My coach just told me to stay away from sugar, hahahaha

what is fuel wrote:

To everyone,

He gets passive aggressive when he sees us drinking gatorade

News flash, simple sugars work well with our bodies with regards to fast running. The only time problems arise is when you ingest too much and/or sit on your lazy bum and don't use those sugars you ingested, which is not the case here, since, ya know, i'm a distance runner

Pigging out on candy is one thing (which should be avoided for reasons other than running performance), having a few gummy worms or drinking gatorade before a 1500, for example, is another. This will not harm performance.

Don't you feel silly for assuming i was advocating full-on candy binges

Will it hurt you? Probably not.

However, you really don't need a Gatorade before a 1500. We're talking about a race that's 4-6 minutes in length, what do you need sugar water and gummy worms for?

Gummy worms? Gatorade?

Heard of bananas?

Gatorade is candy.

You don't need it unless you are exhausting all available glucose in your blood, liver and muscles. This isn't going to happen until you've run at least an hour or 1.5 hrs AND if you're going at tempo or race pace for that distance.

You should be able to do long 2 hr runs at low/moderate intensity without needing supplentail calories.

Funny how the tide turns on the second page.

Look, there are times when sugary stuff like gatorade are useful. Rare occasions, but there's a time and place. Particularly when our blood sugar is extremely low and we need to get it elevated quickly like during a marathon race or sometimes we're bonking at the end of workouts at the end of a big week.

But, for the other 99 times out of a hundred, nothing beats real food like fruit and water to keep up the blood sugar in the short term.

By the way, yeah, that gatorade before a race is more of a liability than benefit. It'll play rollercoaster with your blood sugar and you could have a sugar crash just as likely as it may help 0.1%

I already got the fact that "gatorade and sugar won't hurt you" out of a lot of you, so there you go. Don't try to change the topic to when you actually need the stuff. It is good info, but the original conversation was the relative harmfulness of "candy." Would ya look at that, in moderation it's no big deal.

Did i ever say other foods were just as good? No. I just don't like it when coaches act like "sugar" is going to hurt performance. If candy is a large part of your diet, obviously you'll have problems. But having a gatorade now and then or eating some candy is not going to hurt performance, in moderation.

Conclusion... Yes, other foods are better. I never disagreed with that. I disagreed with the idea that advocated staying away from sugar as if it's the devil.

Of course, as always LRC produced people who were hungry to contradict, contradict, contradict an OP they assumed too much about, steadily try to switch the original topic, etc. Goodbye