Morning Run: fasted or fueled?

I have never taken in any nutrition before early workouts.

Funny enough, because of the heat lately, I decided to do my tempo and some 400s at about 6:00am this morning - I have only been running in the pm so far in 2018. I did not feel very good and wonder if eating a small bite with a little caffeine would of helped. I was supposed to do a 20 min tempo at 5:30 pace, but the first mile was 5:36 and I felt sluggish. Maybe I did not warm up/wake up enough - maybe some nutrition would help.

Would be happy to hear what other people do in the AM, and if it differs depending on the workout at hand.

Just eat something light, like 300 calories of oats.

you will perform better in your workout if you fuel ahead of time. If you just have an easy run, fine go run fasted. But if you have a workout, get some fast digesting carbs and some coffee in you. This will help you evacuate some excess weight and not make the news as well.

My go to is a toasted english muffin w/ some jelly on it and a cup of coffee. Coffee is prepped the night before so when the alarm goes off I go start it then go brush teeth, get dressed etc. Put a few cubes of ice in the coffee so you can drink it quicker. I can be out the door in about 20 min usually.

Here’s my thing:

Almost always do it faster just because I am not hungry first thing in morning. Plus a good way to burn more fat.

If I get up and don’t want to run right away, say i am tired and don’t run until 3 hours after waking, i’ll have 100-200 calories of sugar or juice...keep it light and easy to digest

If the run goes over an hour OR I am doing intervals that morning, I will bring food with me. Will eat a little during the intervals/halfway through a longer AM easy run

I do most of my training in the morning, but sometimes in the winter I'll get out in the afternoons.

For the mornings, I pretty much never eat anything. Just take a few sips of water and go. This is fine on easy runs, workouts, and 20 mile long runs. Sometimes I'll meet a group for a run and that means a short drive. I used to take in about 100 calories of sports drink while driving up and that left me feeling good, but only initially. I found about an hour into the run I'd feel hungry and more depleted than if I didn't eat anything. So I've gone back to doing those runs fasted and have had no problems.

I also think doing all my morning runs fasted has led to better fueling and less bonking. Years ago I used to bonk all the time (and I was never doing morning runs at that time), now I never run into fuel issues.

Thanks for the responses, all. This isn't my first rodeo with early morning running. With summer internships and whatnot during college, I did pretty much all of my summer running fasted. But this was just base, and doubled in the afternoon fairly often. Now that I'm moving post-collegiate, and morning runs will be de facto, I'm trying to be the smartest about this and keep myself healthy. I know that experimentation with some fuel sources and figuring out what works for me is really the only way to know, but it's helpful to hear what other people are doing!

It depends on what you hope to achieve and the distances you are training for. For 10 k or less a bit of carbos will help you, if you are having goals for longer distances, then the poster"itdepends" advices are very good.

Personally if I have no session I start the day with a boiled egg (always having 6 in the fridge!) because after 10 hours in bed the body starts to eat my muscles so I need protein, but eggs are not ideal when working out, so then I have a spoon of whey in water, half a banana, coffee, and then after 30 minutes I head out just having the other half of banana and a sip of water.

If I aim for longer triathlons in the future I will cut out the banana.

I meet a buddy at 6:15 AM every weekday morning before work. We go 7-14 depending on running schedule.

I have a 5 minute drive to where we meet. I could run there, obviously, but kind of like the drive because it gives me time to drink a cup of coffee and eat a piece of bread.

I skip the bread 50% of the time.

Here is the thing: you'll need to eat afterwards. So just have a plan for that. With work, you can't go run 12 miles fasted and then go into the office and forget to eat until lunch. So if you'll be crunched for time, consider pre-made meals that you can grab on your way to the office (egg bagel or something that you made the night before and wrapped in foil). Don't get into the habit of eating snacks at your desk after runs. Bad habit. I've been there. I used to commute via running: 7 miles each way (14 a day, I was fit!). But I relied on a CVS in my building for breakfast, and I could never recover. Eventually, a little restaurant opened up near the office and I started eating 2 hard-boiled eggs and a fruit cup every morning, for like $8 though :(

It was enough for me to feel okay until about 11:30 and then i would have to go get lunch.

TL;DR - running fasted is usually fine as long as you drink your coffee (if you need it), the tough part is decent post-run fueling if you're pressed for time.

