Carb Loading?

I was doing really well yesterday at not overeating on my rest day. Including the dessert with my dinner, I’d had less than 1875 calories with decent proportions of protein to fat to carbohydrates. And then I decided to stay up and watch a movie, which required popcorn and a couple of drinks. Do you think I could claim I was Carb loading for my long run today?

Carbohydrate loading is not something it would ever have occurred to me to do before. The idea is to make sure your muscle glycogen is fully topped up before an important run or race by eating lots of carbohydrates for a couple of days before. For shorter races, this often just means eating lots of relatively low in fibre carbohydrates the night before. As I’ve mentioned before, this is not necessary for short, easy sessions as you do have some glycogen in your muscles and you will be using fats for fuel as well. However, for longer but intense sessions, such as a race lasting more than an hour, your body will rely much more on muscle glycogen (carbohydrates) for energy. So in addition to drinking a sugary sports drink during the race, many athletes will also eat plenty of carbohydrates for a couple of days before. As I am not getting the recommended 60g of carbohydrate per hour during my long runs (I’m still not comfortable eating or drinking that much on the run) it is something worth considering.   

Having said that, I’m not sure drinking sherry counts as carb loading!

The Score:

Calories:	Protein:	Carbs:	Fat:	Alcohol:	Fibre:
2151.86	113.11g	260.85g	60.95g	15.6g	34.88g
	21%	48.5%	25.5%	5%
Calories burned through exercise:		Rest Day

What I ate:

Time	Item	Amount
08:00	Vitamins - Centrum Advance A to Zinc, 400iu of Vitamin E, 1000iu Vitamin D3 and 500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 each
	Cold water	200mL
	Whole Scrambled egg with 2 egg whites	3 eggs
	Heinz Beanz, reduced sugar and salt	185g
	Mushrooms	100g
	in butter	5g
	Raw tomato	77g
	Sainsbury's pressed apple and cherry juice	200mL
08:30	Black Tea	500mL
10:30	Raspberry and Echinacea tea	250mL
11:00	Muller rice pudding original	190g
12:00	Green Tea	250mL
13:00	Sainsbury's peeled prawns	100g
	Moorish Vegetable Tagine	169g
	Merchant Gourmet Red and White Quinoa	50g
	Irish Yoghurts Diet Apricot and Nectarine	125g
	Sainsbury's pure pressed pineapple juice	200mL
16:45	Sponser Protein Snack bar	1 bar
19:45	Sainsbury's Pork loin	71g
	Boiled and mashed sweet potato	200g
	Steamed broccoli	100g
	Bisto Best pork gravy	about 5g
	Essential Waitrose Gooseberry fool	120g
21:30	Butterkist microwave butter popcorn	30g popped
	Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry	50g
22:15	Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry	50g
23:00	Ellactiva Chocolate Calcium Chew	1 chew
	500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 pill

Plus 500 to 1500mL of cold water sipped from a water bottle throughout the day.