Thursday, May 01, 2008

What I eat in a day...

When your training hard it is just amazing the amount of food that you eat and yet you are still pretty constantly hungry. The worst is the recovery ride day. On that spin you may only burn 500 calories but due to the previous days work your still starving all day...

Anyway, this is me for today.

Breakfast:
Oats (with raisons, cinnamon, banana and a small yogurt) I eat this almost every day
Bagel with Jam (when I have a longer spin...)
Coffee

On the ride:
A TorQ bar
2 Nutri-grain bars
2 Bottles of TorQ Energy

Mel and I try to eat as much of this as possible

Straight after the ride:
100 grams of TorQ Recovery (tasty stuff, a bit like chocolate milk – make sure you mix it well!)

15 minutes after that
A large Ciabatta with a chicken and pineapple salad.
Coffee

now the rest is all spread out
A large yogurt and an apple
Some rice cakes with honey (don't usually eat rice cakes)
Some Oats with Jam
A Pear and a Plum
A Cereal Bar

Still to eat...
Dinner – Brown Rice with tomato based Thai Chicken Curry
Dessert – Fresh chopped fruit salad
and then probably some more snacky stuff before bed... I'm guessing 4,500 calories...

Man I eat a lot...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Ryan, is that your typical food intake on a long spin day, or just normal diet?
BTW, what’s your definition of long and short spins?

Cheers

Richie

Ryan Sherlock said...

That would be a reasonably typical food intake for Sat/Sun/Tues/Wed/Thur when training Basically, the days that I would ride a lot. Monday and Fridays are recovery days for me so I only ride (tootle) for about an hour and eat a bit less.

Short spin is pretty much 2/2.5 hours or less. And long, well, that day was about 3:35 but it was a tempo road workout so I was going hard => burning more 'fuel'. Covered 108km and 1500m of climb in the time.

Last Sunday after the DNF in the race I came home and went on another spin... That day I think was around a 5,500Cal day :)

Anonymous said...

Cheers for that Ryan, just trying get a handle on where I need to go re: food and training. Basically I've just bumped up my road work this week (only started training in March, so call this preperation for next years K-cap!) Did 100km with about 1000m of climbing in about 3:40 on Monday. I plan on doing that once a week, with 2 X 60+ km spins during the week, and a 2 hour mtb interval session once a week. Work, Study and house DIY will limit my training to the above :-)
My only problem is diet. I get well, lots of veg, good meat, and fruit, but can't help tucking into a couple of choccie biccies every so often :) I probably also eat too much when I'm not training. I like snacking a lot too, so probably need buy less choccie stuff and more 'healthy' snacks...
Richie

Paul C Smith said...

Great blog. I'm pretty much in the same boat calorie wise. It has taken me a long while to find the right balance between eating too much and too little. I'd hate to think now how i'd be looking if I carried on eating the way I do without the training...! Like you, I find it hard not to over-eat on recovery days. Drinking plenty usually caps the hunger. I must say, my favorite meal of the day is breakfast where I usually down Porridge Oats, fruit and toast/bagels. Always go down well because I always seem to wake up starving! Are you racing at the British NPS this weekend?

Cheers
Paul

Ryan Sherlock said...

Yeah, I'll be racing this weekend in Scotland. XC NPS and then the 100km marathon the next day. Do you know anything about the course? The double header racing is a nutritional problem in itself. Mel messed herself up for about a week the last time by not eating enough after the marathon and then eating like a crazed zombie for the following week - I'll be force feeding her this time :)

As far as snacks etc... are concerned, I probably eat (something) about every 60-90 minutes during the day when I'm not on the bike with a bigger breakfast, lunch and dinner. I used to not buy any rubbish (bickies etc...) so that I can't graze on them (I'm much to lazy to go shopping just for them) so I'm left with fruit and veg for grazing. Seems to work pretty well. At this point though it does not really matter what is in the cupboard I can stick to my 'diet' as long as there is something to eat.

It really is amazing the difference in energy your body needs between a heavy training day (maybe 5,000 Cal for me) and a recovery day (3,000 ish). Sometimes I wonder if I just get into a habit of eating a lot. On holidays in Tanzania last year was interesting - for the first week I still had my massive appetite but after that, I calmed down to something more normal. I was glad to see I could eat like a normal person again :)

I love the oats in the morning. My thing is to prepare it the night before with raisons and cinnamon, cook it in the morning, add a banana and yogurt and then cook it some more :) I look forward to that and my coffee every day.

Ryan Sherlock said...

Oh yeah - and I mentioned it before in my "Narky after spins" post but ALWAYS eat straight after training if your rode longer then an hour or it was intense... ALWAYS. Training is not over until you have started eating :)

Such a big improvement to recovery.