Episode #10 - Powering Your Performance in Long Distance Triathlon

Today we delve into the crucial element of nutrition in powering your performance for long-distance triathlons. 
In this episode, I share the secrets to fueling your body optimally for the demands of endurance events like Ironman and beyond.

Join me as I share my insights, strategies, and real-world experiences to help you achieve peak performance in your next long-distance race.

From pre-race fueling strategies to on-the-bike nutrition tactics and post-race recovery tips, I cover it all. Whether you're a seasoned triathlete looking to fine-tune your nutrition plan or a newcomer seeking guidance on where to start, this podcast is your ultimate resource for mastering the nutritional aspect of long-distance triathlon performance.

Get Your Definitive Guide to Race Week Nutrition here👇🏻
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Transcript

0:03

[Music] hi I'm tiia boothman founder of LTR coaching and I'd like to welcome you to the inspired triathletes podcast where I'll be bringing you stories from female triathletes and taking on topics that are important to women in the sport hello and welcome to today's episode I'm going to be doing a solo uh episode today because this week I've been talking with 10 iron women about nutrition and training for training and racing and I wanted to share some of those that information with everybody else um and I wanted to chat about the basics of nutrition how to fuel for everyday day life and how to fuel for events I'll also be diving into specific issues that women May face when thinking about their nutrition and also o sharing a few personal stories so whether you're a seasoned triathlete or you're just starting out on your journey this episode is packed with valuable insights to optimize your nutrition for Peak Performance so let's get started the first thing I want to talk about is the difference between fueling for your everyday life and fueling for an event so our eating patterns and diets are influenced by so many things including the Bel beliefs that were formed before we even started training for endurance events or training with some kind of intent and all of us come from a slightly different place with this but it's really important to understand the difference between your general nutrition advice for women and how you feel when you start exercising a lot and it's very common for women not to realize or to underestimate the amount of exercise they're doing and to use that exercise as a way to lose weight and then use that training as an excuse to eat certain foods that they think are bad or a treat so we're kind of like compensating using our training psychologically this is not a positive way to look at fueling and it will take some work to redefine those eating habits because you've taken quite a long time to build up those habits you've probably absorbed information from around you that's ingrained those ideas and beliefs if you find yourself thinking if I do this workout then I can eat this food or I deserve this food then the chances are you are thinking about food in a bit of a harmful way and it's something that you would need to look at a lot of us have been exposed to a diet culture and core advice around eating as we've grown up and it's all wrapped up in uh our family and what we learned from our society around us there's it's quite it can be quite complicated unraveling all of that and we eat every single day of Our Lives so our habits do become this ingrained thing that's in our psyche and those habits as I've said take a long time to build up they also take a long time to change so the first step is to become aware of what's going through your mind when you eat if I'm working with a client I'll often ask them to write this down in their food diary alongside what they're eating so they'll maybe have an emotion attached to eating or they'll have a reason for eating and it helps us to tune into that and helps us to understand where we're coming from when we're eating certain foods and then we can start implementing change we can't start implementing change until we understand what we're doing and why we're doing it and our general eating habits probably do need to change when we're training for an endurance event because our energy needs are going to be greater skipping meals binge eating that kind of pattern that you may have is not going to help you to get the best from yourself the bikini diet or any general advice on women's health often isn't appropriate and can be at odds with our goals as athletes the trouble is we've probably read stuff along the way growing up that has influenced us and made us think that eating a certain way or eating certain foods attaching that to something like good bad um and we want to kind of break down those labels so I'm going to share a bit of a personal story here I was in my teens in my early 20s during the 90s and the magazines were full of photos of super skinny models we all kind of aspire well in my co group anyway we aspire to look like P Moss um and I did experiment with disordered eating a few times a lot of my friends had some kind of weird eating patterns I remember my friend just she would bring in a carrot and an apple for lunch or something like that and in my last year of a levels uh my mom would make me a really nice black lunch and I would throw it away um and then I would run in my lunch break so that I didn't feel like eating and I remember getting slightly obsessed with being eight stone or eight and a half Stone I think it was I wanted to be under nine Stone um which is around 50 to 54 kilogram which is still a healthy weight for me but it it wasn't it was really hard to get to that weight without skipping meals and and restricting my food intake and I weighed myself every day at that point in time when I moved away from school and home I stopped doing this for a time um it only lasted a year or so that I was going through this slightly disordered eating and then I moved to University in Nottingham and started slipping back into restricting calories and for a short