Training in the Era of Covid-19

Our host Dr Judith Bryans chats to three-time gold medal winning Olympian Ed Clancy - ahead of his fourth bid for a gold at the Tokyo Olympics, and is also joined by expert sports nutritionist Wendy Martinson OBE - who is the lead nutritionist for the GB rowing team. 

The trio chat all things dairy, diet and nutrition, as well as how some of the nations top athletes coped with lockdown and the cancellation of major sporting events - and how this effected their mentality and training. 

Transcript

Judith Bryans: Welcome to dairy in discussion 

Judith Bryans: As the start of the Tokyo Olympic Games is fast approaching, have you ever wondered what's going on in the minds of our Olympic athletes during lockdown? The effect it had on their mental health, their physical health? Have they changed the way they train or what they eat, did they give into the banana bread and dalgona coffee craze like so many other people in the nation or did they stay on track? 

Judith Bryans: Well today I'm going to try and get answers to those questions and more, in discussion with two very special guests. I have with me today Ed Clancy OBE, well known as one of the most successful team pursuit cyclists in history, having won gold with team GB at 3 successive Olympic Games and Wendy Martinson OBE -lead nutritionist for the Great Britain rowing team and lead performance nutritionist and intensive rehabilitation nutritionist for the English Institute of Sport. Welcome to the podcast. 

Judith Bryans: Ed if I can start with you. So you won your first gold in team pursuit at the Beijing Olympics in 2008; your second gold in team pursuit in the London Olympics in 2012 and an historic third gold medal in the team pursuit of the Rio Olympics in 2016. Soon you’ll be heading to Tokyo for your fourth and final Olympics and hopefully another gold. So let me start by asking you this: how did you feel last year when lockdown started and when the Olympic games were postponed? 

Ed Clancy: Probably the same way that almost everyone did, I dare say wasn't something unique to sports people, we are probably a little bit more in the press than most but I think almost everyone's had the life affected in some way or another, and we can all relate to just the goalposts moving. Unless you had some sort of crystal ball that I didn't have, nobody saw it coming and everybody's lives has got turned upside down. We all love to make a plan it's very much human nature; we like to know where we going and what we doing, and unless you’re very good at mind management I think a lot of people are always thinking about what’s next and where they want to be or what house you want to live in, or where's the next job. I guess Olympians are the same, you know for me I had a nice little game plan - I was going to do my fourth and final Olympics like you said and you no matter if we won lost or had a draw, that was going to be it for me and I was gonna walk out. 

So the Goalposts moved, and it takes me back to a conversation I had with Dr Steve Peters who was the psychologist at British Cycling a long, long time ago. He sat me down when I was a young cyclist and told me the 3 facts of life, like a movie scene. He said: the goalposts move, there’s no guarantees and life's unfair. Things like that sprung to mind you know when the Olympics was cancelled last year. 

Yeah it's all good, you know, it's looking pretty positive the moment so fingers crossed for this year. 

Judith Bryans: So what did you do in that initial phase where you weren’t sure if it's going to be postponed? And then it was postponed. What did you do with your training? I mean, did you turn to chocolate and banana bread? Did you say: no, I'm staying on track here - how did your training and your diet change?

Ed Clancy: You know what I think everyone took a bit of a different approach towards everything, like a whole lifestyle approach. Some of the younger athletes - in my team at least - used it as a great opportunity to just gun-ho, and whatever they felt like their weakness was at that point in time said: I'm gonna do loads of strength in the gym or going to loads of Endurance on the road and I'm going to 30 hours a week. 

I did the opposite. I was already 35 years old have been doing it full-time for 17/18 years and it was a fairly big blow to be honest. I kind of figured that if I'm going to make it there in another 16 months time the best thing I could do was to take my foot off the gas, kick back and sort out everything non cycling related in my life. Like housekeeping and accounting stuff, catching up with friends and family that have been neglected. You couldn't see anyone in person but it didn't stop me sort of like having video messages voice calls with auntie's, cousin's, my brother's kids and things like that. It’s easy to neglect when you're so focused on your job and so I tried to do all that sort of stuff. Then in 2021 when the Olympics was indeed gonna happen, I was in a good place to sort like start going again. 

