more recipes for the off-season...

Roasted Aubergine Salad  

Isn’t it funny how your taste buds change as you grow up?  I used to hate aubergine as a child and now I’d say it’s one of my favourite vegetables.

This salad is simply gorgeous, I bet if you make it next summer and you invite your friends for a barbeque there won’t be any left and your friends will be asking you for the recipe. It’s very versatile and can be enjoyed hot or cold.

·         3 x aubergines

·         3 x yellow/red peppers

·         2 x red onions

·         1 jar (250/300g) pitted black olives

·         Generous amounts of cooking olive oil.

·         Seasoning to taste.

Heat the oven to 200C. Chop the aubergine and peppers in big square chunks and place them in a large roasting tray. Chop each red onions in 8 segments (normal onion also works well – I prefer red) add to the other vegetables as well as the olives.  Season with salt/pepper and dried mixed herbs or oregano.  Mix it all well with generous amount of olive oil and place it in the pre-heated oven for roughly one hour. It’s a good idea to check half way through, mix the vegetables and if necessary add some more salt and olive oil. Don’t let it overcook so keep an eye from the second half onwards. Enjoy hot or cold. It can be kept in the fridge for a few days.

Roasted Salmon with Sundried Tomato/Goats cheese topping

I first enjoyed this recipe at a friend’s house, I obviously asked for the recipe and with a bit of creativity I transformed it into a metabolically efficient version.

·         1 side of salmon

·         50g  of sundried tomatoes (pre-soaked in boiling water as per packet instructions)

·         150g of soft goats cheese

·         2 tablespoons of olive oil

·         1 lemon

·         Grated parmesan

·         3 to 4 tbsp of Almond flour.

Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Place the salmon side on a roasting dish and squeeze the juice of half a lemon on top, then season it with pepper. Using a food processor, place the sundried tomatoes and olive oil and blend it until it has formed a paste. Add the goat’s cheese to the mixture and pulse a few times until mixed. Using a spoon, spread the mixture evenly on top of the salmon then sprinkle the almond flour on top and lastly cover it with grated parmesan. Roast it for roughly 35min at 190C. Enjoy!

Almond flour pancakes/Turkey steaks - Recipes for the off-season

If you are an endurance athlete and live in the Northern hemisphere the chances are that you’re now in the off-season and you are probably training with less volume and intensity. For those following metabolic efficiency   (synonymous with blood sugar control), remember that periodising your nutrition is also a key part of the concept; certainly during the off-reason you won’t need as many carbohydrates as you did during the racing season. Not only use the off-season period to plan your exciting races for next year, but also spend time working on your metabolic efficiency again.

To help you do that I’m going to share a couple of my own recipe ideas. I hope you enjoy them!

Almond Flour Pancakes – if you search online there will be many almond flour pancake recipes out there and I have tried several in the past. With a bit of experimentation I came up with my own recipe which I make regularly. They are easy to make and can be enjoyed in many forms. I particularly enjoy them as a bacon and egg sandwich and a coffee on a Sun morning, or with sugar-free peanut butter and raspberries/blueberries on top. I make sandwiches with them during the week to take to work as lunch with a filling of tuna mayo or cheese and ham. Once you learn how to make them you can use your own imagination and eat them the way you like.

·         1 egg

·         25g unflavoured whey protein (1 scoop)

·         35g of almond flour/ground

·         40ml of olive oil

·         50ml milk

·         a pinch of salt

·         1 teaspoon of baking powder

·         a dash of vanilla essence (optional)

Ideally you will also use a mini frying pan (10cm diameter), this makes them nice and uniformly round and olive oil spray.

Mix the egg, oil, salt, vanilla and whey protein well in a measuring jug. Then add the almond flour, milk and baking powder to the mixture and whisk well until combined. You want a batter that is not too runny or too thick, you can adjust this by adding a bit of extra milk or almond flour.

Heat up your mini frying pan on a medium heat and spray the surface with olive oil. Then pour enough mixture to cover the surface of the pan and cook until bubbles start popping open or the batter has started go brown in colour underneath. You will need a metal spatula to flip the pancake and cook the opposite side. Repeat the process of spraying the pan before cooking each pancake. You will normally get 5 to 6 pancakes with each recipe; it can be doubled if you want to make more pancakes. They can last around 3 days if stored in an air proof container.

