Carb Loading the Italian Way: What to Eat Before a Long Run

Every fall, three weeks out from Chicago or six weeks out from New York, the same question arrives in slightly different words: how much pasta do I actually have to eat? The answer is more than most people think, over fewer days than most people think, and with a lot less sauce.

Italian food is unusually good at this job. Not because of anything mystical about the Mediterranean diet, but because the Italian primo — a plate of starch, lightly dressed, eaten before anything else — is structurally the meal a carb-loading athlete needs. This guide covers what the research actually says, how to turn the numbers into meals, and the mistakes that cost people their race in the 36 hours before the gun.

What carb loading is, and who it's for

Muscle stores carbohydrate as glycogen. A trained athlete carries roughly 400–500 g of it in the muscles and another 100 g in the liver — call it 2,000 calories of readily available fuel. At marathon pace, a runner burns through that in around two hours. The wall, at mile 20, is that tank running dry.

Carb loading raises the starting level. Instead of a typical 100–120 mmol/kg of muscle, a loaded athlete starts at 150–200. It buys time, not speed: you do not run faster in the first half, you simply have more left in the second.

That also tells you who needs it. Events under about 90 minutes don't deplete glycogen enough for loading to matter. A 10K, a spin class, a hard hour in the pool — eat normally. The threshold is roughly:

• Under 90 minutes: a normal high-carbohydrate day and a decent breakfast. No loading.
• 90 minutes to 3 hours: one day of loading at 8–10 g/kg.
• Over 3 hours (marathon, century ride, long trail race, Ironman): two days at 10–12 g/kg.

Forget the depletion phase

The version of carb loading that persists in club lore comes from Scandinavian work in the 1960s: three days of near-zero carbohydrate and hard training to "empty" the muscle, then three days of gorging. It works, and it is miserable — the depletion phase leaves athletes exhausted, irritable and prone to getting sick in the most important week of their year.

It is also unnecessary. Sherman's 1981 study showed a modified three-day protocol with tapered training and no depletion produced the same muscle glycogen. Bussau and colleagues went further in 2002: trained athletes reached maximal glycogen after a single day of 10 g/kg with rest. The current position stand from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the ACSM reflects this.

So: taper the training, eat for one or two days, skip the suffering.

The numbers, on a plate

Here is the target in pounds and grams.

Those numbers are startling the first time you see them. For context, the average American adult eats about 250 g of carbohydrate a day. You are being asked to nearly triple it, which is why this cannot be done with three normal meals — it takes five or six eating occasions, and it takes food chosen for carbohydrate density.

What that density looks like in Italian terms:

A loading day that isn't a chore

Here is a real Saturday for a 68 kg runner racing Sunday morning, built from food rather than gels. It comes to about 650 g — the low end of the range, which is where most people should aim the first time.

• Breakfast: three slices of ciabatta with honey, a banana, a glass of orange juice — about 150 g
• Mid-morning: a handful of raisins and two plain biscotti — about 70 g
• Lunch: a bowl of pasta e ceci — 100 g
• During the shakeout run: a bottle of sports drink — about 40 g
• Afternoon: two slices of bread with honey and a banana — about 85 g
• Dinner (early, 6 p.m.): butternut squash risotto with two slices of bread — about 147 g
• Before bed: a small bowl of rice pudding — about 60 g

The two anchors of that day are both dishes Italians cook for their own reasons, not for athletes.

Endurance

Pasta e Ceci (Roman Pasta with Chickpeas)

• 35 min
• 611 kcal
• 23 g protein

Endurance

Butternut Squash Risotto (Risotto alla Zucca)

• 45 min
• 622 kcal
• 14 g protein

What to take out

This is the half of carb loading nobody talks about, and it is where races are actually lost.

Fat slows the stomach. A cream sauce or a plate of fried food sits for hours. Keep fat under about 20% of calories on loading day, which for most people means tomato instead of ragù and no fried anything.

Fiber is the bigger trap. A loading day built on whole-wheat pasta, brown rice, beans, broccoli and salad can easily reach 60 g of fiber, and the reviews of gastrointestinal complaints in endurance athletes — de Oliveira, Burini and Jeukendrup surveyed the literature in 2014 — put a high-fiber pre-event meal among the leading causes. This is the one week of the year to eat white pasta, white rice and white bread. Peel the potatoes. Drink the juice instead of eating the orange.

Alcohol interferes with glycogen synthesis and with sleep. One glass with dinner two nights out is fine; the pre-race dinner is not the place.

Novelty. Nothing you have not eaten before. Not the new energy bar, not the restaurant you have been meaning to try.

Race morning

Three to four hours before the start, eat 1–4 g of carbohydrate per kilogram — for a 68 kg runner, somewhere between 70 and 270 g, and in practice usually 100–150 g. White bread with honey and jam, a banana, coffee, a sports drink. Nothing high in fat, nothing high in fiber, nothing new.

Then during the event: 30–60 g of carbohydrate per hour for anything up to about 2.5 hours, and up to 90 g per hour beyond that if you use a mix of glucose and fructose, which are absorbed by different transporters. Practice this in training. The gut adapts, and an unadapted gut at mile 18 is a bad place to learn.

Afterwards

Recovery is the mirror image: 1.0–1.2 g of carbohydrate per kilogram per hour for the first four hours if you need to be ready again soon, alongside 20–30 g of protein to start repair. Sodium helps you hold the fluid you drink.

Endurance

Sicilian Tuna Pasta (Pasta al Tonno)

• 25 min
• 662 kcal
• 31 g protein

The five mistakes

1. Loading for a race that doesn't need it. Under 90 minutes, you are just eating a lot of bread.
2. Loading for a week. Extra days add fat, not glycogen. One or two is the evidence-based answer.
3. Adding carbohydrate without removing fat. A big plate of fettuccine Alfredo is a fat-loading meal that happens to contain pasta.
4. Going whole-grain. Admirable on a Tuesday, a liability on the Saturday before a marathon.
5. Eating the big dinner too late. Aim for 12–16 hours before the start. A 9 p.m. carb dinner for a 7 a.m. race is still in your stomach at the start line.

Where to start

Our endurance collection is built around these two slots — fuel-up meals at 80–120 g of carbohydrate with low fat and fiber, and recovery meals with carbohydrate plus 20–30 g of protein. If you are loading this weekend, the risotto for Saturday dinner and the Sicilian tuna pasta for Sunday afternoon cover both ends of the day.

General information for healthy adults, not medical advice. If you have diabetes, kidney disease or another medical condition, talk to a physician or a registered dietitian before changing your carbohydrate intake. See our nutrition disclaimer.

Sources: Burke L. M., Hawley J. A., Wong S. H. S. & Jeukendrup A. E., Carbohydrates for training and competition, J Sports Sci 2011; Thomas D. T., Erdman K. A. & Burke L. M., Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the ACSM: Nutrition and Athletic Performance, J Acad Nutr Diet 2016; Sherman W. M. et al., Effect of exercise-diet manipulation on muscle glycogen and its subsequent utilization during performance, Int J Sports Med 1981; Bussau V. A. et al., Carbohydrate loading in human muscle: an improved 1 day protocol, Eur J Appl Physiol 2002; de Oliveira E. P., Burini R. C. & Jeukendrup A., Gastrointestinal complaints during exercise, Sports Med 2014; Jeukendrup A. E., A step towards personalized sports nutrition: carbohydrate intake during exercise, Sports Med 2014; USDA FoodData Central for food values.