142 Days and Counting...

-Breakfast: Blueberry Bagel with Cream Cheese, 2 cups coffee.
-Lunch: Large bowl of granola with raspberries and blueberries, skim milk.
-Dinner: Can of chicken noodle soup with veggies, and a grilled cheese sandwich. In honor of my good friend Todd, I put bacon on my grilled cheese sandwich. Awesome.
-Snacks: 1 bottle of vitamin water, 2 chocolate truffles, handful of potato chips, 1 package of fruit snacks, handful of smoked almonds.

Training: 60 minutes on the treadmill, at 6.5 mph. 16 oz Gatorade (100 calories), 3 pina colada shot blox (100 calories).

If you have stayed with me for this long, and are not bored to tears yet, I'll explain a little bit why you will see essentially the same 3 items being consumed during training. Seriously, this should bore you to tears.

Pina colada shot blocks, gatorade, and eventurally, tri-berry flavored gu are pretty much all that I will use as fuel during training, for several reasons.

-First, they taste good.
-Second, they sit well in my stomach, and I tend to absorb them quickly.
-Gatorade is available on the Ironman race course; orange flavored for the bike, lemon lime flavored for the run (aid stations are about every 15 miles on the bike, and every mile on the run).

During an IM race (per a nutrition article posted a few days ago) I'll burn about 8500 calories. My body will store about 1800 calories worth of glycogen as fuel. If I want to continue racing after those 1800 are used up, I have to consume calories throughout the race. This becomes the basis for my nutrition strategy; what am I going to eat, how much, and how often.

That leads us back to the reasons above... I am getting my body used to fueling/hydrating with the sports drink available on the course, and digesting foods that taste good and sit well, even during sustained levels of activity.

I think this is one of the really appealing aspects of this whole process to me. Nutrition isn't a philosophical discussion on religion or morals. This is math. It is an exact science that doesn't allow for interpretation. You either got the equation right, or wrong. And since solving the equation technically has started 147 days in advance of the test... Well, that is the cool part.

You just can't fake it. I like that.