Chunking Up

“A double cheese burger, chips with cheese and onion rings please” was my order in Ricks Burgers last Friday night. I ate the lot - guilt free. We’re layering on the fat for the race and all dietary restrictions have been lifted!

The next day I met up with Brendan Smyth for a crêpe and a sugar-loaded mocha in a café called Lemon. Brendan was my rowing teammate and we spent a year dieting to make lightweight for our Commonwealth rowing campaign in 2002. When we rowed together we were constantly controlling our weight to make the 70 kilo lightweight category by eating nearly zero fat. Six years on (and in my case 16 kilos on), we were loading up on burgers and crêpes.

The lightweight rower inside me still makes me feel slightly guilty about the burgers and crêpes, but I’m told that I will be glad of the fat reserves for warmth in the first phase in Antarctica and for energy in the latter stages. At that point, our bodies will begin to eat themselves.

We will eat around 6,000 calories per day and use anything from 8,000 – 10,000 calories in energy – so everyday we’ll be missing a normal daily recommended calorie intake and more. Even the shivering burns calories!  So, it is likely that we’ll lose 2 or 3 stone and I’ll be back to a lightweight rower weight. 

The fattening up process started after our final training camp in Norway. Simon got us on the scales for the first time in many months and I was my lightest for a few years – 84.5 kilos, nearly 3 kilos lighter than my September weigh-in. So, the race was on to put on as much weight as possible in the remaining couple of weeks.

Simon steamed ahead of me and started to pile on the kilos – creamy cheesy pasta sauces were the mainstay. Simon normally has a very healthy diet and is a vegetarian. He noticed that adding dairy back into his diet really helped pile on the weight.

On Saturday night before training on Sunday, I stayed in and watched The X-Factor (the exciting social life of a polar adventurer) and ordered a large meat pizza and garlic bread with cheese. While The X-Factor was pretty good, the fatty stodgy food was starting to get to me. On Sunday I felt really rough and missed my second training session of the whole campaign. My back was sore and I just felt awful. But, I kept up the good work on the fatty food and after a day’s grazing on various carbohydrates, I ordered fish and chips (traditionally still cooked in lard).

This was the last straw. I slept really badly on Sunday night and couldn’t do anything on Monday. I couldn’t concentrate and basically the only thing I did was a pretty poor quality ‘functional strength’ body weight session.

Thankfully my girlfriend, Simone, has come to the rescue. She saw me slipping into a pit of doom and gloom with my diet and decided to step in. The plan was - healthy vitamin and protein rich food, together with the fat. On the menu for Monday was a creamy fish pie – Jamie Oliver style – with spinach, carrots and mashed potato. Ah, the joy of good food after the fast food! The fish pie was loaded with double-cream and cheese and olive oil, but it really was good…so much so that I had it for breakfast for Tuesday and dinner that night. By Wednesday she had conjured up an African dish called ‘ground nut stew’ served with rice and spinach. Brilliant again - I am nearly back on form.

I am amazed at how badly poor food can affect you. Throughout this whole process I have been eating well, losing weight, getting fit and my energy levels have been really good. In 3 or 4 days eating fast food and lots of fat, my energy plummeted, my sleep was interrupted, my motivation disappeared and my general mood was downbeat. I’ve got to put on weight for this thing but I can do it without making myself depressed along the way. So, it is Simone’s cooking and chunking up until we leave!