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  • Amateur MTB Marathon: Kick-start Nutrition

  • In the build up to the 24-hour marathon, I'm going to be putting my body through some pretty extreme lifestyle changes, and I need to make sure I'm doing everything I can to look after myself.

Words by Gary Lake - posted 19/02/2009

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Amateur MTB Marathon: Kick-start Nutrition

In the build up to the 24-hour marathon, I'm going to be putting my body through some pretty extreme lifestyle changes, and I need to make sure I'm doing everything I can to look after myself. With the help of Bristol-based nutritionist, and Cyclist No.1 contributor Jamie Richards, I'm going to investigate the importance of good nutrition and how it could help me achieve success.

Jamie's approach to sports nutrition is not about sugary energy drinks and pasta for every meal. His focus is on improving general health through a nutrient rich diet and eating natural, non-processed foods. What this basically means is eating less of the calorie-dense, nutrient-poor food that modern diets are often full of and instead taking on a more balanced diet. This will help protect and nurture the body through a good intake of fibre, essential fats, minerals and vitamins; all of which are often lacking in our diets. The idea is that you help your body cope with the strain of training, rather than simply fueling it endlessly and depleting a constantly low store of nutrients. You might think this all sounds like common sense and something we should all be doing regardless of whether we're doing sport or not. And you'd be right, it's just healthy eating!

Before we could begin I needed to keep a week long food diary and perform a metabolic test with Jon from TrueZone training. The idea is that these things would give Jamie a good idea of my current health and fitness, coupled with my existing eating lifestyle.  

Some things to sort out

The ultimate goal of good nutrition is to get your body firing on all cylinders so that you can get the full benefit from your training. Chances are you've probably got some little health niggles you'd like to iron out and often these can be nutrition-related. There were a few things I wanted to sort out and having been given an otherwise clean bill of health by a GP, we looked into whether nutrition was the answer to these ailments.

The main things bothering me were mood/energy swings, restless legs, head-rush/light-headedness when standing up and bouts of insomnia. It turns out my complaints are common in Jamie's clients and he had a pretty good idea what the issues were as soon as I told him.

Getting the diagnosis

Based on my symptoms, Jamie did some basic mineral tests for checking Magnesium, Zinc and Chromium levels. This just involves tasting mineral solutions and reporting tastes and sensations. The result was a fairly big Magnesium and Zinc deficiency and a minor Chromium deficiency.

We performed a stress profile on me and pretty much confirmed what I already knew - I'm a very stressed individual!

Finally we did an advanced blood pressure test taking measurements with a combination of sitting and standing positions. I have an otherwise reasonable blood pressure by medical standards, but looking at it critically it is a little low.

What does this all mean?

Well the big problem is that food just isn't as nutritious as it used to be, and essential trace minerals have simply been processed out of our food. Minerals that I have been found to be deficient in are already low in many of the foods we all eat, and then when you consider that exercise can accelerate the usage of these minerals, it becomes a never ending cycle.

Classic symptoms of Magnesium deficiency are cramps, dizziness, irritableness and restlessness - well that sounds familiar! And although I didn't have any overwhelming signs of Zinc deficiency, it is a mineral that is essential in the repair and rebuilding of the body and in boosting your immune system. It might not be casuing me too much trouble right now but as my training ramps up, it's likely to become an issue. Like Zinc, I wasn't showing any particular signs of Chromium deficiency, but it's a key mineral in the process of balancing blood sugar and utilising energy stores. Once again, it's something that could cause me problems going forward in training.

For me, and I suspect many of you, a big compounding issue on top of this is stress. As we get worked up over a situation, our bodies trigger the age old fight or flight response and our adrenal glands go to work releasing hormones that help us deal with the situation at hand. The problem is that this accelerates the use of vital nutrients, which we've already established are pretty low. But side effects also include reduced production of stomach acid and also a redirection of bodily resources away from the digestive system. So we're already down nutritionally, we're then accelerating the usage of what little nutrients we do have, and then finally our bodies are doing an even poorer job of replacing nutrients from the food that we're consuming. You only need to add this on top of a physically stressful training regime and you can quickly see how badly things could go.

My slightly low blood pressure is also contributing to the dizziness or 'headrush' I experience when standing up. As we stand up and move about our blood pressure needs to rise to compensate. If you're always stressed, as I am, your adrenal glands will be feeling fairly challenged and they'll not respond properly to this sudden change in activity. The heart is forced to take up the slack and it beats harder to try and drive blood around to cope with this sudden change in activity. With the head being at the top of the body, it naturally feels the effects most and the resulting feeling is a 'headrush'. Adrenal fatigue isn’t usually severe enough to be considered a medical emergency or to be featured in a fashionable Sunday supplement. Nevertheless it can wreak havoc in your life, and in athletes can lead to injury and illness that is increasingly hard to recover from.

So how are you going to fix it?

The sad fact is that commonly deficient minerals such as Magnesium, Zinc and Chromium have been eroded so much from our general diets, that supplements may be the only answer. There's much debate over the value of your average one-a-day, over-the-counter multivitamin type supplements, but that's not what we're talking about here. Jamie recommends practitioner only supplements that aren't available to the general public. These are pharmaceutical grade supplements backed up by a wealth of good science and knowledge.

At the time of writing Jamie has put in a sponsorship application for me with a supplement supplier so I haven't yet started the program. We'll keep you posted.

In terms of actual diet, it's all about just eating natural, real and home-cooked food in the right way and at the right time - a balanced diet of carbs, protein and fat. Big problems in mine and many people's diets is heavily refined and processed foods. Particularly breakfast cereals (even the ones sold as healthy) and bread, which are heavily processed and lack goodness and vitamins - even the ones you'd think are ok!

Finally stress - it's something I simply need to work on. By eating well and getting my nutrition sorted I can at least start to break this ever depleting cycle. But taking some proper downtime from everything, giving myself some real rest days and just taking time to enjoy life should put me on the right track to lowering my stress. Stress is commonly associated with high blood pressure but it can work both ways. Hopefully I can correct my blood pressure as my stress is better managed over time.

How's it going?

Supplements aside, which will hopefully start soon, I've been making some fundamental changes to my diet which we'll discuss in future articles. It's actually been six weeks that I've been working with Jamie and while I've not been managing the stress side of things all that well, I am feeling a lot more energetic than I would normally feel given the stress levels I've been under. I'm also noticing a real step up in performance on the long training days which I suspect is down to a much improved breakfast.

I've lost a full 14lbs in weight since the excess that was Christmas ended and given the high level of training I've been doing, it feels controlled, healthy and good - despite the apparent headline grabbing numbers.

In my household, we've made the way we cook and eat a huge cultural change. We're really enjoying it and it's refreshing to know that eating healthy isn't about dull, bland or obscure foods. The meals we're cooking now are far nicer than we ever used to eat, cost pence to make and are fun and easy to cook!

What next?

In our next feature on nutrition we're going to look into what food to avoid and give an overview of the kinds of things you should be eating. We'll also look into sorting a really solid breakfast to ensure you start every day in the best possible way. It will also be a proper introduction to our Nutritional contributor, Jamie Richards as I hand over to him for the next article.

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