More on Triathlon-Targeted Nutrition

More about nutrition that will improve your triathlon performance.

Every Saturday morning he wakes up; two out of every three weeks, he wakes up at 02:00 AM, he has got five cans of Ensure next to the bed at home. He downs the five cans, he goes back to sleep. He gets up the next morning, and he goes does his brick. It's just like the race. We are going to practice that to get ready for the race. I don't want him to come to race morning having never tried that, and now all of a sudden he is going to take five cans at 02:00 AM, and we don't know what's going to happen, it's going to be like this unknown situation. For him though, he has gotten very used to it. Now, I don't know what his wife thinks about this, she is somewhat of a saint I have discovered. She is very willing to go along with whatever he is doing to try to qualify, so she allows this to happen, and he takes five cans of Ensure every Saturday morning, or two out of every three Saturday mornings in the last eight weeks before the race. By the time he gets to the race, he knows it works. There is no question in his mind. It's just a routine he goes through. By the way, if you decide to go that way with replacements drinks like Boost or Ensure or something; I would recommend by the way, Ensure instead of Boost, most of the others include, like Boost include, milk product as the base, and Ensure does not. It has got bit of oils. Of all the possibilities, I would recommend Ensure, but find one that tastes good to you also. If you decide to go that route, make sure you buy them well before the race, several days before, because two days before, even three days before, all the grocery stores in 50 miles of an Ironman race will be sold out of Ensure. That will all be gone. So buy well in advance when you get there, or bring your own with you. I went to Hawaii last year with Ryan Bolton, the coach, he has spent sometime, months before the race staying in Phoenix with me, preparing for the race, and the heat down there. So we go to the United check in the morning we are going to fly out to Kona. His bag was slightly overweight; it was like 52 pounds or right about there. They charge an extra $25 if it's over 50 pounds, so it is like 52 pounds or thereabouts. So he said it's going to cost you $25, and I said, what can you take out of your bag? So he opened it up and he had like eight cans of Ensure there. I said take that out so you can put it in your carry on or something. So he took that out and made the weight. But he was thinking ahead. He was thinking he is going to take his own Ensure, so he wouldn't have to try to find it when we got to Kona. It's just like a way of making sure I am ready to go on run morning. One of those little things. You could use sports bars that have protein in them also. If you find a sports bar that satisfies your appetite, that you like the taste of, that's a possibility. Obviously, include fluids, especially water before a race. It's okay to drink caffeine, it's okay to drink tea or coffee. There are actually some benefits that may come from having caffeine, and still, even after all these decade of talking about caffeine, and researchers still debate about the exact benefits of using caffeine before a race, I think it probably helps. Now, I said don't eat anything in the last hour before the race. Let me talk about that. What I told you was water only, last hour before the race. Exception being, ten minutes before the start of the race or the workout, you can now take in liquid carb source up to 16 ounces. Liquid carb source could be a sports drink like Gatorade, or ti could be a gel with water. So you could do this. The reason why is, again, it takes time for that. We talked about the Glycemic Index, it takes time for that sugar to get into your blood, and it takes essentially about ten minutes, a little bit more than that, even with a high Glycemic Index food like a gel. A gel is like very high Glycemic index. You eat a gel, it goes in your blood like that. So you have got about ten or fifteen minutes before this spikes. Once we start the exercise, then the body changes the way it deals with this sugar that's been put into the bloodstream. It deals with it in a different way and doesn't create any problems for us. So if we can take it in and then have that peak occur after the race, when workout begins, then we are going to be okay as far as the sugar in the bloodstreams. It's not going to cause us problems. So now it will become hyper glycemic because of that, and yet we will still get the carbohydrate in we may need. So if you have got a workout; you have got to be at the pool at 05:30 in the morning for your workout, and you get up at 5 o'clock, and you have got to drive across town, just take a couple of gels with you, and 16 ounce bottle of water, and get ready to go in the pool. Before you go in the pool, just before you get in, just take two little gels, wash it down with about 8-12 ounces of water, and you are ready to go for the workout.