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@Greenbank
Never bothered fuelling before/during runs up to and including a HM. The body should contain enough energy from glycogen in the muscles/liver to cover at least that distance*.
I've only started to run (pun intended) into problems when I was pushing further than HM. The 25k or 28k training runs for example, I just took a couple of gels and had them at 8k and 16k.
This is part of the reason why a marathon is such a different thing to a half marathon. The vast majority of people could cover the HM distance without eating. Very few could run a marathon without eating and not suffer some loss of performance.
It does depend on how well trained your fat metabolism is though. When I started doing long distance cycling I would barely scrape into the first control at 50km feeling absolutely starving, after a while doing them I could go much further before needing to eat. On PBP I had my first food at the 180km mark and I've done a few 200km rides on a couple of bidons of squash alone.
* As a generalisation the number of calories used to cover a certain distance is roughly the same regardless of whether you walk, jog or run.