Episode 263 - Three Questions Holding Triathletes Back From Dialling In Their Nutrition

Why is your triathlon nutrition strategy still not working when you already know what to do?

I asked the triathletes who just finished my Triathlon Fuel Camp what they had spent money on to improve their performance. 70% had paid for a bike fit, 66% had a coach and 50% had bought a power meter and faster wheels. Only 20% had ever invested in a dietitian or nutritionist, and 57% told me they were winging their nutrition. These are smart, driven athletes with more information at their fingertips than any triathlete in history. So why is it still not working?

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

• Why more information is not what is missing from your nutrition
• What a strategy specific to you is actually built on (and why generic advice never holds for long)
• The 3 ways triathletes try to build a nutrition strategy, and the only one that lasts your whole racing life
• The 3 questions that keep triathletes on the precipice of dialling in their nutrition for years
• How Kelly, Steve and Julia from the Triathlon Nutrition Academy finally got off the fence

Links:

Check how well you’re doing when it comes to your nutrition with our 50 Step Checklist to Triathlon Nutrition Mastery

Start working on your nutrition now with my Triathlon Nutrition Kickstart course 

It’s for you if you’re a triathlete and you feel like you’ve got your training under control and you’re ready to layer in your nutrition. It's your warmup on the path to becoming a SUPERCHARGED triathlete – woohoo!

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Episode Transcription

Episode 263: Three Questions Holding Triathletes Back From Dialling In Their Nutrition

Welcome to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. The show designed to serve you up evidence-based sports nutrition advice from the experts. Hi, I'm your host Taryn, Accredited Practicing Dietitian, Advanced Sports Dietitian and founder of Dietitian Approved. Listen as I break down the latest evidence to give you practical, easy-to-digest strategies to train hard, recover faster and perform at your best. You have so much potential, and I want to help you unlock that with the power of nutrition. Let's get into it.

[00:00:00] I asked the triathletes who have just completed my Triathlon Fuel Camp what they’ve spent money on so far to improve their triathlon performance. 70% have paid for a bike fit. 66% of them had paid for a coach. 66% had also paid for recovery, massage and physio. 55% are buying supplements, and 50% of them have bought a power meter and faster wheels.

Then I asked them how many people have actually invested in a dietitian or a nutritionist to help them improve their performance, and only 20% of athletes in Fuel Camp had. That’s less than one in four athletes. And do you know what blows my mind? 57% of them told me they were winging it when it came to their nutrition.

Now, these aren’t triathletes who just don’t care. They are smart, driven, high achievers just like you. They came to Fuel Camp with me to upskill themselves, to get a better understanding, and ultimately we’re trying to improve our performance. They listen to podcasts, including this one. They read articles. They’ve tried the apps. They’ve asked AI. They’ve even followed influencer plans, yet not one of them that came knew how to periodise their nutrition to triathlon training. Lots of the athletes had never actually put their race nutrition plan down on paper, and they’re vomiting, they’re cramping, they’re bonking, they’re napping, and they’re having lots and lots of snackcidents.

I’ve been in the triathlon nutrition game now for two decades, and I can tell you that more information is not what you’re missing. You don’t need more information. You have so much of it already at your fingertips. What you need is a strategy that’s specific to you. So today I want to dive into why your nutrition still isn’t working when you probably already know what to do, what specific to you actually looks like, and the three questions that keep triathletes on the precipice of getting this dialled in for years. And the last one, oh, yikes. All right, let’s get into it.

Let’s start with information first, because you have access to more information than any triathlete has ever had in history. You can find out a pro’s race nutrition plan in detail in about four seconds. There are podcasts, YouTube, Google, ChatGPT, and the supplement brand at the expo that has a very strong opinion on beetroot juice.

If information alone fixed your nutrition, none of the athletes that I got to meet at Fuel Camp would be winging it, yet more than half of them were, and 0% of them had their nutrition working for them. Here’s what some of the Fuel Campers told me in their own words: “I don’t know what applies to me when and why.” “Sometimes I feel like I should know this already, but applying it to myself continues to be a struggle.” “I suffer from paralysis by analysis.”

Finding information is not the hard part. The hard part is knowing which bits actually apply to you on this training day, for this particular race, with your gut, your physiology and your life, and that is the bit you can’t Google. If you’d like to learn more about why I don’t think your DIY nutrition is working, then jump back into episode 237.

