How to make your food for long distance open water swims

Swimming tips: How to make your own energy drink for marathon open water swims

 

Why should we invest time in making our meal as a drink?
Why not just take a jell, energy bar or any other food when swimming in open water?

In order to answer this question we need to understand what does our body need, and what should we be afraid of?

 

When swimming long Distance in open water, and I mean 4 to 16 hours, or ever more than that, we need our “fuel” to be tasty, not salty (there’s enough salt in the sea) and we need to eat it fast especially when swimming in cold water that are 17 degrees Celsius (62F) or lower.

We can consume those bars or jells, but there are 2 major issues about those “foods”:

  1. The food needs to be tasty, we need to enjoy our fuel!
  2. It’s important for the swimmer to know what he puts into his body, which is not clear with those bars and jells.

So I’ve decided to start cooking my own open water marathon swim “meal in a drink”!

 

How do I do this?

  1. Cut 6 units of fruits that you like: banana, pear, papaya, peach or anything else, to little pieces.
  2. Boil water in a pot, add the fruits to the boiling water and let them cook until they’re soft.
  3. At the same time, take 2 cups of Quaker, add 4 cups of boiling water to it, and stir it will until the water and Quaker blend into a liquid porridge.
  4. Mix the cooked fruits with the Quaker in a big bowl (you wouldn’t be using the whole amount for the meal in a drink, so if you want you can leave half of it for breakfast next day, it’s yummy!)
  5. Put everything in the freezer to cool for 20 min.
  6. Mix everything (after it has cooled) in the blender.
  7. If the blend comes out too thick to drink, you can add some water.
  8. Pour the drink into bottles of 333cc and try to drink consume on bottle in 2 hours of swimming, when stopping to drink a quarter every 30 minutes or so.

 

It is important to know that for some of you this drink wouldn’t be good and you need to change fruit, or some time when we swim in a 10k competition we need to take a jell in order to have the energy, the salt in the jell wont be a problem for our body in 3 hours or less.

In if you use a jell I recommend the High 5 jells with water in it.

I want to say thanks for Ofran  Torateva that helped me and my swimmers to get to this amazing energy drink.

And after 8 months of changing it I am so happy to share the open water energy drink to all the swimmers

One last thing the I tell all WEST swimming swimmers: Not every thing that is good for one swimmer is good for another especially in open water Marathons swims it is very different, try my swimming tips for making your own drink, but if you don’t like it find what’s good for you and I hope you will share it to.

Some open water swimmers and Marathon open water swimmers tend to have shoulder and lower back pain, if you know and want to improve your swimming technique you can fill in the swim WEST questionnaire and you will get your online swimming technique course with 50% off>>>>

What happens to the body during the swim?

When you mix 4-5 kinds of fruit With Quaker there is a slow release of energy through the entire 30-45 min, some fruits give us energy right away and some take longer, even Dates that have very Fast release , with the help of the Quaker take more time.

The open water  nutrition drink can be taken cold, medium or hot (when the water temperature is very cold in the water).

Some people change what they eat every stop, if you like the drink you can eat and drink it all the way.

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