The Long Munch - Nutrition for Runners, Cyclists & Triathletes Stephanie Gaskell and Alan McCubbin

Nutrition advice can be confusing for runners, cyclists & triathletes. With a firehose of information coming at you, from general nutrition professionals, sports nutrition experts, and wellness gurus, sometimes it can be hard to pick it all apart and work out what’s relevant to athletes, and what’s not.
Today we’re going to look at those general nutrition messages, which whilst sensible for the general population, may be doing a disservice to runners, cyclists and triathletes. We’ll examine where the message comes from, why it might not be the best advice for you, and what to do instead. 

It’s called the sunshine vitamin, and given we’re just coming to the end of winter here in the southern hemisphere, our Vitamin D stores should be at their lowest point of the year. So what exactly is this nutrient that we can get without eating any food? Why is it so important to runners, cyclists and triathletes? How much Vitamin D is enough, when should you get tested, and when, how much and what type of supplements should you take to prevent or correct a Vitamin D deficiency?
Today, we’re speaking to researcher Dr Dan Owens from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, whose research is aiming to answer these and more questions about Vitamin D for athletes. We’ll also discuss the different types of Vitamin D in food, supplements and the body, ethnic differences and their relevance to Vitamin D testing, and how much sun exposure is enough to meet your Vitamin D needs.

In our last episode, we discussed with Dr Dana Lis how to decipher sports nutrition information you come across, and Dana shared with us her five step process for filtering that information. One of those steps was to figure out what is the cost and benefits of different nutrition strategies, your Return on Investment if you like. So today, we’re going to have a look at some of the most common nutrition strategies that can be employed to improve performance on race day. We’ll discuss some of the practical pros and cons, and find out what the science says about quantifying the actual performance benefits you might expect from each one.

As runners, cyclists and triathletes, you often come across new information about nutrition for your sport. It can come from anywhere - a fellow athlete, a coach, an article you saw online, or even this podcast.
But how do you filter that information and decide if it’s valid, useful, and most importantly, worth implementing for yourself? In this episode we’re joined by Dr Dana Lis, a Canadian sports dietitian based in California who’s constantly asked this question with the athletes she works with: the EF-Tibco-SVB pro cycling team, and the Golden State Warriors (NBA). Dana will give you a framework to use when you encounter new information about nutrition for your sport, that you can use to decide whether it’s worth pursuing or not.

We often hear the message that plant-based protein sources are inferior to animal sources, and recommendations from sports nutritionists often emphasise the use of dairy and other animal-based protein foods. In this episode we speak to protein researcher Dr Alistair Monteyne (University of Exeter) who’s done of the more recent animal vs non-animal protein comparisons. We’ll look at where this common belief came from about animal proteins being superior, how the research has evolved just in the last few years, and what that means for this common sports nutrition assumption.

We’re joined by British ultra-trail runner and writer Damian Hall, who shares his personal journey to discovering the environmental impact of his running (including nutrition choices), the changes he's made as a result, and what he learnt along the way. We also chat about the Barkley Marathons which he ran earlier this year, and his recently published book, 'We Can't Run Away From This - Racing to improve running’s footprint in our climate emergency'. 
 
To learn more about Damian's books, blog, etc: https://www.ultradamo.com/
 
Our World In Data - information on food & the environment discussed in the podcast: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#explore-data-on-the-environmental-impacts-of-food 
 
To find out about The Green Runners: https://thegreenrunners.com/ 
 
Follow Damian:
Instagram: @ultra_damo
Twitter: @Ultra_Damo