Fast Fuel, by Renee McGregor

Renee McGregor, a nutritionist for leading athletes in the UK, wants to help you become a better runner.  Fast Fuel: Food for Running Success will give you information and recipes to fit your training plan, whatever your level of experience and whatever distance you are training for.  She covers more than diet.  She explores different types of meals and snacks eaten at different stages of a training week and during runs, discusses hydration, and emphasizes the importance of weight training and rest and recovery.

Besides absorbing the large amount of information McGregor provides (there were times when I got bogged down in the info, eyes glazing over, skimming to the bottom of the page), the great challenge of Fast Fuel is applying it to your own training.  I have always been an "eat what you want" runner.  Of course, I have always been a middle- or back-of-the-pack runner.  (OK, OK, I admit, more frequently at the back. . . .)  If a runner wants to take his or her sport seriously, paying more attention to what (and when) you eat is key.

Fast Fuel has examples of training/eating plans.  The best part is, she has dozens of recipes as suggestions to follow the plan.  She includes snacks, entrees, recover drinks, etc.  Some of them sound really good.  (I want to try the sweet potato brownies.)  American readers might wonder about some of the foods she talks about, like lolls, crisps, jelly babies, lemon squash, malt loaf, pork pie, or--this sounds really appealing--yeast-extract sandwich.  But for the most part the foods sounded familiar.

McGregor includes lots of charts and other text layout that didn't show up well on Kindle.  For this reason, and because of the recipes, you would probably want to get this in a paper version, not Kindle.  Fast Fuel is a good start for a motivated runner who is already good at planning his or her training and diet.  For a newbie, a casual runner, or a eat-whatever runner like me, Fast Fuel will be difficult to navigate in a useful way.  But it may very well be worth it.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!


2016 Reading Challenge: A book published by a UK-based publisher
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