Can you carb load on Haribo?

We’ve all been there: it’s Friday night, you just remembered your long run tomorrow morning and you’ve had nothing but a protein shake and a fistful of peanuts. You need to top up your carbs, but cooking and eating a kilo of plain rice isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time. 

Despite being basically sugar, gelatine, and food colouring, I reach for Haribo over traditional sources like pasta and rice, and it works surprisingly well for carb loading.

What is carb loading and why do runners do it?

Carb loading is about filling up your muscle and liver glycogen stores before a long run (90 minutes+), so you don’t hit the wall early. Standard advice is 8–12 g of carbs per kilogram of body weight per day for 24–48 hours before your event. For me, at 80 kg, that’s nearly 1,000 g of carbs - a number I’ve only hit from binge eating my emotions during bouts of depression.

Here’s the trick: once carbs are digested, the body breaks them down into glucose and stores them as glycogen. Your body doesn’t care whether that glucose came from wholegrain rice or a cola bottle. That’s why Haribo still works: it’s pure carbohydrate, just in a more colourful, tastier form.

When to carb load before a run or race

The optimal window is the night before your long run. Most of the glycogen gets stored overnight, and you won’t feel sluggish from having an enormous breakfast. That being said, I think there is often too much focus on ‘optimal windows’ for food - just make sure you get enough food at a time that suits you.

It all comes down to personal preference: you have to find your personal optimal window, and don’t be scared to get it wrong. The worst that can happen is that literal shit happens. Just try to get it wrong on a route with toilet access and ideally not in a race scenario.

How much to carb load (and how many bags of Haribo that is)

The science says 8–12 g/kg of body weight for marathons, but that’s based on healthy body composition. If you’re overweight, use your ideal body weight to calculate.

In my experience, the answer to how many carbs you should eat when carb loading is simply trial and error. I am currently running ~20k for my long runs which doesn’t require huge amounts of carb loading, my target at this stage is 5g/kg of bodyweight (400g for me) the day before, I then have an additional 60g for breakfast and still have to fuel during the run (another 100g). 

It is the bare minimum for me to survive my runs without hitting the wall, and I will need to increase to at least 600g of carbs the day before (7.5g/kg of bodyweight) when I get to the 30k distances in the next few weeks.

I currently struggle reaching 400g the day before, having gotten used to a high protein diet from hitting the gym more over the last couple of years. A 140g bag of Haribo comes in at 112g of carbs - it is basically to carbs what chicken is to protein. Maybe a tad less nutritious.

My results from Haribo carb loading

Genuinely: one of the best things I have ever tried. I used to go for giant bowls of pasta and rice but always felt bloated and never got anywhere near my carb goals, then felt sluggish on my runs.

Gut-wise, Haribo has been surprisingly kind. Low fibre means I’ve had no toilet emergencies, though the sugar load might not suit everyone, and your dentist will not be impressed if you sustain a Haribo diet for extended periods.

Sweets on a Friday night still feels like a treat, at least for now when I am eating two bags of Haribo after dinner, but I have a feeling I will get sick of them when I start having a third.

There is one downside, which stems from the long-term trauma of being a little fat kid: eating two bags of sweets feels like binge eating which of course comes from a place of self hate and sadness and the meaningless of it all, which of course is exacerbated by the sugar crash. But this is what therapy is for. Still, it’s a small price to pay for starting your Saturday long run feeling like you’ve just licked a live wire.