Adventures in Nutrition

A week ago, I did yet another 7,500 yard swim on Friday, and it was my 12th swim of 6,000+ yards. In building up these long swims, I have needed to adjust my thinking about them in terms of nutrition and hydration, both before, during and after.

Before I began this UMC preparation season, I'd swum 5,000 yards at a pop maybe 3-4 times before my last 2 or 3 Ironman races. This came about once I discovered the outdoor 50-meter pool a few years ago, which made it easy and even pleasurable to swim longer.

Up to about 5,000 yards (but just once a week--not like I was swimming that much each swim), I didn't need to do anything differently nutrition or hydration-wise, but that may have been that I was already doing them during an Ironman build phase, where I've already kicked up my calorie intake in general.

But I also think that you can wing it on almost any workout that is about 1.5 hours in duration, provided it's not an all out effort. If your longest workout is 1.5 hours, and you do that every day, you have a bigger margin of error on your nutrition and hydration. Here I think the post-workout nutrition is most important--you know, some mix of protein and carbs right away.

Move that time up to 2 hours and things get interesting. 2-hour workouts day in and day out seem to require that my tank (glycogen) is full when I start, and I can't have a lot in my stomach when I begin, whether it's a ride, run (especially!) or swim. If it's the only workout I'm doing that day, I can fudge on the during workout nutrition as long as I do a good job once I'm finished.

It's at 2.5 hours where things demand you do things right across the board (for me), and while I've had plenty of years to get that right for biking and running, this season is the first time I'm swimming that long, too.

I can do 2.5 hours a day, even on some work days. If it's split into 2 or 3 sessions, it just means I need to keep eating a couple hundred calories every few hours, but mostly carbs, because fat and protein will take too long to digest before my next workout (although a piece of string cheese or a hardboiled egg doesn't upset my stomach too much between workouts). Most of my fat for the day will come at dinner time, after all the workouts are done.

If I do a 2.5 hour session on the weekend, I'm careful to load up on calories beforehand, during, and I will always have a complete meal afterward.

I don't often do 2.5 hour workouts on work days, though, or at least I don't usually until I am close to an Ironman and doing 2.5 hour runs on Thursday mornings. So it's a new phenomenon to be already doing 2.5 hour workouts (swims) on work days in the winter, and I guess I'm just an old dog learning new tricks, but it's taken me a few tries to get it through my thick head that I need to be as good about my nutrition for them.

The really long swims I've done on Saturdays or days off from work trigger the same preparation as any long weekend workout, making sure I eat plenty the day before, take in maybe 600-700 calories before I begin working out, good nutrition during and after. Why I wasn't doing this for these long swims on work days I have no idea--habit, I guess!

So Thursday I made sure I drank plenty of water and other fluids, ate a pile of carbs and began my shutdown procedure (you know--like shutting down a computer for the day--mine includes preparing my workout gear for the next day and any special nutrition and loading the coffee pot) early enough in the evening so I'd sleep well. Wanting to get as much sleep as possible, I set the alarm for 5AM on the nose. I woke up, fixed one cup of coffee, had a toasted English muffin with orange marmalade (I love jam, sorry I know it's sugar, but oh well I'm not perfect), at 5:30 I drank 200 calories of Ultrafuel and then I suited up and headed for the pool with 2.5 hours worth of Infinit (573 calories) mixed in 64 oz. of water.

I started my swim at 5:55AM and finished about 8:28. I didn't quite drink all the Infinit--but I did get down 486 calories in 54 oz. of water, which is more than I have ever taken in during one of these long swims. Since yesterday's swim was all about getting the nutrition (hopefully) right, I did 10x750 (sort of--the last 3 repeats were 5x150), stopping around every 15 minutes to drink. Now, during UMC I won't want to stop that often for nutrition--maybe every 20 minutes--but this is a start.

I showered and stretched a bit in the sauna and then went home to start my work day. When I got home, I drank my usual Endurox R4 recovery drink and had 2 servings of oatmeal. Again, while I would like to go to non-instant oats and all that stuff, I can't make the time for that so it was Quaker Oats Raisin, Date and Walnut. Yum! So that was about 540 calories post-workout.

I still felt tired after the workout and really wanted to lay down for about an hour, but I couldn't do that because of work and wanting to be done by 5PM for the day. I had stuff oozing out of my eyes most of the day (damn chlorine), but other than that, I felt better than I had the week before, and this morning I feel pretty good, unlike last Saturday.

My next experiment will be in a few weeks when I will once again combine the long swim and ride on Saturday, which means I will get Friday off! It will be a train-through thing, to see if it's any worse to just do both the same day with a day of rest vs. doing the big swim on a work day. What will be key here is keeping up my calorie intake on Friday. For me, the stimulus to eat comes from working out, so if I'm not working out, my appetite just isn't there.

Now that I think about it, my appetite isn't what I would expect it to be. I'm not ravenous, but I also don't feel my workouts are being compromised, so I must be doing OK. I do know that I will start eating more pasta--it seems to be the best way for me to get in more calories without adding significant volume (which is why I don't eat it when I'm not training very much because I will overdo it). As it is, I'm a rice-a-holic, love the fruit and salads, but I need to kick it up a notch.

Once again I find it comical that the issue for me is not in doing the workouts--it's the nutrition and all the other stuff. I have never had issues being motivated to do the work. Since I think I've eaten pretty well to support my training in the last 10 years and am finding I need to work harder at it now, it makes me wonder how many people are really sabotaging their training with crappy diets. Certainly for Ironman training, it's beneficial to be somewhat lean, and if you want to be able to do any intensity in addition to volume, you had better be eating right. Although, I understand one man's idea of hobby is another woman's (!) obsession. I remember back to the first year I trained for an Ironman and did many things wrong, and I suffered because of it. I was overweight, didn't eat right (thought I could eat anything because of how much I was training), looked like crap, and sucked. My how things have changed!