Fuelling an ultra on plants.

How do you run fifty kilometres on a diet with no meat in it? The honest answer: it’s mostly the same problem every ultra runner has to solve, and the plant part is smaller than people expect.

I get asked about this more than almost anything else. Not how I train, not how I handle the climbing, but how I run fifty kilometres on a diet with no meat in it. The honest answer is that it’s mostly the same problem every ultra runner has to solve, and the plant part of it is smaller than people expect.

An ultra doesn’t care what your food philosophy is. It cares whether you can get enough carbohydrate in during a race without your gut shutting down, whether your electrolytes hold up over hours of sweat loss, and whether you’ve practised all of it enough times that none of it is a surprise on the day. Those problems exist for every runner on the start line. I just solve them without animal products, which mostly changes what’s in my kit, not the maths behind it.

Carbohydrate is still carbohydrate. Whether it comes from a gel, a rice cake, dates, or a sports drink, my body doesn’t know or care that none of it came from an animal in the first place. During long training runs I’ve worked out roughly what I can take in per hour before things go wrong, and I stick to it religiously on race day. Most of what’s on the market built for this exact problem, gels, chews, hydration mixes, already happens to be plant based, so this is one part of the puzzle that’s genuinely no harder for me than for anyone else on the course.

Carbohydrate is still carbohydrate. My body doesn’t know or care that none of it came from an animal in the first place.

Protein is where people expect the difficulty, and where I’ve found the least of it in practice. Recovery after a long day out matters more than what’s happening mid-race, and there’s no shortage of plant protein dense enough to do that job properly, lentils, tofu, tempeh, a decent scoop of protein powder in a smoothie after a big Sunday run. The harder part isn’t finding protein. It’s remembering to prioritise it on the days I’m tired and just want to lie on the floor.

Iron and B12 are the two I actually watch, properly, not performatively. Endurance training already puts pressure on iron stores, and a plant based diet needs a bit more attention here than one that isn’t. I get bloods done regularly and adjust based on what they say rather than what I assume. This isn’t a scare story, it’s just good practice, and I’d say the same thing to any runner regardless of what’s on their plate.

A few numbers I actually train by

Before I get into this, worth saying plainly, I’m not a nutritionist and this isn’t a plan for you to copy. It’s what I’ve landed on after a lot of long runs and a bit of trial and error, nothing more prescriptive than that. If you’re serious about dialling in your own numbers, especially around a health condition or a specific event, a sports dietitian will do a far better job of it than a blog post ever could.

I used to fuel on instinct and pay for it later in a race. What changed things was treating my nutrition like any other trainable skill, something with numbers behind it, not vibes.

Carbohydrate: somewhere between 60 and 90 grams an hour is what most endurance runners are chasing once a session runs past three hours, and I’ve landed in that range too after a lot of trial and error. I don’t hit it perfectly every long run, but I know roughly what it looks like in food now, which is the whole point.

Fluid: I aim for somewhere around 500 to 750 millilitres an hour, adjusted up in heat and down when it’s cooler, and I’ve stopped waiting until I feel thirsty to drink, because by then I’m already behind. Plain water on its own for hours isn’t the answer either, it needs carbohydrate and electrolytes in it to actually do its job, otherwise you’re diluting the very thing you’re trying to fix.

Caffeine, when I use it at all, sits at the low end of what’s generally considered effective rather than the high end, and only after testing it in training first. It’s not something to introduce for the first time on race day, and I’ve learned that one the hard way.

None of these numbers came from a chart I read once and trusted blindly. They came from years of long runs where I paid attention to what worked and adjusted the next week. That’s really the whole method, whatever your diet looks like: test it relentlessly in training, so race day is just repetition, not experimentation.

Train your gut on the exact food you’ll use, until fuelling stops being a decision and becomes a habit.

What I’ve noticed more than any of this is how much of ultra nutrition is really about repetition, not ideology. The runners who get into trouble on course, of any dietary background, are usually the ones trying something new on race day. I train my gut on the exact food I’ll use in the race, over and over, until fuelling stops being a decision and becomes a habit I don’t have to think about at kilometre thirty when everything else is falling apart.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to eat the way I do. What I’d actually say to any runner, plant based or not, is the same thing: work out your numbers, practise them relentlessly, and don’t let race day be the first time you’ve tried anything in your pack. The diet is just the detail underneath that. It happens to be mine.