In terms of nutrition I cannot take the same approach, you can never go too far from the truth you've still got to have a good balanced diet and you've got to watch what you’re eating and still be training. Don’t get me wrong I was still doing 20 hours a week but I didn't have that same song ruthless focus that you would you know now in their weeks and months preceding a bigger than in terms of specific athletic event. I was still getting my porridge in the morning, still had a balanced diet, still trying to take my five fruit and veg a day and things like that but I wouldn't feel guilty about having a beer in the evening or whatever or having the burger and chips once a week or anything like that. I just needed to do something that at that time was sustainable and week, it gave me the mental ability to go out again 100% with 6 months to go. 

Judith Bryans: It’s really interesting that you say that you have phone calls with your auntie's and connected with people. I think last year we all discovered just how much human connection was important to us, and what we were missing by potentially not having that. Obviously in team pursuit you would I guess have a close relationship with your teammates so how did you manage to keep connection with them? 

Ed Clancy: Team pursuit has been my event over the last decade or so and I just love the teamwork and camaraderie. But I'm not like a massive extravert, I don't crave human company 24/7 - but I did miss my teammates more than ever imagined and it was hard train on my own.  I'm sure Wendy will have the same thing in rowing - there's a big sort of team aspect to support - face-to-face conversations with coaches and physiotherapists. I miss being on camp but before I was fed up with packing my suitcase and going to Manchester Airport and getting a flight to Majorca, Portugal, France for a road race competition. The GB lads hated it you know I despise packing my suitcase. But yeah, I did keep in touch with the boys and you know WhatsApp to great thing for video calls and things like that. We still haven't managed to a camp abroad but we were in the Peak District in Belper last week for a couple of weeks doing a road camp and it just makes life so much better when you're surrounded by the team. Yeah I'm glad things are starting to get back to normal. 

Judith Bryans: You mentioned you were doing your 20 hours of training week, what did you do? I mean the very basic level what did you do - did you go out and train on the road? Did you go on the track? 

Ed Clancy: Yeah so I was quite fortunate I think. I’m a track cyclist in the Great Britain cycling team and people think we riders just train around the velodrome in Manchester every day but the truth is 85% of our training is done on the road. For a track endurance ride you go off and road race and you do all your hard work on the road, you do some more specific things on the static bike in the garage and just stare at the back of the shed door and do all the hard work there. Then you take your foot off the gas in you coming back to the track fresh and ready to go and then nail down some real specifics and you nail down the technical stuff. Really all the hard work is done in the garage or on the road so from that point of view we are all right, we could train. 

I went out on the mountain bike and that’s one thing I did do differently - it was a chance to me to take my foot off the gas and not be so ruthlessly focused and a lot of time when we go on our road bikes these days we've got this little black box on the front about bike that records our heart rate and we have strain gauges and cranks so the bike can record the power and the speed in the altitude to see what the correlation between your heart rate and your power racing is and see how you are. By the time you've got back from your ride this little black box in your bike has download all this information and the coach has got it within your 30 seconds of you finishing. The thing I'm getting at is that is you are always sort of monitored, there's always somebody watching what you are doing, monitoring your progress, how hard are you going, how successful was that block of intervals - and I got away from that. I just rode around my road bike with nothing other than basically a sundial to train - I did the same on the mountain bike there's no power Cranks, has no heart rate monitor, I just rode my bike. It was the way I was coping with it mentally, and despite being a 35-year old man I just enjoy riding my bike and getting the mountain bike out and having a play in the woods. I enjoyed it, I needed that and you know I dare say I might’ve only been 80% fit but that's all we needed to be at that point in time when there's absolutely zero racing going on. 

Judith Bryans: Not that I would ever wish it on you Ed, but if you were to come off your mountain bike and needed physio - did you still have access to all of those team GB services like a nutritionist or physio? 