amount of time I thought it would be a good idea just to eat a tin of soup for my evening meal as it only had a few hundred calories in it and at that time I was walking to University every day I was climbing quite a lot and also running so running pretty regularly so I was really active but I wasn't fueling properly for what I needed to do and it didn't last long before I realized what I was doing was making me unhappy and I stopped that disordered eating the reason I'm telling you this is because when I started training for Iron Man the first time around I started to slip into that disordered way of eating again I wanted to have a good power to weight ratio and it made sense to me that if I was lighter I'd be able to race faster so I started to monitor my weight again I started to eat in a different way I read the book racing weight uh watched my weight go down and it made me feel really good if I saw a lower number on the scale but if it was a higher number it made me feel really bad and eating the way that I did was not sustainable my mood wasn't great it affected me socially you know I felt a bit embarrassed almost about my the way I want was trying to eat I didn't want to eat certain foods at certain times and I felt uncomfortable really trying to keep my weight down but I did think it would help my performance the second time that I did Iron Man I really didn't think about my weight at all I didn't worry about it I just ate what I needed when I needed to and I trusted my body to adapt to training and kind of get to a a normal weight for me and the right weight for me without weighing myself I felt much less stressed around eating and I did put on weights but I also got stronger and I raced faster than when I was lighter so now I have got to the point where I trust my body to find its optimal weight I eat a balanced diet I don't have restrictions but I try to eat things that are cooked from scratch and nutritionally got a good a high nutritional content so what I found was that training for an Iron Man event really was stressful enough without adding this extra stress around your eating and when I took that stressor around eating a way of restricting calories or trying to lose weight it just helped me focus on the training more and I performed better so how do training and competition demands affect or impact women differently from men I've already talked a little bit about the societal impact on women from our culture with many of us being encouraged to lose weight to feel good about ourselves and I've seen now with my son men are being being told to kind of bulk up and there's a lot of push for people taking steroids and to be really muscular um so it it's not just women being influenced like this now men are also struggling with this as well in this day and age um it didn't used to be the case when I was growing up but it is definitely H happening now but for women I think we're we're supposed to be in you know Society expects us to look a certain way and that can impact our our way of eating and and the way that we are in the world and we have very different hormonal profiles to men this can affect our energy metabolism our nutritional needs and also our recovery so there is some evidence to show that our energy needs increase just a slight amount from 100 to 300 calories it depends on on the individual per day during the late Lal stage of your cycle so that's when you're premenstrual in the week or so before you get your period so it's really the need for adequate fueling is in this stage is very very important and your blood glucose levels can be a little bit unstable at this time as well which can sometimes lead to Cravings if we don't fuel properly for our training and our life if we're not eating the right amount of macronutrients during that time you're going to start getting those Cravings we've probably all experienced that as women so I would recommend that athletes go into their training really well fuels and by this I mean not leaving too long a gap between eating and training and you want to make sure you fuel during your longer sessions this also helps to provide you with the energy for the session so that you can execute the training better and it will also help with your recovery if you don't feel when you finish your session your body is in a state of debt when you've been training for a long time because you can't replace all of the fuel that you use in that training session and it's harder to replace what you lose during the training session if you don't start replacing as soon as you return from that session so what I think of it as rolling over onto your next session and if you start under fueling that it can impact the next session or the next day even so really try and stay consistent with your fueling not leaving massive gaps where you've got these crashes with your blood sugar making sure that you're always going into sessions feeling like you've got the energy to complete that session so in that late Lal stage we can also find that are um their signals can be muted so what we can do is preload with a drink that contains a little bit more salt than usual and making sure that we have a little bit more salt in our diet before racing so that's key I've talked about preloading in an Instagram post which I will uh link to in the show notes along with a useful article from Precision hydration if you want to find out a little bit more about preloading it's I don't want to get into all of the details about that now but it's quite a useful tool that I've used many times during racing and in that late Lal stage as well we can have impaired recovery and that's due to the inflammation in the body so we've got inflammation from our training and inflammation from our hormones and menstrual cycle and this continues as well from the late Lucio stage into your menstrual cycle we can reduce that inflammation by consuming foods which contain antioxidants so berries are a really good example of this and also there's many other fruit and veg that contain antioxidants that you make sure that you include a wide variety of fruit and vegetables in your