With two of our biggest races of the year just around the corner — Ultra X Jordan and Ultra X Mex­ico — many of those com­pet­ing will be start­ing to think about their race week nutri­tion plan. Wheth­er your goal is to podi­um or to fin­ish, get­ting your nutri­tion right is vital to suc­cess in a multi-stage ultra (check out our point­ers on what to con­sider when plan­ning both your mid-race and post-race recov­ery fuel). Ensur­ing you have enough food and are con­sum­ing the right com­bin­a­tion of mac­ronu­tri­ents to sur­vive 250km of run­ning in an extreme envir­on­ment can be a daunt­ing task. Love it or loathe it, the most use­ful tool for plan­ning a week’s worth of break­fasts, mid-race fuel, recov­ery snacks and even­ing meals is an Excel spread­sheet. For those who don’t enjoy set­ting up for­mu­las and geek­ing over the num­bers, don’t worry — we’ve saved you the effort! We’ve put togeth­er a tem­plate race week nutri­tion plan, which can be down­loaded as an Excel spread­sheet here.  

The format for each Ultra X multi-stage race is the same: the race dis­tance is spread over 5 days (Monday to Fri­day) with one longer stage mid-week and com­pet­it­ors must be self-suf­fi­cient from Sunday post-break­fast until depar­ture the fol­low­ing Sat­urday, with the excep­tion of an even­ing meal on Fri­day (food is typ­ic­ally avail­able to pur­chase on Sat­urday, though it’s always a good idea to have some snacks handy). There­fore, though our tem­plate has been designed with this year’s edi­tion of Ultra X Jordan in mind, it can be rep­lic­ated for Mex­ico, Sri Lanka and any of our future races. The tem­plate has also been com­pleted with an example nutri­tion plan, to give an idea of what food a com­pet­it­or at this year’s Ultra X Jordan might con­sume. How­ever, a nutri­tion plan should be tailored to each indi­vidu­al and will depend on a mul­ti­tude of envir­on­ment­al and per­son­al factors, includ­ing pace, weight, energy expendit­ure, heat, humid­ity, and (most import­antly!) taste pref­er­ence. To per­son­al­ise the plan, simply down­load the spread­sheet, replace the example food items with those you’re con­sid­er­ing and enter the rel­ev­ant fig­ures for cal­or­ies, mac­ronu­tri­ents and weight. The daily and weekly totals will auto­mat­ic­ally recal­cu­late as you adjust. Happy nutri­tion plan­ning! Dis­claim­er: Ultra X do not claim to offer expert nutri­tion­al advice. The tem­plate provided is simply an example aimed at get­ting you think­ing about how to struc­ture your nutri­tion­al plan with some ideas of what food to take. If you have spe­cif­ic diet­ary require­ments, we recom­mend you obtain the advice of a qual­i­fied dieti­cian.