Why what you are eating is making you SLOW!

I got the question again a week ago, “What should I eat?” I have written about how I approach this question before on a posted I titled: Why the farmer’s market is a triathlete’s best friend.

There are different responses to the way I handle this question, but here are the four general responses I get:

1. Just tell me what to eat and when to eat it and I’ll do it!  My response:  Well,  I am not a registered dietician so creating meal plans is out of my scope of practice and isn’t something I do.  I think a good place to start would be to assess where you are at and we can begin to make small changes to improve your diet.  While I understand you don’t want to have to put any thought into what you are eating and don’t want to make any decisions about your food, maybe that’s a sign of some psychological/behavioral changes we need to address first?

If you are interested in a structured meal plan to get started, then we can seek some advice from a dietician and begin working with them.  But we need to make sure they understand the demands and nutritional needs you’ll have to support your training.

2. I don’t eat vegetables, I can eat some fruit and I limit the amount of meat I eat. My response:  What do you eat?  Are you willing to try eating real foods and varying your diet?  Can you find time to make your own meals?

3.  I don’t really need help with my regular diet, just tell me what sports drink and sports nutrition I need to use before and after every workout. My response: This depends on a lot of factors.  For example, what part of your season are you in?  Are you doing off season training (which in late September many of us are) that doesn’t require a whole lot of extra caloric intake.  Or, are you in the middle of your specific preparation period that requires you to be diligent about your caloric intake while training and post workout recovery nutrition?

4.  Can’t I just workout a little more so I can eat what I want? That’s not the way it works!  Bob Seebohar has said it best when he said, “Eat to Train, Don’t Train to Eat”.  We want to create healthy eating patterns not a disordered relationship with food that we justify because we are training 8, 10, 20 or 30 hours a week.

How do I know these responses are slowing people down:

If you would walk around an Ironman race, it is interesting to see the different body types that are taking part in the event.  It doesn’t have to be an Ironman; it could be the local 5k, marathon or sprint distance triathlon.  I never get into the business of guessing how well a person will do at an endurance event based on what they look like, because I’ve seen many runners and triathletes have amazing performances that “don’t look the part”.  (I have an excellent story to tell about my first marathon, but will save it for another day).

But what puzzles me at times is how someone can be so obsessed about making the right equipment decisions, getting in all the right workouts at the proper intensities, yet they are limited in their ability to manage food and eating choices that would propel them from the back of the pack to the middle of the pack or even further.

There are several reasons that I think making these nutritional choices are harder than making the training decisions:

1. Marketing — we are sold the “magic” pill every day as athletes when it comes to sports nutrition products.  Use this product to increase your endurance, that product to hydrated more optimally or this substance to recover faster.  I see people that wouldn’t eat a Snickers bar in a million years take two Snickers Marathon bars on bike rides with them “because they work.”

Let me be clear, I’m not against the proper use of sports nutrition products!  Nikki and I have a bunch of Infinit nutrition products and egel’s left over from the pre Ironman Louisville training.  But the products need to support your training, not increase your positive caloric balance for no reason.

2.  We are told we work hard and can “afford” it.  Here’s a confession, my personal nutrition this past year has been a mess!  If it wasn’t for Nikki’s hard work and our CSA membership, I would probably live off of packaged meals and soda.  The interesting thing for me is that when I start to discuss with my clients about how I’m struggling with eating well, they always say:

Well, you can afford it with all the exercise you do.

Not true!  Not only is that not true from a weight management perspective, but it is especially not true from a long-term health perspective.  And the reality for most of us non-Elite age group athletes is that we are doing this to have fun and be healthy.  Eating 2 pounds of sugar a week is not healthy, no matter how much you exercise!

So how do I know that people are who are responding in one of the four ways mentioned above are slower than they probably could be?  Because their responses show me that they are not taking full responsibility for their eating habits.  And without a full investment into their daily nutritional needs, in addition to their training nutritional requirements, my guess is that they are carrying around a few pounds of excess body fat that is causing them to be slower on race day.

Did my nutritional habits this past year slow me down? I think they did.  I haven’t had my body fat tested in a few years, but my guess is that even though my weight is a few pounds heavier, I’m likely carrying 8 pounds of additional body fat and have lost a few pounds of muscle.  Despite my regular injury prevention work in the studio, I’m as weak as I’ve been since 2005.

