Nutrition/Hydration for the 2026 Wild Goose Trail Festival

Yeah, and this is one, like, it's a great question.

And I bet for every single participant in Wild Goose, the answer is so different.

But generally, we can speak to this question.

As far as calories per hour, I would also add a little bullet point to think about.

carbohydrate foods or carbohydrate grams per hour.

The longer that we're going, so depending on what distance you've chosen for wild goose, you kind of want to think about all of these elements, but carbohydrates are kind of the main energy source that we want to think about.

So we can have, for example, calories from bacon or we could have calories from bananas so the bacon's like fat and a little bit of protein and the bananas carbohydrates so in terms of carbs per hour i think about a range somewhere of like 40 grams maybe upwards of 70 grams per hour of carb calories um Some of us are doing more than 70 grams of carbs per hour.

It might be a hundred grams of carbs.

So the upper kind of ceiling for carbs keeps creeping up.

But for a lot of us recreational, like wanting to finish, have a good time, good performance time, but we're not elite level or professional level runners, carb grams like 40 to 70, that's working out to about 160 calories to about 280 calories per hour.

But if you're going to be out doing, you know, the 36 hour or the 100 miler, the 100k, whatever, those longer, we definitely then expand to think about calories because we are going to eat most likely foods that have some protein and some fat.

So your calories per hour might be you know, three to 400 calories, depending on your size, depending on the energy you're burning, depending on what you've practiced and so on.

So you kind of have to have a little bit of nuance there, but I appreciate this question because you're thinking about like targets for you and to kind of think on the hourly basis, we just need to be flexible.

As far as hydration goes, that's also variable depending on how sweaty you are, how hot it's going to be for those hours that we're out there on the trails, which drives how sweaty we are.

The intensity that you're moving makes for more body heat.

We've got to offload that body heat.

through sweat.

So thinking about fluid intake, that range of fluid per hour for someone who's not very sweaty or maybe they're just not producing that much sweat because they're moving at a slower pace or a more party pace, their fluid intake may be 12 ounces per hour.

We could talk in milliliters if we want.

Upwards, if like you're a bigger person, you sweat a lot, maybe you're wearing, you know, clothes that trap the heat, your sweat rate might be higher.

And so the fluid we need to replace will be higher.

And so that might be for those people 24 ounces per hour or maybe 32, like a liter per hour.

So this is where learning your own sweat rate which there are some calculators out there.

You can ask AI or Google for that, and that can help you determine what your fluid needs are, similar with carbohydrate and calories.

But hopefully that provides a range and gives you some things to think about in terms of what drives those numbers, things to think about as you're creating your fueling plan.