Because this is the exact gap that I see when athletes do join the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, which is my nine-month online education program where I teach athletes how to fuel their own training and racing. Most of them arrive knowing plenty of information, but what they don’t have is how to apply that information to themselves. And honestly, I spend the first few weeks busting myths and getting them on the right path.

You might remember hearing Kelly Estes on episode 259, where he shared his experience racing the 70.3 World Champs in Nice. He’s been part of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy and our alumni program for four years now, and he has taken his 70.3 time from seven hours to five and a half hours at 65 years young, with a good nutrition program and a good training program. Before that, he did what most triathletes do.

Kelly: Ultimately, what I ended up buying was confidence. I am confident that my triathlon nutrition is exactly what it needs to be. I am confident that it optimised my performance, and I couldn’t get that confidence any other place or any other way. I had searched the internet. I read articles. I was YouTubing. I was talking to people at events, trying to figure out what to do, what to eat and when to do it. And there was still always a mystery, because I’d go off and try what somebody recommended, and I still couldn’t necessarily tell if it was optimising my performance.

Taryn: Now, Kelly’s a smart dude. He tried the internet, he tried reading articles, he tried watching YouTube, talking to people at events and in Facebook groups, and it was still a mystery. And that’s what more information gets you.

[00:05:00] So if more information isn’t the answer, Taryn, what is? The answer is a strategy that is specific to you. So I want to be really clear about what that means. A strategy that’s specific to you is built on your inputs.

Your specific training program, whether that’s coach written, app written or you do it yourself. A rest day and a 45-minute easy run day versus a four-hour brick need different nutrition strategies. You cannot eat the same way for those different types of training days, and every triathlete’s program is unique to them.

Your gut and digestion, and what it tolerates at race pace, is unique to you, so there’s no one-size-fits-all carbs per hour that’s going to apply to everyone. Your sweat rate, your sweat sodium concentration, your race distance, your pace, the intensity and the conditions, as well as the terrain. All of that is unique, and it requires its own nutrition interventions and strategy.

Your age and your life stage, because nutrition changes as we get older. Your actual life, not the ideal, your actual life. Wrangling kids, shift work, fitting in 4am sessions before a workday. Maybe you’re retired, maybe you’re an empty nester. And life changes all the time as well, so too should our nutrition strategy, based on what’s going on in life.

Your medical history, and this is a big one. You might have no previous medical history whatsoever. That is great, but a lot of triathletes are managing irritable bowel, diabetes, pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and histories of disordered eating. All of those nuances about you, as your own little special unicorn, go into your nutrition strategy. If one of those inputs changes, then so too should your nutrition strategy, and that is why generic information doesn’t hold for very long.

Now, there are three ways triathletes try and get their strategy. The first way is DIY, do it yourself, from all of the information that you can pull from podcasts and YouTube, et cetera. You try and piecemeal your way through some free information and hope it holds up on race day.

Number two is you buy a plan. Someone hands you a plan that’s done for you, or you blindly follow an app, and it might work for a while, or work for that time period of your life, until one of those inputs changes. One of the Fuel Campers had a carb loading plan written by a sports dietitian for their 70.3, but is gearing up for a full distance event, and her question to me is, “Can I use that carb loading plan, or do I need to adapt it for full distance racing?” And my answer is, “Of course you need to adapt it for full distance racing.” You can’t just double your 70.3 plan and expect that to perform well at an Ironman. Her plan needs to be updated, and so her options are to try and fake it till you make it, or go and pay for another plan to be done, and at the end of the day, she still doesn’t really understand what she’s doing.

The third way is to learn to build it yourself. Educate yourself with expert eyes on it, so that you can understand the why and the science behind our strategies, so that when your training or your life or your race distance changes, you know how to adjust this for yourself. That’s pretty cool and powerful. It is yours for the rest of your racing life. When you know how, you can so easily and quickly adjust a 70.3 carb loading plan to a full distance carb loading plan and not have to fork out the money to do that.

A plan you don’t understand is a plan you can’t fix two thirds of the way through the bike, when the day is way hotter than expected and your race nutrition plan stops working. My philosophy when it comes to nutrition is that if I give you a fish, you eat for a day, and that’s great, but if I can teach you how to fish, then you know how to eat for life. It means you know how to do this for yourself, and you’ve got an Advanced Sports Dietitian checking your work, reviewing it, making tweaks and thinking critically to get shit done fast.

