Marathon Hot Take: Gels are incredibly overrated

My experience with gels is that if i take 1 and don't continue getting one every 35 mins or so, i don't feel good and i would be better not using them at all.

But since i don't run that far anymore, i found that taking a gel at the end of a hard workout before the cool down seems to be good for recovery especially if i know i'm not going to get much in the way of food for an hour or so.

Anything that can go in a gel can also be accomplished with a sports drink mixture.

I think fueling can be helpful when the weather is warm and you are sweating out more than you can replace.

I am not convinced that fueling does much for a well trained marathoner who runs consistently under 3 hours. My second fastest race was on a two loop course. There was a large half marathon that started with a smaller full. There wasn't enough gatorade on the course such that when I went around for the second lap, there was only water on the course. I thought I was going to crash and burn especially considering that there was a steady 10-15 mph headwind for about 4-5 miles on the second lap. But I had no problems at all and was able to out kick another masters runner the last mile to move up to 2nd on the masters. Without the wind, it would have probably been a PR.

I'm a hobbyjogger and I agree that gels are overrated. I've tried most of them in multiplies. My energy still faded on long runs. During a marathon after hitting a wall. They were passing out different food samples on tables during the race. I figured why not?. Immediately my energy returned. I finished running. And I've been eating small bites of food on long runs since. As slow as I might be. I like finishing the best I can. No gels for me. Not that anyone cares lol

it's all about the caffeine for me.

as much as possible.

I drink 1.5 cups of coffee as soon as I wake up on race day and NEVER drink coffee accept for other races in build up. cleans out your guts and wakes me up/heartbeat increases because i'm not a morning person and don't warm up much for marathons.

5 gels.

- 20 minutes before gun w/ water

- mile 5.5 - 6

- mile 11-12

- mile 17-18

- mile 22.5

alternate water and sports drink every aid station. base it on how you feel though, not some prescriptive procedure.

This is just my take as 2:32 marathoner in his 30's who struggles with big mileage (over 60 mpw) and is wrecked for a week after runs longer than 20 miles.

I also eat massive amounts of carbs starting 3 days before the race and don't run the day 2 days before the race.

this seems to be the consensus here. Another poster said that sympathetic arousal downregulates insulin release while at the same time greatly increasing your muscle's ability to sponge up the sugar. I think that is what I was overlooking.

Thanks for the insight!

This is a great post, i just have a thing to two to say about some of your points

1) I agree with the caffeine, but only from an anecdotal perspective. Popping a caffeine tab before a race seems to really help

2) This is the big thing I was ignorant on. I stand corrected

3) I have been puzzled by this for a while, cause it doesn't fit nicely into my model. The best conclusion that I could come to is that Elite athletes are abnormally good at metabolizing fat, their years of high volume training has given them an incredible metabolic efficiency. Also to be considered is that the ability to store glycogen is trainable, I would guess that Kipchoge can store way more grams of glycogen than I can. Therefore, he is less dependant on fat metabolism to see him to the finish. His race is also much shorter (timewise), so his carb tank is probably BIGGER than needed. My ability to store glycogen is probably limited to the first 80% of a marathon, if I don't supplement that with fat burning I will be toast. IDK if that is how it really is, but that makes sense to me.

4) hmmmm how do you get these ketone esters?

5) I actually really like UCAN... here is the thing, just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean that it is the best way. Products like Ucan are brand new, I wouldn't be supprised if I saw it increase in popularity in the next 10 years. I think it is similar to the Nike Dragonfly effect, all the pros this year scrambled to get some dragonflys because they might be the best, and that is what everyone else is using so you don't want a disadvantage due to not having the same thing as everyone else.

THIS. THIS is the post of the conversation. I am going to have to research those ideas, specifically the supression of insulin release.

Also I have to say, this threat is awesome. Here we are actually talking about running (not some dumb political BS or something from some obscure runner's social media), people are disagreeing in a civil way. This is what letsrun should be.

UCAN has already been around for almost 10 years. It is not that new.

I had never heard of UCAN... so visited their website.... didn't see any science behind their claims... they did have a graph... which was honest enough to note it wasn't scientific and based on a sample size of one.

In-race nutrition is hugely overemphasized. 2, maybe 3 gels is more than enough. Why would you need more than 300 calories or carbs in a 3 hour race? Especially if your liver and muscle have been loaded with carbs for days and you took in carbs just a couple hours before the race. You really don't need that much glucose unless you're doing a 5 hour marathon.

