By Rachel Grunwell – Rotorua Marathon Ambassador, Coach, 25 X Marathoner, and Author of the book Balance: Food, Health + Happiness

Sign up for the Rotorua Marathon event on May 7 by clicking HERE

Running more miles is not the only way to uplift your run performance. Lifestyle factors can play a big part. Here are 10 tips to fuel your run performance. Choose one idea and incorporate it and see how you feel!

  1. Consider cutting back on your alcohol intake while training for an event. Alcohol can impact on your performance, energy levels and even impact sleep quality (which helps you to perform at your best). I’m personally all about “balance”. I have some drinks socially and savour them. But I know how drinking the night before a run can feel (it’s not pretty!) and so I’m keen to avoid that  personally! Alcohol impacts everyone differently. So ask yourself if you could pull back on this to help you power forward with your run game too.
  2. Adopt a sleep routine. Like babies, we can really benefit from sleeping enough hours daily (7.5 hours roughly for adults and even more sleep is required for kids and elite athletes). Sleep is when you repair, rest, and essentially get stronger. My sleep routine is a bath to help me wind down before bed-time and I always turn the lights out by 10pm so I can aim to sleep like a baby (and train like a beast at 6am)!
  3. Eat beetroot or drink it in a juice. The raw veg isn’t king either – the freeze-dried powder in packets is just as good (and sometimes actually better)! Beetroot has nitrates which gets converted to nitric oxide in your body. This relaxes blood vessels and can lead to lowering your blood pressure. You can grate it in salads or chop it up and put it in a blender to make a juice. Here’s a recipe I show you how to make on a vid. Click HERE.
  4. Master your mindset. What the mind believes, the mind can achieve. Look, everyone is in “the hurt locker” during any event – even the elite athletes (who are obviously running faster than most of us, of course)! What drives your stride to keep powering on… is down to your mindset. Stay strong, confident, stick in there and just keep going. You can do this.
  5. Eat more greens. Eat all colours of the rainbow in fact. These contain micronutrients and help to fill you up, keep you healthy and are a key to good weight management.
  6. Lose a few kilograms if you are overweight. If you are lighter then you can run stronger and faster!
  7. Eat enough protein so you can maintain the muscle you build when you run (which is metabolism-boosting). The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations are 1.4-5g per kg of body weight. But I personally have 1.6-2.2g per kilo of body weight (as recommended to me by a professor and dietitian in NZ).
  8. Get a coach to help you train to your highest potential (and help you avoid getting injured). Having a coach gets you to your goals smarter and faster.
  9. Use meditation and yoga to calm your nervous system so you can perform at your best. Yoga helps bring length back to tight run muscles. Meditation is research-backed to help you chill out and feel more relaxed and recharged.
  10. Sign up for an event to keep you motivated towards your run goal. This scares you into action and gives you a deadline to aim for to keep accountable! Also, follow other runners on instagram. ie I follow the things like #rotoruamarathon #nzrunners etc on instagram, I’m on strava and I love finding other fellow runners to get Inspo and feel connected to this epic cool community. Find more of your tribe too. It helps keep you excited about running!