Post 14 - My daily bread

I recently finished a tough 3-hour turbo session followed by a 30 minute run. Immediately on coming in the front door of the house, there is a full-length mirror, and I happened to glance at my reflection. This is what my legs looked like:

When training for an endurance event, your weight is a reasonable indicator of fitness and progress. I’m not an athlete who fastidiously monitors my weight, analyses my body fat percentage, and counts every last calorie. But from time to time, I weigh myself, for no reason other than to observe the effects of heavy training on my weight. My height obviously remains constant, at a fraction over 6 feet. However, my weight goes up and down depending on what time of year it is.
 

In the winter off-season, my weight is somewhere around 72-75kg. I reached my heaviest weight, 77kg, at the end of a long spell in Sydney where I enjoyed more than a few pints and wasn’t training much. After Sydney I went to Korea and started training for triathlons, and within a few months I was back down to around 71kg. Going into my Ironman races last summer, my weight was around 68-69kg.

Seeing my legs so lean in the mirror, I started to wonder if I was possibly too light, too early in the year, and maybe a bit too fit and approaching my peak fitness level too soon. I’m currently just under 69kg when empty. Ideally, I’m trying to hit my peak a few weeks before the Ironman race, and then spend the rest of the time tapering. I don’t want to peak a couple of months before the race, because it is very difficult to maintain peak fitness levels for too long, from the point of view of getting injured or sick.

These thoughts were reinforced when I went out for a bike ride in the Kent hills with my housemate Steve and his friend Paul. We rode for just over three hours and took in Ide Hill, Toys Hill and the ironically named Titsey Hill. Just before we tackled Titsey Hill, Steve told me he often rides with an Italian friend who calls it “Titty Hill”. I can’t think why. I understand the “Hill” bit, but a tarmac road ramping up at a 16% gradient doesn’t really lend itself to being named “Titty”. Maybe he was using humour to distract himself from the pain of the climb to come. I countered this by telling Steve and Paul that in Northern Irish dialect, describing something as “titsey” means it is small and insignificant. Or “wee”, if you like.

A section of Titsey Hill

 

It turned out that Titsey hill was neither titsey, wee, or in any way tit-like. It was a leg-burning, lung-bursting slog, and should be renamed “Hell Hill” or “Sore Legs Hill”, or something more appropriate than Titsey Hill. Steve is no slouch on a bike, he’s pretty fit, and I was a lot faster than him up the hill. So this was a good reinforcement that my training is moving my fitness in the right direction. And it got me wondering that maybe I’m too fit too soon. I would like to think I’m ahead of where I was this time last year. So in the next few weeks, I will ease off a little. Next week is a scheduled easy week, I’m in Northern Ireland for a long weekend, and then racing in Flanders in Belgium the week after that, so my tough training routine will be broken up somewhat, and I don’t think that this is a bad thing.

Anyway, my lean-ness got me wondering about my diet, and I thought through everything I eat and drink in a day. Then I thought of photographing it, and this was the result:

Just over 4000 calories per day

On a typical day, for breakfast I’ll have a big bowl of porridge, a slice of brown toast and peanut butter, a fistful of spinach, a glutamine drink, a multivitamin tablet, an echinacea tablet and an acai tablet. An hour and a bit later I’ll be at work and I’ll be hungry again, so in the morning, I’ll have an orange and an apple and a litre of water.


At lunchtime I’ll have a fruit smoothie, a chicken and vegetable salad, a yoghurt/cereal mixture, a fruit and nut cereal bar and a vitamin C tablet. During the afternoon I’ll drink another litre of water, eat a pear and a banana, and then go home. My pre-training snack will be an energy bar and a gulp of water. On the bike, I’ll drink a litre of electrolyte drink and have a couple of energy gels. I’ll then go for a run, and my post-training snack will be another fistful of spinach, a banana, and a protein/milk drink, along with a calcium/magnesium/zinc tablet, a vitamin D tablet and a cod liver oil tablet. I’ll then shower and eat my dinner.

