What Should Triathletes Eat In A Day with Taryn Richardson

More is better. But as an endurance athlete, there's definitely a tipping point where like fiber is going to be an issue. And the other thing is, is that then displacing, getting enough fuel and protein, all those other important things on board.

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Taran, a big welcome back to the podcast. We're really excited to have you back and thanks for joining us again.

Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure.

So today we really want to focus on how endurance athletes and triathletes should be going about their day to day nutrition. And we did a podcast with you recently, as we explained in the intro, about more food around food and fuel sources pre, during and post training. But today we really want to look at just the day to day because a lot of athletes are just going, what the hell do I eat? So can you start us off with some maybe founding principles or fundamentals around what you want endurance athletes to understand about just day to day nutrition?

Yeah, I think it is the most important thing, but we tend to overlook it, right, because we're so focused on all the little 1 percenters and doing all the little things. But really you'll get the best bang for your buck out of what you consistently do on a day to day basis. It's not the one thing that you do once on race day. It is literally what you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep every single day, compounded over time. So we need to just focus on that as the big rock and think about putting the premium fuel in our high performance engine on a day to day basis rather than treating it like a beat up Honda and putting the cheap economy stuff in it and hoping for the best.

That's an awesome start. So if we just, if we take the daily goals, I mean for endurance athletes, compared to an everyday athlete or an everyday person, sorry, you're really just trying to make sure you've got enough fuel to get you through training and recover. So how do you, how do you start, how do you go about that, what you would start thinking of?

It is overwhelming, isn't it? Because there's so many things that you can do. You do need to think differently as an endurance athlete and a lot of us do come to the sport from, you know, just general Life. Maybe we've done a bit of walking, bit of running, maybe a bit of swimming or gym or something like that. But then when you start to layer in training for three sports in a week, we need to think so much more strategically around what we're putting in our mouth. So I think we just need to start at the basics and do things that are maybe not so sexy, like eating enough fruits and vegetables on a day to day basis, even though we are still trying to eat enough fuel to support training. So we need to not kind of forget that. And we do, because we're like, gotta get all the macros, gotta get enough carbs in, gotta do recovery, gotta do all these things. And then we drop the nutrient ball as well. And as an endurance athlete who doesn't sit on their butt all day, you have higher needs for a lot of things compared to somebody that is much more sedentary and much more general population.

So you said to us off air that it is hard with nutrition to answer specifically and help people on something like a podcast like this because it just depends on so many factors. But when you say things like, well, you need to eat more fruit and vegetables, how do we know how much? Where do we go there?

Yeah, that one's pretty easy because we have like general guidelines around fruits and vegetables and only 5% of the Australian population eats enough on a day to day basis, which is just craziness. Like honestly. But we take multivitamins and things because we think that's better for us. But we should be aiming for at least 2 serves of fruit and 5 serves of vegetables every single day. The only times that you wouldn't do that would be if you were carb loading or on race day or sometimes where we're trying to manipulate fiber intake. But a server fruit is like a piece of fruit, like an apple or an orange or a pear. If it's smaller fruits like mandarins and apricots, it's two. Or it's like a cup of berries or fruit salad or something like that. And we want to aim for fresh and the, the skin on for all of that beautiful gut loving fiber as much as possible. And any additional that you get in a day, maybe that can be made up by dried fruit or juice. But ideally we want it to be fresh, we want to be able to chew it, we want our little gut microbes to have all that fibre to keep them happy. Because a lot of our immune system resides in our gut. And in terms of veggies, nobody eats enough vegetables. Honestly, it's not that hard. It's like my job as a dietitian to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables. It's pretty. Not sexy, but you know, it works.

Yeah, yeah.

So a server veggies is half a cup when it's cooked or one cup if it's raw, like lettuce and carrot and things like that. And that's really easy to do if you kind of split it up. So instead of just having eggs on toast for breakfast, like throw some spinach on there, throw some tomatoes, throw some mushrooms on there, tick one off for the day, get a couple in for lunch and a couple in for dinner, and you've done that really easily.

Can we just dig into the fruit for a minute and then go into the vegetables? Have you got, in your opinion, a priority for. Just think about the endurance athlete. Is there any priority you would give to certain vegetables over others or are you going to be happy with anybody? Just whatever's likely. Likely to be your best taste vegetable to go with that.

My biggest tip when it comes to fruit and veggies, there's no right or wrong way, is that varieties are spice of life. So the colors and the different types of fruits and vegetables you have in your diet, the better because we get lots of different vitamins and minerals from all the different colors. We get lots of different phytonutrients from all the different colors. So instead of like just sticking to bananas and eating two bananas a day and going tick like, job done, try and incorporate lots of different colors and in particular try and eat seasonally as well, because we know that fruits and vegetables grown in season are better for us and more nutrient rich than ones that are forced to grow out of season.

Can I dive into that? Because I've never understood, it makes sense, but never understood why variety is better. You know what is happening in the different colors and that's so good for us. And again in season as well. That's a great point.

Yeah. So like all of our oranges and our citrus and things are really high in vitamin C, but the other colors, like the purples and things are higher in different other vitamins as well. So if you are trying to hit all of your micronutrient targets in a day, you're not going to get there just by eating apples alone because maybe it's not high and you know this is not right, but vitamin K for instance. So if you've got all the different colors, you'll have a wider range of all your vitamins to meet your micronutrient needs on a day and then think about like in terms of season forcing something to grow in it's not natural environment. It's never going to be as nutrient rich. Like maybe the soil's not right at that point. It's not getting the right amount of sunlight, it's not getting the right amount of, I don't know, moisture or something like that. And so it's not growing in its optimal conditions. Kind of like us as humans, we need like this optimal environment. Right. I'm in Queensland. It has to be warm for me to be happy. If it's cold, I'm miserable.

