Meal Planning for Runners: Save Time, Eat Better, and Fuel Your Training

Quick Navigation

• Why Runners Should Meal Plan
• 7 Benefits of Meal Planning for Runners
• 6 Easy Meal Plan Ideas
• Meal Prep Methods: Pre-Made vs. Batch Prepping
• Meal Planning and Shopping List Templates
• 5 Meal Planning Cookbooks for Runners
• My Personal Meal Prep Journey
• Key Takeaways

You got up early, smashed your morning run, and now you're getting ready to rush off to work. Thoughts are already swirling through your head about what you'll have for lunch. Will you grab something from the fridge? Hit the vending machine? Step out for fast food — again? What on earth are you going to make for dinner once you get home?

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. As an athlete, you need to make sure that you are getting the fuel you require. High-intensity workouts demand a proper balance of macros, and without it, your body will not get the nutrition it needs to push through your runs, sustain your energy, and properly build and repair your muscles.

One of the easiest ways to save yourself a lot of time and effort — plus meet all of your nutritional requirements — is to make meal planning part of your weekly routine.

You do not sit and think about whether or not you will go out for a run. You just do it. So why waste time contemplating your food options?

Why Runners Should Meal Plan

Meal planning is a game-changer, trust me. Once you start planning out meals, cooking them ahead of time, and eliminating those daily kitchen scrambles, your life is going to change for the better.

Imagine waking up in the morning and never having to spend time deciding what you or your family are going to eat that day. Imagine opening your fridge, grabbing something healthy, and going. Imagine knowing every bite of food you put in your mouth has been considered ahead of time to give you the most nutrition for optimal energy and to meet your health and fitness goals.

That is the power of meal planning.

7 Benefits of Meal Planning for Runners

1. Save Hours Every Week

2. Meet Your Nutrition Goals Consistently

3. Stop Making Poor Food Choices

4. Save Money

5. Cut Down Grocery Store Trips

Meal planning means fewer trips to the grocery store. With one well-planned trip each week, you get all of the ingredients you need and use the time you save to do something much more exciting than browsing frozen food freezers.

6. Reduce Stress and Stay Organized

None of us need added stress in our lives, especially when it comes to eating. Planning out meals ahead of time takes away the indecision that occurs when deciding what to eat and makes life simpler. You will find that you are better organized, have more time, and will not have to endure the daily stress of figuring out what to cook.

7. Make It a Family Affair

Meal planning is a great way to get the whole family involved. You can all learn healthy eating strategies, try out wholesome recipes, and set an excellent example when it comes to proper nutrition. Gather all the free hands you can and make it a fun, shared experience.

6 Easy Meal Plan Ideas

There are many different approaches to meal planning. Some will be more appealing than others depending on your eating habits, schedule, and preferences. Here are six proven methods:

Cook Once, Eat for a Week

This is the most popular type of meal prep. Many people choose Sundays as their prep day — visit the grocery store, spend a few hours in the kitchen, and prepare all meals for the entire week. By mid-afternoon, all of the cooking and cleaning is done and you do not have to turn on the stove again until next weekend.

Sheet Pan Meals

Sheet pan meals are a great way to cook a lot of food in a short time with hardly any mess. Put your protein and veggies on the same pan, drizzle with oil, dash with spices, and bake. Divide into containers and you are done.

Pro Tip: Combine proteins and vegetables that have similar cook times on the same pan.

Homemade Frozen Dinners

There is nothing more convenient than pulling a dinner from the freezer and having it ready in five minutes. The problem with store-bought frozen dinners is they are often high in calories and sodium and lack nutrients. So make your own. All you need is simple recipes, fresh ingredients, and containers that can go in both the freezer and the microwave.

Mason Jar Lunches

Mason jar lunches are easy to prep, easy to store, and contain healthy ingredients. Whether you make a layered salad or try your own homemade instant ramen noodles, the possibilities are endless. Plus, they look great. You will be the envy of the office.

Slow-Cooker Meal Plans

Do not have time to spend hours in the kitchen? Pull out your slow cooker, dump in the ingredients, and turn it on. Within six to eight hours, you will have enough food to feed you and your family for multiple meals. It does not get easier than that.

Organized Grab-and-Go Fridge

Use dividers or plastic baskets to organize your fridge so the whole family can grab what they need. Have a protein section with pre-packaged cold meats, hard-boiled eggs, cheese slices, or tofu bites. A fruit section with sliced apples and oranges. A veggie section with pre-cut and bagged vegetables. Packaged nuts and trail mix in the pantry. This method allows for mindful snacking and ensures everything is appropriately portioned out.