diet and you will get antioxidants in your diet and um micronutrients that you need as well but make sure if you leave that to the main meals for to eat those Foods because there is some evidence that it can impair your recovery if you eat too many antioxidants after your training so after training the main goal really is to replace some protein that you um need to help you to recover faster it's going to give your body what it needs to rebuild muscle that has been broken down this is what happens in training we break down muscle and then it rebuilds stronger but we need to give it what it needs and if you don't give your body protein and carbohydrate after you've trained then it's not going to be able to repair itself very well then when we get to dur during your period make sure that you include enough iron in your diet it's really common for female athletes to get diagnosed with anemia I take a supplement throughout my cycle just to help with keeping my iron levels topped up I have had iron deficiency before and it can impact your training a lot what I noticed was my rate of perceived effort went up and I started having palpitations as well and I just felt like I couldn't complete my training when I got into a really low iron state so you can get that checked with your GP if you're at all concerned about it um so when we get to training and racing your carbohydrates are the main source of fuel for for your training and racing we get a little bit of energy from our fats um but it's harder for the body to use during exercise as a fuel source so women often try to limit carbs uh they might have heard that you you got to go slow to burn fat and so they're trying to burn fat and they don't want to give their body fuel because they're trying to get their energy from fat but we always burning both um it's just the ratio changes as you increase the intensity of your training it's not a good idea to limit carbs in your diet because it can lead to relative energy deficiency so both men and women can suffer from this it's abbreviated as Reds you've probably seen a bit more information about this coming out now because people are starting to talk about it it's a common problem um women have got a signal with their menstrual cycle that it will start to get a regular or stop if we don't fuel properly for what we do there's quite a lot of other symptoms for uh relative energy deficiency in sports so don't rely on your menstrual cycle to warn you of under fueling you'll probably notice things like poor moods or lack of energy your performance declines you start getting injured more you might not be able to sleep very well you stress fractures because your bone density decreases those kind of things can be a war signal that you're not fueling properly for your sessions so if you are thinking that you could be under fueling for your sessions I would recommend seeing a nutritionist and working with them to try and get you back on track if you're getting to your per menopause so you're in your kind of 40s to late 40s some people go start noticing symptoms of param menopause earlier than that if you've had a Hyer then you will have um you will go into menopause so you might notice these kind of changes taking place you'll find that as your cycle becomes irregular it gets a little bit harder to track where you are and and know where you are in your cycle but you still need to fuel really well for your training you might need to adjust your diet a little bit because you might notice that you get more sensitive to certain foods um and you want to get more protein in your diet because muscle mass starts to decline we want to try and keep building our muscle mass and and maintain our muscle mass and to do that we need protein and the diet and more of a carbohydrates one to come from fruit and vegetable sources and um like slow burning cars so things that whole we whole grain that kind of thing rather than white rice and pasta is it's a lot um better for us to try and get that those carbohydrates from different sources in your main meals not around training and racing because that's slightly different we want fast acting cars at that point so for competition we we still want to use those simple carves sugars and easy to digest foods and we want to avoid eating fat fatty food during competition and and training and and uh racing because it's harder to digest so in that stage of your life you need to again pay attention to your hydration and we can use preloading before events and possibly during training if it's hot weather your thirst signals are dampened when you get into this stage of your life and then when we move into menopause again we need to increase our protein intake especially around recovery and during the day um to make sure that we're giving the body what it needs to maintain and build muscle you also want to preload with your hydration for competition remember I'm going to put a link for you there in the show notes about preloading and also just stay on top of hydration needs you might need to drink to a schedule a little bit more be just be more mindful of of drinking because The Thirst signals that you get can lag behind your need for fluid and if you're having things like hot flushes um you know sweating during the day more then this can cause you to lose more water and you can also have an overactive bladder which causes you to pee more and again that's going to make you lose fluid so thinking about hydration as being a really high higher priority when you're in menopausal stage that is after your periods have stopped so when we're leading up to race day I want to talk about what happens then it can be quite stressful when we're leading up to a big event um and I've seen different people cope with this in different ways and have different strategies some people are worried that they're going to start gaining weight because they're tapering and so they're not training as much and I also see some people start to eat more and car load maybe Comfort eat way ahead of time the car loading meal you know eating a big bowl of pasta the night before a race has largely