That's all of us. It's my gratitude every week.

Sunshine.

Exactly, exactly. No, that's awesome. Oh yeah. And I just kind of. That next level of why I, I think is something that we, we all miss and that might help us make better decisions and, and um, really understand the importance of, you know, while we hear these cliche sayings like variety, spice of life. But it is, what you just said shows exactly why it's important. And so my next question would be, okay, so the, the minimum Recommendation guideline is 2 servings of fruit and 5 servings vegetable. Is that a strong minimum? Like would, would you be better off doubling it? And you're going to be way better off and tripling it. Does it just get better as you go bigger?

Typical triathlete is more better, go harder, go home. Yeah. So that's like the minimum requirements, right? We can definitely do more. And the requirements like the actual goal would be more like seven to ten serves. But we are just so far away from that that the national recommendations are like, let's try and hit 2 and 5. Like if 5% of the population's getting it, 95% of the population are underdoing it. So more is better. But as an endurance athlete, there's definitely a tipping point where like fiber is going to be an issue. And the other thing is, is that then displacing, getting enough fuel and protein, all those other important things on board. So like smaller females do tend to eat a lot of fibrous foods and sometimes that can block the digestion and absorption of other things and that can be problematic. So yeah, there's always going to be balance. Like more. More is good, but it's not necessarily better.

When we're thinking about our main meal for the day and Jordan was asking me off air, you know, what are the main vegetables that you would categorize in your top five? And so I'm pretty much having the same, you know, broccoli, corn, carrot, sweet potato, beans, every single time. Is there going to be better value for me having some other. And you've talked about that already, just everything, every vegetable provides something different. As an endurance athlete, we're always striving for the optimal and you know, where just the variety is the best way. And how is it going to affect us differently if we have only broccoli as compared to corn example or some pumpkin? Yeah. Where's the value? You know, what do we in terms of functionality as an athlete? What's going to give us that edge that's going to make us function better? I don't mean perform better, I mean function. Um, so. So our fuel tank is optimal.

Yeah. So you do want to add that different variety. Cause otherwise you are stuck in the same sort of rut of the same things. We have our starchy veggies and our non starchy veggies as well. So things like corn and potato and sweet potato are giving us way more carbohydrate than something like broccoli. So you need to kind of consider that in terms of our macronutrients. But yeah, you want to have all of the different colors of the rainbow every day. So the goal would be 30 different typ plant based foods in a week to give us all of the vitamins and minerals that we need. And like I said before, trying to choose seasonally rather than something that's grown out of season because a lot of people will take just a multivitamin as you know, even a safety blanket. But those synthetic forms of vitamins, like we don't really know what that does to our body. And even those like vegetable powders, I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus in particular, but like greens powders and things like that, they might put a whole heap of nutrient rich foods in there, but nobody's then batch test, batch testing that product after production to know if those nutrients are still there. So it could just be a bit of green powder that isn't actually vitamin and mineral rich.

I've done some deep dives on those, on those powders and some nutritionists online really debugging them. And it's absolutely fascinating and it's really cool information to hear and it's important for people to know because the marketing around them is so strong.

So yeah, save your money, please go, go and get like a fruit and vegetable box for half the price and you'll do so much better job for your health because they don't have fiber as well, that's the main thing too. That's problematic. And we need fiber in our diet. Like it's a hard balance. As an endurance athlete, too much fiber is not good either. But you still need that for all of your little gut microbes to be happy to produce so many different things in our gut. I'm not going to dive into the nerdy science. Like I'll bore you and we'll be here for hours.

I would love it.

But you're. Maybe we'll talk about it. But you know, your immune system is mostly in your gut and so if you are burning the candle at both ends, exercise is a stress and you're doing a lot of it. We need to have a really robust immune system and one of the ways that we can do that is eating fiber and eating fruits and vegetables. It's not very sexy, but it'll help.

It makes perfect sense. Oh, one more question on fiber. I just really want to dive into before you go in. Dad is as you can see us, Taryn, almost talking over each other trying to ask another question. It's a brilliant start. So I'm trying one of think about mentally getting this balance right. So what is the problem with too much fiber? You mentioned potentially digestive issues. Are there anything else? Is that the main problem if you have too much fibre?

Yeah. Like think about when you're running and your gut is jiggling up and down. You throw like fuel into your gut, you throw some caffeine into your system and it just increases that peristalsis movement which is the smooth muscle of your gastrointestinal tract. So it moves food through faster. And then in stressed response, which is exercise, where our sympathetic nervous system is heightened, it kind of just evacuates food in a way. So if you have too much fiber then like runner's gut is something that people might resonate with. I guess really, really high fiber intakes too do block the absorption of some of our micro. So that's not generally triathletes, but I have seen it in, yeah, some smaller female long distance runners where their fiber intake is just off the charts. Like it's 60, 70 grams a day or more. And they do have some other like deficiencies because we are blocking the absorption of some important nutrients.

And could you generally say that 10 servings of vegetables around that mark, you'd be potentially not. I know it depends on the person, their weight, their digestive system, whatever, but that's probably. You've got to be in a safe range around there. If the athletes aiming for more than that. Five?

