

These recommendations are really important to keep energy levels up and prevent injuries, as you can imagine without the proper fuel, the engine won’t get too far!

If you’re interested in hearing more about Pritch’s 100k challenge, please check out his website http://www.pritchards100kchallenge.com/for more information about the challenge and how to donate.

If you’re interested in ensuring you’re taking in the right food for your training and want to discuss it further don’t hesitate to contact us at info@agiletherapy.com