Feeding Kiwi h
New Zealand’s Olympians must adhere to a diet that meets their perform m even if that means some sacrifices, reports Andrew Voerman.
THE FIRST thing you need to know is that high performance athletes do a lot of crazy stuff. Human beings shouldn’t be running 100 metres in less than 10 seconds.
They shouldn’t be walking 50 kilometres in less than four hours, always keeping one foot on the ground.
And they shouldn’t be sitting in a boat, pumping oars at a rate of 40 strokes per minute.
But they do, and every four years, more of them do it in one place over the same two-week period than any other, at the Olympic Games.
To do those things, they need the right fuel, which is where nutrition comes in.
Alex Popple, one of the nutritionists employed by High Performance Sport NZ, sums it up like this.
‘‘What you have to come back to is you’re working with human beings and human beings need certain nutrients in their diet – they need proteins and they need carbohydrates and they need fats and they need fluids. It just changes according to the type of training they’re doing and the amount of training they’re doing.’’
Your average person doesn’t do a lot of training. If they’re living a healthy lifestyle, there should be some, of course – a bit of social basketball maybe, or a few sessions at the local gym – but nothing approaching what most of those off to the Olympics have to do.
Jeni Pearce is High Performance Sport’s lead nutritionist, and is able to summarise quite cleverly how the three main types of nutrients – carbohydrates (think pasta), protein (think eggs), and fats (think butter) – all work.
‘‘Carbohydrates are like fuel, and then there’s different qualities of fuel – there’s rocket fuel, and then there’s the stuff you put in your motor bike, and then there’s the stuff that you put in your lawnmower. We’re all about the quality of the carbohydrates. That’s what’s fuelling your muscles, that’s what keeps your heart beating, and provides the energy for you to do things.
‘‘We look at getting a healthy balance there, and then we look at what the athlete needs on top to do their training. Most people need 1200-1500 calories every day just to tick over, but our athletes will be using way more than that.’’
The key is getting the intake just right – too little, and athletes don’t get what they need; too much, and they risk gaining weight. In one training session, they might burn more calories than the average person on an average day, and they might have two or three of those sessions in the same day, hence why their diets can sometimes appear crazy to outsiders – they simply need the fuel.
Then there is protein, which Pearce says is like the bricks in a brick wall.
‘‘So you have all these bricks, like your muscles, and your skin, and your hair, and your nails, all your organs, they’re based on protein. You’re replacing those every day, and then as an athlete, you’re training and so you’re tearing your muscle fibres apart and then building them back stronger, day after day after day, so you want enough protein to cover your needs.’’
Finally there are fats, which as well as being an important part of a balanced diet, can also be a source of energy.
‘‘You can’t live without any of the nutrients – that’s just how life is,’’ says Pearce.
‘‘The trick for our athletes is they have to do it day after day. They don’t get a day off. If an average person misses a day’s training or eats unhealthily for a day, they’ll be fine, but for our athletes training for Rio, it can compromise them quite severely, so they don’t have the same choice everyone else does.’’
How different athletes take all of those on board varies greatly.
At 19, trampolinist Dylan Schmidt is one of the youngest athletes in the New Zealand team for Rio.
He says he doesn’t stick to a particular diet per se, and just tries to keep everything as simple as possible.
‘‘I don’t make any rules, like I don’t have to have a banana before I compete, because what if I can’t find a banana, you know? I kind of just take it as it comes. Every place we go the food is slightly different, so I just make the best choices I can there.’’
Teenagers are stereotypically poor eaters, which when put to Schmidt, he agrees is ‘‘pretty accurate’’.
None of that stuff tempts him, however, because he hates fast food.
‘‘I think because I haven’t had it for a few years and when I did have it, I felt sick afterwards, I just didn’t like it,’’ he says.
‘‘I’ll have the odd french fry or chicken nuggets or whatever, but burgers and stuff like that, I’m not a big fan of. I don’t have it that often, and when I do have it, I tend not to feel that great after. Because I’ve been putting so much good nutrition into my body, I feel it
I feel really sluggish when I put crap stuff in. DYLAN SCHMIDT