Yeah. Like somewhere around seven to ten, you should be okay. But you're going to have to, I guess, build your way up to that. If you went from not eating much to eating a crapload, it's not going to end well. Like, you just, you, the bacteria in your bowel are going to have a field day with all that extra fiber that you've thrown in there. So, yeah, it really just depends. It depends what you're used to and what your baseline is. But I guess if, if you're listening and you don't think you get your 2 and 5, the goal is like 2 and 5. And if you're already doing that and it's easy, like maybe add one more and see how that feels.

A lot of people don't really understand what a macronutrient and a micronutrient difference is. So can you just take us through those basic concepts and, you know, if you're out there listening, don't feel like you're the minor minority. A lot of people really don't understand this. So it'd be great for you to get. Get a clear picture of what we're talking about.

Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? It's one of the things that I like to teach triathletes is those foundations of like, what is a carbohydrate? Because working in private practice for many years, you could ask somebody that question and they're like almonds. Like, no, there's no carbs. Or there's tiny amount of carbs in almonds, but we don't eat almonds for carbs. So we've got four main macronutrients. They're carbohydrate, protein, fat and alcohol. Alcohol is, yes, a macronutrient. Not a good one for us, but it's in that category that's music to.

Some people's ears, that one.

I didn't say to drink.

Let's make that clear.

Yeah, don't edit that bit differently.

Yeah, yeah.

And then our micros are like all of our vitamins and minerals. Right. So carbohydrate comes from five main real food groups. They come from all of our breads and cereals. So things like rice, noodles, pasta, muesli crackers, muesli bars, all those types of things. Dairy is carbohydrate as well. Everything but things like cream and cheese. Our fruits are carbohydrate, so fresh, dried, and juice, our starchy veggies. So potato, sweet potato, corn, any. Any of those kind of Root vegetables. And the last group that provides carbs is our legumes. So chickpeas, lentils, baked beans, those types of things. And then obviously we get carbs from lollies and sports drinks and gels and stuff like that, chocolate ice cream. But they're the five main food groups that have carbohydrate in them and then.

Protein and fats for everyone to be really clear on what is actually a protein source.

Yeah, so we've got plant based sources of protein and animal based sources of protein. So we've got all of our meats. So chicken, fish, red meat, any sorts of animal and game mates. Eggs are protein, Dairy's protein as well. Legumes and nuts and seeds are protein. And then we've got all of the vegetarian and vegan alternatives. So things like tofu and its fermented cousin tempeh, the not meat type products that exist and you know, TVP and all those types of things, that's protein. And then the last group is fats. And we have different types of fats, but fats come from things like olive oil, avocado, nuts and seeds. There's fat in meat, there's fat in dairy, it's obviously fat in junk food like donuts and anything deep fried like chips and chocolate and stuff like that as well.

And I guess it's important for people to understand that when you say something's a protein source or a carb source, they're not purely that. So a, like you just mentioned, a steak isn't pure protein or like something like chicken is, you can correct me if I'm wrong here is quite high protein. It's mostly protein, but there is 1 gram of fat in it or something or and 0 grams of carbs in something like chicken breast. But other sources of protein might have 40% as protein, but it's also 40% carb. And I'm trying to explain that. Right, but not everything's not just pure protein or just carbohydrate or just fat.

Yeah, yeah. So think of legumes like chickpeas and things like that. They fit into both the protein and the carb group. Dairy's the same, it's carbohydrate, it's fats and it's protein. So we can't kind of silo things as pure protein unless we're looking at even like, even a protein supplement like a whey protein isolate still has fat in it and still has carbohydrate in.

It, which is also quite good for indigenous athlete because you know you probably want protein and carbs most of the time, right. You never, you never want really just protein because you're always trying to get.

As much energy in most people. Yeah, yeah. Some people know.

Yeah, yeah. And that's a really important point is the whole time with discussion you really want to stress this is that you can't, we especially you can't make these black and white statements and you're very good at picking it up to make sure people don't get confused into the boxing, into these rules or anything that go. This is a rule that applies to everyone.

Yeah, I guess I'm really passionate about that because there's no one size fits all with nutrition and we can't like box people into. Everyone should do this. Like whether it's day to day nutrition or it's fueling during races, normal is a cycle on a washing machine. It's not like normal nutrition for everyone. Everyone is different. Our genetics are different, our body composition is different, our goals are different, the bugs in our gut are different. So we really need to understand how to eat for us and not try and emulate or copy, you know, what a pro is doing and expect that to work.

So how do you go about that process? If you look at the macronutrient breakdown, so you're aiming for a certain amount of carbs, fat and protein per day, how do you start to look at what do I need?

Yeah, it's really hard because you can pull equations off the Internet but they're not going to fit for you. I really like to teach triathletes just how to eat foundation wise and manipulate fuel for training and the work required and then everything kind of slots into place and then it's really just about tweaking and fine tuning and finessing over time because there are so many limitations with calorie counting and also limitations with trying to estimate energy expenditure that you're never gonna get it perfect even in a lab sense. I guess it's just about the foundations first. Like I always talk about building a nutrition cake. We want to bake that sponge first with some non sexy things like fruits and vegetables, you know, pre training nutrition, recovery nutrition, those sorts of things that we talked about last time. And then icing that cake with more advanced principles and then we can put the sprinkles on the icing on the cakes that we have got our day to day nutrition right first before we start tackling, you know, the 1 percenters.

