One of the most important ingredients a runner must stay informed about in his training is vitamins. This is even more so with the long-distance runner. A lot of iron is lost in sweat and urine. Vitamins are one thing in your diet a runner can control through proper nutrition. You want faster racing times then you must do some faster training.
Some of the aspects you can control to make you a faster runner is long runs and repeats at track sessions. Longer runs make you a stronger runner so in turn you can keep building faster tempo runs. Faster tempos allow you to develop faster repeats. Through you’re running formulas you do finally get to the point that you are becoming fast runners. You will be seeing the difference on time clocks at your next race day.
Allow me put this into perspective of how vitamins can make you faster. I know you just had to read this because vitamins can not make you faster. No not directly, but by indirect means they can! It took me a long time to really understand this. If you miss very much of your training you’ll see slow times on race day. So by now you get to thinking why would you miss any training days? Because we know to become fast runners we must do faster training.
Well that can be any number of a dozen different things. I use to never have enough time to get my runs in. However, I made the time, because I knew it would show on the time clock! Some times I found myself running at lunch. Some times I ran after dark. Then some times I ran before work. I could always change my training days around if needed to. This meant my long run might fall on a Saturday, Sunday or a Tuesday.
Now we are down to why would you miss any of your training days? Of course! Sickness! Yes, that is why you would miss training days if you were sick with a cold or the flue or any number of things. A good cold can knock two weeks out! There is one other thing that would cause you to miss a training days and that is injuries! But injuries are a whole other ball of wax we won’t talk about them here today.
See you actually do have many reasons that could actually knock you off your schedule but we are runners and we keep running on! This is what it takes to be a competitive runner at any age group competition. We get to the part here about vitamins and running. There’s no question running will deplete you of vitamins so we will watch our diet and make it a priority in our training.
You lose a lot of iron in your long runs. Some great snacks with iron are apricots. Another one is wheat germ. You can sprinkle that on your cereal in the mornings. Cashew nuts and liver those are a couple more. Runners know it’s easy to lose too much weight too fast. That’s why we make it a habit to weight every morning. If you’re down more than three pounds than the previous day then you have lost too many fluids. Drink up!
One of the easiest ways to maintain your needed intake of vitamins is to add nutritional supplements into you diet. It’s not very likely you are going to eat a bushel full of vegetables in one day, like the USDA requirements say is needed to keep a body healthy and build a strong immune system. There are a few excellent nutritional supplements company’s to choose from. We don’t want to get sick because we’ll miss training days. Missing training days is going to cost you seconds off the time clock on race days. If your passion is winning races then fast runners you will become!
