New morning fuel?

A little admission: I'm cheap sometimes, especially when it comes to bread. See, once a week I get free bread from a local church mostly to pass along to my parents but I usually come away with some loaves that I can use immediately or freeze for later use.

But at my local grocery store, every trip I make I peruse the day-old bread rack and usually find some good deals. Sometimes the bread turns not-so-edible in a couple of days but usually it lasts just fine - especially when I freeze it - and at 59 or 99 cents a loaf or package, you can't beat that.

After blogging about morning runs and the affects of not eating breakfast may have on them, I decided to see what else would be a good breakfast fuel. I read in my new book on running that bagels serve as a good breakfast for running.

In the book The Competitive Runner's Handbook, the author suggests several options for pre-run meals: a small high-carb meal (500-1000 calories) two to four hours prior to running; a high-carb snack an hour before running or a sports drink or sports gel 5-15 minutes prior to a run. A high-carb snack includes bagels, the author suggests.

I made a mental note of that and was going to bring it up here at some point. So, I went to the grocery store on Monday and while checking out the day-old bread rack came across a bag of bagels. I picked them up and just had them for breakfast... not the whole bag of five but I did have two.

Each bagel has 110 calories so it was about the same as an energy bar. Each bagel also has 26g carbs and 7g protein as well as 8g fiber. So already I'm quite close to meeting my daily fiber intake recommendation. Yay for me.

Anyway, I didn't have coffee with the bagels even though I'm always up for a cup of joe in the morning. I don't know why but I just can't drink coffee and run effectively afterward. It just doesn't do it for me.

I'm running intervals today so we'll see how well the bagels held up. Another thing, the bagels were 39 cents so if they don't work out, the investment wasn't grand.