How My Cross Country Athlete Dropped Her 5K Time

I'm gonna teach you the nutrition system and supplements that my runner used to take her 5K time from an 18:25 to a 17:33, her 1600 meter from a 4:56 to a 4:49, and her 800 meter from a 2:14 to a 2:10 midway through the season without changing her training regimen or anything else that she was doing except the nutrition system. We're gonna start with the nutrition system and then we will talk about the supplements after. So here's the nutrition system. I'm gonna break down everything that Chloe did to get the results that she got. First of all, We got her on a meal plan. So I'm gonna show you how many calories she was eating, how many protein, fats, carbs she was eating. I wasn't necessarily having her track these in an app. We have a system where it gave her options for her breakfast, for her lunch, for her snacks, for her pre-practice snacks. Like, it gave her those options so that she didn't have to track it in an app every single day. So she was eating between 2,500 calories and 2,700 calories every single day. Now calories are broken down into 3 different food groups. There's carbs, There's fats and then there's protein. So with these foods, all of these combine to give you total amount of calories. That's kind of just what you need to know. Carbs are gonna give you energy. They are the gas in your energy tank. These are runner's best friends. Fats are gonna help you have healthy hormones. It's gonna give you kind of those long-lasting energies. Also very important for runners. Then we have protein. This helps maintain your muscle mass and keep you healthy and allows you to recover faster. Now my runners are special. They can't necessarily have a normal split between these like a football or a basketball player would have because you guys are putting in the mileage. You are running 40 to 50 miles every single week. You are burning through your gas tanks, you're burning through your energy, and that is why we need to prioritize carbohydrates even over protein. Doesn't mean you don't need protein, you definitely do. But usually we have you guys have less protein during your season than we would a basketball player. For the reason of we need some extra carbs in here. So for Chloe, again, she was about 125 pounds. Her weight in kilograms is roughly 57 kilos. And so for carbs, we multiplied that by about 6. That was about 340 grams of carbs every single day. That's a lot for 125-pound female runner. That is going to scare a lot of you female runners and maybe some of you male runners. This is going to make it so your times drop. The carbs are so freaking important. The breads, the pastas, the rice, the fruits, like all of those good healthy carbs are so essential to each meal that you're eating, to your breakfast, to your lunch, to your dinner. You want to include a large portion, maybe even like half your plate of carbs every single meal. That is what Chloe was doing. We were carbing her up to make it so she had fuel in the tank when the 5K came or when the 1600-meter race started. We wanted to make sure that she never ran outta gas. So next you'd figure out your protein. We took her kilos, 57, and we multiplied it by 1.6, which gave us about 90 grams of protein. Between 90 and 95, right? So that told me she needed about 30 grams of protein every single meal she was eating. So for breakfast, she would have 30 protein. For lunch, she would need about 30 protein. For dinner, she would need about 30 protein. And that would get her to her protein goal for the day. And for fats, she was eating about 111 grams of fats. Honestly, that can give or take just depending on how many carbs she's eating. This is a minimum amount of carbs that we wanted her eating, but it could have gone up to like 400 grams for the day if she had a super hard workout, if she needed more energy in the tank. Like, we would increase those carbs and lower those fats. It's just kind of a give and take situation. So Chloe was successful and got the results that she did because she was religious to sticking to her meal plan. Now, that doesn't mean she was tracking every single little gram of carbs or protein because she had joined my program. And that's just not how we do it in our program. We just make sure it's as easy as possible for them. But if you are sitting at home and you're like, ah, I'm not really ready to join Kelsey's program, I'm not really ready to do this stuff, but I do want like kind of the next right step to follow, you can follow the Performance Plate method. And that's gonna be a great place for you to start getting a good idea of how many carbs, fats, protein your body needs per meal. So, uh, the performance plate method is half of your plate for breakfast or lunch and for dinner wants to be— you want it to be made up of carbohydrates. Remember, carbs are the rice, the pastas, the potatoes, the whole wheat breads, the fruits. That is going to give you energy in your gas tanks. Then you take about a fourth of your plate and you want that to be protein. So this would be chicken breast, this could be ground turkey, this could be steak, it could be any source of meat, right? It could also be Greek yogurt or cottage cheese. I would recommend sticking to whole real foods, um, instead of like protein bars and stuff like that. It's just going to give you more nutrients for your body. And then fats are going to be kind of like this small portion of the plate. This is going to be cooking your meat in olive oil or adding some avocado or some almonds or nuts to the side of your plate to give you some healthy fats for your body. And then the last but not least, we would add color. So typically this would be like a, a side of vegetable, right? Like would be, uh, carrots or broccoli or a salad right here. And then we'd add a second color, which would be more fruit over here, which would then give us extra carbohydrates as well. It will make you guys focus on getting a veggie here and a fruit here, um, to really finish out the performance plate. So if you start here, it's going to be a great starting point. Is it going to give you the exact amount? Maybe not, but this really is a great place for any, any runner dipping their toes into nutrition to follow, and you will see some good results and some good energy changes from it. So that's what Chloe was eating daily and how we structured the meal