Ed Clancy: The physio is interesting, so we've all become incredibly familiar with zoom haven't we over the last year and it works well for most applications with the coach or the psychologist, that works 90% as well as sitting in front of them face-to-face. But the physio is the one thing that we couldn't really hold over zoom, and I think it's probably more important than others. 

In 2015 I had not an inconsiderable operation on my back on my disc, within British Cycling there’s a physio called Hannah that's pretty much been my go-to person to kind of keep me going on the bike. Thinking back to Rio, Hannah was the number one person in my life in terms of getting that gold medal. At that point in time she was more important than the coach, the psychologist or any of that. For a long time we couldn't see Hannah and that was difficult you now, and it's not like you could go to a local physiotherapist or anything like that you just started managing to roll around on a cricket ball thing to try and ease your glutes and things like that. Despite best efforts in phone calls and in video calls it hasn’t been the same so I did struggle without the physio that's the one thing I really did miss. 

Judith Bryans: If we remember the run up to Rio, many commentators when the races were coming up were talking a lot about your back injury - so you must have been really pleased to come back from that and win that gold. Was it particularly significant because you come back from that injury? 

Ed Clancy: Yeah big time, yeah absolutely. In terms of the Olympics my favourite one by far really was Rio. If I rewind back to Beijing I always think you remember your first, and all that you have to go there is a 23-year old with his best mate Darren looking to get an Olympic medal. Looking back we were too young and stupid appreciate what we achieved and you know at that point in British cycling we had a quite significant head start on a lot of the other teams to be honest, and I think that point we already operated on quite a high level. 

It is never easy win an Olympic gold medal and I don’t want to belittle the achievement, but it was easier in terms of how rewarding it was. And then 4 years later we had the huge expectation of the Olympics, more than in London you know, and we didn't win an awful lot between Beijing and London. We did get it right in the last 18 months - everything came together and it was an amazing experience in terms of the profile of the sport and I just suppose around the whole country will never have anything like London again. So you know that was special but yeah, really both of them just because it was hard work and we really went through the mill to be honest you know when we had that back problem. By London I had a mortgage and dependence and there was an awful lot resting on that. British Cycling hasn't always had the best reputation for being supportive even looking after their assets, but I've gotta say that they always stood by me, and I was glad I was able to repay them in the end.  

Judith Bryans: So on a slightly more frivolous note, we’ve just met Boris, your cat. If he had to give you a score on how you coped during lockdown? 

Ed Clancy: I think he’d give me a 10/10 he was loving it out home all the time, at least I like to think so anyway. Though at times we struggled to be honest, I think initially we did quite well and then about the time of June, July the reality hit home this wasn't just gonna come and go and you know it wasn't going to be alright anytime soon. We struggled then, it was just different you know, I think again humans are resistant to change as well and there was a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty. 

Sports has taken a big hit from coronavirus, there is no doubt about it, you know. The sponsorship opportunities dried up quick, every single continental British-based continental Road team was liquidated within months - the change was not all that bad, but there was a lot of change going on and I did struggle to get my head around that between June, July and August. I started question whether it was time to just throw the towel when they announced that there was hopefully going to be an Olympics 12 months later, I don't know if my time had come and if I still had the want and the need to keep going. I was speaking to a lot of people - friends, family, teammates, ex-teammates that had retired and so on, and can I got their experience of retirement. Yeah, I guess I thought went around the houses for a long time and it took me awhile to find out what I really wanted to do, which was to crack on and continue. 

Judith Bryans: I think you're reflecting the humanity of the whole country there, where people across all walks of life had challenges and had to dig deep, but for most people there is no hard and fast deadline of an Olympic Games coming up! So I appreciate that was probably a big difference for you guys in that sense. But I think we’ve got to remember that Olympians - even though they appear superhuman - are all human beings just like us. 

So if I can ask you Ed about your diet - you mentioned earlier making porridge, do you have that porridge with dairy, do you eat dairy products?  

