The Paleo Diet for Athletes (5 page)

An essential part of making this diet work for endurance athletes like you is to maintain an adequate carbohydrate intake so that your muscle glycogen levels will be fully restored before your next workout. Consequently, you will need to include additional carbohydrates in your diet, particularly during and following long workouts. In
Chapters 2
,
3
, and
4
, we fully explain the ins and outs of carbohydrate ingestion relative to your workout, your training schedule, and your personal needs.

PART I

T
HE
R
OAD
M
AP TO
P
EAK
P
ERFORMANCE AND
H
EALTH

CHAPTER 2

S
TAGE
I: E
ATING
B
EFORE
E
XERCISE

What should an athlete eat before, during, and after exercise? This is a question to which athletes have sought the answer for as long as there have been competitive sports. In the days of the Roman Empire, gladiators ate the heart and muscle of lions before the contest, believing this would give them the ferocious qualities of the animal. As late as the 1960s, athletes were still eating prodigious quantities of red meat before engaging in “battle.” In the 1970s, there was a swing toward consuming carbohydrates on race day. That trend still continues, but recently there has been an increased interest in protein and fat in the athlete’s race-day diet. And so the pendulum swings the other way once again.

While the role of carbohydrate ingestion before, during, and after exercise has been studied extensively over the past 40 years, only recently has there been much research into the role and timing of dietary protein and fat relative to exercise. Since such research is still in its infancy, there is a great deal not fully understood, and, further complicating the matter, there are contradictions in the limited research available.

THE DEMANDS OF ENDURANCE TRAINING

Training for endurance sports such as running, cycling, triathlon, rowing, swimming, and cross-country skiing places great demands on the body, putting the athlete in some stage of recovery almost continuously during periods of heavy training. The keys to optimum recovery are sleep and diet. Even though we recommend that everyone eat a diet similar to what our Stone Age ancestors ate, we realize that nutritional concessions must be made for the athlete who is training at a high volume in the range of 10 to 35 or more hours per week of rigorous exercise. Rapid recovery is the biggest issue facing such an athlete. While it’s not impossible to recover from such training loads on a strict Paleo Diet, it is somewhat more difficult to recover quickly. If it is modified before, during, and immediately following challenging workouts, the Paleo Diet provides two benefits sought by all athletes—quick recovery for the next workout and superior health for the rest of your life.

Such high training loads require a great intake of carbohydrate for short-term replenishment of expended glycogen stores, perhaps as much as 1,200 to 1,500 calories. Eating low to moderate glycemic index foods in the Paleo-approved categories of fruits and vegetables may certainly replace such deficiencies, but will be accompanied by several pounds of fiber. Such a diet will also be slow to replace expended glycogen stores in the muscles following hard workouts or races, thus delaying or substantially affecting a subsequent workout or race in the next few hours and days. This is when modification of a strict Paleo Diet is beneficial to the serious athlete.

While highly fit and athletic, our Stone Age ancestors never ran 26.2 miles at the fastest pace possible or willingly took on any of the other racing challenges of 21st-century athletes. Evolutionarily, today’s athletes are pushing the limits of physiology. Their diets must be adjusted to meet these demands.

In this and the next two chapters, we will examine the times when eating in ways other than the more conventional Paleo Diet is appropriate
for the serious endurance athlete. But we can’t emphasize strongly enough that these are exceptions to the standards discussed in
Chapter 9
and are limited to specific time windows relative to training sessions and races. In
Chapters 2
,
3
, and
4
, we discuss the five recovery stages through which the athlete passes on most days that include exercise. By dividing the day into the following stages and eating appropriate foods in adequate amounts in each, you can enhance your recovery and maximize performance.

Stage I: Immediately before exercise

Stage II: During exercise

Stage III: 30 minutes immediately following exercise

Stage IV: A period equal to the duration of the preceding exercise session

Stage V: Long-term, postexercise recovery preceding the next Stage I

Before getting into the details of these stages, let’s take a look at diet during a time when most athletes seem to be unsure of what to eat—the week of the race. To differentiate the importance of all of the race events on your schedule, we classify them as priority A, B, or C. Priority A events are the most important on your schedule. Normally an athlete will have only two or three of these planned for a given season since each involves cutting back on the training load for several days to a few weeks prior. Such reductions, while allowing the athlete to fully realize race readiness, may well lead to diminished fitness if done more frequently than a few times per season. Priority C races are the least important events on your schedule. There may be many of these because they are considered little more than challenging workouts done, for example, to test fitness or to make final preparations for a higher-priority race. As you might expect, priority B events fall between A and C in terms of importance. You want to do well at these races, so you may rest for a few days before them, but you won’t taper your training over the longer period as is done for the highest-priority events.

EATING DURING RACE WEEK

This is not a time to make wholesale changes in your diet. Stick with the foods you’ve been eating, but be aware that if this is a priority A event, you will probably need to reduce the amount of food that you eat this week, as your training volume is reduced, so you may avoid excessive weight gain. You might still put on as much as 2 or 3 pounds, but most of that is water. For every gram of glycogen your body stores away in the muscles, it also packs away 2.6 grams of water. Having extra water on board may well be an advantage, especially if you’ll be racing in hot or humid conditions.

