The day before: boring is the whole strategy
The perfect pre-race dinner is dull. White rice or pasta, a simple protein you cook regularly, a modest amount of cooked vegetables, minimal sauce, nothing deep-fried, nothing new. Save the lentil curry, the raw kale salad, the enormous bowl of dried fruit and the second coffee for afterwards. Fibre is a genuinely good thing in ordinary life and a liability on a morning when you will be running, lunging and carrying heavy objects in front of strangers.
Drink to thirst across the whole day rather than forcing down litres in the evening — that tends to produce a broken night and four trips to the bathroom rather than genuine hydration. A little salt with your meal does more than you would think. And eat early enough that you are not going to bed on a full stomach.
Race morning: three hours, not thirty minutes
Aim to eat your main pre-race meal roughly two to three hours before the start, and keep it small, familiar and mostly carbohydrate: toast with honey, a banana and a bit of porridge, a plain bagel. If you get up very early, a smaller top-up closer to the start — half a banana, a few sips of sports drink — is easier to tolerate than one enormous breakfast.
Caffeine deserves a special note. If coffee is part of your normal morning, have your normal amount. If it is not, race day is a spectacularly bad time to discover that caffeine is a very effective laxative. Whatever your routine, build in time at the venue to use the toilets before you warm up, because the queues are always longer than you plan for.
