Training

Race week

The final weeks are where nutrition apps usually go quiet, at exactly the point the answer changes most. Your training volume drops while your carbohydrate needs go up. Gauge handles that in three stages.

The taper — three weeks out

Inside 21 days of your event, taper protection turns on. Your deficit pauses and carbohydrate stays up, even as your mileage falls. You'll see it on the day: "Taper — deficit paused, carbs stay up."

This is deliberate and it is not a bug in your weight goal. Arriving at a start line under-fuelled costs more than the last pound would have gained you. If you want to lose weight for an event, that work belongs earlier in the block.

The carb load — the final days

Closer in, Gauge shifts into a carbohydrate load sized to your event:

Marathon, ultra, triathlon — the final 2 days, at roughly 9 g of carbohydrate per kg of bodyweight
Half marathon — the final day, at roughly 7 g per kg
10K and other events — the final day, at roughly 5.5 g per kg
5K — no load

Shorter races don't get one because there's nothing to load for — you can't run a 5K out of glycogen.

These are big numbers, and they usually surprise people. Loading properly means eating more carbohydrate than feels normal, and mostly means displacing fat and fibre rather than simply eating more on top. Fat targets drop during the load for exactly that reason.

Race day

Race day is fuelled as race day: no deficit, carbohydrate high, and the in-session plan sized for the event rather than for a training run.

Your race plan

Before the event, Gauge assembles everything into a single plan you can read through — the load, race-morning food, and what to take during the race — and you can share it. Useful for putting on a phone that isn't yours, handing to whoever is meeting you at mile 20, or just reading the night before instead of trying to remember.

Practise before you need it

None of this should be new on the day. The fuelling plan on your long runs exists so race-day fuelling is a rehearsal of something your stomach already knows. A carb load and a race-morning routine tried for the first time on race morning is an experiment, and race day is a poor laboratory.