Ed Clancy: Yeah I do, I probably have at least a pint of milk a day. Protein yoghurts are a staple part of my diet every day. I'll start the day with porridge or cereal and then depending on how bright I want to burn for the efforts, you know - whether I want something slow burning in my stomach for a longer ride, or something to kind of like a bonfire. But yeah, I do enjoy my milk. 

Thinking back the best example using dairy was in 2017 - and I don’t know if this is something Wendy can explain a bit. But in 2017, despite the fact I was just 32/33 years old, and I thought I was quite a healthy dude, I had gout and I’ve never experienced anything like it. 

I woke up in the morning and my knee was that sore - just the weight of the blood in it when I stood up was almost unbearable. But I crawled into my van and drove to the track. First it was kind of diagnosed as a knee infection because I had crashed my bike a couple of weeks prior, and anyway long story short, after a few blood tests and a lot of head scratching we did indeed have gout. From mid-2017 I had to go one a low purine diet right, so you add stay away from certain fish, red meat or white meat was also pretty high in purines and had to get rid of this uric acid stuff which is what causes it. The doctor told me that it wasn't uncommon in endurance athletes when you're worn down but from that point onwards I had a lot of dairy in my diet and pretty much finished off 2017 using cheese, milk and protein yoghurts to try and get protein. 

Judith Bryans: So did you have a Wendy who was helping you through all of this?

Ed Clancy: Kath was our performance nutritionist at British Cycling - she's just left as it happens actually - she's been working with the docs for the last five years and she built me a diet that wouldn't in theory give me gout again. Because within quite short space of time I had it in my knee, in both my elbows - it was all kicking off and we need to do something about it.

I tell you what I've had a few injuries and have crashed in my time of being a cyclist, but gout was as bad as it got it was ridiculous. 

Judith Bryans: That sounds like a painful one! Well I'm glad the dairy products helped you out

Ed Clancy: Yeah in terms of nutrition, we’ve got a nutritionist on hand, and like I said we've just been away in Belper for the last 2-weeks doing a training camp there and the great thing about the training camps is you've always got a chef on site that makes a wonderfully balanced meals and there’s no cooking and cleaning involved. We can just concentrate on sleeping and training. 

Judith Bryans: So maybe Wendy if I can come to you now, because you've got long history in terms of helping athletes deal with their nutrition both pre-games and during the Olympic games. 

I know that you've been to both the Beijing games and the London Games with the British rowing team, looking after their nutritional needs before and during games. I think you were involved in Rio as well  - can you tell us a little bit about what that's like helping athletes and then being at the Olympics with them, helping them with their diets?

Wendy Martinson: Yeah, I was in Rio as well and pre-Rio - so Tokyo will be my fifth games. As Ed said every games is very unique. When you’re prepping athletes for a games, you’ve got your normal training camps when they happen - not that they happened last year. You look at all the adaptations you want the athletes to achieve and how nutrition can support that during the training camps and what the goals of the training camps are. 

Then you tend to look at what the challenges are going to be at the individual games. Tokyo heat and humidity is going to be a big challenge and lots of challenges around the bubble we’ll have to be in and nipping out to supermarkets. But the type of food you can get in the village and usually there’s a big catering company for that. Usually there’s just about anything you could ever want in the village. I’m sure Ed’s got experience of going to Village dining - there’s almost too much choice sometimes, and then how do you control what you eat. A lot of the prep might be around education with athletes, especially if it's their first games. How they can be best prepared and what things they might want to take out, your normal comfort foods and everyone has a food they like to race on for example. So they might want to take out foods personal to that. Then the focus is really around things like jet lag which affects athletes, which in Tokyo may well be an impact due to 8 hour time difference. Then gut health and immunity, staying well during travel. So you’ve all that to think about as well as the normal prep for that sort of competition. 

Judith Bryans: Have you ever found yourself at an Olympic games where, you know, maybe there haven't been enough comfort or specific foods that you wanted, and that you’ve had to go out and track them down?

