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Showing posts from August 11, 2019

Coach vs. the Dieting Athlete

In many sports, it is considered beneficial to achieve a leaner body composition for locomotive efficiency — in other words, the less you weigh, the easier it is to move your body. Within the sport of triathlon, triathletes are not immune to this mindset and will often manipulate the diet in order to achieve a lower body fat percentage. Although there are safe and healthy ways to change body composition, triathletes can be very rigid and inflexible with their thoughts and actions. When a driven, perfectionistic, competitive, achievement-oriented triathlete is constantly exposed to diet discussions, advertisements, articles, endorsements and images on social media, a general interest in weight loss may manifest into an unhealthy obsession. With so many ways to enhance performance and to optimize health, two of the most popular sought-after strategies by athletes include diet and body composition changes. When done correctly, performance may improve. However, it’s not uncommon for a...

In route to Ironman #16!

The past two weeks has been an interesting ride. While I've been incredibly busy with coaching and nutrition consultations as this is an important part of the season for most triathletes, I did minimal training. After returning home from Ironman Canada/Whistler, I was excited to ease into a week of light training before starting my "official" start of Ironman Kona training on 8/12 (today). However, the universe had a different plan for me as Campy accidentally poked me in the right eye with his nail while he was stretching, which left me with a tremendous amount of pain and discomfort for five continuous days. It wasn't until this past weekend that I finally started to feel better. My mom told me that my dad's greatest fear for me as a baby was our cat Sasha poking me in the eye. Of course, as an optometrist, he would worry about something like that. Here I am 37 years later and I end up with a scratched cornea. Without being too dramatic, this was extremely p...