If you are not training for marathon I don't think there are any benefits of better utilization of fat as a fuel source. And running fasted will make you run slower (or use more effort). So if you are not training for marathon I'd suggest you have a meal before going out. Personally i'd go for more than 100 calories, take 10 minutes for a normal breakfast. But maybe you get trouble with your stomach easier than me.

My morning runs are terrible. I wake up at 5am and about 6 minutes later I'm out the door for my 7 mile run. I eat nothing and don't even warm up. I sort of stumble through the first two miles at a 8:05 to 8:20 pace and then I start rolling 7:30-7:40's the rest of the way. It sucks ass waking up that early and I wonder if it's doing me any good to run a such a pace.

I have a long commute plus dropping my son off at daycare. Waking up at 5am then going through an entire working day leaves me dead tired at the end of the day....so I can't imagine waking up at 4am and being worth a damn at 5pm for anything but eating.

I envy those who can run at 6am-7am and still get to work on time!

If you eat before runs youre body will learn adapt to run on Glycogen stores and sugars. You are more likely to bonk on this style of training. If you run fast every time your body will adapt to run on fats. You wont bonk and will be better at steady paced running but you wont be a "sprint to the finish" kind of runner. Check out Zach Bitters thing on Joe Rogan

You have plenty of fuel to run without eating in the morning. You can race on an empty stomach and likely do better too.

We are seeing a wave of kids who had to have a snack every 5 minutes growing up and that's probably why we have so many oatmeal snowflakes running now.

All of them claiming they need their little sugar rush to get ready for anything.

SprintTriathlon wrote:

It depends on what you hope to achieve and the distances you are training for. For 10 k or less a bit of carbos will help you, if you are having goals for longer distances, then the poster"itdepends" advices are very good.

Personally if I have no session I start the day with a boiled egg (always having 6 in the fridge!) because after 10 hours in bed the body starts to eat my muscles so I need protein, but eggs are not ideal when working out, so then I have a spoon of whey in water, half a banana, coffee, and then after 30 minutes I head out just having the other half of banana and a sip of water.

If I aim for longer triathlons in the future I will cut out the banana.

Excellent points. I should have mentioned I primarily train for marathons. I hardly ever do super intense/VO2 max type stuff in general. When I do, I still tend to do them fasted but they are not my primary focus, so I don't worry about whether or not I set them up or execute them in an optimum manner.

SprintTriathlon wrote:

because after 10 hours in bed the body starts to eat my muscles .

How do you come up with this crap?

I usually only eat a bit on my long runs. Anything over an hour.

Anything less im pretty good not to eat. I always hydrate before my runs.

So 12 mile run I would have 1/2 cup oats and banana. Or one slice of bread with peanut butter. Not too much.

For runs over 13–22 i use some gels ect.

I get sick to my stomach if I eat anything within an hour or two of running. I do most of my runs first thing in the morning, shortly after waking up, and I definitely do not eat anything, just drink half a cup or so of coffee. This works fine for me for runs up to 20+ miles. However, everyone is different and you should definitely experiment with eating something light before your morning runs to see whether that works better for you.

I run fasted all the time early mornings. Here is the only real question to consider: will your race be long enough that you will have to fuel during? If so, get your body used to digesting during hard efforts. If not, run fasted.

If you run far enough, you can start "fueled" and end up in a fasted state. If you aren't running that far, then it isn't going to make any difference.

morning person wrote:

you will perform better in your workout if you fuel ahead of time. If you just have an easy run, fine go run fasted. But if you have a workout, get some fast digesting carbs and some coffee in you. This will help you evacuate some excess weight and not make the news as well.

My go to is a toasted english muffin w/ some jelly on it and a cup of coffee. Coffee is prepped the night before so when the alarm goes off I go start it then go brush teeth, get dressed etc. Put a few cubes of ice in the coffee so you can drink it quicker. I can be out the door in about 20 min usually.

for a nice easy to moderate run, by no means a workout, fasted runs are great. If I want to do something past 5-6 miles and push it a bit, I want some oatmeal and coffee in me. Since having a kid a few months ago, fasted morning runs are tough because of disrupted sleep, so when the AM rolls, my enthusiasm isn't there yet again as sleep is still working itself out. My favorite fasted runs are when I am on vacation, up around 6:30 and getting out for some miles before everybody else is up.