Who Knew Food was Important
Training has been going steady over the last couple of weeks. The weather has improved ever so slightly, which has meant more outdoor rides and less time on the turbo trainer. Swimming pools are unfortunately still closed but I’m hopeful they will be open soon. On the plus side, I have recently gained access to gym equipment and a rowing machine. This means my strength and conditioning sessions have become more productive.
My Saturday long rides are now at three and half hours long and I’m really enjoying most of them. I have done one or two with sore legs, making them a bit of a slog, but on the whole I’m really enjoying the rides. With the weather being a bit kinder, I able to take in the scenery and just enjoy myself. I am training in the same place as when I trained for Hamburg Ironman in 2019 and I am currently covering a lot of the same routes. My aim in the next month or so, is to find some new routes and do a bit of exploring. I have the Mourne Mountains about an hour drive from me and I hope to be able to do some exploring over the hills there.
As the swimming pools have been closed, I have been substituting the swims with a run and a bike every week. I now have access to a rowing machine and I am going to substitute the swims with a row. My aim is to try and mimic the swim sessions on the rower as best I can. The theory here is, it’ll give some of the muscles I use on the bike and run a rest and it’ll work my cardiovascular system in a slightly different way. I hope it will also mix up the sessions a bit more and hold off any boredom that might set in.
Another positive result I have had over the last month or so, is the impact of good food. If you have read my older blogs, you will know that at the beginning of the year I had to work away and ate a lot of takeaway food. Not a great diet for, someone training for an Ironman. I am now back on healthier food and the results are impressive. I feel like I have more energy, I am more awake, I have lost the extra kilograms I put on while I was away and I feel stronger.
During the first lockdown in March 2020, I had decided I had put on too much weight and wanted to do something about it. I was the heaviest I had been in years at 92kg and that doesn’t sit right with me. I listen to a pod cast by Dr Chatterjee called, Feel Better Live More. Specifically, I was listening to pod cast number #29 with Amelia Freer. She had some simple tips for healthy eating and the way I understood it, I should, stop eating sugar, eat far less bread and pasta and don’t eat processed foods. She has a book out which, I read that gives far more details:
After reading the book and listening to the pod cast, I really wanted to try the new life style. I did not want this to be a new diet, it wasn’t, diets don’t work, they imply there is an end at which you can start eating what you ate before. That just defeats the object, I wanted this to be a life change and it was, I am still eating in the same style now. I cut out sugar and milk in my coffee, I stopped eating bread and pasta and I mostly eat whole foods.
I do still eat meat but instead of the meat being the main ingredient, it has no more importance than what is on the rest of the plate. There are some meals I don’t have any meat at all. I have realised it the nutrients that are important and high nutrient to calorie ratio is very important. This is especially true for someone like me who is training 12+ hours per week. Nutrients help maintain my stamina and strength as well as helping recovery. Meat is very low in nutrients but very high in calories, this is not ideal and there are much better alternatives. That being said, I do like meat and I will continue to eat it.
Since march 2020 when I weighed in at 92kg, I have been living this life style and I now consistently weigh 80kg. This goes up and down slightly, depending on the amount of training I am doing. However, I lost the majority of this weight without extra training, I just changed the way I ate, did the same training and the weight simply dropped off. I use to think food had very little to do with weight loss and it was how much you trained; how wrong I was.
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