Gastritis

Today's run was spoilt a bit by stomach pain. It appeared around the half way mark and ebbed and flowed until I got home. Eating a bit of Clif bar seemed to dampen it a little. As soon as I got home I took an extra Omeprazole and the pain went - far too quickly for a pharmacological action!

There is some sort of link between running and my gastritis, although there's also something to do with eating largish meals and travelling. Stress is a key factor too. This bout seems to be being a little harder to shake off than previous ones but maybe there is more ongoing stress.

Should I be cutting out breakfast, meals the night before a run, or even stopping running. When I spent a week trail riding on the motorcycle in France I couldn't quite stop the tablets - no running then, but there was travelling.

Some interesting papers to read about poor guts in runners and my interpretation:

• Simons and Shaskan (2005) - Running can aggravate gastritis and Omeprazole is prescribed. Not eating for 3 hours before exercise helps some people. Best to avoid carbohydrate pre-run too.
• Choi et al., (2006) - Runners at 200km/week training bleed into their guts from oesophagus and stomach. H2 antagonists (ie different class of drug to omeprazole) reduce the pathology seen by endoscope and blood loss. Even though I don't train this hard, and don't have lesions (or didn't have) my guts are delicate post irradiation.
• Thalmann et al., (2006) - A proton-pump inhibitor reduce faecal blood post-ultramarathon. Some of the sample already had gastritis.

My take home message from this is that gastritis is fairly common in runners. The studies look at athletes far more active than me but a link is there.