Sports Science Seminar: Performance Nutrition

I was out at the first of a collection of free seminars arranged by South Dublin County Council last night (Monday 11th Oct). Really interesting talk by Marcus Shortall (Twitter link).

Firstly, it was great to see the range of different sports in attendance: rugby, GAA, boxers, ten-pin bowlers(!), etc. Ireland really is so impressive for the range of sports that are on offer these days: and getting better each year.

On the talk, it was really interesting throughout, Marcus doing a great job of passing on the concept of nutrition for athletes through a great story on one of his clients, Martin. From my teaching days, it was great to see another person recognising the idea of communicating knowledge through stories. Granted, this client was a person in his late 20's who worked a full time job and ran a sub 2:30:00 marathon and definitely what you'd call a normal, average person but it gave context of what to aspire to in standard!

Here's my notes from the event - may be of interest. I've received a copy of the slides from the event but waiting on confirmation I'm able to distribute - will update the post if so.

[Update: Marcus has kindly allowed the slides to be published. Here (slide deck) and here (sample snapshot from nutrition plan for marathon runner.] 

As for what I can take away for climbing. Hmm. As ever, this was describing a marathon runner who runs at high/medium level for around 2-1/2 hours which is probably comparable to perhaps big wall speed climbing? In comparison to rock climbing, which is largely based around the idea of 3-10 routes in a day, most of decent intensity, means that there's some translations in what is required. What was obvious was that feeling correctly is key and that so many people I know in (all) sports, aren't doing it correctly. I'll be elaborating on this more soon....