Fueling In Sport: An Honest Account of Misinformation

*Please note that this post discusses the topics of disordered eating, body image, weight, and mental health*

One of the most impactful pieces of coaching I ever received was an off-handed comment regarding my weight and how it affected my performance. The word impactful can mean many things, and while I don’t want to look at my experience with food and weight as strictly negative or positive, I do want to be honest about my path and highlight what moments and conversation have influenced me along the way. Regardless of where you are in your journey, please know that there are resources and help available, and that although progress might not always look linear, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t moving in the right direction.

I grew up in a sport where eating enough, and often times eating too much was celebrated. In the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, several news outlets produced stories on Michael Phelps. That year he was attempting to break Mark Spitz’s world record of seven gold medals in a single Games. In most of these stories there was a segment that discussed how many calories Phelps would consume in a day. Usually upwards of 10,000, often times over, and the media couldn’t get enough. I’m sure at the time there was some discussion about how much the extra calories aided his training or sped up his recovery, but as a twelve year old boy, I, along with many other people (both in and out of the sport), only saw the relationship between eating a lot and labeling yourself as a swimmer…and this label ran DEEP. Every team dinner, every travel meet, every ice cream social that took place for the next ten years, an unspoken competition took place. Who could stomach the most calories and who could embody the image of a swimmer the most? We have to take into account that during this time my teammates and I were training a lot. Two-a-days four to five times per week, weight-lifting, racing, constantly burning energy, and from age twelve to when I finished my swimming career at twenty two, there was a lot of physical growth that took place. In other words, the intake was warranted, albeit not always for the best reasons.

Fast forward to the end of my swimming career in February of 2018. It was the first time in my life where my relationship with food didn’t have anything to do with athletics, and I no longer sat in a structure dedicated to consuming calories for the sake of showing off. At the time I was the heaviest I had ever been due to consistent training and a steady increase in lifting throughout college. I had a big chest, wide shoulders, and lackluster legs, but in all honesty as a distance swimmer I was still relatively light compared to some of my teammates. I spent years torn between enjoying my slight figure because it aligned with the image of endurance athletes, and wishing I could put on extra weight/muscle so people would take me more seriously as a competitor. When swimming ended, and I no longer had anyone to compare myself to, I didn’t fully know how to re-contextualize my body. Throughout the next year, I would play around with different sports, mainly sticking to lifting and running a couple of times per week. I finished my first half marathon in May 2019 off of very little training, and for the most part I was either injured or disinterested in trying any other sport. In June, my parents surprised me with a road bike for my birthday. Whether they could tell I desperately needed something to put my energy into, I don’t entirely know, but it was enough to create some momentum.

I started to spend a lot of time in the saddle, still occasionally running, and thoroughly enjoying the freedom/exploration my world was opening up to. Like a lot of endurance enthusiasts, once I started to fall in love with the bike, I went all in physically, mentally…and emotionally. Researching, learning, testing, failing, watching big races and following dozens of the best cyclists and triathletes on instagram. My feed was suddenly jam packed with training articles, race updates, and epic workout pictures from some of the top endurance athletes in the world. There are only so many hours of posts, interviews, and videos you can devour before you start to notice what sells on that side of social media. A showcase of powerful, aerodynamic frames, bodies built for climbing, persevering, outlasting, cut abs, strong legs, skinny arms, churning out power through gritted teeth. With all of the media I was consuming, it felt in earnest, like I was looking through a catalog of highly efficient and perfectly built humans. As if I was window-shopping for my next ideal body and putting it together piece by piece in my head. Even with more time spent training each week, at the end of the day all I knew is that I didn’t look like the pictures and videos I was constantly taking in.

A few weeks of running and riding later, I was encouraged to join the University’s triathlon team by a friend. Before I knew it I was back in the pool, having fun on the bike, and learning how to run with a group of great people. After a positive experience with the tri team, I decided to keep branching out and meet up with the local bike club. It felt like a good way to make more connections and learn during the process, so I showed up in my $20 Amazon bike shorts, nervous but looking forward to my first group ride. About thirty minutes in, the man behind me expressed how fun I was to ride with. He told me that my body was like a sail, that my wide shoulders made drafting easy, and although he could probably out climb me, I would have no problem catching up on the downhills…I didn’t ride with a single person for over six months after that. While that may seem like a childish or immature reaction, the sudden manifestation of a massive insecurity made months of comparison suddenly valid, and something inside of me snapped. I quickly realized that by switching sports, I went from one of the smaller athletes in swimming to one of the bigger athletes in cycling and triathlon. 