Dinner is usually carbs, meat and vegetables. The carbs will vary between brown pasta or sweet potatoes, the vegetables will be a combination of broccoli, cabbage, carrots or onions, and the meat will be either chicken or turkey breast, or occasionally fish. Usually I’ll season this with pepper, garlic and chilli. I’ll have a glass of water with this. Before I go to bed, I’ll have an orange, an apple, or an avocado.

I’ll eat the same diet day in and day out, and it will rarely change. It’s a good balance of what I need. It’s no wonder then that the hotel food before Ironman UK was so alien to me and caused me to retire from the race in an explosion of vomit and diarrhoea when leading my age group with 10 miles left to run. I took my own food to Ironman Wales and had no problems. A lesson learned for this year...

I’ll generally cook a pile of food on Monday evening (my rest day), and put it in boxes in the fridge, for eating during the week. I don’t have any time on any other weeknight to cook. I’ll also usually cook a pile of food on Friday evening, because I can usually leave work earlier on Fridays, get home, train, and still have time left over to cook. What I make on Friday will last me through until Sunday night, and then the cycle will repeat over again from Monday. I usually order my shopping online and have it home-delivered, because I don’t have the time (or the energy) to drag myself to a supermarket once a week, and I don’t want to have to carry heavy shopping bags home.

There are a lot of foods I would love to eat, but I don’t. My diet, as with my training, and any decision about anything I do, is based on the premise of “will it benefit my training?” If it won’t benefit my training, I won’t eat it. As an example, one morning I came down for breakfast, and there were two massive apple cakes sitting on the bench. They had obviously been made the night before. I could probably have demolished both of them for breakfast. But it wouldn’t have done me any good. I’m stressing my body hard on a daily basis, really pushing it, and it needs good fuel for energy, for recovery, and to stay healthy.

I learned this lesson at university, when I first started to become a reasonably good runner. I used to go to the track on Sunday mornings and do a tough interval session. One particular morning, I was doing 14 x 400m. The night before, I had eaten pizza. Pizza isn’t the world’s worst food, but it certainly isn’t athlete food. I expected to rip through the 400s. It turned out that my times slipped and slipped, I felt awful, with no energy, no ability to run like I normally could, and I eventually ran completely out of steam after 8 repeats. It was pathetic. I trudged off the track in a dark mood with my tail well and truly between my legs. But it was a good lesson, that eating (and drinking) well is essential.

I try to drink about 5 litres of fluid per day. It’s really important to keep hydrated. It helps with recovery, and helps the body fight off illness. It’s important to replace sweat that’s lost. It’s possible to lose over a kilogram of sweat on a tough training ride, and it needs to be replaced. So I force myself to drink lots. The downside is that I always need to go to the toilet, and I always have to get up in the night to go. Ideally I’d have over 8 hours of unbroken sleep per night, but I also ideally need to stay hydrated…

I’ve found that when training, I can usually do around 70-80 minutes without needing much liquid or energy gels/bars. When training for anything longer than this time, I’ve found it’s important to be eating and drinking from the start. My long days will end up being 5 or 6 hours later in the year, and the race itself will take up to 10 hours.  I’ve found little point in waiting an hour to start eating and drinking during these long training sessions, because by then it’s too late. So, for my long sessions, I’ll be eating and drinking constantly, taking small gulps of liquid every 5 minutes, and taking on an energy gel or bar every 30 minutes. After my long training sessions, when I'm taking gels and electrolyte drinks, I will try to clean my teeth straight away. The gels are like sugary glue, and my dentist was very alarmed when he asked me if I took them and I said yes. Still, no fillings as yet! I always find it amusing to go into a bike shop and buy all of the gels and bars they have on display. What’s below will last me 2 or 3 weeks:

 

At Ironman UK in 2011, I tried to rip one of these gels open and ripped the sachet too much, so the gel went all over my fingers and hand. I'm not exaggerating when I say my fingers stuck together, and ended up stuck to the handlebars. It was an effort to free them, and the problem persisted for the rest of the day. It would have taken hot water, soap and a towel to properly solve the problem, none of which are in abundant supply on an Ironman course...

One aspect of Ironman training that I find particularly tough is avoiding illness, particularly in the winter. I have a long commute, and have no choice but to sit on a packed, hot, sweaty and frankly disgusting commuter train for far too long every day. I wince at every cough and splutter, whether on the train or in the office. It’s tough to know I put so much effort into this, and that I could catch a bug very easily, which from past experience would set me back around 4-5 weeks. So, as well as having a really rigorously healthy diet, I also take a lot of dietary supplements.

I take a multivitamin/mineral tablet, a vitamin C tablet, and a vitamin D tablet every day. The multivitamins and minerals are useful for general health and dietary supplementation. The vitamin C supposedly helps the body fight off the common cold. I also eat two oranges a day for this reason. The body produces vitamin D when exposed to sunlight, but thinking carefully about this, I rarely see any sunlight. In the winter, it’s dark when I get to work, and it’s dark when I leave work, and during the daylight hours there is rarely any sun anyway. During the summer the sunlight levels are a bit better, but the fact remains that for 5 days out of 7, I’m in the office. So I take a vitamin D tablet. I take a calcium/magnesium/zinc tablet to help my muscles. I take acai and echinacea for general health and immune system benefits. I also take a cod liver oil tablet to help my joints stay loose. Finally, I take a glutamine drink and a protein milkshake every day to help with muscle recovery and repair.


I also take garlic and chilli with my dinner. When I first started to train for Ironmans, I was teaching English in South Korea. I was eating a lot of (really nice) spicy food. I think the spicy food helps to burn off any germs or infections. In almost a year in Korea, teaching young kids who were frequently snotty and spluttery, I only got sick once, and this was during the Christmas holidays when I wasn't even teaching. So I'm convinced that the spicy food diet helped, and to this day I have chilli and garlic in the cupboard.

Dietary supplements

Do they work? Well, they don’t make me feel like some sort of a superman in terms of fitness levels, but I think there is some benefit in taking them. I started to take them early in the New Year in 2013, ironically when I was suffering from the flu. Since then, I haven’t been sick once, and it looks like I have made it through this winter without picking up a cold or a flu bug. I came off all of these supplements, cold turkey, for a few weeks after Ironman Wales last year, and I felt terrible. It was a fairly big come-down, and I wasn’t training much, or eating a rigorous diet, all of which combined to be a shock to the system. Stopping taking all of the supplements without giving my body any warning probably wasn’t a great idea.

Anyway, I’ll continue to take the supplements because I feel there is more benefit to taking them than not taking them. I would be uncomfortable with the thought of having to take them indefinitely and becoming reliant on them, and I would wonder about the long-term effects on my body, but I know it’s only short-term. However, the benefits of the supplements and healthy diet are helped massively by having sufficient sleep, and I strive to be in bed for 8 hours per night during the week. At weekends, it’s more like 11 hours per night. I’ll always wake up hungry and I’ll go and eat a good breakfast and tackle another day...

Training this week was as follows:

Monday 17th March: Rest
Tuesday 18th March: 70 minute turbo (1 hour hard), 20 minute run
Wed 19th March: 70 minute turbo (30 x 1 minute hard, 1 minute easy), 20 minute run
Thurs 20th March: Rest
Friday 21st March: Swim 2.5km (with 5 x 400m in 6 minutes, 40 second recovery), 1 hour turbo (single leg drills: 5 x 4 minutes on each leg and 4 minutes with both)
Saturday 22nd March: 3 hour bike, 30 minute run
Sunday 23rd March: Swim 4km, 85 minute run

Totals: Swim 6.5km, Bike 115 miles, Run 21 miles