High Performance Vegetable & Fruit Smoothies

My sleep post was apparently so boring that most of my remaining followers immediately cancelled their feeds. 

So in this post I will give the audience what they want — the one thing that endurance athletes actually all seem to care about — discussion about smoothies.

Yes since last summer I have been making smoothies every morning.  Originally the idea was to simply trick myself into eating more vegetables  (when you are surrounded by Vegan triathletes demonizing meat and dairy, and Paleo Diet triathletes demonizing bread and fruit, you can’t help but start to feel that vegetables are the only safe food choice).   

Now in addition to improving basic daily nutrition, I learn that smoothies have performance-boosting powers*

Was my recent PB at Toda 10k due to the smoothies?

I am a sloppy and lazy cook, but even for me making a smoothie is a forgiving enough process to be almost fun.   Now I am finally adhering to nutritionists recommendation to have vegetable at every meal (the trick is to add just enough fruit to make the smoothie taste like the sweet American breakfasts I grew up with, while still tossing in a full serving of vegetables).   Moreover the texture and green hue of the smoothies just feels and looks so darn healthy that I simply feel stronger as I drink it (OK, maybe this is a placebo effect, but as more knowledgeable athletes have told me about the placebo effect, if it works -- bring it on). 

So here is my special, performance-enhancing recipe:

1. Take a totally random amount of the following ingredients: 

• Spinach 
• Carrots
• Almond Butter
• Chia Seeds 
• Bananas

2. Mix in blender

3. Serve Cold  

I will be sure to track whether my special smoothie diet leads to further race improvements. 

• Yes, that's right, my takeaway after recently listening to hours of seemingly authoritative fitness podcasts is that diet, particularly smoothies, are the primary driver of endurance sports performance.  Personally I had always thought that the key variables were genetics and training, with belief and execution playing a key role, and things like sleep, stress, and diet being merely factors that if neglected could derail the rest of your program.  But apparently it is mostly about the smoothies. 

The Sleep-Deprived Triathlete

Way back in the earliest of posts in this blog, I lamented being such an outlier in terms of sleep.  I have never met anyone who has needed (or admitted to needing) the steady 9 hours of sleep I seem to require.  For that matter I hardly ever speak to other athletes who even acknowledge needing a mere 7 hours of sleep which is allegedly well below the average minimum required.     

    

So I am the type of person inclined to read this new book called “Why We Sleep”  

The book is hundreds of pages of research extolling the need for sleep.    

This chart is particularly striking, showing how among a study of young athletes, chronic lack of sleep correlated with a massive increase in sports injury (a far greater predictor of injury than hours spent practicing the sport, strength training, stretching, etc).  

The book even goes on to link athletic performance with adequate sleep. 

The book is so vehement in its blaming lack of sleep for almost all health problems that even I, the biggest of sleep partisans,  begin to wonder if the author is over-stating the importance of sleep.  I start to look at all the chronically sleep-deprived people I see dozing off standing up on trains and worry they will start simply dropping dead around me.

One of the big takeaways from the book is that one should maintain the same sleep schedule night after night, avoiding long naps and avoiding trying to make up for lost sleep on subsequent nights.  Unfortunately, since I am one of the 30% of population with a night owl type of circadian rhythm and struggle to fall asleep in the evening, I find after just one later night to bed I struggle to revert back to the desired early-to-bed schedule.    Of course I have also always been struggling to join my militant teammates who always wish to meet at 6am for an early ride or swim.

While traveling to races has been the big challenge to meeting my sleep needs, strangely, crossing the 8 time zones over the Pacific Ocean has helped re-set my night owl pattern and allow me to wake up early.  So in the weeks since my recent trans-Pacific flight I have been diligently seeking to stick to a 9pm to 6am sleep schedule, a schedule that is absurdly out of synch with the world around me. 

I have even cut down on caffeine (switching to a decaffeinated mix in the morning and always ordering cappuccinos when at cafes).  And I have eliminated alcohol -- and more or less any social life for that matter.   

It was nice at the recent Toda 10k to naturally just wake up before 6am without an alarm clock, and have lots of time before the race start.

However each night the struggle to fall asleep is a bit harder than the previous night, and it is upon waking each morning when the effects of the previous day's training session hits me and I wish to sleep in a bit later to recover.  So with travel, and evening work events ahead of me it is a big question whether I can maintain this early-to-bed program through my A races next month.