Had a tricky week at the ultra runner office this week.
Had a rather confronting consult with the sports nutritionist on Wednesday. It is clear from my food journals and his feedback that there is poor food consistency due to having a number of running events present while I’m trying to make changes which derails me from the progress we are trying to make. There is also potentially a lot of deeper stuff with food going on but I’m not super keen to open that can of worms unless it’s absolutely necessary. In the meantime we have changed tack and trying a different way of making my meals more fun through an app where he has set my macros for the day and I choose the recipes. I’ve already enjoyed the shopping for different ingredients for new recipes from using this, and it is refreshing compared to what had become a bland diet only focusing on bloody protein.
Physio and coach Caden was the next day, we discussed what’s been going on, the running hasn’t been too bad besides a few niggles in the normal places brought on by a short hike a couple of weeks ago, nothing serious. He can see some of what the nutritionist is saying around food consistency, and we have made the decision to pull out of Kaikoura trail marathon in a month and focus on another event in December instead. This gives me a couple of months to improve food consistency, add strength and time in the hills and get this lardy body of mine somewhat less lardy.
You’d think you’d be able to eat whatever you like when you run 5 days a week and gym twice, wrong! Nutrition is still a constant ‘struggle’ and ‘battle’ and the focus at the moment is to remove that type of language from the equation.
I explained to the coach that I feel like I have an elite standard of mental competitiveness, followed by a body that is ‘back of the pack’ and broken, and a nutrition brain of a 10 year old – this balance doesn’t work. If I want to be at the pointy end of the field when finishing a race I need to rectify this – just someone tell the 10 year old food brain part of me that (then watch the epic tantrum!).
Tomorrow I’m off for a 2.5 hr training run in the mountains, likely in the rain, dark & cold, and this is still the easy and enjoyable part of being an ultra runner. I wish the other parts came so easy – I guess having it all takes a bit more work than ‘wishing’.
If you read this far, thanks for pausing the doom scrolling briefly to do so, I wrote this just to break up my own doom scrolling – another thing to fix! Arrgghhh!