plan. But now I'm going to show you guys how we did it for practice and training day. So for practices, she usually practiced around 3:00 PM, like 3:00, I think, to like 4:30 PM most days. Sometimes she would have a morning practice, but I'll show you just afternoon practice. So she'd wake up in the morning, she'd eat around 7:30 AM, and she'd have breakfast. That B stands for breakfast. Then around 10:00 AM, we'd have her have a mid-morning snack. And this was usually like a carb-based snack. So this would be like an applesauce and pretzels or like an orange and small PB&J. It's just gonna be a carb-based snack that's going to keep her energy levels up. Up. That's going to eventually fuel this run. And then around noon, she would have her lunch, and this is where like the Performance Plate would come in, um, you focusing on the carbs, the fats, the protein, and the colors. And then about an hour and a half before her practice, she would have another high-carb snack. That's where another applesauce would come in, or a granola bar, or something that she was willing to eat and that was easy to pack and keep in her bag every single day to reach in, grab, and to be fueled for this practice. After practice, she usually would have like a quick small protein snack. Like, she loved to do like an Oikos yogurt, um, to help her get the protein in, to get some extra carbs in too, because she would put some granola in it and some berries as well. So she would usually eat that like right after practice. It's actually funny because her teammate— she started doing that and she was crushing it that season, and her teammates took notice like that she would bring Greek yogurt every day and eat it after practice. And then after a few weeks of her crushing it and hitting all those PRs, she saw like some younger teammates also start bringing yogurt and granola and like, they're like, "Oh, that must be the trick, right? Like she's doing this." And so they were just mimicking everything she was doing, which was pretty funny. It was pretty awesome. So she would do that right after practice. And then obviously she would go home, she would around 6:30, she would have her dinner also following kind of the Performance Plate method. So sometimes it would be salmon with a bunch of rice on the side with a good salad and a fruit, right? And depending on how hard the practice was, sometimes around 8:00 PM, we would just have her have like a smaller snack, right? This could be like a bowl of fruit. This was sometimes maybe a piece of toast, just depending on how her energy levels were that day. If she was feeling a little bit hungry before bed, she might've had like a toast and honey right there, a small bowl of oatmeal or something. Usually again, this was carb-based 'cause we're, we're needing to really, really focus on the carbs for her 'cause she was training her butt off in these situations, especially if she would've had like an AM practice before school. So ultimately what I wanted her to be paying attention to on practice days was not skipping any of her eating windows, specifically the breakfast, the lunch, and then the, the high-carb snack before practice. 'Cause this was gonna give her the energy that she needed for the tough practices they were having, which then led to her being able to show up on race days even better. Now we'll talk about what she did on race days. Honestly, not much different than what she did on practice days, except we really, really honed in on when she was eating the certain meals and foods. 'Cause that just made it so her digestive system was ready ready to push her body for a full 18 minutes for a 5K. So the first step was to know when the race was. A lot of times her races would be at like noon, 12 PM, right? And then we would work backwards. I call this the 4-2-1 approach. So 4 hours before the race, we'd subtract it and we'd say, okay, around 8 AM, Chloe, this is when you want to have a full meal. That happened to be her breakfast at the time, so she would have her full breakfast, her normal breakfast, kind of Performance Plate style, A lot of times this would be like sourdough toast with some eggs and fruit and an orange juice on the side. Then 2 hours before, so this is 4 hours before, and then 2 hours before, this would be at 10:00 AM, she would have a high-carb snack. So I'm gonna say HCS for high-carb snack. This is where it would be the applesauce and granola bar, something like that. And then one of the supplements, which we'll talk about here in a little bit. 1 hour before, she would have fluids, which we'll also talk about here in a little bit, plus other supplements. That we'll also talk about here in a little bit. And then she would race. And then after her race, it would be around, you know, 1 PM by the time she was able to get to it. She would have her lunch and then she would kind of follow the rest of her eating schedule as was on a training day. Like, this is the ideal situation. But I also understand that some races start at 9 or at 10. If that is the case, an easy way to do it is just cross out this 4. Or if you wanted to get fancy with it, This breakfast would be a high-carb breakfast. It's going to be like a bowl of oatmeal instead of like eggs, oatmeal, and some sausage. You're going to cut out the protein and the fats, and you're really going to just focus on carbohydrates. And then you could smash this high-carb snack, take half of that and put it with your fluids. So this is for a race day, a one-and-done 5K, right? But if you are focused on a meet where you were running multiple events in the day— she was sometimes running the 8, the 4, and the 16— she was having to do it a little different, and we were following the 1:1 rule. So 1:1 is for every minute that you have in between your races, that is the amount of carbohydrates that you will want to eat. So if you have, if she had 60 minutes in between her race, she's gonna have about 60 grams of carbs. An easy way to think of this would be like a banana and a PB&J, right? If she only had 15 minutes, that would be more like 15 carbs, which is like an applesauce or a GoGo Squeeze. She had 30 minutes, it would be 30 carbs, which is about a banana. If it was like 2 hours or 3 hours, that's when I would just say to come through this process again and do the 4-2-1-0 again, or the 2-1-0 if you don't have a ton of time. Um, but usually hers was like 60 