Meal Prep Methods: Pre-Made vs. Batch Prepping

Pre-Made Meals

With pre-made meals, all of your food is fully prepared, cooked, and portioned into separate containers. Each container is one meal you can grab and heat up whenever you need to refuel. This method gives you the convenience of freezing meals and ensures everything is portioned correctly for your nutritional needs.

The downside is that it does not allow much flexibility for days when you need a larger or smaller meal, and it can be harder to portion for other family members.

Batch Prepping

With batch prepping, each component of your meals — vegetables, protein, carbohydrates — is prepared in bulk and stored separately. When it is time to eat, you portion out your plate from each container. Most batch preps include vegetables, a protein source, and a carbohydrate source like rice. You can also batch-prep hard-boiled eggs, breakfast muffins, or energy bites.

This method takes a bit more time to portion out meals to take on the go, but it is more convenient for feeding an entire family since everyone can adjust their own servings.

Meal Planning and Shopping List Templates

Before you can begin prepping your meals, you need a plan. Each meal plan should be divided by days of the week, and each day should include every meal and snack. Some people even include the time each meal will be eaten. If you have family members with different food preferences, create a separate plan for each one.

Once you have decided what you will eat for the week, create a grocery list with every item you need. For optimal efficiency, divide your list into sections that match the layout of your grocery store — fruits, vegetables, dairy, meats, frozen, grains, drinks, and other. This organized list will make your trip faster and eliminate the chance of forgetting something.

You can create your own template by hand, in a spreadsheet on your computer or phone, buy a meal plan journal, use an app, or download a free template online.

5 Meal Planning Cookbooks for Runners

Getting your hands on a meal planning cookbook is a great way to learn tips and tricks from professionals. Here are some of the best specifically geared toward runners:

The Runner's Kitchen by Emma Coburn

Designed by Olympian Emma Coburn, this cookbook helps you achieve your running goals with healthy recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, along with methods on how to fuel your workouts for peak performance.

The Runner's World Cookbook

Over 150 delicious recipes focusing on nutritious, performance-enhancing foods. Whether you need easily digestible pre-run snacks or satisfying post-training meals, this book has it all.

Run Fast, Cook Fast, Eat Slow by Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky

Olympic marathon champion Shalane Flanagan partnered with chef Elyse Kopecky to compile healthy recipes that can be cooked quickly with minimal ingredients. Quick on time, big on flavor.

Runner's Cookbook by Anita Bean

Over 100 delicious recipes focused on fueling your runs and optimizing performance, compiled by an athlete with a background in nutrition.

Runner's World Vegetarian Cookbook

The meatless version of the Runner's World Cookbook. Countless protein-packed, plant-based options perfect for vegetarian runners looking to enhance performance.

My Personal Meal Prep Journey

I will be honest — getting started in meal prepping was easy for me. I bought a bunch of plastic containers and food, and spent most of my Sunday prepping a week's worth of meals.

That lasted two weekends tops!

I probably repeated that approach a half dozen times over 10 years with the same result and ultimately walked away frustrated each time.

Then, in early 2023, I came up with a more hybrid approach to meal planning — one that actually worked. A few months earlier, I had obtained my certification as a nutrition coach with Precision Nutrition. I pursued this certification to help my run coaching clients learn and adhere to better eating habits. And my own.

My personal journey with meal prepping has historically been heavily focused around weight loss. I meal prepped during times I wanted to lose weight, and not so much during other times. As a result, I developed a love-hate relationship with it as I cycled between on and off again and again.

But with time, experience, and a focus on putting strategies in place that make meal prepping easier, I was finally able to crack this nut (for me anyway). I have been successfully meal prepping for several years now and it has become my family's standard way of eating.

Key Takeaways

• Start small. You do not have to prep an entire week of meals on day one. Start with prepping lunches for the work week and build from there.
• Meal planning saves time, money, and stress — while ensuring you eat healthy and hit your fitness goals consistently.
• Choose the method that fits your life. Whether it is cook-once-eat-all-week, batch prepping, or slow cooker meals, find what works and stick with it.
• It gets easier with practice. The first few weeks require effort, but once it becomes a habit, you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Check out our dozens of runner-friendly recipes in our growing recipe library or learn more about what to eat before a run and natural fuel options for runners.