The Wonders of Sports Nutrition from the Perspective of an Idiot, and an Expert

The happy finishers

A couple of years ago, I completed my first Olympic triathlon with considerable difficulty. Having never been the best runner, I pushed myself be entering the London Landmarks half marathon last year. In attempt to continue punishing myself, this year I entered an Ironman 70.3 (a half Ironman to normal people).

I’ve been instructed by David to write a blog about my experience with Sports Nutrition. I suspect this is to distract me from talking to David about it…

Rather than boring you about my training schedule, I wanted to talk about something that is often overlooked by people training for big events (myself included).

Nutrition.

The different triathlon distances

I won’t be talking about dieting and loosing weight, but about fuelling the body properly for long distance events. Nutrition has moved on quite a bit from simply eating large bowls of pasta, but this appears to be the predominant thought amongst most people who are quite exercise literate. Case in point, me. My understanding of nutrition has always been quite simple, burn more than you take in. Got a long distance event? Eat a banana and get some sweets down. Funnily enough, when my training schedule consisted of a half-marathon Monday, 2km lake swim on Wednesday and a 60km cycle on Friday; my method of fuelling was leaving a lot to be desired. The importance of having a more detailed understanding of nutrition became apparent. 

Enter Jake, performance nutritionist extraordinaire. After picking his brains a little bit at work (one of the benefits of working at Until), I decided to sign up properly for a 9 week programme. Jake was absolutely elite. He checked in regularly, and had a detailed plan that included what time I should be eating the food, and gut training for the silly amount of gels you need to ingest during the event. After only one week, my energy levels felt miles better. As my training schedule upped in intensity, Jake would programme an increase in fuelling to ensure I had the energy to do so. More impressively, he was able to do this whilst also balancing my desire to continue enjoying life (a few beers were had), as well as allowing me a week off when I went to visit family in West Africa for a week (no such thing as a diet when nan’s cooking).

Jake

The unfortunate chap subjected to measuring my love handles

In essence, Jake proved to me that proper fuelling is essential and not as daunting as I thought. His explanations and timings were spot on, helping me achieve something I thought was impossible for me to do just one year prior.

Jake’s thoughts

Since I started working with Gus for this half ironman preparation the priorities were: to ensure adequate energy availability, sufficient carbohydrate intake relative to his daily training demands, to train his gut to handle more carbohydrates and fluid during prolonged exercise and lastly, a minimal focus on body recomposition. 

When we first started working together it was clear that Gus was definitely under-fuelling for the requirements of his training (which most people do), so my first initial goal was to get him to consume some more food, and we immediately saw improvements in his rates of perceived exertion during long runs and cycles. 

And we managed to do this without Jake losing his temper with me!

Consuming more food can sometimes be a tricky one for people, as when you tell them, “hey you're going to be eating 5000 calories today”, 1) they think they are going to get fat and 2) they think this is all in the form of sweet potatoes! Once you get past that initial apprehension most people have and they start to see the benefits of eating more they start to enjoy the process more. 

Next up was training Gus to handle more carbohydrates during his long cycles and rides. There's only so much glycogen we can store in the body so if we want to perform well over long distances we need to consume intra workout carbs. We took Gus’ carbohydrate intake up to 70g per hour for 5+ hours on race day with no gastrointestinal issues, which was great for a 9 week gut training block. Next time we can now aim to up that a little bit and provide more energy for each section of the race. 

Overall, we saw a modest but good decrease in weight throughout the 9 weeks whilst maintaining and adding some lean mass due to the increased protein intake Gus was consuming compared to his normal intake.