The day before the race, if you’ve been carefully following a Paleo Diet, shift your food choices by taking in slightly more carbohydrate than usual to ensure that your carbohydrate storage sites are full. With the reduced volume this week, your body is primed to store glycogen, so this last day of shifting your diet to increased carbohydrate should be adequate.

Now is a good time to eat more fruits such as bananas, peaches, cantaloupe, watermelon, and honeydew melon, along with vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams. Snack on dried fruit today. To moderate the glycemic index of these foods, include protein and fat with each meal. Examples of good fats to select today are olive and flaxseed oils as salad dressing along with cold-water fish such as salmon, halibut, haddock, herring, and mackerel. Such fish, as always, will satisfy both the protein and fat needs the evening before the race. Skip the pasta party.

In addition, reduce dietary fiber to allow for easier digestion of foods in preparation for the next day’s race. Otherwise, eat at usual times and keep food types as normal as possible.

STAGE I: EATING BEFORE EXERCISE

It happens all too often: An athlete prepares meticulously for weeks and months for an important event. There is no workout that is too demanding, no sacrifice too great. Then comes race day, and an error
is made in the prerace meal: choosing food that takes too long to digest or digests too quickly; eating too much too close to the race start; taking in too little fluid; or eating nothing at all. The result is a disastrous performance—all that preparation for naught. We’ve seen it happen too many times. In fact, we’ve experienced it ourselves. Live and learn.

How could this have been prevented? How, indeed, could the athletic performance have been enhanced by the foods eaten before a demanding race or training session? The purpose of this section is to help you establish a dietary routine that serves you well, whether for a workout starting at your back door or a race a thousand miles away. Of course, it’s easier if you’re at home than on the road. Our goal here is to establish a select menu of foods that you can find whether you’re in Hometown, USA, or traveling to Hobart, Australia, for a race.

Preexercise Eating Goals

Let’s start by examining the goals for preexercise foods and fluids. There are five major objectives we are trying to accomplish with nutrient intake just before the race or workout.

Satisfy hunger.
This is pretty basic, so it’s a wonder that some athletes ignore food first thing in the morning. If it’s race day, you may be too preoccupied to be aware of telltale signs at first, but your body will soon cry out for food. The longer you put it off, the greater the risk of starting exercise underfueled. The biggest downside of such a mistake is what cyclists call “bonking” and runners call “hitting the wall.” You simply run very low on muscle and liver glycogen—the body’s storage form of carbohydrate. When that happens, you’re forced to slow down or completely stop.

Realizing that you’re hungry in the last hour before exercise may well be too late. Eating so close to starting is likely to do more harm than good. Don’t start hungry and don’t put off eating. If possible, eat at least an hour in advance of exercise. The higher the intensity of the workout or race, the more time is necessary for digestion. At first you may find it difficult to eat right out of bed, but this aversion is mostly mental. Get
used to taking in food of some sort early every day and it will be much easier on race day. You may find that a liquid meal is the best option if you dislike eating early in the morning.

Restock carbohydrate stores depleted by the overnight fast.
During the night, as you slept, your body was busy repairing and replacing tissues in an ongoing maintenance routine it has been engaged in since your conception. And, of course, there were energy demands throughout the night simply related to being alive—breathing, cardiac activity, movement, digestion, and other life-sustaining functions. All of this takes energy, and one of the most available fuel sources for this activity is the carbohydrate stored in your muscles as glycogen. So when you awake after several hours of sleep, your carbohydrate stores may be depleted by as much as 140 to 260 calories, depending on your body size and fat-free mass (muscles, bones, hair, fingernails, organs—everything other than fat). Replacing these expended calories, roughly 10 percent of your carbohydrate stores, is important to your immediate athletic performance, and the longer the race or workout session, the more critical this becomes.

Reestablish normal body fluid levels.
Besides expending energy as you slept, your body also lost water in your breath, through your pores, and during any bathroom visits. First thing in the morning, your body may be down several ounces from normal hydration levels. Failing to replenish fluids prior to exercise could set you up for a substandard race or workout.

Optimize performance.
This is a big one. Other than simply restoring your fuel and fluid levels, proper preexercise nutrition has a lot to do with how you perform. Certain nutrients have been shown to boost performance for some types of events. We’ll examine these possibilities later in this chapter.

Prepare the body to recover quickly postexercise.
The better your hydration and fuel levels are going into the race or workout, the faster you’ll recover, assuming you refuel and rehydrate adequately during exercise. But if you start with a low tank, even if you eat and drink as you should during activity, recovery may well be delayed. This means it
will take you longer to return to a high level of training in subsequent days. It’s even more critical if you are working out two or three times a day or if you are stage racing, as road cyclists often do.

Preexercise Eating

There is little doubt that preexercise nutrient intake can help your athletic performance. The big question has to do with what you should eat and drink. We can offer several guidelines that come not only from the research but also from our personal experiences as athletes and from coaching hundreds of others in several sports over the past 30 years. In a nutshell, here are the guidelines that will help you make decisions about what to take in before starting a race or workout.

Consume 200 to 300 calories per hour prior to exercise.
The amount you need is determined by your body size, how much you ate the night before, what time that meal was eaten, and your experience with eating before exercise. We recommend eating no less than 2 hours before the race or workout when possible. Three hours is usually better, especially if you tend to have a nervous stomach on race days. If you eat 2 hours before, take in 400 to 600 calories. If eating 3 hours before, you could eat 600 to 900 calories. Your body size and experience should help you narrow the range.