Nestled between the infamous Col du Tourmalet and Col de Peyresourde in the beautiful Hautes-Pyrénées, the Col d’Aspin has a long and illustrious history with the Tour de France, first featuring in the race as part of the inaugural mountain stage (a mere 326km from Luchon to Bayonne dubbed the Circle of Death) in 1910. 

Many 24 hour events offer a popular ‘Team’ category whereby you can club together with other like-minded individuals and share the 24-hour load between you in a relay type arrangement. 

There are a few additional supplements that we’d like to mention here to help you on your way to ultra-endurance success. 

Do you know what? We could advise you to consume a recovery drink within 15 minutes of finishing the event and you may feel better for it for the rest of the day, but at the same time there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to recovery from such an epic effort. 

We’ve discussed the fundamentals in the previous section, but let’s look at this real life example and what we’ve suggested Mark should actually do for this race. 

Now there are two ways of looking at this. 

Preparing nutritionally for the big day starts around 24 hours prior to the beginning of the race. 

There are some simple processes to consider in the recovery process. 

Fuelling your training and life in general outside of ‘race day’ involves following some very simple fundamental steps with your general nutrition. 

As well as nailing down an effective nutritional strategy for race day, your nutritional intake and training effectiveness are hugely intertwined, which is why we separate training and racing nutrition here. 

We’re sure that for many of us, the concept of racing over a 24-hour period with no sleep seems completely loopy! 

The RTTC National 24-Hour Championships is the one that matters.