It would be almost impossible to avoid all the messaging around protein these days. Even if somehow your algorithm spares you the social content, I have to imagine that, like mine, everything from protein pasta to protein popcorn lines your grocery store shelves. The hoopla largely comes from a good place.
Protein helps with everything from muscle growth to weight management to bone health and recovery from exercise. But you need carbs, too—especially when you’re training for something like a marathon. Your body turns to carbs as the primary energy source, so when you’re lacking on the nutrient, you’ll start breaking down muscle for energy.
Adequate (read: increased) carb intake in the days leading up to and during a marathon is also key to maintaining performance through the later miles (a.k.a. durability) and avoiding bonking late in the race. Personally, I felt stuck in the middle of two vastly different conversations while marathon training: One set of experts was telling me to eat my bodyweight in grams of protein per day and the other was telling me to consume upward of 500 grams of carbs per day. You probably don’t have to do the math or know how much I weigh to guess that it would be nearly impossible to comfortably get down that many calories!
In speaking with more dietitians and coaches, I’ve learned it’s important to always have a primary fitness goal, even if you also have secondary ones. Then, you optimize everything—workouts, nutrition, recovery—around that primary goal. Right now, my primary goal is running the New York City Marathon on November 1.
And while I had been focusing on getting 30 grams of protein at every meal, I knew I needed to take a hard look at my diet and make some changes to set myself up for success in training and on race day. These strategies helped me increase my carb intake, backed by dietitians. If you’re in a running maintenance or base-building phase, 5 to 7 grams of carbs per kilogram of bodyweight per day should suffice, per Brian St.
Pierre, RD, CSCS, the director of performance nutrition at Precision Nutrition. But once you get deeper into marathon training and are nearing your peak, you’ll shift that to 6 to 10 grams of carbs per kilogram of bodyweight. For me, that looks like roughly 318 to 530 grams of carbs per day in my higher-mileage weeks before I start to taper.
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