been debunked and you can read a little bit more about that on in the article that I've linked to Below in the show notes um what I'm going to do is describe my protocol for a half Iron Man or Iron Man event and you can get a free download of the PDF with all this info in by clicking the link in the show notes for this download so you can have it to hand when you get to race week just to help you to um going get into race day in the best possible shape so when you're around seven days out from your event just you want to stick to your normal diet but try not to overeat you want to be checking in with those hunger signals and make sure you stop eating when you're feeling full and satiated if you're exercising make sure you use a hydration drink during your session and also refuel afterwards you really don't want to be limiting your calories this week because that can leave you feeling a little bit tired and you want to make sure that your carbohydrate stores are topped up so limiting calories isn't going to help you with this if the weather is particularly hot you may want to use a hydration product during the day too so if you're in a hot country and you're use losing a lot of fluid during the day you might want to hydrate with a hydration drink when you're around 5 days out again we want to stick to our usual diet preferably with a regular intake of protein for example chicken eggs tofu fish uh veggie burgers plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables whole grains qu quinoa rice fats such as avocado olive oil and nuts so we're looking at getting a high nutritional content in our diet if you don't normally eat that kind of thing then I wouldn't recommend starting it now to try and stick to what you normally eat but that would be a good uh way of eating normally in your day-to-day life um so try and stick to that then when we get four days out make sure you've got snacks available during the day so if you're out and about make sure you've got things like salted pretzels or bananas or maybe some bars if you're out and about sometimes if you've traveled to a race venue you can be out and then you might not have what you need to eat at the right time be mindful of your eating as before try not to overeat and go for familiar foods to you if you can avoid eating out then try and avoid eating out because you don't want to end up getting food poisoning or GI distress is close to the event so try stick to things that are familiar to you and um eat your own prepared food if you can when you're two to three days out you want to start to taper down your fresh fruit and vegetables and anything else that's like difficult to digest so you don't really want to have beating greasy or fatty foods you want to focus on simple carbohydrates now so things like rice um that are very easy to digest with a moderate amount of protein so I keep mentioning rice because rice is much easier to digest than something like pasta so I usually would opt for rice and some chicken or rice and eggs or something like that and a small amount of um avocado oils from avocado nuts um olive oil that kind of f when you get to about 2 days out you want to have cut out your fresh fruit and vegetables entirely and this is going to feel really weird if you're used to eating a variety of fruit and vegetables it might be something that you feel uncomfortable doing but it's really helpful to reduce um GI distress on the day of the race um you also if especially if you're racing in a hot country you want to start adding a little bit of extra salt into your food and that helps you to keep holdes of um water in your body you need to store water alongside carbohydrates so when you store when your body stores carbohydrates it stores water alongside it so make sure you're having enough hydration and the salt can help your body to keep hold of that um and you could be adding a little bit more of extra carbohydrate into your diet so The Salted pretzels are great that kind of thing cereal but make sure it's low fiber cereal so when you're one day out for you from your events when start things start to get real we want to be using a hydration drink during the day but make sure you don't overhydrate so you don't want to be drinking so much that your pee is really really light in color so check the color of your pee you've probably seen those charts and you can see what should what's normal um it doesn't want to be like dehy you don't want to be dehydrated either where it's too dark so in in that on that day that last day try and eat a high carbohydrate breakfast and then a fairly light lunch so for example a wrap or sandwich something like that and you can snack on on salted pretzels to keep your sodium levels up um and top up your carb stores or you could choose something like white bread and Marmite sandwiches if you like Marmite not everyone does then our evening meal we want to

try and eat that before 6: 26:56

00 p.m. I say just to give yourself plenty of time to digest and choose some easy to digest protein and carbohydrates as I said before something like chicken and rice or eggs and rice uh maybe some tuna and rice and also if you're preloading you want to drink 300 to 500 mil of some kind of preload drink that's the night before um I'll give some examp examples of that in the show notes so on race day just eat your usual race day breakfast you should have practiced your what you're going to eat on the day of your race beforehand in training sessions make sure you know that you can digest whatever it is you're going to pick to eat and eat that breakfast around 2 to three hours be before your start time depending on how well you digest your food some people need a bit longer some people need a bit less so low fiber food we're aiming for here and we can also sip a preload drink so 300 to 500 Ms again of a preload drink around 90 minutes before your event starts sipping on that preload drink and try and finish drinking that around 45 minutes before your start time of the race all this information in case you're wondering is in the PDF so if you want to have it all written down um um you can get