Tips: You can easily mess up the first pancake if you don’t have the patience to wait for the pan to fully heat up. Also try mixing a bit of coconut flour to the mixture to vary the flour from time to time.

Thin-cut Turkey steaks in an Almond flour batter – this recipe is a real winner with my kids and my wife and I probably make it once a week. I borrowed the idea from one of my mum’s recipes; however she uses chicken and breadcrumbs rather than almond flour. For my family we easily get through 6 turkey steaks for dinner, so adjust the recipe according to your needs. 

Whisk one egg on top of a plate and season it with salt. Add enough almond flour/ground to cover another plate. Cover both sides of a thin-cut turkey steak with egg then dip one side at time on the almond flour until it’s completely covered (see pic) and place it on a clean dish. Repeat the process with each turkey steak. Once done, let them dry and settle a bit on the side before frying.

When ready to eat shallow-fry each steak on a medium to high heat until golden and crisp. Place them on another plate covered with kitchen towels to remove the excess oil. I use beef dripping to fry them rather than highly processed vegetable (including sunflower/ canola, etc) and corn oils.

I love them served with a bit of mayonnaise, roasted cauliflower and courgettes and fried pointy red peppers. 

Tip: if you can’t find thin-cut turkey steaks you can always buy normal sized and flatten them with a tenderiser and chopping board.

If you’re tired of the same breakfast every day, why not try making this ‘muesli’.

The Winter 100 race report – End of the 2014 season

#Winter100

Why? Why? Why? That is the common question I get when I tell people I’m running 100 miles. To be fair, at times during the Winter 100 over the weekend I was asking myself that same question. Inevitably during a race that long you’ll suffer quite a bit but the joy and feeling of accomplishment of crossing that finish line make all the pains and aches more than worthwhile. A feeling I plan to experience many times over the next few years.

The Winter 100 wasn’t on my plans for 2014, I usually race very little but when I saw spaces available I couldn’t resist and signed up. Training for this race was unusual, I completed Ironman Sweden, one of mine A races for 2014 just weeks prior, I raced hard and did well there but it took a lot out of me, for a while afterwards I felt tired and suffered from niggling pains and aches, so my strategy for the Winter 100 was to train less, recover hard and be at the start in the freshest way possible and of course grow a beard to look more like an ultrarunner! I knew with the fitness I accumulated training for the Thames Path 100 and Ironman Sweden would help me get through my last challenge for 2014. This time also coincided with my wife and kids being away in New Zealand, free of any family responsibilities one would think that I would have all the time in world to train but my common sense dictated that this wouldn’t be the smartest choice. The upside of not having the family around for a while was that I was able to get plenty of good quality sleep. During the time my diet (as far as metabolic efficiency is concerned) was pretty close to perfect with the exception of a few treats, I decided that since I couldn’t train as much it would be a sensible idea to try losing a bit of excess body fat, metabolic efficient eating worked a treat. In comparison to my Ironman Sweden race week weight I was more or less 5 pounds lighter, it doesn’t sound a lot but when have to run 100 miles and it will help a long way.

My main tactics to lose a bit of excess body fat were to reduce my portions a bit and try to exercise just before my main meals so that it worked as my recovery food. I never counted calories or went hungry. If you want to know more about metabolic efficiency you can read this post, but essentially it’s a way of eating that emphasises the reduction of insulin spikes and control of blood sugar levels with the aim of enhancing your body’s ability to use its own fat stores as fuel.

