What Elite Athletes Actually Eat — A Live Panel with Charlie Sweeney, Dr. Marc Bubbs, and Jason Fitzgerald

This one is a little different. Jon hosted a live panel in Boulder with three people who between them have worked with Olympic athletes, NBA teams, professional runners, and tens of thousands of recreational athletes. The topic was fueling, strength training, and the fundamentals that most runners are still getting wrong.

Charlie Sweeney is a professional marathoner who has lived the training load most people only read about — 140 miles a week, two sessions a day five days a week, and 110 grams of carbohydrate per hour at Boston this year. Dr. Marc Bubbs is the founder of ProBio, a performance nutritionist, and author who has spent his career in elite sport locker rooms translating research into what athletes actually do every day — from Canada Basketball to NBA and NHL teams to Olympic track clubs. Jason Fitzgerald has been coaching runners since 2010 and works primarily with adult recreational athletes.

The conversation is practical, honest, and occasionally funny. There's pizza involved.

Topics covered:

• What runners think they're doing right that might actually be hurting them
• Why fueling is deeply individual and how to stop copying what your favorite runner eats
• How carbohydrate recommendations have changed and why the pendulum has swung so far
• Fast carbs versus slow carbs and when to use each
• What 700 grams of carbohydrate a day actually looks like in practice
• How Charlie went from 20-mile runs on water to 110 grams per hour at Boston
• The 75 to 90 minute threshold for when to start fueling during a run
• Why the marathon specific long run is the one workout you should fuel at 100 percent
• What ProBio is, why it exists, and the compliance problem it was built to solve
• Vitamin D, B12, magnesium, and why elite bloodwork is often surprisingly average
• Why you can't just eat plants if you're running 140 miles a week
• Charlie's strength training breakdown — 90 minutes once a week, earn the massage first
• How to periodize strength training alongside your running
• When to taper your lifting before race day and what race week actually looks like in the gym

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