[00:09:00] No more mucking around. Kelly found out the hard way the difference between general nutrition education and highly specific triathlon nutrition education.

Kelly: Before I signed up for the Triathlon Nutrition Academy, I had been searching for these. I found a sports nutrition program that was computer-based and self-paced, and I think I paid $1,000. And when I got done, I was going to get a certificate that, I wasn’t necessarily a nutrition coach, I don’t even remember what they call it, because right after I started taking it, I found Taryn’s Triathlon Nutrition Academy, and I jumped right on the Triathlon Nutrition Academy right away, because I saw the value of what was being presented there. And so this other nutrition program that I started, I did finish it, but I didn’t really do anything with it. It wasn’t nearly as valuable. It wasn’t triathlon specific. Even though they said it was sports nutrition, it was too generic, it was too high level. It didn’t help me understand the nuts and the bolts of day-to-day triathlon training and what specifically I needed to eat. It just didn’t get there. So I ended up wasting $1,000.

Taryn: So it was sports nutrition, but it wasn’t triathlon nutrition specific. It was too general and not specific enough for him.

Now, a lot of the triathletes that I talk to already know everything that I’ve just said. You might be nodding along, going, “Yes, Taryn, I’ve heard this before.” You know you need a strategy that is specific to you, but you still sit on the precipice of dialling it in for months, sometimes years. And when I dig into why that’s happening, it comes down to these three questions.

Question number one: Is it actually worth it? You are already paying for nutrition, whether you know about it or not. You’re just not paying for the strategy. You’re paying for supplements you’re not really sure are doing the right things. You’re already paying for gels and sports drink that you use in training and in your race, and you’re not 100% confident that it’s the right products for you. You might already be paying for the app subscription that you haven’t actually opened for months but you’re still paying for, or you’re following along and you have no idea how it actually works. You are already paying for the race entry fees, the flights and the accommodation for a race where something goes pear-shaped and you do not finish, DNF, or you end up vomiting or cramping or bonking, or something doesn’t go right. That is a huge waste of money, to not have full confidence to fully send it.

One of the Fuel Campers sat down and added up what he spends a year on protein and greens powders he’s not really confident are even right for him. And guess how much it came to? $2,900 a year. That is crazy, but I bet you’re probably doing the same. You just haven’t sat down and calculated it. When I got stuck into Kelly’s nutrition plan, he ended up saving $550 US a month on supplements he didn’t need. So his TNA program paid for itself in less than six months.

A carbon fibre bike might make you 1% faster on the bike course, but you’ve still got to pedal the damn thing, and then you’ve still got to run to the finish line with your body afterwards. A race nutrition strategy that you understand comes with you for every race, at every distance, for the rest of your life. So if you think nutrition education and understanding your strategy is expensive, wait until you add up all of those costs of getting it wrong.

Steve, who you’ve just heard on episode 261, is 71 years young, and he has done more than 300 triathlon races in his career. He sat on this exact precipice for more than 30 years.

Steve: I gave it a thought for a couple of months, actually. I thought about it. I looked at the price. I thought, “Gosh, that’s kind of steep,” but then I thought about how much I’m spending on a strength coach, massages, how much I’m paying for my Ironman coach, and added all those kinds of things up, and I thought, “Well, it’s really not that much if you’re paying for all those other things.” And honestly, if it helps me out, this will be worth it, and I’ll be able to use this for as long as I want to race, which hopefully is for at least another 20 years.

Taryn: He thought the cost was steep, then he added up what he spends on his strength coach, his massages, his coach and everything else that he pays for for triathlon, and realised that he would use this for the rest of his life.

Question two is, is this going to work for someone like me? I’m a back of the packer. I’m too slow for this to matter. I haven’t even raced yet. I’m 60. I’m complicated. If you are a back of the packer, nutrition matters even more for you, because you’re out there for more hours. If you are brand new to triathlon, it is the perfect time to invest in your nutrition education, because you don’t have any bad habits to undo yet. The best time to learn is before you’ve built them, to align your nutrition with your training as it builds and develops. If you’re a masters athlete, like Steve who’s 71, and your recovery is not as fast as it was when you were younger, and you can’t seem to get away with the same mistakes as when you were younger, it is the perfect time to re-educate yourself and understand what’s going to work for you now.