When race day arrived I felt ready, niggle free and lighter, let’s go and finish 2014 in style. The Winter 100 race is a series of 4 different 25-mile spurts along the Thames Path and the Ridgeway, with spurts 1 and 4 being flat and spurts 2 and 4 hilly, the course resembles the shape of a cross, what I loved about this race was being able to return to the starting point where my drop bag would be with all my favourite foods and spare clothes/shoes. My race strategy was to start at a sensible pace, run the most I could during spurts 1 and 2 whilst in daylight and hang on during later sections. The first 50miles went without a problem, the rain that was forecasted never arrived and it felt very warm outside, I had started the race wearing a base layer but soon felt it was too warm for that. I got through some of the hills at the start of leg 3 and around mile 55 I suffered my first ‘bad patch’, you just have to try to stay positive and accept that these patches will come and go, I walked for a while and all of sudden I felt re-energised and able to run again. It felt great arriving at mile 75 back at headquarters and see some familiar faces before the last spurt. Two miles into spurt 4 I was crossing some fields and up to now I am still not sure what exactly happened but being tired and with my concentrating levels dipping I managed to turn around on myself and started running towards the finish, I ran about a mile in the wrong direction and realised of my cock-up when I saw the bridge near the finish line. Very annoying but all I could do now was to pay better attention. At around mile 85 I suffered another bad patch and had to walk for a while, that must have lasted a good 20-25min, it still felt warm and muggy outdoors, even for my Brazilian body, I was still just wearing a t-shirt despite being autumn here in the UK. The rain came down at this point and it felt refreshing and I started running again. During the last 15 miles or so I really didn’t feel like eating at all, at the time the thought of chewing food didn’t appeal to me at all, with a few miles to go I started sipping cold and flat coke mixed with a bit of water and salt sticks. I know some of you that follow my blog will be curious to how much and what I ate. I ate roughly every hour and consumed in the region of 90 calories each time for the first 60miles or so, during the later stages it all becomes a bit of a blur really. My foods of choices are cheese/ham sandwiches, peanut butter/banana sandwiches, Generation UCAN sports drink, Nakd bars, crisps and flat coke. As I left the last aid station with 4 miles to go something just clicked, the pains and aches disappeared. I was on the home straight, even taking a tumble in the mud with a mile to go.

I crossed the finish line in 21h09 and 18^th overall and with a big smile on my face. I’m very chuffed to own my second ONE-DAY buckle. 

Super thanks to all the volunteers, no volunteers means no race, thanks to my co-runners and Centurion Running for putting a great event.

The 2014 season

That’s it; it is the end of my season, I’m here writing my blog and sipping a cold beer. What goals did I have in mind when I planned for 2014. My race goals were to complete a 100-mile ultramarathon at Thames Path 100 and to go sub-11 hours at Ironman Sweden in August. My other goals were to become a better cyclist and remain injury free.

Every goal has been ticked and I couldn’t be any happier. My debut at 100-miles at Thames Path 100 exceeded my expectations earlier this year; you can read my post here. My attention shifted to Ironman Sweden from May with lots of cycling. I had a really good race and pb-ed with 10:57, during training for this my FTP power improved as well as my power/weight ratio, you can read about my Swedish adventure in here. Another year and I remain injury free, in actual fact I haven’t suffered from injuries since 2008, I’m not superman, far from that and I do suffer from niggles from time to time, more of them in 2014 though. I don’t have a secret but a combination of ideas some may find useful. I listen to my body, if something isn’t right I don’t ignore it, I see my physiotherapist regularly and I back off hard training, especially running when I feel the need to. I am bit anal with my sleep, I like 8 hours a night, fuck the TV, sleep is the best recovery there is and it's free. I swim, bike, run and also perform conditioning and strengthening work, this combination keeps training entertaining and gives me a complete body workout. I also don’t race very much and have breaks every year. And of course I eat the metabolic efficient way.

More than race times and power meter data, 2014 has been about building my confidence and knowing I’m heading in the right direction. I don’t have any special athletic talent or favourable genetics but I’m learning that my hard work, my faith in my training methods and being patient are allowing me to achieve more than I once thought possible. It’s been a great learning curve and experience and I look forward to the future.

I now embark on a two-week end of season break, no exercise at all, time to give my body and mind a break. Plan is go to the cinema and a few trips to the pub of course.

I have one goal for 2015, well, one goal with four parts though. That is to complete the Centurion Running Grand Slam and finish four 100-mile ultramarathons from May to Oct, the Thames Path 100, the South Downs Way 100, the North Downs Way 100 and finish off with the Winter 100. I really look forward to this challenge. I’m love with ultrarunning at the moment! I’m going to start my season in style though, I’ll be racing the Tarawera 100k ultra in Feb and the Motatapu off-road marathon in March , both in New Zealand and great preparation for Thames Path 100.