Wendy Martinson: Oh for sure. I remember Bejing was a good example. I was staying in a hotel based with rowing and some other sports as well. We had an athletes lounge and in that athletes lounge we basically stocked it with foods from a store that we found - team GB had found - that sold English/American type foods, like cereal bars. Milkshakes featured heavily at those games, I hasten to add. So we did buy foods from this western supermarket that they were used to eating and that they could snack on between meals.

Some of the food you get you didn’t always plan on, you might have a perfect menu but when it comes out the kitchen it’s not always quite what you expect. It’s always the same with any games if you're outside the village. But we tried to get food they were used to, and athletes are used to taking foods they see as comfort foods. I’m sure Ed, you pack your favourite foods when you’re going away on camps and you’re not sure if you’re not going to be able to get them and there’s always a stock in athletes rooms of their favorite sorts of foods. 

Judith Bryans: I’m really interested - you have a fascinating job that must be quite complicated, as you’re catering to individual nutritional needs, catering to for them pre event, and then there's obviously the event. Then if there's multiple events, you have to get somebody back on track for the next event. So how do you do that from the logistics space, do you have really clear plans which as you say sometimes can go off the road. What do you need to do, do you have to go around lots of food, some of it will be time sensitive. I mean how do you manage it Wendy? 

Wendy Martinson: ((24:24)) I think when we’re planning performance dining, as we call it these days, when we’re planning menus - especially at an Olympics, for example for Tokyo in the prep camp where I'll be to start with. We’ll have a lot of sports passing through that camp - 20 plus sports. You have to have a feel for what those sports need and cater for that in menu planning. 

That’l;l mean speaking to nutritionists in those sports to see if there’s anything particular we need for those sports.

The menus are pretty varied and the three of us involved are pretty experienced. Picking through the menus, if we’ve forgotten something - which I'd be surprised about because we’d have been over it upteen times- but if something’s not on there it usually means we can't get it.  experts in those fields to see if there’s anything specific needed.  

Very wide variety of foods, and also timings. So breakfast might start at 6 for those who need it at 6 and it might go on until half 10 for those who need two breakfast - for example the rowers have two breakfast. And then we’ll have snacks in between - we have a snack station so that if an athlete comes in and have missed meals, they can get some food. There’s always going to be something available. In the village food is generally available 24/7 but outside of the village we need to try and emulate that as much as possible. Some sports will go on training camps before the games, and maybe not part of the team GB prep camp - but they’ll have their own nutritionists and menus taking into account what they need for that sport. 

Judith Bryans: At this point, when you get Tokyo - which will be very unique games, but do you have any sense of if there will be any restrictions around how many people can be in a dining facility at any one point? How you keep people apart, how you keep them healthy? Do you have any sense of that already? 

Wendy Martinson: Yeah definitely, in the village in the dining area - that’s going to come up next. We don’t yet have all the detail on the dining areas, they’re producing these playbooks with all the rules and restrictions which we’ll have to follow. We’ll get a bit more information then about what’ll happen in the village. 

But in terms of Team GB areas we’re already looking at that. So, the size of the dining room, if it’ll have to extend out, how many people we can have in the dining room at a time and how we’re going to stagger that. If you’ve got a high number of athletes in the prepo camp at one time, how do we operate that. So there’s a lot of consideration already been put into that/ and the menus are already pretty much done in that regard, we know we won’t be able to move around a lot, we'll be in a bubble. So we can’t just nip out to the supermarket to get things we’ve forgotten, we’ll have volunteers for that. 

But we’ve contingencies for that in place, if an athlete is desperate for something and they’ve not got it we can probably find a way around it with the volunteers we’ve got. And everyone wants to push the boundaries at the games, you want to do everything you can to support the athletes so there’s probably a way around it. 

Judith Bryans: I guess other people listening to this podcast would be interested in your perspective as a performance nutritionist in the role of dairy and what they can bring to athletes. 

I remember at a conference a very long time ago - and I’ve never really forgotten  - that you made a comment when you were on stage, that for a number of years you've been recommending dairy products to athletes as you feel that the composition would be useful to them, and now there was the science to back that up. 

So can you tell us a little bit from your perspective what is it about dairy products that are useful for athletes or any one in fact? 