The “I’m complicated”. This is exactly where generic advice falls apart, and why the specificity is going to matter the most for you. If you haven’t listened to episode 261 yet with Steve, Curt and Jade, go back and do that now. Curt now eats 1,000 calories more than he did before, and he’s lost eight kilos in nine months. Like, that’s crazy, and I know a lot of triathletes want those same results, but you can’t do it by winging it.

The third question is, is now the right time to be doing this? I’m just about to race, or I’m actually just about to hit my off-season and I’m taking a step back from thinking about triathlon so heavily. There is never a quiet time in triathlon. If you are in season or just about to start, you’re racing on guesswork, and every race that you’ve paid for and invested in and you’re winging it is one that you can’t get back. You will learn something in every race, but we want more good results and less shockers.

If you’re in the off-season or just about to start, you have the best window to educate yourself and learn how to do this properly before your training starts building again. If you’re thinking, “I’ll just wait till my next race and I’ll sort it out after that,” that turns into, “Okay, the next race after that. Oh, I’ll just wait for the next one, and then the one after that.”

Even if you’re in peak race season and you’re racing next weekend, now is the perfect time to understand how to recover from that race, or how to recover from your training, because you’re going to get the best bang for your buck out of what you do in your daily training environment. It’s not the one thing that you do on race day that has the biggest impact, it’s the small things compounded over time that add up to big results.

Julia, who you heard on episode 235, calls herself a back of the packer, and she sat on this precipice for months as well.

Julia: I hesitated and I waited, and I didn’t join the Nutrition Academy for another three months. I had a 70.3 coming up, and I thought, “I don’t want to confuse what I’m doing.” And honestly, if I had a regret, that’s my biggest regret. I should have joined the Academy straight away after the Endurance Essentials, because what you learn just absolutely blows your mind. I was a back of the packer and thought, you know, “I’m just doing this for fun. Do I really need to invest this time?” But honestly, it blew my mind. And now, you might have seen me up in Cairns. I had the most amazing time. I mean, my time wasn’t fast, it was just under seven hours, but I had the best day ever. I was fuelled properly.

Taryn: She waited for three months because she had a 70.3 on the calendar really quickly, and in her own words, she calls that her biggest regret. Then she raced Cairns 70.3 with us this year in just under seven hours and had the best day ever, because she was fuelled properly.

It’s not about going fast, unless you want to. For me, it’s about you crossing the finish line with a smile on your face, knowing that you have done your best. That is a massive win, because we don’t want to be disappointed. We spend so much money in this sport to not cross a finish line feeling disappointed.

So let’s bring it all the way back to where we started. You don’t need more information. You have got more of it than you would ever know what to do with. What you need is a strategy that’s specific to you, and the skills to keep it working when your training, your racing and your life change, which is exactly what the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program is built to do.

It is nine months where I’m going to teach you how to fuel for triathlon, step by step, systematically, in the right order. We start with your everyday training nutrition, which is where your performance is built, and then we build your fuelling around your race calendar for every distance. You don’t just get told what to eat every second of every day. You actually learn why, so you can build it, test it and adjust it, and get it fully dialled in no matter what’s going on.

And you’re not doing this alone. In our live Power Hour sessions with me, you bring your training questions and your race, share your blood results with me, whatever it is, and we apply it specifically to you: your gut, your sweat rate, your biochem, your medical history, all of it. It’s not generic. It’s not general. It’s not one size fits all, and it’s definitely not me trying to sell you supplements I get kickbacks for. Just ask Kelly how much money I saved him.

Kelly: Taryn is selling confidence, and you should be buying.

Taryn: I want the program to be as accessible as possible, so there is a payment plan option that spreads the cost out over the program, or you can choose to pay upfront and save 20%. Head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. I’ll see you on the inside.

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions or want to share with me what you've learned, email me at [email protected]. You can also spread the word by leaving me a review and taking a screenshot of you listening to the show. Don't forget to tag me on social media, @dietitian.approved, so I can give you a shout out, too. If you want to learn more about what we do, head to dietitianapproved.com. And if you want to learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to helping you smashed in the fourth leg - nutrition!