In terms of getting that foundation right. Is there a lot of experimenting that you're expecting each person to do with. Because on a Sunday, you might be less active or more active than on a Wednesday or on a Monday. And that could change every week. You could be more active on the day you were less active the week before. Are we trying to just be general with our food fuel source each day, every day, or are we trying to be a little bit more clever? And if I know that I'm going to be sitting in a car driving for four or five hours, then I need less fuel for that day, or should I. What's your thoughts on how much you should be consuming? And I know it's a general question, but, yeah, just give us some specifics of how that would differ from person to person.

Yeah, I feel like this is a setup question because I always talk about periodization, which is, you know, fueling for the work required, which is something that is so key as an endurance athlete that trains for three sports. Because you're right. Like, there's days that you're way more sedentary. Maybe you drive a desk for work and you might be active in your sessions, but otherwise you're sitting on your butt all day versus a weekend when you've got more time and you're out on the bike for six hours. So you need to eat differently for those different types of training days. It's one of the key things that I love to teach my athletes inside the triathlon nutrition academy is how to do that but without having to track everything and without having to count calories. There's some really practical ways that you can do that to set you up with some understanding of how to fuel for lighter days, more moderate days, harder days, so that you're getting that balance, you know, close to right. And then it is about, you know, monitoring how you're going, how you're feeling, how your energy levels are, how you're backing up and recovering so that you can continue to tweak and evolve it. Because it's not set and forget, we kind of. We forget that, like, a lot of what I used to do is, like, writing someone a meal plan. And I used to hate doing that because I'm like, if this changes, this needs to change. And if this changes, this needs to change. And people are like, yeah, I'm good. I got a plan. I'm just gonna follow it and, you know, tick that box green in training peaks or whatever. But you need to constantly evolve your nutrition as you evolve as an athlete, as your training program evolves, whether you're in season, whether you're off season where your body composition is doing like there are so many factors that go into how you eat on a day to day basis that you can't just tick a box and go, yep, I'm done for the whole week and I'm good.

And that's why understanding some of these principles can really help your decision making. And a great example is what you said in the last podcast where you just spoke about that window. Post training. It's so important to get, you know, that good serving of get a range of 20 to 40 grams of protein depending on the person, the weight, et cetera, plus carb source. And for any athlete, that is just gold information to help them make a decision, you know, and that's not saying you need to eat three eggs after training every time, but you're saying that's, that's the goal kind of fuel source and two macronutrients in there and that, you know, really fuels good decision making.

Yeah. The hardest part is then knowing how to translate those numbers into then what you put in your mouth, which is, I guess my happy place as a sports dietitian is translating that research around what is ideal and what is optimal for the person and then translating that into food. Like my love language is food. So I can tell you how much like carbs are in loads of things, but for an everyday person, it's not something we're taught in school. We can read a label, but it's likely to be 20% either direction of what's actually in the packet. So it's like understanding what we need, but then how to translate that into something that's easy that you can put.

In your mouth, is that important post training? Sorry, dad. So I know we kind of spoke about this last podcast, but is for example the fuel source you're getting again, the range was approximately 20 to 40 grams. Is that right? Of protein? Doesn't matter whether it's from chicken, eggs, whey isolate protein, plant based protein powder. Is that important?

Totally. Always.

Yep. Yep.

So our animal sources of protein are more biologically available to our bodies. So for a plant based athlete, they're going to need more plus a variety of protein sources to get that full range of amino acids that our body can't produce. There's nine essentials that we can't produce in our body and we have to get them from our diet. So animal sources are superior and they turn on the switch to, to build muscle and do muscle protein synthesis better than plant based sources. But it doesn't mean that A plant based athlete can't get there. They just need to be smarter around how they do it and you know, more on top of their nutrition.

I was going to go another step and and ask. Actually I've now forgotten what I was going to ask. So we have to.

Sorry. So many rabbit holes. So just like you keep taking me down them.

I know I'm back.

Yeah.

So the thing I was going to say. Oh, fairly come. I've forgotten it again.

Welcome to my life.

My mind is being sidetracked.

Short term memory for God's sake.

I've got my sub questions. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out which way I want to go as well. But I do want to stay.

Okay. No, it's back. Before I forget Jordan. So is there going to be. In everyday life we make decisions based on how we are feeling and coping with stresses with work, with training and we have for example a hard training session, we come home, we actually without doing this intentionally or we find out in our own mind and rate it. That was hard. I feel like I'm improving. So when we're coming to how our fueling is going with with the everyday that we wake up, we go to work, we train. At the end of the day should you be doing the same thing? Did I think I fueled myself well today? Do I feel tired? Did I get enough energies into myself today? Is that how we're measuring whether we're being effective? Are there other ways to measure other than your own feelings and your own taking notes like I'm asking athletes to take notes about how the session went.

Yep.

Should we, should we be asking ourselves did I get the fuel in today that, that I needed and should I be doing something about it as soon as I wake up tomorrow?

Yeah. Great question. I think we do need to reflect on our nutrition and we probably don't like it's like what I said right in the beginning. We kind of don't treat our bodies with the respect that we should or deserve to give them but we still expect a high performance outcome from them no matter what junk we throw in them. I think just energy levels is a really good subjective measure. Like are you getting to 3:30 in the afternoon and you just need a nap or you're starting to crave sweet because your body's in a hole and it's trying to catch itself up and so you're looking for the cookies or you're walking to the corner store for a Mars bar or something like that to get you through that afternoon slump like that's a really clear indicator to me that your nutrition's not right. But you can also.

I'm going to get some food.

Oh, it is that time of the afternoon. I'm on fire. Maybe my fueling's right.

Practicing what you preach.

