Bryony Gordon
The eating regime fuelling my marathon
One of the great myths about marathon training – along with the notion that it’s really good for you (it just isn’t) and that you have to have run a marathon before doing one (you don’t) – is that you can eat whatever you want.
“Ooooh,” my friends said, clapping their hands together in delight when I announced my intention to do the Virgin London Marathon. “You’ll get to stuff your face with pasta and cake and it won’t matter! The weight will just fall off you!”
I suppose, given that this was what I stuffed my face with before I started regularly running distances longer than 10km, that they had the vaguest of points. But the truth is that you can’t eat whatever you want when marathon training, any more than a pregnant woman can eat for two. Eat whatever you want when training to run 26.2 miles, and you put yourself at risk of never even getting to the start line. Sure, there are probably some naturally athletic people who can gorge on KFC and then head out for an intense gym session, but I don’t think I am one of them.
I’m learning that fitness is 20 per cent exercise, 80 per cent nutrition. It’s what you put into your body. You really are what you eat.
Those plates of carbs, like pasta, might be just about passable the night before a long run, but they’re not going to do you any good after one, when your body is in desperate need of protein. Ditto, starving yourself and only eating salads while marathon training is probably going to see you faint before you’ve run a single kilometre (even if you happen to have a frame like mine).
“It’s all about fuelling yourself correctly,” says Rick Parcell, the head trainer at the Bodycamp in Ibiza (it’s where I went at the beginning of my marathon journey, and where I will have returned to by the time you read this piece, for some last-minute maintenance). “You wouldn’t put diesel in an unleaded car, would you? The same goes for a body in training. Food isn’t just for pleasure. It actually becomes medicine.”
Left to my own devices, though, I’ll balloon to 16 stone (as I did post-baby). I’ll get high on burgers, bliss myself out with crisps. My portions are out of control. Even when I’m cooking with good intentions – lentils, vegetables, salmon, lean white meat – I manage to eat several servings. But I want to lose weight while training for this marathon. I want to lose weight not because I have some desire to look like a cover girl, but because I know that running the marathon will be far easier the less pressure there is on my joints. Ditto all the training. The question is, how do I fuel myself to run distances of more than 13 miles and still shed the pounds?
Enter Fresh Fitness Food, a company that creates – and delivers – bespoke meals. All you have to do is heat it up and eat it.
For someone like me, whose skills most definitely don’t lie in the kitchen, it is a dream – given that I am being g so active everywhere else in my life,ife, it is nice to be lazy when it comes to o food.
“Someone is actually bringingng your food to the door every morning,” g,” says my husband, shaking his head with an expression that could be horror or admiration. “This is the marathon that just keeps on giving.”
I have six weeks with Fresh Fitness Food – six weeks in which to drop a dress size and ease the strain on my weary joints. On the first day, I nervously open the front door to find a cool bag containing an omelette and spinach for breakfast (beats Frosties!), chargrilled Mexican chicken for lunch (with chunky guacamole, spicy tomato salsa and charred corn on the side), and slow-baked beef tagine for dinner. This comes with roasted butternut squash, flaked almonds, dates, burnt lemon and turmeric dressing. It is heaven in a Tupperware box, and even the microwave doesn’t spoil it.
Every day, I am sent about 1,600 calories of food, including snacks (there is a healthy Scotch egg and some satay chicken that I had to fight off work colleagues to keep). The highlight is the Southern spiced pork shoulder with apple, red cabbage and beetroot slaw, chive and lemon cashew mayonnaise, which even has my husband offering to swap a slice of his delivery pizza for.
There is a moment when I have a little cry at the sight of some stone bass – there is something perfectly miserable about knowing that you have food you don’t like for lunch – but when one of the company’s nutritionists calls to check in on how things are going, I politely mention my dislike of that particular meal and am pleased that from then on, every container has “NO STONE BASS” written on it. I feel like a rock star demanding only blue M&Ms.
I do not feel like I am on a diet, which is the only kind of diet I will do; make me feel deprived of food and I will be in the treat cupboard quicker than you can say “giant tub of Pringles”. I lose a pound for each week I am on the Fresh Fitness Food programme, which is almost half a stone, bringing my total weight loss from marathon training to almost two-and-a-half stone. Crucially, I never feel too weak to exercise, and am allowed my massive bowl of pasta the night before each long run. And speaking of long runs…
Since my last update, I have done another two half-marathons. (I just went out and ran 13 miles, all by myself, people!) Last week, I flew to the Bodycamp in Ibiza for a boozefree week doing exercise and eating an 85 per cent plant-based diet.
This is now my idea of a holiday. At the bottom of the villa grounds, there is a mile loop through woods and fields of wild flowers, and on the first day I ran around it 16 times by myself. Without music. In 23 degree heat. It was as much a morning of mental training as physical.
By the time you read this, I will have done my last long run before “tapering”p begins – the period just before thet actual marathon, where you startstar to take down the training a notch or two to allow your body to be ini tip-top condition for the big day. For now, I am quietly preparingp for a beast of a run thatth will be between 18 and 202 miles. I’d say I can’t wait, but, like the idea that you can eat anything you want in the run-up to a marathon, that would be a big fat lie.
‘I’m learning that fitness is 20 per cent exercise, 80 per cent nutrition’