I think it's going to go through several pathways including those and liver gluconeogenesis.

should be studying 102 wrote:

I feel like the worst thing you could do in an ultra is take gu after gu after gu.

It’s an experiment of one, find what works for you and refine it. I’ve done probably 50 ultras including 13 100 milers. I take gel after gel (and an s-cap with every other one) during ultras, sometimes skipping one and taking in ‘real’ food like mashed potatoes or whatever. I’ve found which brand and flavor gel works for me. By the way, I’m from the south and some of the ultras were done in temps in the upper 80s low 90s and it’s usually a balancing act between taking in calories and keeping the stomach happy. I’ve tried lots of food variations and options over the years and found that gels work best for me.

Well. I ran 2:35 in my first marathon , London 1996, without gels. I also believe in doing my long runs on an empty tank.

Yep I am starting to think that they are more of a placebo.

I knew a pretty good ultrarunner who said something like "Half of ultrarunners eat nothing but GU the whole way, and the other half eat nothing but real food. Each group thinks the other one is crazy. Try it out and see what group you are in."

I haven't thoroughly read through this entire thread, so apologies if what I am about to say has already been brought up.

There are a lot of issues with what OP said, but I like this critical thinking regarding the current paradigm of marathon nutrition and would like to offer some additional insight.

First, sugars are taken up into muscle cells via an insulin independent pathway (see citation from Nature).

.

The implication of this is that sugar from your drink or gels are taken up from the blood into the muscles very quickly, and hyperglycemia is not an issue, and your other points about the downstream affects of insulin are irrelevant.

To save myself the time of finding scientific manuscripts for you, heres a video by a cyclist about this topic which cites a lot of good papers.

Also, look at the ingredients list of most gels. You mention starch from potatoes, and it's super common to find things like this in gels. Honey stinger and clif, two of my favorites, use tapioca starch to offer more complex carbohydrates and presumably prolong the effects of taking the gel. Maurten is kind of the gold standard with the most thought put into optimizing the speed and volume of sugar absorbed, and they achieve the same prolonging affect by forming a gel which sits in your stomach.

should be studying 102 wrote:

Also I have to say, this threat is awesome. Here we are actually talking about running (not some dumb political BS or something from some obscure runner's social media), people are disagreeing in a civil way. This is what letsrun should be.

+100

Owain Lewes wrote:

Well. I ran 2:35 in my first marathon , London 1996, without gels. I also believe in doing my long runs on an empty tank.

Yep I am starting to think that they are more of a placebo.

What if you took gels?

Maybe you would have run 2:33:30 in your first marathon?

should be studying 102 wrote:

Instead of gels, you are better off taking in starch such as potato starch or cornstarch, because these molecules will be digested slowly and they won't result in a blood sugar spike.

I thought OP was talking total nonsense here, but I just found this paper that suggests otherwise:

"Twelve cyclists (70.7 ± 7.7 kg, 173 ± 8 cm, 31 ± 9 yr, 22 ± 5.1% body fat; means ± SD) with average peak oxygen consumption (V̇o2peak) of 60.7 ± 9.0 mL·kg−1·min−1 performed a 2-h cycling challenge (60–85% V̇o2peak) followed by a time trial (TT; 6 kJ/kg body mass) while consuming potato, gel, or water in a randomized-crossover design. The race fuels were administered with [U-13C6]glucose for an indirect estimate of gastric emptying rate. Blood samples were collected throughout the trials. Blood glucose concentrations were higher (P < 0.001) in potato and gel conditions compared with water condition. Blood lactate concentrations were higher (P = 0.001) after the TT completion in both CHO conditions compared with water condition. TT performance was improved (P = 0.032) in both potato (33.0 ± 4.5 min) and gel (33.0 ± 4.2 min) conditions compared with water condition (39.5 ± 7.9 min). Moreover, no difference was observed in TT performance between CHO conditions (P = 1.00). In conclusion, potato and gel ingestion equally sustained blood glucose concentrations and TT performance. "

I do think gels are overused and overrated. However, they are effective simply for the convenience. It’s much easier to chug a gel than to eat food when running sub 7 minute pace.

My typical race nutrition is a bagel with peanut butter and a Red Bull before the race, then a gel at miles 13 and 20. I bring my own caffeinated Roctane gels.

It usually feels like it helps, but there are times where it seems to do nothing.

I typically take one gel about 2/3 of the way of my long runs as well.