But like, you can also check your bloods and things. Like if you're deficient in iron or something, you're going to feel pretty smashed regardless of what you're doing. So I guess, yeah, there's, there's two ways. There's objective and objective. But I think reflecting on that is really useful. The other thing to think about though is that like, unless you're educated, you don't know what you don't know in a way. And so when I work with athletes in the academy, so many of them say, one, I wish I had done this earlier. But two, like, I have so much energy and for me, like, that's my job done is that they. You kind of don't know how good you can feel until you feel differently and then you're like, ah, I shouldn't have felt so smashed. Like, a lot of people think I'm training for an ironman, so I'm meant to be tired. But we need to stop wearing that as a bit of a badge of honor because we should be able to get through that training and absorb that stress so that we can be fitter, faster athletes. Right. Smarter, faster. All those things that you guys are doing with your programming, we need to absorb that training rather than get to the finish line and be like, oh my God, I'm never doing that again.

Such a great point. And it's. Yeah, it's this kind of fine line between feeling like the training's hard, which it is, and you are so stuck from training. But you're exactly right. It's. Yeah, if you, if you're not feeling properly, and I just see it all the time in ourselves and myself is that if I just missed out on something pre training or during or just a bit delayed post training, I just pay for it so heavily. And you just constantly reminded smack to the face sometimes, especially in, you know, big type of volume training where on the weekend you're doing monster endurance sessions. If you don't get it right, you'll pay the rest of the day and it just sucks.

Yeah. And at the end of the day, your body is the thing that's getting you to the finish line. Right. And it's the thing that you have beyond the finish line. Like, we have that for life, but we don't Tend to respect it like we should, particularly when we're younger. I don't know about you, but I probably disregarded my body a bit more so when I was younger. Flogged itself. And now I have so much more respect for it. Because you'll end up as an 80 year old with osteoporosis if you're not careful with the things that you do when you're younger. And that's. You can't fix that at that point.

Yeah. Really interesting to think about. So, going to a kidney sting in this macronutrient target perspective and thinking about just total calories, how do you start going about that process of understanding yourself or how do you teach your athletes? Do you start tracking your calories daily just to see what you're doing or. Yeah. What, what methods do you use?

Yeah, so everyone's calorie needs are really different. Like there's no. Particularly with triathletes, there's no way to figure it out really accurately unless you're in a lab and you're breathing into a bag and understanding all of the specifics of everything that's going in and everything that's going out. So I don't actually believe in counting calories for triathletes. Maybe it's a, like a opposite type of opinion, but I actually did a podcast episode on my own podcast about that because there are so many limitations with estimating what goes in and estimating what goes out, and it's kind of like counterproductive. It's so time consuming. It's overwhelming. It's a stress point for people. So I like to get triathletes to not count calories because it doesn't really matter. It's about, you know, getting your fuel right, getting your recovery right, getting all those fundamentals right first. And your calories will sort themselves out when you can do that.

Yeah. Awesome. That's a great starting point. And yeah, I guess I really don't want to try and pigeon you pigeonhole you into a question about specifically what.

Are your calorie requirements? I can't tell you. No idea exactly.

No, I'm, I am just thinking from macronutrient perspective and, and, and your protein, carbs and fats. Yeah. Trying to figure out how much you should be having of each day. And I, I kind of feel like as endurance athletes, it's almost like you never have enough carbs. It feels like, you know, you just. Especially with a high training load, maybe for you, jealous. But if you are, if you are hungry, just you know post training and you stay hungry throughout the day because you are burning a lot of energy. Is it okay just to keep getting the carbs in and just go, well, I, I clearly should be eating. Is that or is that an incorrect kind of signal that you're trying to trust?

Yeah, it's hard because everybody's different. Again like you were one type of athlete and then there's probably like, I'm just thinking about a particular guy in the Academy, he's like 55 and he wants to lean up and he's like, like I can't, I need to stop eating. So we need to, yeah, work with the person in front of us and what their goals are. But also I don't really find that appetite's a good gauge for what you need when we are training for three sports because for like people at two camps, they're either starving all the time and you can't feel a hole and you know, maybe overeating. And then the other camp is people that have the appetite very much blunted from exercise and they really struggle to eat and recovery nutrition is a punish. And they're fat, feel like they're force feeding themselves all the time. So it is really individual. And an appetite can not be a very good gauge because it's not instantaneous either. So often when we do really high intensity exercise, our appetite suppressed and that's not giving us the right signals to say, hey, you need a whole heap of recovery here and you need to keep eating for the rest of the day if people are feeling like that. So you have your experience in the way that your body works and it's probably, you know, a relatively efficient, well oiled, machine. And then there's other people on the other end of the spectrum who I may be trying to drop some body fat but are starving all the time and you know, constantly trying to scale back.

How do you deal with that, that athlete and what are your tactics that will help them? Because if they're used to a certain way of consuming over their lifetime, if they're a 50 year old and they've been doing it a certain way for so long and their body's kind of got in sync with that method and they want to lose weight to be a better athlete, if that's their reason, that would be one reason maybe. How are you guiding them if they're starving and they know that if they're going to consume food they're going to remain the same way. What's your guide around that I can't.

Give you away all of my secrets. It's just about being strategic with nutrition. Like I got lots of tips and tricks in my tool belt to fill someone up when I need them to not eat as much and then also to fast fuel people if they need as many calories as they can get.