By the time I started working with a formal triathlon coach, a few months had passed since the bike incident and I was in a very negative place with body. To my dismay, I was still roughly the same weight as when I had stopped swimming, and I was looking in the mirror daily to see if my shoulders had gotten any smaller. During the first call we ever had, they were straightforward and asked me how much I weighed. With the exception of my strength coaches in college, I had never had never been asked that by someone I planned to train with. I knew in this context, a higher number wouldn’t be celebrated in the same way that it used to be. I was honest, and after a few moments of silence on the other end of the phone I was told I could easily drop eight to ten pounds by my next race, and if we kept my numbers high on the bike and the run, my power to weight ratio would be on the verge of professional. It was everything I wanted to hear. Some could look at this as a question of “What are we willing to do for the sake of performance?”, but all I could think about was that I finally had permission to lose weight and align myself with the athletes I had been idolizing for months. I was elated.

I dove into their guidance head first, cutting my meals down in size, tracking my calories, going for fasted runs and rides in the morning before breakfast to boost my fat-oxidation rate and decrease my body’s dependance on carbohydrates. Privately, I was weighing myself a dozen times a day just to see how my body was responding and fluctuating with training and meals, and measuring the circumference of my arms and legs weekly. A combination of newly structured training, and reducing my overall nutritional intake had me simultaneously seeing incredible athletic growth as well as my first signs of weight loss…and it was incredibly addicting. My arms and shoulders were getting narrow, I was climbing faster than ever, and I was seeing muscles pop without doing any strength work. It may all seem slightly absurd for the sake of increased confidence and performance, but in the depths of insecurity, justification of harmful thoughts and behaviors becomes a highly mastered skill. 

I could go into detail about all the things my coaches said during my time in triathlon, that over-eating was a lack of self control, that you’d never find a professional triathlete over certain weight, that by the end of the season your t-shirts should be fitting looser, but that’s not the point. The point is that when you believe there is only one way to succeed at something, and have decided to do whatever it takes to get there, you put yourself in a desperately fragile position. Over 18 months, and in the span of working with several coaches, I lost nearly twenty-five pounds. What’s even scarier is that I was training at the professional level when I finally stepped away. My body had allowed me to progress far enough during that time that it was easy to believe everything I was told. What I didn’t know is that an internal clock had started counting down from the first day I decided to alter my diet and exercise habits. I began to regress. I stopped recovering. Mentally I was more anxious and depressed than I had been in years. Every muscle and joint felt one step away from injury for months on end. I loathed training and I came to resent the narrative I was feeding myself, and my own decisions. While there are many reasons why I eventually stepped away from triathlon, the decision to start researching exercise science and nutrition is what pushed me over the edge. The more that I learned, the more I understood how much misinformation there is being pushed in endurance sports, and how much damage I had done to my body and my mind after a year and a half of intentionally starving myself.

I have only touched a scale twice since leaving triathlon as a promise to both myself and as a sign of respect for my body. Once was towards the end of 2022, about 18 months removed from triathlon, and the second occasion was a couple weeks ago for the sake of this post. After 18 months I had gained back about 8 pounds. A third of what I lost in the same amount of time. When I weighed myself recently, coming up on three years removed, I was exactly the same weight compared to when I finished swimming in 2018. Twenty-five pounds heavier than I was at my lightest in 2021, and I’m currently running faster than I ever have in my life. It took me three years of dedicated research, attention, and implementation to get back to a healthy place, and it wasn’t until recently that I could admit that. While we may all have different goals, different bodies, different genetics and hormones that impact the way we look, age, and process everything from food to training/recovery, I urge you make finding your healthy place a priority.  Even though I didn’t regularly look at a scale, my body naturally found its way back to a balanced state after a lot of patience, research, and care. It gives me great confidence that others can do the same. 

To be clear it was never the bike or the running that sent me down this path. Endurance sports, at their very best, open us up to discovery, growth, discipline, connection, and incredibly positive experiences. Media, literature, and divulging in commentary has its place, but when combined with insecurity, necessity for control, and desire to compete at the highest level, please look at the cost. Since that initial comment, I have been told by multiple coaches, former teammates, athletes, physical therapists, podiatrists, and doctors, that I am either too heavy, that any gained weight will put me at risk for injury due to increased impact, or that altering my power to weight ratio will have a negative influence on my athletic potential. Speaking now as someone who’s spent years studying the truth behind fueling and performance and someone who’s learned to trust what their body needs, then I am scared to know what’s being said to other athletes who may not have the experience and resources to deal with misinformation. 

While there may be no easy answer to an issue that is deeply rooted in athletics, in human comparison, and in life, education is incredibly important. Understanding the difference between what looks healthy and what is healthy is vital to your longevity as both an athlete and a human. Therapists, Sports Psychologists, Nutritionists are all incredibly valuable resources, and if you have been (or are going through) your own journey, I encourage you to be open and honest with those around you because a teammate, a child, or a coach may need to hear it. Finding ways to celebrate what your body is capable of at its healthiest is the key to balance and well-being. Your body has an incredible way of finding equilibrium if you give it what it needs, and I urge you to do exactly that. Eat enough, always.

Athletic achievement, and health furthermore, is not a one size fits all. There is no ideal body for performance. There are no shortcuts. There is only you and your needs. Your body is unique, your body is strong, and your body is capable of incredible things. Let it speak, give it time to adapt, and allow it to find peace.