The Diet

Maintaining a “healthy” diet has been my weakest link in the endurance training realm.  I have an addiction to energy drinks and soda.  Energy drinks were easy enough to kill off after college but soda still lurks.  So to me the greatest part of long runs and rides is the sweet, sweet, tasty sugar.  The hardest part about training is attempting to avoid lying to yourself, so many of my workouts have been celebrated with soda and candy to “replace carbs.”  But in reality, with some exceptions with ingredients here and there, endurance foods are all varying forms of sugar.  Gels, chews, and sports drinks are made of sugar.  This is what I get to eat all the time, and it’s great.  These foods are also the reason I can’t stand the “sugar is bad” argument.  That argument makes me angry because it’s all about context.  Little Jimmy Joe sitting watching nine hours of TV is going to suffer eating 600 calories of sugar while an endurance athlete on a two hour bike ride is going to prosper from that sugar.

So back to actually training and trying to be a good little endurance athlete!  The best days have an absence of true meals.  I just eat all day at work, at home, in the car.  I eat something roughly every 2 hours.  A solid training day (with an actual meal) would look something like this:

Pre-gym 4:30 – balance bar

Post-gym 7 – banana and dried coconut

10’ish – PB&J and a soda

Noon’ish – brown rice and an apple

3’ish - dark chocolate and a banana

6’ish – spaghetti and meatballs

9’ish – cereal

This isn’t super great; I could stand to eat more before I started work.  I also am TEEERRIBLE at eating vegetables.  But regardless of the foods filling each slot I was shooting for around 3000-3500 calories to facilitate a day with two one hour workouts.  On heavy distance days I aim for 60%-70% of my daily calories to be carbs.  People make comments that I get to eat whatever I want because I’m so skinny and I train a lot, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Two hours of working out gives me an additional 1000-1200 calories.  As much as that sounds like… I could eat that in ten minutes after a heavy workout.  In addition to that I could let my hungry little gut trick me and continue to eat meals that size countless times throughout the day.

The things I keep on hand for buffer foods include nuts, dark chocolate, fruit, soda, and crackers.  If it requires a plate I try to avoid it.  The largest carb heavy savior I’ve found is spaghetti.  I can buy a five pound bag of 97% lean ground beef and package it into four ounce freezer packs.  No matter how lazy I am it’s hard to beat boiling some whole wheat noodles and throwing a four ounce beef block into a skillet.  Dump on some sauce and there’s the meal.  Easy.

I keep in mind that the exercise is always the more important than the day’s diet (in my opinion).  A bad food day is NOT an excuse to have a weak workout or skip it.  Yesterday, like literally yesterday, I had a rough day with life and my daily food intake was a bowl of cereal, a soda, 54 oz of beer, chicken strips and fries, three peaches, and 5/8 of a coconut cream pie.  Now, I don’t know how you fine folks of the internet would rate that diet, but it was just a terrible day.  Now it’s a new day, and a new workout, and the failure of yesterday is just ember in the fire.

Now that I’ve started this blog, this means I can rant.  So it’s time to rant… ready?  Failure!?!  Failure is NOT an absolute.  This is why the wise pipe smoking owl is on my training binder.  “Ever tried?  Ever failed?  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  For some reason it’s human nature to fail at something and believe that failure is such a negative word with such drastic weight that they can never try again.  Failure is a thing that happens; I’ve failed at countless things in my life.  That coconut cream pie I ate over half of yesterday?  That was a pretty large failure on my part, but there is no reason that should affect my life right now at this moment.  I’ve learned (that when life gives you lemons, eat a pie), I’ll adapt, and I will continue to work towards failing better.  The successes I’ve had in life would have taught me nothing without the numerous failures standing behind them.  Flaws, failure, imperfection… Good.  I feel sorry for the individual that succeeds at everything on the first try, it sounds so boring.

In rereading this all I’ve decided that diet is a necessary topic, but it’s boring.  Really boring.  The next posts will center around the actual craziness that goes through my head while training, dealing with the monotony of training, and whatever else I come up with. 

And because there aren’t any pictures related to my diet, here’s Crater Lake.