Wendy Martinson: Yeah, there’s so many aspects to what makes dairy foods good. I mean, some of the key things: protein - it’s such an easy drink to have and get some protein in. Calcium - in the rowers that I work with. In any sport you can get burn injuries, and so having a good food like dairy foods which are rich in calcium and well absorbed - is critical for during injury. And you’ve got the sodium content which can be useful to replenish that lost from sweat loss. Plus its a drink in itself which helps with replenishment of fluid and hydration. Then you’ve got phosphorus, potassium, b vits - its a food packed with nutrients. We’ve got a long history in rowing with milk, we get through a lot at Caversham. For a while we had a dairy sponsor, it went through the roof then. So I would say most rowers would drink some milk every day, but like Ed said a pint a day - most of ours would drink that or more. Then also the greek-type protein yogurts feature heavily because of the concentration of protein.

We use it for recovery, hydration, adaptation to resistance training because of the protein content. We use it for calcium source to protect bones and bone injury. The list goes on. It’s still a very highly featured food in athletic diets and in sports- for performance diets. 

Judith Bryans: And it tastes good eh?

Wendy Martinson: It tastes brilliant! I’m ever so slightly biased, coming from a family of dairy farmers. But I still think it’s great. 

Judith Bryans: So I’m just wondering if either of you have questions for each other? 

Ed CLancy: Yes, definitely! I’ve  just been noting a couple down here. 

If you think about what things will look like in Tokyo - I mean for us it is going to be a bit more like a non-Olympic event for us because we're not in the Olympic village anyway. We’re over 100 miles south of Tokyo at the track, out the way, contained in our bubble in our hotel. I believe this time we're going to bring our own chef out to use the kitchen at the hotel - hopefully, you know - if rules allow. You think back to Beijing, Rio, London, like the food hall is just a busy place and it’ll be an interesting. I don't know, you probably know as much as I do, but I think people are going to end up like delivering packages of food like the doors of accommodation..

Wendy Martinson: In terms of the dining room and such?

Ed Clancy: Yeah, yeah. 

Wendy Martinson: Yeah I think- though I don’t know what the setup will be for you guys - but i think you will be able to go into the dining room. 

I do know some people have had to have food delivered to their doors on camp, but because everyone will be in their self contained bubbles and we’ll be tested daily, you would be able to go and have food in a dining room. It would be my expectation. 

I mean what we’re preparing for is athletes going into a dining room but it won’t be self service. Like it won’t be a self serve buffet where you decide on your portion. We can’t really do that because we need to be separate from the staff working at the hotel you need to stay in your bubble. So they’ll be behind a screen or something but they would serve you as opposed to you helping yourself. That’s what we’ve been planning for in the prep camp so I'd imagine it’ll be similar wherever you’re staying. 

Ed Clancy: I thinkI heard you say there that the rowers have two breakfasts?

Wendy Martinson: Yes! Everyday 

Ed Clancy: That’s great! Why? ! I feel like we’re missing out on something!  

Wendy Martinson: Yeah, you’re right really. I know you guys train really hard but the rowers get up early and do a training session at half 7 or 8, so they’ll have a small breakfast before that - like porridge. Then they’ll do a session then they come back and have a second breakfast which tends to be a bit more substantial. Like an egg, bagel, baked beans - whatever. Then they go and do a second session, come back and have lunch, then they go out and do a third session.

Ed Clancy: Wow.

Wendy Martinson: And then they might even, if they’re on a camp - the guys, sometimes the girls - would have an afternoon tea type of thing as well. You know they’re burning so many calories. 

They’re big, they’re heavyweight guys - they can be 100 kilos, the girls can be anywhere like 70-80 kilos so they need the calories. So if they don’t have the two breakfasts they won’t have the fuel. 

The problem comes when they retire and have been rowing 10-15 years, having two breakfasts, how do you get out of that habit! I have to give them a bit of a briefing, and say you don’t really need to have that many breakfasts when you don’t row three times a day. 

Ed Clancy: Yeah, I’m looking forward to having that sort of problem. I won’t even be able to fit inside the screen! 

