Marathon Runner's Guide to Avoiding GI Discomfort

March 13, 2024 Helen Keith

We use natural root ginger in all our nutrition products. Ginger is scientifically proven to help prevent bloating, nausea and stomach discomfort during exercise, thereby allowing athletes to focus on their performance rather than their stomach.

We only use simple, high quality natural ingredients. You won't find any unpronounceable nasties in our products. We believe natural ingredients help maintain a settled stomach, which provides more predictable results, avoiding the dreaded gut bomb!

All of our products have a clean, light refreshing taste that leaves you wanting more. We know you want your sports nutrition to taste clean and delicious, rather than refuelling & rehydrating with something that you don’t like the taste of!

Ginger not only helps prevent stomach discomfort but actively helps increase your appetite so that you actually want to eat or drink whilst exercising. This becomes more beneficial the longer the event you are doing as the necessity to keep fuelled and hydrated increases.

Many of the gastric problems that arise from energy gels are because of the artificial sweeteners and preservatives that they contain. This can also lead to a sickly, chemical taste. Active Root Gel Mix just uses natural ingredients that your stomach regularly digests. It's therefore also a far more natural, palatable and, we think, delicious taste!

Top tips for avoiding GI discomfort:

Try, try, and try again! Testing different fuelling strategies and products during your training is essential for ensuring all goes well on the day. Remember the golden rule - nothing new on race day! Test your fuelling on your long training runs until you’ve found what works for you - remember everyone is unique and what works for others may not work for you.
Aim to consume fuel little and often. You should aim to consume a small amount at regular, frequent intervals, e.g. every 20 minutes. This is to maintain a steady energy supply and prevent blood sugar peaks and crashes. Steady fuelling is especially important from halfway onwards. A lot of people suffer from the dreaded wall at 20 miles which is often when your glycogen (energy stores) are completely depleted so keep fueling to prevent this, even when you're feeling good! (Top tip: use the 20min fuel intervals as a way to count through your marathon. E.g. if you're going for 4x hours, that's 12x fuel intervals.)
Use ginger! Ginger contains unique gingerol compounds, which interact with the stomach and help keep your digestion feeling normal. Whether you use our drinks, gels, or energy chews, our number one goal is get your normal right. With normal digestion nailed down, we then give you all the other sports nutrition essentials - the carbs and electrolytes - you need to perform. We use 100% natural carbohydrates and sea salt electrolytes. No synthetic sickness-inducing maltodextrin here. With all these working together, our products give you normal digestion, energy boosting carbs and electrolyte replacing hydration!

Depending on exertion levels during exercise, we recommend drinking one 500-750ml bottle of Active Root drink per hour, up to 3 servings of Gel Mix OR 6 Energy Chews. Doing this will assist with normal stomach digestion, and help you to perform to your best. This is the amounts of ginger in our products: