To The Finish Line

I first met Chrissie in 2006 and, soon after, she approached me for advice on her daily diet and race-day nutrition. We were (and still are) both members of the Birmingham Running and Triathlon (BRAT) Club; she was preparing for the World Age Group Championship in Lausanne and I was working as a Professor of Exercise Metabolism at the University of Birmingham.

Even as a rookie age grouper, Chrissie realised the importance of nutrition and had read around the subject. We looked at her diet over a typical week, as well as what she had consumed in the few races she had undertaken, in order to develop a strategy that would optimise her performance and her overall health.

On the whole, her daily diet was good. However, I knew that with a few tweaks we could make it even better. She was a creature of habit, and tended to eat the same foods day in and day out. I suggested that she varied her diet a little more, including incorporating more complex, less refined carbohydrates such as spelt, quinoa and buckwheat, and choosing sources of protein other than her default option of chicken and fish… such as tofu, eggs, nuts and tempeh.

Chrissie had previously suffered from an eating disorder and still had a tendency to limit her intake of all kinds of fats, and so my advice was for her to increase her consumption of this vital food group, through foods such as coconut, olive, hemp and rapeseed oils, dark chocolate, avocado, cheese, nuts and seeds. Essentially, we had to break old habits and her ingrained food phobias.

Over recent years there has been considerable discussion around low carbohydrate diets, with proponents suggesting that such diets enable the body to become increasingly efficient at fat burning. This is then advertised as a positive effect. The evidence would suggest otherwise: although an improvement in fat burning can be observed by depriving the body of carbohydrate, at the same time it also de-trains the body to use carbohydrate and this is an unwanted side effect. Therefore, I advise athletes to utilise carbohydrates strategically and select different amounts and types of carbohydrates depending on the need. For example, in order to train fat burning, you use longer training sessions with limited carbohydrate intake to force the body to use fats and over time the capacity to use fat will improve. One or two days per week of lower carbohydrate intake and little or no carbohydrate during training will do the trick.

However, conversely there are sessions or days when a higher carbohydrate intake is required; for example, to enable an athlete to maintain a higher quality of training, facilitate recovery and, importantly, practise a race nutrition strategy.

I have to stress that foods are not “good” or “bad.” It is a case of consuming them at the right times and in the right quantities. If used correctly, there is a time and a place for ingesting more refined sugars, for example during a high intensity or long training session or in a race. However, if used excessively they can lead to a variety of health problems and declining performance.

Chrissie kept improving her daily diet by making small tweaks and monitoring her performance and health indicators; for example, her times/effort levels, her recovery, her sleep, her mood and markers such as iron, calcium and vitamin D which were assessed in routine blood tests.

Race weight

Many athletes also come to me to discuss “race weight,” and specifically how they can determine and then maintain this. It is more common for such athletes to want to lose weight and in such cases I recommend that this be done gradually, rather than through crash diets that can deprive the body of essential nutrients and cause long-term problems, such as reduction in lean muscle, future weight gain and reduced immunity. Although Chrissie tended to gain a few kilograms in the off-season, she tried to maintain the same weight, rather than yo-yoing too much, for the rest of the year. For her, losing weight was never a major issue. The body fat she started with was already very low and as she trained harder towards important competitions, this brought her lean body mass down even more. In Chrissie’s case, my concern was more about making sure she had enough to sustain the training she was doing.

Insight