Olympic Breakfast

Olympic breakfast: what to eat and when The Brownlee brothers have to take in calories while exercising to keep their energy levels up Georgie Gillard

The Brownlee brothers have to take in calories while exercising to keep their energy levels upGeorgie Gillard Published at 12:01AM, September 11 2012 Diet control is an essential aspect of an athlete’s training. Two Olympic nutritionalists talk to The Times Dr Kevin Currell Nutritionist for British Triathlon I’ve worked with the British Triathlon programme for five years and the Brownlee brothers were there at the start. We began by providing the Brownlees with basic cooking skills. If you can’t cook, you can’t provide yourself with the right types of food and nutrients. As they have such limited time, they have to prepare easy meals — it is never going to be gourmet food.

Once upon a time, athletes would eat a whole load of pasta and get running. We know more now about what the body needs. Nutrition provides building blocks for the body and, as an elite athlete, if you don’t have those blocks, you’re not going to be able to adapt to the training or recover from it.

As the brothers progressed from juniors to senior world champions, that nutritional support became ever more performance-focused in terms of looking at what they ate in the days leading up to a race. Their diet became stricter in the build -up to the Olympic Games and they used better quality food while keeping their energy intake high so that they could be absolutely at their peak.

Triathlon brings unique challenges because you swim, then cycle, then run. If you’re just a runner, you will suffer damage to the stomach and the intestine and get diarrhoea or feel sick while you are running. One way to solve that is to eat five or six hours before a run. But if you are a triathlete, you’ll do a two-hour swim before breakfast and then you’ll go on your bike for four or five hours in the middle of the day and you’ll run in the evening. And you’ve got to eat after that bike ride to refuel and recover, but if your stomach is sensitive when you run, you have to strike a balance.

So the timing of eating is really important for triathletes and a real challenge. They are time poor — they are always training — so we get them to eat on the bike, to see it as a rolling buffet so that they are getting those nutrients in. I’m an average triathlete, nowhere near as good as the Brownlees, but competing gives me an insight. I know how you feel sick when you get on the bike, in the first five minutes it is hard to eat or drink anything so I won’t advise them to do that. I know it is hard to eat on the run. And anyway, when they are running, the blood flow to the intestine is reduced and it is hard to digest anything.

It is not unusual for a triathlete to do 40 hours of training a week so the volume of food they need to eat to meet the energy demands of that are quite high. For breakfast they can’t go wrong with porridge. If they have been for a run and need to recover, there is nothing better than a pint of milk straight afterwards. They need protein and carbohydrates and fluid to replace what they have sweated out. Milk gives them all of that and calcium; one of the biggest problems among triathletes is bone damage such as stress fractures and calcium helps to prevent those. In the evening I would recommend a dish of sweet potatoes, oily fish and salad. Sweet potatoes, which have more fibre than normal potatoes, release energy slowly overnight.

During early-morning training triathletes will have something lighter than porridge, such as a banana, and the real breakfast will come after the swim.

If they are competing, they will eat three or four hours beforehand so then they can have a bowl of porridge and a bagel, which will be fully digested before they dive into the lake.

There are two phases of refuelling. It is like filling up the car with enough carbs. They do that in the two days before a race and they top up the fuel tank with the porridge and bagels.

When on the bike they will have a simple sports drink (as the Brownlees are sponsored by Gatorade, they will use that) and they use gels made up of sugar and carbohydrates that are easily digested; there is lots of scientific evidence that they improve performance. This all means that when they get off the bike they have enough energy left to complete the run.

As told to Alyson Rudd

Typical triathlon meal plan Pre-swim Small bowl of cereal with milk Post-swim Large bowl of porridge with milk, raisins, chopped nuts and cinnamon. Two slices of toast with eggs.

During bike Slice of homemade flapjack and 500ml of sports drink per hour of the ride Post-bike Large plate of steamed rice and chicken with tomato sauce and some vegetables Snacks Banana or flapjack After run 1 pint of milk and 1-2 pieces of fruit Dinner Salmon, cous cous and salad Pre-bed Yoghurt Jeni Pearce Head of Performance Nutrition at The English Insititute of Sport When thinking about copying an elite athlete’s diet remember that, for most of us, exercise is something we try to fit in around our working hours, but for athletes, exercising is their work.

However, everyone has the same food in their pantry as an elite athlete would eat. It is just that athletes have to get the balance right every time and focus on the timing of their meals.

If you like going for a run at 6am, you need to train your body to take on a bit of fluid before you set off. If you are running for 30 minutes, you probably need just a little water. If you will be out for an hour and a half, you need to get used to drinking a sports drink while you run and maybe a cereal bar too, otherwise you will be asleep at your desk by 10am.