Eat Healthily, Run Faster
Recently I was reading an article by ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan about NBA players and their dietary habits. In the article, entitled “How Draymond Green and Kevin Love Wage War – On Their Weight,” MacMullan asserts that even though professional basketball players are assumed to be among the most physically fit people in the world, they struggle with weight and diet issues the same as the rest of the population does. As a 49-year-old man struggling to stay within shouting distance of my high school weight, and as a coach who needs to be at least somewhat aware of the dietary habits of my athletes, I found this article to be quite revealing as to the benefits of a healthy diet, as revealed by the players themselves.
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Back in the day when I was coaching Johnny Dutch, current world leader in the men’s 400 meter hurdles, we traveled to Philadelphia for the Penn Relays in April of his senior year of high school. The 400 hurdles took place early in the morning – like 9am – and there was very limited warm-up space. I was excited to go because I was born and raised in the area, and had always considered the Penns to be one of the most electrifying meets in the nation. Little did I know that Johnny had family who lived in the area as well. He, his mom, and his sister stayed with family members, which I felt good about because it would give him the feeling of being home even while being away from home.
However, Johnny looked sluggish during his warm-up, looked even more sluggish in the race, and looked exhausted by the time he crossed the finish line. I was standing at the tunnel near the finish line. At the end of the race, Johnny hobbled over toward me and sat on the ground, leaning his back against the wall. “You all right Dutch?” I asked.
He slumped further down, then rolled over on his side and proceeded to throw up. Two times.
I was trying to think of what the problem was. He was in excellent shape. He’d been doing very well with very demanding workouts. I thought maybe the long drive from North Carolina was the culprit. Or maybe the early morning start. Asking anyone to run a 400 hurdle race at nine in the morning is a bit inhumane.
Later, when talking to my coaching partner on the phone and explaining what had happened, he knew instantly what had gone wrong: “Too much chicken.”
That’s when I remembered Johnny’s mom having mentioned the day before that instead of going out to eat, they were going to have a big family meal. I just slumped my shoulders and shook my head. A 400 meter hurdle race at 9am after gorging on fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and God knows what for dessert the night before. What a wasted trip.
That was my introduction to how misguided eating habits can have a devastating effect on performance.
One day last summer I had lunch with Dutch at a local Whole Foods Market, and he was very meticulous as we walked through the store, making sure to pick out fruits, vegetables, and nuts that, when mixed together into a salad, would be both filling and nutritious. “I hope this is all worth it,” he said, and I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking back to that Penn Relays fiasco, and knowing how much he loved fattening foods.
In MacMullan’s article, she talks about how Kevin Love has lost a lot of weight, and thereby become a more effective player, by changing his eating habits. He avoids foods that are high in calories. According to MacMullan, Love “switched to a plant-based diet in 2012, with salmon and grilled chicken as his preferred entrees. He eats five to six small meals a day, and when he was traded to Cleveland in 2014, Love hired a full-time chef who prepares menus that feature organic egg whites, beet juice, shredded wheat with almond butter and protein shakes.”
Sounds a bit extreme perhaps, but perhaps not. The fact that his own teammates tease him about his diet indicates that Love does not represent the norm. Still, as more players become more aware of the value of eating properly, the days of chicken fingers and french fries are becoming a thing of the past.
For Draymond Green, who entered the NBA overweight, it could be argued that his weight issues had more to do with him being drafted 35th overall in 2012 than a lack of skill. Green dropped 20 pounds after his rookie year just by tackling his addiction to tacos. According to MacMullan, “Green says his lighter build has alleviated chronic knee pain, improved his stamina and enabled him to cut down on mental errors.”
The last part of that quote is a bit eye-opening. You can cut down on mental errors by eliminating tacos from your diet? The food you eat can have a direct impact on your ability to concentrate and stay mentally sharp?
Think about how that applies to hurdling. Eating habits can impact whether you run a clean race or start clipping hurdles late in a race. Eating habits can impact your ability to stay focused on your lane when hurdlers around you are doing things to distract you. Physical fatigue creates mental fatigue.
Young athletes tend to assume that they can eat whatever they want and just “run it off.” To a degree they’re right because they have a faster metabolism. However, you don’t want to just “run off” what you eat, you want to be able to actually use it as fuel.
With Dutch (and myself, in a big way), sugar is another food addiction that he had to give up because of its negative effect on performance. MacMullan writes that Andrew Bogut, a teammate of Green’s on the Golden State Warriors, eliminated processed sugars from his diet after their championship run last year, and dropped 22 pounds without making any other changes to his diet or to his workout regimen.
If you ask me, processed sugar is as addictive as any drug you can name. I grew up on my mom’s apple pies, chocolate cakes with vanilla icing, cinnamon rolls, sticky buns, not to mention donuts and cookies that she bought from the grocery store that were always available for dessert and for snacks through the course of a day. And back in those days, I ate whatever I wanted and “ran it off.” When I was in the hospital my senior year of high school after being diagnosed with aplastic anemia, I was put on a dietetic menu plan that prohibited sugars. I about lost my mind.
Eleven years ago, when it became clear to me that my aching shins and tibias would not allow me to sprint and hurdle anymore without pain, I switched over to distance running. During that summer when I did so, I also cut out all donuts, cookies, cakes, pies, etc. Whenever I had the urge for such food, I instead ate grapes, bananas, oranges, or cantaloupe slices. I lost about fifteen pounds that summer, and about a year or so later I was able to run a half-marathon at a pace slightly under 7:00 per mile.
I feel like the modern-day athlete has to work harder to eat healthily than we did when I was in high school. Back then, fast food options consisted of McDonald’s, Burger King, and maybe Wendy’s. And eating fast food as a meal might occur only once a week at the most. I know in my house that my mom cooked every night, and in most household the family dinner was a staple of the early evening. My mom usually cooked fish or chicken, mashed potatoes or rice, and a vegetable portion. Lunch usually consisted of a lunchmeat sandwich, potato chips, and maybe some cookies. So the only “junk food” my siblings and I ate was the dessert portion of lunch and dinner, and snacks.
But now there’s a fast food restaurant on every corner of every city and every suburb throughout the land. And if you want to eat healthily at one of these places, you really have to put in some work. The family dinner has pretty much become a thing of the past, as fast food restaurants and sub shops and take-out options are simply more convenient in a lifestyle that consists of long work/school days for all members of the family. Even at the house, home-cooked meals are often replaced by microwave dinners because nobody, including mom, has the time or energy to spend an hour-plus cooking.
For the athlete, the dilemma is a real one. Most track athletes, even among professionals (since “professional” is such a loose term in track and field), can’t afford to hire a professional nutritionist who plans and prepares meals the way an NBA player can. So the key is to avoid fattening foods and foods heavy in processed sugars – the types of foods that weigh you down and sap you of energy despite how good they might taste. When grocery shopping, replace that box of Oreos with a dozen bananas. Replace the dozen donuts with a bag of grapes or tangerines. Drive past places like McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, Dominos, Church’s Chicken, Popeye’s Chicken, KFC, Subway, Jersey Mike’s, etc. Because at the end of the day, the reason you hit that tenth hurdle with the foot of your trail leg, or got walked down off the last hurdle in a 400m hurdle race, may not be because you haven’t put in the work, but because you’ve been eating a whole lot of empty calories.
Source Article: “How Draymond Green and Kevin Love Wage War – On their Weight” by Jackie MacMullan, June 12, 2016.
http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/16080927/how-draymond-green-kevin-love-wage-war-their-weight
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