It's honestly such a good answer to understand that yeah, everyone is responding to things differently and that is something that I would have assumed, you know, appetite is, is always probably correct for endurance athletes. And yeah, for you to say that that's absolutely not the case. It's like it's so good to know and yeah important for both people on the spectrum. I think I definitely fall into that category like you said of someone that's always hungry and could yeah, potentially overeat sometimes. And then there's people on the complete other end of the spectrum.

So yeah, it's hard and males and females and hormones and you will extract a different amount of calories from the exact same apple that I would too. So we can't kind of put people in boxes and pigeonhole. It is like very individual and it's understanding about you and how your body works plus evolving that over time as you get efficient too. Because somebody that's very well trained is a well oiled machine. Right. Like you're really good at using carbohydrate and extracting that nutrient and storing as glycogen and pulling it out again. Whereas somebody that's very untrained is not as good at that. And so carbohydrate requirements are going to change as your journey as a triathlete changes too. So there's so many different components I guess for me like I've been a dietitian for 15 years now and I've worked with triathletes for a long time. So understand the practicalities of the sport. Being a retired one myself. Retired. But then like some strategies to, to help people, you know, fill up if they need to or get as much fuel on board if they can. And that really just comes with practice.

I wanted to ask about the, the carb source that you spoke about in terms of gels and sugar and lollies and especially sometimes when you haven't feel properly in your bonking or post training, you are literally just desperate for anything. Is that a negative thing to be doing? You know, just sculling power aids and a Mars bar because you just want some sugar post training especially again, endurance, endurance style sessions. Is it? Okay, what's your, what are your thoughts around it?

Are you asking for A friend.

I.

Did, I don't know.

I will give one example of someone I know that, that I don't know the details. So you can't blame it on one thing. But they did, they did develop type 2 diabetes and they weren't sure if it was because of that or just completely random and coincidence. So I guess that's kind of where the question stems from.

Yeah. So like I can't talk to that medically. There is some post Covid diabetes kicking around though I don't know if it's that, which is pretty crazy. So drinking like having sugar is not gonna cause diabetes. It's more of a lifestyle disease that, you know, there's too much fat around the cell typically for type 2. And so the insulin's not doing its job properly. But it could be genetic, it could be, you know, could be lots of things. It can't really talk to that. But if you are sculling, you know, sports drink after a session, you're like, you've bonked, you've hit the wall, then that tells me you've done a crap job of your fueling. Right. That's like a really clear way of going you under fueled in a big way. Whether that was your fuel tank going in was not optimal or you had pre training was not optimal and then what you had during training was not optimal as well. So yeah, it's just a pretty clear indication that something needs to be fixed with fuelling.

I suppose the next step in that question is is it okay to refuel quickly? That's you've obviously made a mistake. What should you be doing about that?

Yeah, good question.

Immediately. I'm talking about not, I know you're not going to do that the next time, but immediately in that, when you're in that situation. Because I've been in a situation with many times myself and with other people around me where we've gone and had to stop at a petrol station and you know, not able to talk and just standing there unwrapping Mars bars and eating the guy behind the counter saying, you're going to pay for that stuff. You're saying, don't, don't talk to me, mate. I just have to get this into me.

Classic. Yeah, so funny. Hold on, I lost you, Jared.

But I, so, so is it okay to do that, you know, in that, that when you've made that mistake, can you be okay with that for that one instance?

Like obviously you're going to have to because you're never going to make it home otherwise, right? Otherwise you're calling a sag wagon. So if you've experienced that, like hitting the wall, bonking. Yeah. The only way to pull yourself out of that is to slow down, stop or, you know, like get a sag wagon home. You will never be empty of muscle glycogen. You'll always still have a little bit or some in your liver because you'd be dead otherwise. But yeah, you're going to have to do something quickly to bring yourself back up and then fix the problem next time. But it takes 24 to 48 hours to fill up our fuel tank after we've pretty much emptied it. So it's not instantaneous like we put fuel in our car. It is going to take some time. And so we need to be eating carbohydrate for the next one to two days to fill that back up again. So it depends when you're training again next is how rapidly you want to do that. And we did talk about that a little bit last time, that the longer timeframe you've got to do your recovery, the maybe slower or lazier you can be. But when we train for three sports, like you don't have that luxury of time. You've got like less than eight hours to train again typically. And so you've got to be much more strategic and much more aggressive with your recovery to refill up again when you don't have that time luxury.

So you've given some unreal principles for day to day and starting with as simple as fruit and veg servings, it's a great place to start and then.

Understand how do we get into Mars bars?

Yeah, exactly.

It always gets to Mars bars.

Yeah, yeah. And then starting to understand what foods are different. Macronutrients. We didn't ask this before, but are you consciously trying to find foods with different sources of vitamins, minerals, the micronutrients, or is that just naturally supposed to come from the fruit and veg sources and a variety of foods?

Yeah, variety of foods. So you'll get a lot from our fruits and veggies, but you also need things like nuts and seeds to give you a lot of micros. You need things like dairy or good quality dairy alternatives to get you calcium. We get things like iron from the best source is red meats, but a lot of people don't eat red meat, so where do we get those from? And so, yeah, it is, it's again, not very sexy. But you have to have variety in your food and not just eat chicken, broccoli and rice because One, that's boring and who wants to eat like that? But two, you might be hitting your macro targets and meaning in macros, sounding like a bodybuilder here, but you're not getting any of that range of micros which we have higher needs for as a triathlete.

Okay, so then the golden question becomes, all right, we've got these founding principles by understanding the varieties of food sources. So what do I eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner? And then how do you go about that with athletes? And because that is just a golden question to everyone, they just go, just tell me what to eat, Taryn.

