FUEL YOUR ADVENTURES

BEN TURNER, an MNU certified nutritionist, personal trainer and endurance athlete, explains why what you put in your body will have a huge impact on how it performs when you’re out in the mountains.

Let me take you on an adventure. We’re hiking the Brecon Beacons, it’s a sunny day, the warmth radiates through our skin and warms the soul. Visibility is excellent and the hills show off their majesty. But the rucksack is heavy, sweat is beading down our faces, the heat is bringing on a headache and as much as we can’t wait for the pub dinner, all we have is a few biscuits and jelly sweets to keep us going.

Soon the splendour of the hills disappears and vision narrows to our feet, plodding away up the never-ending hill and false summits that linger before us. Our muscles are burning, the stop we just took filled our legs with a tingling light feeling that is replaced with a dull and stubborn ache that doesn’t go away. We have a spare bottle of water, but as the pace slows inexorably through fatigue, we start to wonder if we have enough to last. There is still a long way to go…

Welcome to a place I know all too well, welcome to the exact situation I was in while army training in the Brecon Beacons, staring up a really long hill. Fuelled only on Haribo I experienced first-hand the significant spikes and crashes that come with consuming unsustainable and insufficient sugars for prolonged exercise. As a summer and winter Mountain Leader, qualified evidence-based nutritionist, and personal trainer, I look back on these moments both fondly as experience, and critically with greater knowledge of nutrition, hydration, and exercise.

I want to stress the importance of nutrition in the great outdoors. Nutrition is completely individual, but there are some evidence-based foundations from which we can create our own strategies to fuel our adventures and bring about to maximum performance and the enjoyment of the hills.

“YOU’LL ENCOUNTER HIGH AND LOW INTENSITY EXERTION AS THE TERRAIN CHANGES, SO YOU NEED AN ADEQUATE MIXTURE OF FOOD”