post# 14 16 days 20 h 33 m 50 s

Addendum on diet.

There are all sorts of products on the market to ingest (legal products) that are designed to replenish, boost, and otherwise aid your run and speed you along. I enjoy most of the various brands of bars. They’re quite good at quickly refilling your stomach after a long run when you’ve drained your body of most everything. They’re small and filling and basically taste like a candy bar, just not as sweet. I would never eat these while running for much the same reason. They’re so filling it feels like eating a meal while running.
I was never a fan of the various aides, Gator, Power and such. I just thought they tasted awful. The only time I actually enjoyed Gatoraide was a few years back when we took a bicycle tour of Canyon Lands National Park. Biking eighteen miles or so a day through the dessert, a product such as Gatoraide not only tasted good but also was essential. It has been suggested to me that the reason I enjoyed it then was because it was mixed from a powder, which is apparently a slightly different formula. I haven’t tested that theory as I simply prefer water and see no need for the other.
I recently tried one of the boost in a packet products. I can’t say that it gave me any extra energy, but neither did it bother my stomach. I may give it one more try to see if will replenish my energy near the end of a run. If so I’ll carry one in a pocket for mile 19 or 20, the first time I may stop for a stretch and to refocus my mind.
A few months back I did happen upon what has now become my preferred post long run drink. Robbin had returned from our local farmer’s market with a great tasting yogurt produced by a local dairy Ronnie Brook Farms. The next week I thought I would end a long morning run at the market and pick up more of the yogurt. I find great motivation in the last few miles of a run by focusing on what it is I’m going to eat and or drink upon reaching home. I remembered a stall at the market whose berry juice combinations I’d always enjoyed. Reaching the market I first headed for the yogurt. There I came upon Ronnie Brook Farms chocolate milk sitting in a bed of ice. The more you put your body under stress the more it speaks to you. If you stay open to the signs and listen it will tell you what it needs, when it thirsts or what it hungers for. I would never have thought to drink chocolate milk after a long depleting run. But in that state it only took one look at that bottle and I knew it would be what I needed. It was worth every mile of that run so as to reach that point of depletion and then be able to chug down that chocolate milk. I will be certain that my family has a bottle or two of Ronnie Brook Farms chocolate milk with them when they meet me at the finish line on November 7.