I know, well, come and join me in the academy and I'll tell you what to eat.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

A good place to start is somewhere like my recipe database. Like, this is not a, like a plug. But the recipe database has got 200 recipes in there that are designed for the active person. So they do hit macro targets for an active person, not somebody that sits on their butt. Plus they've got loads of nutrients injected into them. And I think that's the problem with like recipe books and online recipes is that you don't know if that's going to be suitable for you as an active person because a lot of them are very low in carb or don't have enough protein or, you know, don't have enough nutrients in it. And so you do want to use recipes as your base that are developed by a sports dietitian, if you can, because it is going to tick all those boxes for you without you having to even think about it.

And then. Oh, you go, dad.

No, you keep going.

So this is great. You guys are fighting over me. I love it.

Yeah, yeah. This is. Honestly, it's like, I just. Yeah, it's such a great topic and it's just something that is just not spoken enough, even though it is what everyone knows, the fourth discipline of training and triathlon. So. And you can say, yeah, it's a.

Fourth leg, but we're not taught it in school. Right. And then the other problem is that we don't go and see nutrition professionals for nutrition advice. We go to the Internet or we go to, like triathlon websites. Those blogs are written by punters. Like, oh, makes my blood boil seeing, like these really specific articles written about stuff that are written by nobody with nutrition qualifications. So you just gotta go to the professional for the professional advice. Because we go to, like an optometrist for our eyes and we go to a podiatrist for our feet, but we don't go to a dietitian for nutrition. It makes no sense to me.

Yeah, we, we often have athletes go to their mates for their training program and yeah, see, we feel the same.

It's, it's frustrating.

Why would you listen to your mate's program when he's making it up and we actually know what we're talking about and do that session instead? Yes, I get it. I feel your frustration.

So the next question I had on, yeah, thinking about your daily meal plan and what your meals are going to be, you start looking at some recipes and that's a great resource and happy for you to plug that because there's going to be some something that people can look at that they go, well, at least I know I'm getting macro micronutrients here. Then I want to understand portion sizes with meals. Does the amount of meals you're having per day matter? Is the amount of food in one sitting? Is it hard to. Can you mention like your body being able to digest certain amounts of the vital minerals, vitamins, micronutrients, macronutrients. How does that all work?

Yeah, it depends. I can't answer that one really clearly. You're asking me these really specific questions.

That I know that you could just do a degree in nutrition science to understand it. You know, it's not just. You can't just.

Yeah, go and do. I've actually got an episode coming up on the podcast about like, like how much money I spent on my education because I didn't really think about that before. And just to do my degree to become a sports dietitian. Well, just to become A dietitian was $36,000 in four years of full time uni, plus the additional stuff on that. Anyway, I digress, sorry, portions. So it doesn't matter if you have your meals split into three versus like six smaller meals. For a triathlete though, you want to think about timing and that becomes really important when we're talking about pre training and recovery nutrition for training. So you've got your main meals, but maybe breakfast is recovery or maybe dinner's recovery. So it's really just personal preference about the way that you like to eat. There's no right or wrong, but I'd encourage you to think about that timing around training sessions so that we are, you know, fueling and priming the system before and then recovering really well afterwards.

And then there seems to be some myths floating around or, and maybe not they're not myths, but stuff like, you know, when people try intermittent fasting or.

Oh, don't get me started.

And people talking about eating, eating, you know, carbs. Too close to bed is another one that floats around that kind of timing where. How, you know, can you give any answers on that?

Around.

Around how the body works and when it's at rest, at sleep, while it's still active during the day.

Yeah. So many deep rabbit holes. I feel like we're going down. Lots of random tangents.

I am just, I am just asking.

Yeah.

There's just so much information. I'm just throwing stuff at you.

I know. It's fine. I love it. I love it. So intermittent fasting, we actually know quite a bit about that with exercise because of Ramadan. And we know physiologically what happens in the early stages of fasting, but we don't really know long term. What it does is I did do another podcast episode again on intermittent fasting and endurance exercise because I wouldn't recommend it, particularly if you're training in the morning. You like faster training either has a neutral effect on performance or a negative. It doesn't have a beneficial effect of performance. So if you're trying to perform, you either fast like and do that strategically or you fuel for performance. Right. But your stomach doesn't know necessarily what time of day it is. And so it doesn't know that at like 6 o' clock at night it can no longer digest carbs anymore. Like that's just nonsense. But I also wouldn't suggest like waking up in the middle of the night and smashing a packet of Tim Tams either. That's not good for us either because shift working in particular, that change in our sleep wake hormones, our gut microbes have their own sleep wake hormones. And so shift working really messes with that. And people really do struggle with body fat levels and maintaining weight when they are throwing their hormone rhythm out of sync constantly.

What about when the athlete has no option because their planned run tomorrow happens to be at 5:15am and they have no way can they run with some food in their stomach. It's going to be detrimental to the feeling of the run. And if it's a high intensity run, what are we doing there? Are we. Are we just going to run faster and. And hopefully the performance isn't gonna be inhibited. What's your thought on that?

I guess you can go a couple of ways. You can just deal with it or, or you try and wake up earlier and do something a bit more strategic. So maybe you wanna think about what you've done the evening before and make sure that while you're asleep, your body's doing a really good job of topping up your muscle glycogen. But if, if that session is designed for peak performance, then you wanna do the best of your best job at fueling that and recovering that. Right. Cause we only adapt and get fitter and faster from the sessions that we recover from. So like you can go and do that session and you can like hit a wall and, you know, do it, but not do it to the best of your ability. So are you then actually getting the most out of it that your coaches plan for you if you're doing that?

