Week commencing 8th February

Posted at 14:35 on Feb 25, 2010 by Michelle White

Exciting week this week, as I’m due to meet with renowned sports nutritionist Lynn Clay.  You might remember a couple of weeks back I painstakingly filled out a food diary where I recorded everything I consumed over a period of four days.  Lynn has now had a chance to analyse my nutritional intake – so I jump on a train and go and meet her so she can tell me how good, bad or indifferent my training diet actually is.

I have to be honest – I’m nervous about meeting Lynn and being given a difficult diet that I can’t fit into my working/training life – let’s face it, with my marathon nerves I really don’t need anything else to feel anxious about.  Like most things I find myself stressing over – I needn’t have bothered.  Lynn is lovely, super encouraging and best of all her diet recommendations and training solutions are all about being quick, practical and easy.  Surprisingly, Lynn thinks my diet is pretty good (I’m a vegetarian so it’s already fairly veg and fruit heavy) apparently she just needs to ‘tweak’ it. Hallelujah!   The main pointers for me are that I don’t eat enough carbohydrates – essential for runners as they store glycogen in the body or enough protein – needed to replace new cells and build muscles but I intake slightly too much fat given that regular endurance exercisers (is that me?) benefit from a slightly lower fat intake.  Lynn provides me with a full nutritional breakdown and a meal plan that splits my optimum calorie intake across five meals a day aiming for low GI around regular meals and high GI before/during and post a training session. She gives me recipes, recommended snacks and smoothies that I can make using maxitone’s high protein Definity drink – at this point, everything feels eminently doable!

I have yet to test my new diet but the best thing that Lynn has done for me is given me absolutely loads of encouragement and reassured me that if my nutritional balance is right and I have worked out and prepared my race fuelling strategy on the day (I haven’t done this yet) there is no reason why I should flake out half way through.  Lynn is an inspirational figure – she’s run marathons, ultra marathons and is currently in training for an Iron Man competition (Jealous, moi?) I’d thoroughly recommend checking out her articles & training diary on this website or in fab new magazine ‘Women’s Running’.

Next Week:  I try my new diet and attempt to drink - whilst running…