Swimmer dives into kitchen, nutrition
Weber-gale, food blogger
AUSTIN — Garrett WeberGale is making dinner. He and his girlfriend crisscross the galley kitchen with quick, graceful steps as they chop and grate, like dancers with razor-sharp cooking implements.
He is pan-frying filet mignon bison steaks in butter. Kara Dockery is tossing a summer salad with corn, avocado and horseradish dressing. They banter playfully as the steaks sizzle.
She recalls how he made her dinner on their first date a year earlier and how that night his chlorine-soaked hair frizzed out as if his finger were in a light socket. Somehow she had worried before the date that maybe this Olympian with the gold medals would be serious and arrogant.
“As it turns out,” he says, “I was irresistible.”
Dockery, a marketing coordinator for a software company, rolls her eyes and laughs. “Turns out he’s really funny and a little silly,” she says, “and I didn’t expect that.”
This is Weber-Gale’s life. He swims. He eats. He dates. And he updates AthleticFoodie.com, his blog about eating right.
This week Weber-Gale, 26, will compete in the swimming trials in Omaha, where he hopes to become a member of the U.S. Olympic team again. He won two gold medals in Beijing, on relays with Michael Phelps and others. This time, in London, he hopes to win medals in individual races, too.
But first he has to make the U.S. team. He’ll swim in the 100meter freestyle Thursday and Friday and the 50 freestyle Saturday and Sunday. He says he feels stronger than ever, which he credits to his mania for good nutrition. That was forced on him at first — and now it is his life’s passion.
He ate the usual college fare of pizza and takeout Chinese at the University of Texas. Then, in 2005, at the end of sophomore year, he got shocking news: He had hypertension. His blood pressure rose as high as 210 over 105, and doctors told him he was at risk of a stroke or heart attack if he continued to train.
“At the Olympic trials in 2004, I missed the team by 23-hundredths of a second, the biggest disappointment of my life,” Weber-Gale says. “Now, a year later, I thought my Olympic dream was being taken away for good. I was 19. I remember going home that night and sitting on my couch and thinking, ‘Is this it?’ ”
Doctors advised that he eliminate salt from his diet. His parents got him cooking lessons. He began seeing a nutritionist. And soon he discovered better nutrition meant not just lower blood pressure but also better times in the water. “I really credit my Olympic success in 2008 to my diet,” Weber-Gale says.
Now, Weber-Gale evangelizes eating right. He co-founded AthleticFoodie.com with his parents in 2010, and the site is getting a makeover this week from his Web-designing sister, Hillary, who says, “I’ve known Garrett since he didn’t know how to fry an egg.”
These days, he’d as soon butterfly a steak as swim the butterfly. And don’t worry about that butter in the frying pan. He rarely cooks with it. But thanks to culinary apprenticeships at top restaurants around the globe, he knows how.
“To be the best, you must learn from the best,” he says. “So where was I going to do that? At the world’s best restaurants with the most famous, most trained chefs.”
Weber-Gale discovered guys in aprons and guys in Speedos are alike in key ways.
“Chefs and athletes, they’re relentless in their pursuit of perfection. They are freaks for doing things the right way.”
The difference: “We’re up early in the morning — and they’re up very late at night.”
A smarter approach
The men’s 4x100-meter freestyle relay in Beijing is widely considered history’s most exciting swim race. Many remember that Phelps swam the first leg and Jason Lezak touched out France’s Alain Bernard by 0.08 of a second at the frantic finish.
Fewer recall that Weber-Gale swam the second leg of that race. He got a second gold in the 4x100 medley relay, but he didn’t medal in individual races. That was a disappointment after he’d won the 50 and 100 in the U.S. trials.
Even so, Beijing changed his
life in an unexpected way. The American men who had beaten France in the relay appeared on Today on the same day that French celebrity chef Daniel Boulud was on to promote a restaurant he had opened in Beijing. Weber-Gale asked Boulud to pose for a photo. Boulud gave him a business card. Days later, Weber-Gale ate at the restaurant — and a friendship was forged.
After the world championships in 2009, Weber-Gale served his first culinary apprenticeship at Castello delle Regine in Italy, followed by another at Daniel, Boulud’s restaurant in New York, and then more in 2010 at Maison Troisgros in France and Noma in Denmark.
France is where Weber-Gale got his groove back. “I went there to learn about cooking,” he says. “I didn’t want to swim anymore. Swimming back and forth in a pool, that wasn’t helping anyone.”
His French friends wanted none of that. They insisted he take a break from work every day in a nearby pool. WeberGale went grudgingly at first, until he found working in a kitchen at a low table with his 6-2 frame meant he was hunched over for hours at a time.
“My neck hurt, my back, my knees, my ankles, so I’d go swim for a while,” he says. He swam for fun, like a child, “and I learned to love swimming again.”
Weber-Gale asked chef Florent Boivin of Maison Troisgros if he had days when he didn’t want to come to work. “And he told me, ‘Of course, but it’s my obligation. I have this talent, and it is my obligation to pursue my talent, and you have an obligation to pursue yours.’ ”
So when Weber-Gale returned to Austin, he returned to the pool, where he works out with the Texas men’s swim team under the guidance of coach Eddie Reese.
“Most of the guys Garrett swims against are 6-4 to 6-7,” Reese says. “Coming out of the world championships last summer, he had the second-fastest relay split of anybody in the meet. Nobody his size can do that, but he does that.
“How? Well, he does all the little things right, and they become a big thing. I have a definition of smart. Smart is using what you’ve got. So Garrett, he’s in the real-smart category.”
Food for fuel
You are what you eat. That’s the saying. And Weber-Gale believes it.
“If you put in great fuel, you are going to get better performance,” he says. “If you race cars, you aren’t going to put in junky gas.”
Weber-Gale says he doesn’t count calories, but here is a normal day for him: get up and have one or two bowls of wholegrain cereal with rice milk and flax seeds, then almond milk with blueberries or blackberries. Go to swim practice. Then dried mangoes or pineapples and a strawberry recovery shake. Then back home for oatmeal, almonds, peanut butter and jelly and maybe a couple of scrambled eggs — before lunch.
“At lunch, I’ll always have asparagus, apple, walnuts, prunes,” he says. “Maybe I’ll have a veggie burger with whole-grain bun and hummus or tacos with rice and beans. I’ll have avocado, fresh fruit and kale. And every single day I have dark chocolate,” which keeps him on an even keel.
Then it’s back for weightlifting, followed by an energy bar and more practice, followed by more dried fruit and another shake. Then he goes home for dinner.
“I eat mostly a plant-based diet, but I have red meat twice a week to keep my hemoglobin count high and salmon once a week,” he says. “I have some kale or spinach, carrots, tomatoes, big salad, Brussels sprouts. I’ll also have brown rice, millet, barley, red beans and kidney beans.”
Weber-Gale sees cooking as instant gratification — “work 20, 30 or 50 minutes in the kitchen and, boom, you have something that’s good for you” — and swimming as delayed gratification, as it takes years of dedication to make an Olympic team.
“Cooking and swimming are similar in the sense that it’s not hard to get better at them, but it’s a challenge to get really good,” Weber-Gale says. “It’s a puzzle to see how it all works. And I really love challenges.
“So that’s why I got into cooking. Eddie Reese always says our purpose in life is to help people. I realize the incredible difference in the way nutrition and diet feels on my health and performance. And my goal is to help others feel it.”
He doesn’t know if he’ll keep swimming competitively after this summer, but he knows this: He’d like to open a restaurant for healthy eating some day.