Trimarni Coaching and Nutrition

With family, friends and food, I can't complain. Our 2016 Thanksgiving was a great success and we hope you had a lovely holiday. It's hard to believe that we are just days away from December which means that time is flying. It's very common to count down days and rush the week but let's remember to always make the most out of every day. Life moves quickly! Can you believe it's almost 2017???? We started off our Thanksgiving morning in downtown Greenville. We had a few Trimarnis racing the  Trees Greenville 8K , including Karel and thousands of other runners. I just love seeing our Main street packed with active minded individuals and I just love how our community supports physical activity. I passed on the race for no reason other than I didn't want to trash my legs with a hard, short effort as I am trying to be as consistent as possible with my running in this foundation phase. There will be plenty of hard efforts to come in the next few months....

For an athlete-in-training, there are many challenges around the holidays, especially when it comes to staying consistent with training and healthy eating. Your frustration is not well-understood by your non-athlete family members but your training buddies understand that a routine disruption disrupts your goals and makes it difficult to get back on track.  So what's an athlete to do?  Do you put your training on hold and say "oh well" to healthy eating, every time there is a disruption to your routine?  Do you become stubborn with your ways and begin to remove the distractions from your life, even if it means pushing away your family and close friends....maybe even quitting your job, because it takes up a lot of your time and energy? What's an athlete to do. While it's not necessary to put your training on hold for an extended period of time or avoid your family in order to get in every minute of your prescribed workout, it's impo...

As a person, you have many roles in life and with each role comes an identity. A mother, a father, a sibling, a teacher, a student, an engineer, a nurse, a doggy parent....... In the off-season, you lose a very important identity of yourself and that is one of being an athlete. You feel a great purpose in life when you are an athlete, even as a mom, dad, employee, etc. When you were training for your key races in 2016, you didn't tell people that you enjoy running, you enjoy biking or enjoy triathlons but instead, you called yourself a runner or a triathlete. You owned it with confidence (and maybe even a secret fist pump too).  I AM an athlete. This is the title you have carried with you for the past 10+ months, alongside being a mom, dad, employee, volunteer, caretaker, etc. Having a strong athletic identity is what makes athletes great.  With great athletic self-identity often comes high self-esteem, commitment, discipline and motiv...

                                                 The off-season /foundation phase presents itself with a unique opportunity in your season where training volume and intensity is relatively low and thus, you don't expend a great amount of calories. This is a perfect time to break away from relying on engineered sport nutrition products to get you through your workouts and to see your daily diet as the fuel for your workouts. In other words, sport nutrition will play a very small role in your training routine.  However, I feel this is where many athletes eat and train with confusion. I'm sure you have been told that you don't need to eat before a workout in the off-season/foundation phase or you should avoid all sport nutrition during workouts, to burn more fat, in the off-season/foundation phase. While there's scientific research to support that worki...