The issue I'm thinking of in particular, I've experienced it is if I'm going to try and run and I've got any food in my stomach, I just cannot do it within two or three hours. And I'm not going to get up and have those Tim Tams at 3am if I've got a 5am run.

So don't do that. I didn't say that. Don't construe that as doing that. Just like the alcohol.

So I'm just trying to practically give the listener, you know, is it okay that we, we're going to perform the session at our best ability? If you have issues with stomach problems, which I had, I could never eat before a run. It had to be two or three hours before I was able to run without feeling uncomfortable from the food that hadn't digested.

Yeah.

And that is a real problem in the morning for people who don't have time.

Yep, totally. I would challenge you though, because that's how I am. I like to challenge and I would suggest you do some gut training to get your gut used to having fuel before you run hard. Like back in the day they used to give people hot dogs and make them run hard. Like you can train your gut. You just had have to provide that stimulus. And so fasting all the time teaches it to run fasted, but you just gotta slowly make incremental change to have something super small, something super easy to digest. And it's not gonna be ideal to start with and that's totally fine. But you're doing that strategically and systematically to train your gut to digest while you're trying to run away from a lion.

Fantastic. That's exactly what I was hoping. And so the beer mile is something that we could actually train for.

Oh my God. Those hot dog eating competitions in the US like they nail like 70 or 80 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Right? Like that is gut training.

Yeah, yeah.

They don't run afterwards, but they're training their gut to just hold that in a short space of time so you can do the same. You just have to challenge it.

The beer mile world record is insane. It is 4:19 or something for the mile and he scales four beers while running it.

I'd be poleaxed.

It is. It is world class running while sculling. Four beers like that is. He's almost Olympic standard.

Probably runs. Probably runs 1650 meters from. Not running straight.

Yeah, well he can, he can easily run sub four minutes if you're sculling four.

Anyway, imagine running, not drinking four beers. He'd be like a weapon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's. He clearly had one goal in mind and that was the BMW world record. So Darren, you've done such a great job of taking a very specific questions and keeping them general enough to be principles and not boxing anyone into any rules. I think that is just such an important part of this podcast and we're so happy for you to be plugging your own podcast episodes and your resources because you've got a whole wealth of knowledge there and it is really hard to answer a lot of these in one episode. So we do thank you for that. I guess the one message that has come up consistently in both episodes we've had you on is you are constantly referring it back to training for the athlete because that is kind of the energy expenditure requirements of the week. And so a lot of your decision making should be around when are you training, how much you're training. You know, your day to day stuff is really impacted by that pre post and during training. Fuel as well as everything outside. And I guess that's kind of one of the key parts for triathlons to remember, right?

Yeah. You have to fuel for the record cry. We can't just do the same all the time. We have to think differently when we are high achieving triathletes that want to fit three sports into a week. You have to eat differently on a lighter or rest day and then know how to scale and adapt that for those really big, long, hard endurance days. Because if you're eating the same way or the same calories or the same carbs or whatever for those days. There's some days that you're very much going to underdo it and more likely to be trying to smash Mars bars to get yourself home or coke or whatever it is, and then those other lighter days where maybe you're less active and you're sitting on your butt, you're going to be overeating your calories and, you know, potentially be putting some fat on. So if we want to be, you know, the best triathletes that we can be, we have to think about our nutrition in that same limelight. Like we often have our training dialed in and we spend a lot of money on our bikes and all of our gear, but then we completely disregard the fourth leg. And that is honestly like, I know I'm very biased, but that is where the magic happens.

Yeah, well, there'll be no magic without it. That's the reality. No matter how fit you are, you, you have to have a fuel source to function. So do all the spending and money, training and anything you want to do. If you don't have that fuel, you're not moving very well. You're not functioning at all. Look, it's been brilliant to get you on again and I really appreciate everything that you're doing. I know it's hard to be specific, but the general comments you're making are really helpful to the people who are listening. And most people are in the same boat. They are, are uneducated. And it's, it's people like you that can make everyday athletes become better versions of themselves if they're just willing to put the time into listening to the advice. So we really appreciate that. Thank you.

Oh, you're welcome anytime. It's my happy place talking about nutrition all day, every day.

And on that note, you do have a three day nutrition camp that starts off and I guess you can explain it but you know, starts to go into all this information, more detail where people can start to learn more of these fundamentals and start applying to themselves. So do you want to talk to us about that?

Yeah, I'd love to. So on the 14th to the 16th of January, I'm running triathlon fuel school. So over three days where I'm going to step you through some of these key foundations that you need to get your year off to the best start. So we're going to talk about some of the foundations of nutrition on a day to day basis to perform to the best of your ability. We're going to dive into hydration and electrolyte balance and then some Rage Nutrition 101, like those things that triathletes honestly like a winging it with. I'm going to dive into some of those foundations to make sure your 2024 is set up for success. So if you want to come to that, it's free. It's an hour each day for three days. It will be recorded and you have to go to fuel.school to register for that. Yep, it's a weird one. So like www.fuel.school. there's no.comno.com. it's literally fuel.school.

Easy to remember. I will track the link in the episode description as well, so you can click it right there. But thanks again, Taran. It's been amazing to have you on. And yeah, we hope that triathletes continue to learn more of this stuff, including ourselves, because it is just so important. So thank you for being on again.

My pleasure. Anytime.

No worries. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you on the next one.