Should you drink coffee before a run?

Coffee - loved, adored and instagram’d by many a triathlete. But is it something that you should drink before you lace up your shoes and head out the door?

What is coffee?

Before we get into this, let’s start with a quick question. What even is coffee? Coffee the name we give to the drink that’s brewed from coffee beans, which come from the coffea plant. The beans are roasted and then ground and in one form or another we add water and get coffee.

As a slight side note, did you know that the coffee bean that we think of is actually the remnants of what’s called a coffee cherry? A coffee cherry! Sounds kinda tasty doesn’t it?

Now coffee naturally contains caffeine and this is where the potential benefits really come from in terms of sporting performance. 

The low down on caffeine - why is caffeine good for running?

Caffeine has been reviewed as a sport supplement in so many ways for so many different sports - strength exercises, repeated sprints, endurance exercise. Needless to say it’s proven to help with almost any sport you can think of.

The exact reason why it’s beneficial isn’t something we fully know though and there are different possibilities. The most likely reason is that it acts as something called an adenosine receptor antagonist. Basically, it blocks the compound adenosine from binding where it normally would, and as adenosine would normally slow down the central nervous system, blocking it means our central nervous system is more stimulated. Caffeine also seems to decrease our pain perception and the sensation of fatigue is decreased.

And it's this combination of effects which seem to help our performance. Our nervous system is more active so we’re more awake and alert, and because our perception of pain and fatigue is less we’re able to push harder for longer. So you can see how it might help us as endurance athletes!

How caffeine can help running

So let’s talk run specific benefits.  What scenarios could you drink coffee before running?

• If you’re up early and want to get rid of some of that sleep fuzz, a quick cup of coffee can help with that. 

• If you’re planning a shorter interval session, it’s going to help you push harder because it’ll make that pain seem a little less intense.

• If you’re planning a longer run then it’s going to help with how knackered you feel towards the end of it because it reduces the perception of fatigue.
  

Basically, whatever run you’ve got planned, coffee is probably good for it.

Ok, you’ve convinced me! How much coffee should I drink before running?

It seems that as little as 1mg of caffeine per kg of body weight is enough to get the benefits of caffeine, and anywhere between 1-3mg per kg seems to be the sweet spot.

When you go above that threshold you’re more likely to run into the side effects of caffeine but you don’t get much more in the way of benefit. It’s worth highlighting that everyone will be different here - some people will tolerate more caffeine, some will tolerate less.

So we want 1-3mg/kg of caffeine, but how much is that in terms of a cup of coffee? Now unfortunately that’s not an easy answer. It totally depends on the coffee, how it’s roasted, dried, brewed. 

There’s likely to be anywhere between about 60mg to about 250mg of caffeine in your average cup - which is quite a big difference. The only way to truly know would be to measure the caffeine content in the coffee you drink… but that’s not really possible for most of us. 

However given that 1mg per kg isn’t that much caffeine, if you’re having just an average cup of coffee - whether that’s instant, filtered or whatever your favourite method is - you’re likely to get to that lower threshold as a minimum and in a lot of cases go above it.

When should I drink coffee before running?

So how long before a run should you drink coffee? Well coffee, and the caffeine in it, gets absorbed pretty quickly into the bloodstream, and you should start to feel the benefits anywhere upwards of about 30 minutes.

And the effects last for some time, as caffeine has what we call a half life, so the time before the concentration of a drug in our body halves, of about 6 hours.

Is coffee bad before running?

Now as a quick bit of balance, are there any reasons you shouldn’t have coffee before a run? 

Well the first would be if you have a medical condition where you’ve been told not to consume caffeine. Fairly obvious. If that’s you, don’t drink it.

Secondly, if it’s later on in the day or in the evening. As the half life of caffeine is about 6 hours, factor that and the effect caffeine has on sleep - as in, you can’t - into your schedule and consider whether it’s actually worth having. It is very likely your sleep will be more important than that cup of coffee!

Lastly, remember caffeine is a stimulant and it will make you need to go to the toilet! So just make sure you have visited the bathroom before you head out for your run to avoid any unpleasant scenarios!