I'm interested in that, I mean there's a lot of parallels between ourselves and the rowers. It's essentially a power sport; a lot of the distances, the same duration at least, and it’s interesting how they train.

I’ve already have worked out from this conversation that they do triple days, with triple training sessions. We think we're having a big day or a messy day if we do a double session. A a lot of the time we just out for a long period of time and we fuel up on the bike and you know. 

Wendy Martinson: Well your second breakfast is probably what you eat on the bike, in terms of calories. If you have your first breakfast before you go out, if you’re out for several hours, snacking all the time. That might end up being the equivalent of what a rower consumes in their second breakfast - though slightly different foods - you can’t really eat eggs or bagels on a bike I suppose! 

Ed Clancy: Yeah. I've got one more question -  sorry I keep banging them in I'm always interested in performance, and acutely aware at the moment that sport never stands still. You know world records keep getting faster and so on. 

I guess my question is like, is there anything - and I suspect you wouldn’t tell me even if you knew - but is there anything like new in the world of sports nutrition that’s groundbreaking or  looking like it might be groundbreaking. There are studies all the time and there's evidence and conflicting evidence and so on, but is there anything in your opinion Wendy that would be a fool to be missing out on right now? 

Wendy Martinson: I can’t think of anything brand spanking new. But I guess it’s thinking about whether you’re utilising the things we already have the evidence for.

There are certain nutritional supplements. So in rowing we might use buffers, nitrates, caffeine. You know, depending on the length - like in pursuit, how long does it take you? 

Ed Clancy: Generally just under 4 minutes, so probably 3:45 is the time that’ll be winning in Tokyo potentially. 

Wendy Martinson: So, you know - do you use buffers? 

Ed Clancy: Yeah, buffers, started using nitrates, caffeine - there’s good evidence for that. Sounds like we’re on the same sort of thing. 

Wendy Martinson: Yeah, sounds like yours is a slightly shorter event. Rowing is like 5 and a half 6 minutes.

Judith Bryans: So Wendy, did you have any questions for Ed?

Wendy Martinson: Yes, I do actually. So tell me Ed, what’re your cooking skills like? Do you like cooking? 

Ed Clancy: I tell you what Wendy, I’m terrible. I struggle with it to be honest, I think I'm just not interested in it. I just do it because I see food is a tool for my training, I guess the problem with that is it takes a lot to make meals that come and tick the boxes you know. 

You have a boiled chicken and brown rice or whatever - but it just I don't want to eat it and then inevitably you come back from a 5 and a half hour training ride, you’re tired you passed knockout a half hour ago and you could crawl through the door. First thing you reach for is a bag of donuts - which I'm not worried about weight gain anything like that - but there's just nothing of  nutritional value in it. 

I could do a better job you know, I'm on these camps it's easy for us we've got this chef and he cooks everything and anything - he makes carbonara in sticky chicken and loads of veg for ius. It doesn't taste like that when I cook, it’s appetising you know and it's healthy as well. He never leaves the kitchen - I've never seen a man work so hard in my life before. He is the earliest one awake and the last one to sleep and you know he won't come out in a team car and follow us around. He’ll never see him do half an hour on the bikes or anything like that, he just works and works and works and works. I'm not making excuses because I know there's a lot of athletes that do cooking a lot better than I do but when I get back from a long ride, half the time you've got some on your bike that needs fixing, you need to clean your bike, you need to stick the clothes in the washing, you need to answer a few emails and it's like alright I need lunch and dinner now but it's 5:30 already. 

I really struggle Wendy I struggle to make appetising healthy food. I do have - it’s not porridge but its made the night before…

Wendy Martinson: Bircher?

Ed Clancy: Yes! Bircher, that’s it. I have that with fresh fruit and berries, and you’ve got plenty of dairy in that. Yeah bircher and protein yoghurt as a pre-bed snack I have every single day and you know throughout the day as well your lunch and stuff I'm always throwing bits of dairy in throughout the day. Yeah we always start the day with Bircher and a yogurt and take it from there. 