that on the PDF that if you download it through the link so when we get to race now um you need to have practiced your race day fueling and you're aiming for 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour not everyone can handle the higher ends here if you are practicing it in training then start at the lower end of carbs per hour and try and increase that if you can um but everyone's different and everyone can tolerate a different amount so just see what works for you see what products work for you as well there is some evidence now that's showing intakes of 120 grams per hour but those Studies have been done I think most on Elite male athletes so we don't really know whether it works for women and we don't really have um much information about age group women either so you would have to train at that level you'd have to practice fueling with that amount of carbs during your training to train your gut to do that and also you're going to have to carry that fuel as well which is sometimes logistically difficult and the fuel needs to be a specific mix of glucose and fructose so it's not something that I'd recommend for most people but you can read up about it if you want I should put some links to that in the notes below with regards race day nutrition I've tried quite a few options in the past and as I've said before it's really important to find out what works for you not for someone else don't be afraid to test things out in training that's what your training is for you don't want to be testing things out on race day you want to know what it is that you can eat and drink on race day and also how you're going to carry it all you need that in planned out and in place before you hit race day so just to give you an idea of things that I've used in the past I've used a mix of bars and homemade energy bars rice cakes and a hydration mixed drink I've used just gels the whole way through a race I've used a carb drink such as scratch lab super Fuel and then bars and shoes um so combination again and when I get to nearer the end of a bike and a on an Iron Man event I will start kind of changing what I'm eating so if I'm eating bars at the beginning of the bike I would change that to something like choose just something that's easier to digest because when you get on the run it's the potential there for a little bit more GI distress so make sure you stick to a schedule on the bike because as I said it's a bit more difficult to Fuel On The Run and we can end up having a bit of GI discomfort so if we stick to our fueling schedule on the bike then we're set up really well for the run I have an alarm that goes off every 20 minutes on my garment and then I will make sure that I'm consuming 20 to 30 grams of carbs at that time and also making sure that I'm drinking the right amount of fluid for that day also your needs are going to change depending depending on the weather and also your hormonal status as I've talked about before a little bit more um hydration in that premenstrual phase and also if you're in uh param menopause and menopause you want to make sure you're drinking to a schedule um towards the end of the bike I've I've just talked about this but I do transition into a a different form of easier to digest choos and gels so I minimize the risk of issues on the run and then on the run I will probably uh stick to chewes and gels and a hydration mix so all that's left is how to carry these things so it can be quite complicated if we've got a lot of things to carry but you there's usually a way to figure out how to do it you can get things like a Bento Box for your bike that goes up front and you can store your fuel in or hydration system that you can place up front on your bike that makes it easier to drink on the go make sure you remember to drink a lot of people forget or they because they find it difficult to access their bottle they don't drink so make sure it's easy to access your bottle practice that in training make sure you can you know stop and and transfer liquid into a different bottle you know if you need to swap bottles in and out and things like that make sure you've practiced that you can use your jersey Pockets to put fuel in for the bike um and on the run I will also use things the soft flasks they're like gel flasks and I can carry those in my hands or sometimes I'll put them in a race belt or flip belt if you've heard of a flip belt and you can put chews and gels in there so you just need to figure out a way of carrying what you need on race day remember if you're doing an Iron Man event they have a special needs bag which is really helpful for the bike you can drop stuff off there and then pick it up later on in the race and it's something that I've used in the past it's super quick and you can get what you need and then it means you can take any hydration products that you want to use rather than if you want you don't want to rely on the feed stations if you are relying on feed stations make sure you've practiced that in your training um make sure you've used the products that going to be on the feed stations in your training so that you're used to them so just to recap then my key takeaways from today are make sure you're consistent with your fueling in every day during training and racing so that you don't get any huge energy dips make sure you eat a range of foods in your everyday meals to support your body to recover and adapt in training stay hydrated and consider pre-loading your hydration and practice practice practice to find out what works for you and to anticipate any potential problems with carrying your fuel or any potential problems with a type of fuel that you're using so that you can change it ahead of time so that concludes today's episode thank you for tuning in if you enjoyed this episode be sure to subscribe for more valuable content on nutrition performance and everything in between remember you can download a free pdf guide to race week nutrition by clicking the link below so until next time stay fueled and keep chasing your goals happy training thanks for listening today have a great day take care bye for now[Music]