If you want to keep in touch you can follow me on twitter @braziliangunner

Thanks for reading my blog.

Ironman Sweden Training and Race Report

Don't ever let anybody tell you that you can't! You are much more capable than you may think… if you are realistic, work hard and have a bit of patience, then good things will come to you...#findyourgreatness

Ironman training isn't easy. Combining swimming, biking and running with a full time job and a family takes a lot of dedication from the athlete and tolerance from your loved ones. This year has been no different. In order to keep my family balance in check I have been very selfish and it was a rare occasion for me to train with others, it just doesn’t work, waiting around for people and finding a suitable time for all parties is difficult and often results in the loss of precious time I could spend with my kids. I usually train very early in the morning and since I work shifts I do the bulk of my training during weekdays, preferably when my daughters are at school/nursery, or still in bed. Long distance running and triathlon is what I love and I’m willing to make sacrifices to keep my passion going.

To make this blog more readable, I'm going to break it down into sections:

Swim - swimming has never been my forte, I don’t remember how I learned the front crawl as a kid, I never attended swimming classes when I was young and I'm not passionate about swimming, although I do enjoy swimming in open water these days. To make the most of my limited time this year and make it more interesting, I have decided to follow a pattern in my swim training which went like this: technique drills swim, speed intervals/time trials swim and long swims. Most weeks I could manage 3 swims, sometimes 2 and on the rare occasion 4. I also decided to read a bit more on the subject and got a copy of Swim Smooth, which is the methodology used by British Triathlon as well as my Tri Club, a really great read. The combination of the reading plus my swim training pattern gave me a new focus on what I do in the water and I looked forward to swim sessions more than in the past. For Ironman Sweden this year I opted to start with the slightly faster group so that I could draft other athletes. A tactic I believe has helped to achieve my swim time of 1h17. Despite the swim being held in the Baltic Sea, the water felt warm and before I realised it I was in T1.

Bike - I feel that the bike section offers the best dividends in terms of your finishing time in an Ironman. I'm not the best cyclist out there and this year my plan was to heavily invest my time in cycling in the hope of a breakthrough. Looking through my weekly training schedules this past week I can see I consistently spent 10 to 12 hours a week cycling. Training doesn’t have to be complicated and most weeks the training sessions were the same, what changed was the amount of time I cycled, the number of intervals I did, or the recovery period given in between sets. I have to thank my friends Harvey and Paul who gave invaluable advice and tips on bike training during this time. I am a big fan of power meters for triathlon racing and training and to monitor my progress I routinely tested my functional threshold power (FTP). My wattage steadily improved over the weeks and months, my time trials were also very consistent and riding at Ironman wattage seemed comfortable during my long rides as I got closer to race day. In comparison to last year, (when I did my first Ironman in Austria) I started Ironman Sweden this year with a significant increase in my power budget. Progress had been made and I had high hopes for this race.

My strategy for the bike race was as follows: to pedal smoothly with high cadence, without spikes in power and spend as much time as I could close to my self-selected power output budget. Well, it's easier said than done and in practice I opted to do this at 1hour-laps, whereby after each hour I'd press lap on my bike computer and spend a couple of minutes stretching my back and eating before I was ready to concentrate again. I managed 4 x 1 hour laps doing this and for the remainder of the bike portion I got out of the aero position more often as my back had started to ache. Looking through my bike data at the time, I saw my normalized power (NP) was exactly my budget of watts for the day and my average cadence was also high as I'd planned. Despite my sore back I was confident I was in for a good marathon. Cycling has definitely grown on me in the last few years and despite making progress this season I think there is a lot more I can improve and this excites me. My bike split was 5:52 in Sweden. During the bike portion I consumed just over 100 calories per hour, I used Generation UCAN, Nakd bars, water and salt sticks. T2 here we come.

