The KL Standard Chartered Marathon full marathon starts at 3.30am. If you’re aiming for five hours, you finish around 8.30am, and the last hour and a half is run after sunrise, in heat that builds with every kilometre. Your nutrition plan has to handle a breakfast eaten in the middle of the night and a race that gets harder, not easier, as it goes.
Here is a plan for a 5-hour marathoner. Faster or slower, shift the times and keep the logic.
The day before
Eat normal meals with more rice, noodles or bread than usual, and less fibre and fat. You’re topping up carbohydrate, not stuffing yourself. Salt your food as you normally would.
Have dinner early, around 6pm, and try to be in bed by 8pm. You won’t sleep much, but lying down still counts for something. The sleep that matters most was two nights before.
Race morning, hour by hour
| Time | What to do |
|---|---|
| 12.30am | Wake up. Drink about 500 ml of water or a sports drink over the next hour. |
| 12.45am | Breakfast, around 3 hours before the start. Familiar, low-fibre carbohydrate: roti bakar with kaya, bananas, white bread with honey. Nothing new. |
| 2.00am | Head to the start. Toilet before you enter your corral, whatever the queue looks like. |
| 3.00am | If you use Katsuo Stamina, the marathon dose is 4 tablets 30 minutes before the start. Set a watch timer as you take them. |
| 3.30am | Start. Drink to thirst from the first water station. |
| Every 30 to 40 minutes | Carbohydrate: a gel, chews or sports drink. Aim for 30 to 60 g an hour, more if you have practised it. |
| 5.30am (2 hours in) | Katsuo Stamina second dose, 4 tablets, if you are using it. |
| From about 7am | The sun comes up and the city warms fast. Keep eating, pour water over your head and neck at stations, and don’t chase lost time. |
| 7.30am (4 hours in) | Third Katsuo Stamina dose, if you are still out there. |
How much carbohydrate during the race?
Sports nutrition guidance suggests 30 to 60 g an hour for efforts of one to two and a half hours, and up to 90 g an hour for longer ones, using mixed sugars (Thomas, Erdman and Burke, 2016). A five-hour marathoner sits in the upper range. Most gels carry about 20 to 25 g, so 60 g an hour means roughly one gel every 25 minutes. That is a lot of gels, which is why you need to have practised it on long runs.
Running low on carbohydrate is the main reason for the wall at 30 km. We explain why in Is Lactic Acid Why Your Legs Burn?
Water and sodium
Drink to thirst. At KLSCM the bigger risk for slower runners is drinking too much plain water, not too little. If you finish heavier than you started, you overdrank.
Whether you need planned sodium depends on how much you sweat and how much you drink back. At five hours in KL humidity, many runners are in the range where it starts to matter. Work out your own numbers with How Much Sodium Do You Lose Running in Malaysian Heat? If yours say yes, Elec Stamina has 220 mg of sodium per caplet, and the label suggests 1 to 2 caplets every 10 km with water.
What you don’t need
A protein sachet, a recovery shake on the course, or anything you haven’t tried in training. Protein during a race earns its place in ultras, not a five-hour marathon. Keep the plan simple enough to follow at 6am when your brain has stopped doing arithmetic.
After the finish
Eat a proper meal with carbohydrate and protein within an hour or two, drink back your weight loss slowly, and get the sleep you didn’t get the night before.
References
- Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM (2016). American College of Sports Medicine joint position statement: nutrition and athletic performance. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 48(3), 543-568.
- KL Marathon, Race Weekend Schedule. kl-marathon.com
