I usually start my day with a light breakfast of fruit and eggs and take granola bars with me to eat after practice. Lunch and dinner usually consist of chicken over pasta or rice and beans.
I don't eat as much as an athlete should. I just don't like it.
Clearly, nutrition is great. I was a vegan, so being an athlete and a vegan certainly sounds like it would be the right thing to prevent something like heart disease, but it's highly genetic.
I've found that a person does not need protein from meat to be a successful athlete. In fact, my best year of track competition was the first year I ate a vegan diet.
When I was competing I didn't have a nutritionist. It wasn't something that British athletics offered back then.
When you're training for jiu-jitsu, particularly if you're training for a competition, you have to be pretty prescribed in the variety of what you eat.
I played sports, so I understood quickly I shouldn't be eating fast food because it was slowing me down, making me feel lousy and lazy, and my instincts were not working as they should.
If you run 100 miles a week, you can eat anything you want - Why? Because (a) you'll burn all the calories you consume, (b) you deserve it, and (c) you'll be injured soon and back on a restricted diet anyway.
Biathletes need to eat 6.000 calories a day: six thousand! That's the equivalent of 2 pounds of butter, 70 slices of bread, 112 eggs, 86 tabs of yogurts, 28 potatoes, 117 biscuits and 21 TWIX bars. On that basis, I could be an Olympic biathlete!
I love to eat a lot, but I try to eat healthy stuff. Especially when you're riding, sometimes I get hooked up with the cycling and when you're riding three, four, five hours, then you can put whatever you want in your body.
I do believe food plays an important role in preparation for the Olympics or any competition.
I used to carbo load. But then I ran my first marathon, actually on a whim. All I could think of was that I needed protein. I remember going to the grocery store and buying one of those roasted chickens. I remember downing a bunch of that and, yes, I had some carbs, but that's what I felt I needed.
I usually try to go for meals that aren't heavy when I'm playing for a long time. I'll try to stay away from carbing up too hard - so I avoid pastas.
Fruit is carb-based, and I limit carbs when training hard.
I can't go out there and just eat turkey sandwiches and hamburgers all day because that's not going to make my body perform at the level that it can.
My training diet can be quite strict when I'm coming up to competition; it's a weight-making sport, of course. But I eat quite healthily anyway, and it's less strict when out of competition.