Running - Since completing the Thames Path 100 miles ultra earlier this year, my running has gone from strength to strength. Yet, whenever I felt a niggle coming or excessive fatigue, running would be the first one to be dropped in training. For Ironman Sweden I did a mixture of hill training intervals, long runs and long runs with Ironman pace, miles reps as the race approached and brick sessions.

For nearly a year now I have been using the Maffetone method and training with a heart rate monitor, I have made great progress in terms of pace at a given heart rate since, for Ironman Sweden I had decided to run at a pace that coincided with roughly the top of my aerobic ability according to Dr. Maffetone, as this felt fast yet comfortable. When I left T2 I set into a pace of 8min/mile, I set my watch to beep every mile and I consistently got in the range of 7:55/8.10s. My back felt great and I was in high spirits with favourable weather conditions for running. It was great seeing my family every time I got back to the centre of Kalmar on each of the laps of the run course. By the time I got to mile 17 I felt cramps starting in both my calves, I had been consuming electrolytes and salt sticks throughout the race so my initial thought was that fatigue and overworked muscles just weren't capable to keep up that sort of pace. Cramps came and went until mile 22 and I managed to clock 8.40s miles during that time. The last four miles were tough as the cramps became more permanent. It's funny to remember, but it was very difficult to try making calculations, especially when I was in pain, it just doesn’t work, but all I thought was that if I could tick each mile at sub 9min/mile I would reach my dream goal of sub 11. I remember ticking 8:45s each mile and starting to dream of the finish line. I normally enjoy picking up the pace in the run up to the finish line but in Sweden I just couldn’t. I had given my all in that marathon. The last few hundred meters were emotional; you do feel like a rock star finishing an Ironman with the crowds and the red carpet. There it was, I was an Ironman again. I was super pleased with my marathon time of 3:38, only a few years ago I would dream of running a solo marathon at this speed, never mind after swimming 3.8k and cycling 180k beforehand. Nutrition wise, I consumed just under 100 calories per hour during the marathon, a mixture of Generation UCAN, High5 Isogels and a bit of flat coke, as well as water and salt sticks.

Nutrition - the last few months I’ve been writing all these long blogs on metabolic efficiency (ME) and its benefits and during a big race like this I just wasn’t going to mess up my race nutrition. Overall I consumed less than 100 calories per hour during Ironman Sweden, yet I didn’t bonk / hit the wall, or suffer from any GI discomfort and I saved precious time by not stopping/slowing down in the majority of the aid stations. When you race and eat, both your muscles and digestive system are competing for oxygen-rich blood, so if you can tap into your own fat stores by working on your metabolic efficiency you will spare that blood for your working muscles, it’s that simple yet so elegant. Metabolic efficiency works without a doubt. Did I do the traditional carbload 3 days before the race? Nope, the only thing I did was to eat some good sources of carbohydrates (a bit of sweet potato, UCAN and couscous ) the day before the race to simply restore my carbohydrate stores.

Overall I finished Ironman Kalmar in Sweden in 10:57. An Ironman Personal Best for me and mission accomplished, all on less than 100 calories per hour. 2014 has been perfect so far and I have one more goal later in Oct when I'll be competing in the Winter 100, a 100 miles ultra along the Ridgeway and Thames Path. I am really looking forward to it!

IRONMAN VS. 100-mile ULTRA - A few of you have asked me what is harder, an Ironman triathlon or a 100-mile ultramarathon. Well, if you train hard for the demands of your race and then race at your potential, then they will both be hard and test you to your limits. Every race is hard if you give all you have got. There are no easy options. J

My tops tips for a wannabe Ironman

Sleep, sleep and sleep: unless you are a professional athlete, you won’t have the time to sit around and rest after training sessions, so the bulk of your recovery will be done when you sleep. Your favourite football team is no longer important when you badly want to achieve your goals. Switch the telly off and zzzzzzzz!

Be selfish with your training time. Training with friends is great but you normally end up going too fast or too slow defeating the purpose of your training. Unless you are in charge of the session leave group sessions for the off-season.

Listen to your body - no training plan overrides how you feel. Training with niggles and excessive fatigue could lead to full blown injuries. Remember, resting is key part of your training and getting stronger. #trainsmart

And last but not least, get yourself metabolic efficient! No brainer!