Judith Bryans: So Wendy, thinking about nutrition and athletes of the future and whatever is going to come beyond Tokyo. If you had some young athletes at the moment with you and you were talking  to them about nutrition and balance, and including all food groups and dairy as part of that whats the top tip you’d to give them terms of their nutrition? 

Wendy Martinson: I think it's just that - you’ve got to do the basics brilliantly. You’ve got to nail the basics of good nutrition first, and get a balanced diet to kick off then start to manipulate it around your training. 

You know, changing your carbohydrate intake to fit in with the volume of training, timing your protein around certain sessions before you start looking at the fancy stuff. Take a food first approach. 

If you don’t get the basics right then there’s no point in thinking about the other stuff - the 1%. That’d be my top tip to young athletes is to nail that. 

Also, and I know it’s hard Ed, if you don’t like cooking - but not necessarily develop a love of cooking but a tolerance for it. And think of ways to make it more tolerable, interesting - maybe like batch cooking. Planning is important. So if you come back from a long training session you’ve got something in the fridge you made the night before that you can just grab so you’re not just reaching for something bad. 

Judith Bryans: And Ed, same again to you on young athletes but with a slightly different twist; some of those athletes will be looking at you an aspiring to be you and win Olympic gold and I think a lot of what you have talked about shows that the mental strength is a really important aspect here as well as the physicality in the training. So what one piece of advice would you give somebody who wants to be a future Olympian? 

Ed Clancy: I think the one piece of advice I’d give them would be that as soon as they can to separate what they consider their dream and what is considerated a goa,l and to try not to get them confused. 

So for example my dream right now is to go to the fourth Olympics, win a gold medal, and spray champagne around a nightclub with my mates. That's the dream right. But you know, the reality is there's an awful lot of people trying to do that as well, so this is where your goals come in. 

The goals are like the day to day logical, pragmatic things that are 100% attainable right, so that Dream of winning your fourth Olympic gold medal is just that, it's just a dream. 

It's important to dream because that kind of forms the basis of your motivation. It's people that can commit to the sort of mundane day-to-day goals that end up the winners. I've seen Bradley Wiggins, Chri Hoy, Gerrant Thomas - say its like that old Aristotle saying isn't, it is that  excellence is a habit, not an act you know. 

I think it's always a great example of that that the real champions are the ones thathave the dream but that’s not the goal. . IT’s fine to have a dream but that's not the goal, the goal is to eat 5 fruit and veg a day, sleep 9 hours a day, cleaning the bike once a week - do all that sort of day in day out stuff and then it kind of takes the pressure off as well you know. If people have a goal of being the world's best ever cyclist it's a ridiculous goal, it's so dependent on so much else happening. 

Base all your self esteem and focus on doing, like what Wendy says: on going shipping, plan ahead, eat your five-a-day, consult with your coach on a regular basis and make a big list of those pragmatic, logical, attainable goals and keep doing those. No, just keep that dream as a dream, think about it and use it for your motivation, but you know don’t get too wrapped up in it. 

Judith Bryans: Ed and Wendy I think those were fantastic pieces of advice for any body listening and of course I will add that, as well as having you 5-day having some dairy as well is a very very good thing! 

Ed Clancy: Yep, a pint of milk a day! 

Judith Bryans: But I think you've both been incredibly generous and open with your answers and I really appreciate that so thank you very much for joining our very first Dairy UK Dairy In Discussion podcast. 

I hope you both have great success at the Tokyo games and Ed, I'll be cheering for you from my sofa along with many, many other people in the country - so good luck to you both! And thank you very much indeed.

You have been listening to Dairy in Discussion with me, Judith Bryans, CEO of Dairy UK and my very special guests today Ed Clancy and Wendy Martinson. I hope you've enjoyed the podcast and you'll join us for next months episode which will be titled: ‘don't feed the trolls’ and in that episode we will be looking at the negativity on social media and how that can have an impact on the diet the mental health of our younger Generations. I hope you can join us, thank you very much for listening.