Triathlon is a body weight to power sport!

Prior to Ironman Louisville I was riding with a power tap built into a pair of Zipp 404′s.  The use of power lead to several conversations regarding the bike course in Louisville and our debate about whether IMLouisville was a absolute watt or a watts/kg course.

I believe it was in the book, Lance Armstrong’s War, where the author (Coyle) discussed a test that Lance did prior to the Tour de France to know how fit he was leading up to the race.  The test was essentially a graded exercise test that he did on a hill climb (on some island, somewhere).  He knew he was fit and ready if he hit a specific watts/kg ratio at his lactate threshold. (If I remember correctly it was 6.7 watts/kg?)

The concept of improving your watts/kg ratio is something that is discussed a lot in cycling.  One thing that influences that is the exponential growth in age groupers using power devices on the bike.  But this concept is not isolated to cycling.

Does power to weight ratio matter in running?

This answer may not be quite as obvious because we don’t have simple tools  that measure power output on the run, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a  relationship in run performance.  One of the most obvious ways to logically think this through is to think about one of the quickest ways to get faster on the run – lose weight!

You don’t have to do a scientific study to start and view patterns of body type among elite runners.  They are lean!  I just read a very interesting article that discussed the relationship between body weight and running speed titled,  The Holy Grail in Speed Training written by Barry Ross.  Ross was the high school coach of Allyson Felix when she broke Marion Jones’ high school 200 meter record and ran the fastest 200 meters in the world that year.  Here’s one of the most interesting statements he makes in the article:

What they found was the Holy Grail to faster running speed. The old equation was still partially correct, but incomplete. It was missing the most important element – the Bodyweight.

(Sidenote: if you read the article, then there is a discussion we could have about how to improve the power and strength side of the equation, but for now we are discussing the body weight factor.  Power discussion will come later)

In triathlon, I personally believe this is where we see many of the poor nutritional choices – during the run.  The absolute power that some of the bigger guys possess allow them to overcome that extra body weight on the bike (at least appear to make up for it), but late in the run when fatigue begins to set in and the power output begins to fall, that power/body weight ratio really starts to slow the athlete down.  And when the fatigue really sets in, it is game over and it becomes survival, not racing.

There is a very interesting discussion regarding body weight and Ironman performance over at Endurance Corner.  The podcast was an interview with Chris McDonald, where they discuss the trend about how Ironman was being dominated by “Big guys racing small”.  That was something I was surprised to witness when McDonald won Ironman Louisville in it’s first year and I got to be at the finish line – He was much bigger than I expected.  If you listen to the whole podcast, a little later in the discussion Chris talks about the balance between size and strength and how he was dealing with it.

Eating Healthy does equate to eating for performance!

I’m going to say it again – your first nutritional decisions should be made to eat a healthy diet.  Once you start changing your food choices over to consuming more vegetables, fruits, quality meats and healthy fats – then you can start to look at the more “complicated” nutritional needs.

Here’s another piece of advice for beginner’s:  If your diet is disordered and full of processed foods, sugars and lacking in the above mentioned foods, then I suggest that you SLOWLY build into your training program.  As someone who is new to an exercise program, if you start to add in too many workouts or add too much intensity, it will make changing your nutritional habits even more difficult.

In a sport that partially depends upon your power/body weight ratio for success, the quickest way to become a FASTER Triathlete is to clean up your nutrition and lose that excess body fat.

Eat Healthy = Get Fast!

Some Extra Resources:

The Paleo Diet for Athletes: A Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance – by Loren Cordain and Joe Friel

Nutrition Periodization for Endurance Athletes: Taking Traditional Sports Nutrition to the Next Level -  by Bob Seebohar

Nutritional Videos on STACK TV – by Bob Seebohar

Team First Endurance Blog – it’s a product company and while I don’t use their products, there’s some good info here

The ZoneDiet’s – ZoneCompete – again a company with something to sale, but good info

Mark’s Daily Apple – an interesting blog written by Mark Sission, a former elite runner and triathlete. The blog contains a lot of information on living a more “primal lifestyle” with nutritional, fitness and health discussions.