to 90 minutes in between, so she was usually following this 1:1 rule more than anything. So those are race days and our meet days. I wanna briefly talk about hydration before we do supplements. For her hydration, we were having her focus on 2 different things. A base out, a baseline ounce, which is like the minimum amount of ounces that she needs to drink even on rest days, not including her practices. And then we have an exercise ounce per hour. So the difference here, baseline, take her body weight in pounds, chop it in half. She's about 125 pounds is what, what, between 60 and 65 ounces every single day for her base. This is what she was having outside of practice. So for her exercise per hour, there is a formula that I would plug in for people. It's kind of complicated. So to make it more applicable to you guys at home, it's probably easier to just say between 16 and 24 ounces. And then like if it's like a super chill practice, you can kind of decrease that. If it's like a hot, it's, you're sweating a lot, super humid practice, you'll probably increase that. Just listen to your body. 'Cause I know it's hard too. You might go on a run and not take water with you and you might need to catch up on the ounces when you get back from the run. So what she would do typically was around 16 ounces though, every single hour of practice or exercise or meets that she would know on top of this, she was also having to do this per hour. So she had a 2-hour practice, she would know she would need 32 ounces during that time. And if she didn't get all of that during the practice, she was gonna add it to this baseline ounce. The last thing with hydration is we got pretty specific with her electrolytes. Electrolytes are very important for a lot of runners. Electrolytes keep you from cramping, they keep you hydrated, it allows your body to actually use the water that you're drinking instead of like having it go straight through you. So for her, she was usually doing like a Liquid IV for most practice days. Like she would include that there, or this is where in the 1 of the 4-2-1-0, that's where she would have like a Liquid IV IV. It doesn't have to be a Liquid IV, really. You're looking for about 500 milligrams of sodium in the electrolyte powder. If you sweat more, you might need higher than that, like an Element. If you sweat less, you might need lower than that. That's kind of just like the happy medium we always go for in general. So that's kind of the number you guys are looking for. Again, you can go up or down depending on how much you actually sweat. Okay guys, that was her nutrition system. Now we're going to talk about supplements. So with supplements, we didn't get super fancy. We didn't do a ton. Honestly, the food got her 95% of the way there. So don't think that supplements are going to take 10 seconds off of your time because it probably won't. But for runners, seconds matter. An extra second off of your time matters, or even an extra 0.5 seconds matters. Like, that's a PR that could win or lose a race. We had her taking beetroot juice. I have a full video on supplements where I'll break this down and what beetroot juice does and the dosage and everything, um, and we can put the link to that video in the description if you want to go dive into that and learn the dosages. But for her, she was doing beetroot beetroot juice. She was taking this 2 to 3 hours before her race. She wasn't doing this for practices, just on race days. She was doing a beetroot juice with 400 milligrams of nitrate in it. Again, go to the supplements video. We break this down a lot more in depth, and you can kind of learn where you can get this, how you can get this, et cetera. Beetroot juice improved her stamina and her endurance, which was pretty cool. Second was caffeine. We only, only had her do caffeine If her race or meet was 8 hours before bedtime, if she raced, and this often happens, sometimes she would race at 8 PM at night, I would say no caffeine. That's gonna mess up your sleep. You don't wanna do caffeine. But if she raced at noon, that was easy cuz she usually didn't go to bed till about 9:30 or 10 PM. Typically we do 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram. So remember she was 57 kilos. We times that by 3, that's gonna give us, you know, about 170. 160 to 170 milligrams on the low end that we would have her, that we would have her do. Usually she would use like Run Gum, and then there was a brand of electrolyte that she liked. It was called Relight. This Relight had electrolytes and caffeine, which made it really easy for the like the 4-2-1. So the 1 hour out before her race, she was having this Relight, which gave her the electrolytes and part of the caffeine. And then she would do Run Gum about like 30 minutes before race time. Beetroot juice, caffeine, and then an everyday supplement that she was doing was omega-3 fatty acids, for the reason being that she wasn't eating fish multiple times a week. Fish, salmon specifically, like fatty fish, is a big source of omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3s can help with recovery, it helps with inflammation, it helps them just feel better, helps her joints feel better. Omega-3s are awesome. So we did have her on those as well. These were race day applicable. This was an everyday supplement. Okay guys, so there you have it. We went over her nutrition system, we went over the hydration, we went over race day, meet day. And supplements. There was a lot to cover. I know it was probably a little bit confusing. There's a lot that goes into this. If you are confused and if you need help, if you want help, we have spots open in our nutrition coaching membership. Come join. We'll, we'll get you situated with all of these things so it's super easy for you to just focus on running. Runners are some of my favorite athletes to work with because you guys are some of the most disciplined athletes I know, and because we get measurable results. Like this last week we had two runners, they've only been in the program for two weeks, and one of 'em said like, I took 60 sec— 60 seconds off my 5K. And another one said, Everyone's like, "I took 37 seconds off my 5K." So it's pretty freaking fun to dial in these things, to dial in the nutrition system, and to start seeing all the crazy results. They're like, "It didn't even feel hard." So anyway, come join if that's fun for you.