What weight should I race at ?
The New Year brings intense marketing for gym membership to reclaim the excess of Christmas with very tempting lead in offers for very long gym contracts with very expensive get out clauses. For this blog entry I wanted to look at the relationship between running and weight as a way of deciding whether or not to have a target race weight.
Some of the most interesting comments I’ve heard regarding weight and running are:
“For every stone of weight you lose you knock off 15 minutes from your marathon time”
“I’ve lost so much weight since I have started training for my Marathon”
“I had severe food poisoning, lost a stone and my next race went 5 minutes faster”
“Your marathon weight in lbs is twice your height in inches”
“I’m giving up x (alcohol / chocolate/ cake / sex) for my marathon training program”
Let me start by saying that I have not read any books on nutrition or claim to have any medical knowledge in this area.
At 6 ft 1 my marathon weight should be 146lbs or 66.22 kg. I am currently 76kg after enjoying a really good Christmas. This is a bmi of about 22, so right in the middle of the Normal weight category.
The very first Marathon I trained for I started training at about 73kg and with 3 weeks to go was about 72kg. So I lost very little weight during my Marathon Training, despite covering probably 400 extra miles in additional mileage. So in the last 3 weeks I went on a diet and reduced my calorie intake so that I was about 68kg on race morning with Carbo loading. This might have been too much weight to lose in too short a period of time, however I felt that to get the best time out of me I had to be nearer to my race weight. In the race I felt tired all the way round and lacking in energy, first half was 1:30 and second half was 1:45. So I missed my sub 3 hour target. I was satisfied with the result for my first marathon so resumed my normal nutrition post marathon. A few months later and a few KG heavier I post my 10k PB which the running calculators indicated should have given me a sub 3 hour performance. Not all of the performance loss was weight, I made a few rookie errors too, but lets save that for another post.
The second Marathon (same course as the first) I trained for I had no set weight target. I weighed in at 74kg on race day following a very similar training plan to the first marathon (albeit slower at some of the benchmark races and training runs than a year before). I focussed on delivering the best performance I could in the condition I was in. Despite being 6kg heavier, being slower in training and a year older I ran 18 minutes quicker.
The last cancelled Luton Marathon I trained for I set no weight target and focussed on increasing my mileage. Despite running several weeks of 90 miles plus, I didn’t lose anything and headed into the race at 74kg. The outcome of the training will unfortunately never be known, however I set a significant personal best at a Half Marathon a few weeks later. Why didn’t I lose weight? Because I needed nutrition to replace those lost during the training and if I reduced nutrition I could not have trained so hard.
Take a look at this website for some interesting calculations: http://academic.udayton.edu/paulvanderburgh/weight_age_grading_calculator.htm Its basically a calculator that The University of Dayton have put together that works out if you weighed 143 lbs and were 25 how much faster you would have run a recent race. I can’t turn back time to 25 so I don’t see much point in this aspect, but I think the weight one is interesting. So I used it on my marathon PB, first I told it I was 25 at the time so that it just focussed on the weight differential. It believes that if I was 143lb (rather than 168) I would have ran 9 minutes faster. If you put in my age at 30 on PB date race date it thinks I would have ran 13 minutes faster. So basically its telling me I’m too old and fat to be doing decent times! Its also saying that the world marathon record would be less then 2 hours if Haile Gebrselassie.had run it when he was 25.
So some fellow marathon trainees exclude Alcohol chocolate etc from their training regimes. I excluded Alcohol when my wife was expecting our first child so was also abstaining too. It made absolutely no difference at all to my running, I think the most important thing about your training plan is that it is balanced. I don’t see the problem with having a beer or two the night after a hard run as a reward and a way to relax, ditto chocolate, cake etc. Some of the best runs I’ve had have started with a hangover (so maybe 3 pints the night before), which clears almost instantly followed by a great run with a feeling of lots of energy.
I was watching TV recently at the UK Version of the biggest loser, which is basically a competition to see who can lose the most weight . After one week they eliminated the team which lost the least amount of weight. Two women got sent home because they only lost a stone combined in 7 days. Now I’m no weight loss expert, but I understand that the best results are achieved through consistent weight loss over a period of time. So why not give the contestants a few more weeks ? Faced with expulsion if they didn’t loose more than 3.5% of their body weight in 7 days is encouraging eating disorders and temporary weight loss - http://abcnews.go.com/Health/biggest-loser-contestant-kai-hibbard-eating-disorder/story?id=11012666&page=1
So heading into London this year I am hoping to lose weight, ideally being below 70kg. However my aim is to lose weight gradually and in the next 10 weeks, not at the expense of lacking energy during training. Whilst I have found success racing heavier, you can’t ignore the physics of running lighter.
So to conclude my own personal recommendations are:
- If you start your training over your target weight, eat the same amount and increase your mileage you will lose weight. If you find that this is at the expense of having the energy to push in your critical sessions you probably don’t have enough nutrition.
- By all means have a target weight, but do not obsess over it. Your fuel tank needs to be full for training and racing.
- Why not treat yourself to your favourite meal the day before the race (assuming you have tested it in training)? It might not be what the experts say is right, but the psychological benefits of it offset it.
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