I have always insisted on a cup of coffee before a race or a long run, because I know I’ll feel like crap without it. I took me a while to cotton on to the fact that it was actually helping my performance though!

All the studies on caffeine use in athletes show that in moderate doses, it can have a positive effect on performance. The main reason seems to be that it enhances reaction time, so the messages get from your brain to your muscles more quickly, helping you run faster and feel less stress. It can also improve your body’s use of fat as a fuel,avoiding glycogen depletion and that ‘dead-leg’ feeling. For more information about caffeine use in athletes, check out this excellent article.

Experts say that the best time to drink coffee is an hour before a race, and this is certainly what I have found works for me. It might mean a toilet stop slightly earlier than planned though!

Because I don’t want to be slowed down or bloated by a milky, frothy coffee, I now drink cold brew before my runs. It is perfect because it doesn’t require any milk or sugar, and is smooth and mellow. I didn’t invent the process of making cold brew, but would like to share the recipe because it’s delicious and incredibly easy to make. Even if you’re not usually a black coffee drinker (I certainly wasn’t), I urge you to try this. Because the coffee beans aren’t heated at any stage of the process, the coffee doesn’t become bitter but stays mild and sweet.

Here’s what I do:

Buy a standard 200 gram bag of ground coffee in a plunger grind. If you like to grind your own beans, use the coarsest setting on your grinder.

Tip the coffee and a 1.5 litre bottle of filtered water into a bowl, stir, cover and leave for 24 hours.

After 24 hours, you need to filter the coffee. I do this in 2 stages. First, tip the lot through a sieve to get the bulk of the grounds out. I chuck these on my garden as fertiliser.

Then get a piece of muslin or a double-ply paper towel and use it to line a funnel. Sit this in a 1.5 litre glass bottle and gradually tip the coffee into it. It takes about 20 minutes to filter it, so I usually just leave it dripping and tip a bit more in each time I walk through the kitchen.

Once it’s all filtered, that’s it! Keep the bottle in the fridge, and when you want to make a coffee, pour 2-3 cm into a coffee cup and top with boiling water. You can play with the coffee to water ratio until you find the way you like it.

This is also really portable; I often take a screw-top jar of the concentrate to work and top it up with boiling water for a much nicer coffee than staffroom instant!

I would love to hear feedback from anyone who gives this a go, so please leave a comment and tell me how you found it. I hope to create a couple of cold-brew converts!