Why the Farmer’s Market is a triathlete’s best friend.
behavior change, farmer's market, nutrition, organic food, triathlon 1 Comment »The spring season is in full swing and as of this past Saturday (April 11th), the farmer’s market is open here in Lexington, Kentucky. This is really good news for Nikki and I as it is a sign that our participation in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program at Elmwood Stock Farm is just about ready to begin.
Spring is one of my favorite times of year because our bodies are anxious to get outdoors and experience something besides treadmills, bike trainers and 25 yard pools. It is also a time when the harvests are just beginning to start taking place and the early season vegetables are going to be available to fuel those outdoor adventures.
I wrote about our CSA participation a couple years ago when we first signed up. (CSA’s and Eating for Fitness) Now that we are entering our third year of participation, I thought I would go back and review some general thoughts about what our participation has meant to our nutritional habits and the benefits this participation has on training for triathlon.
… the more things stay the same:
As the years change and as time moves on, it is interesting to see how the same questions and issues come up again and again. The big nutritional question that I get asked often goes something like this, “What is the perfect mix of calories I should take in to fuel my training?”
The question may not specifically include the word “perfect”, but essentially that is what I’m being asked to answer. The questioner is often someone that nails each workout, day-after-day, often thinking that they may not be training enough. In this way, they want to take a very detailed kcal-by-kcal approach to their nutritional intake.
Once you start asking questions such as:
1. How many servings of vegetables do you eat?
2. Do you eat a variety of fruits, or are bananas your only fruit?
3. What do you eat to get your protein?
4. What is your dependence upon sports nutrition products and sugar, during the times you are not working out?
It often doesn’t take too much probing into the athlete’s everyday nutritional behaviors to realize that a strict account of dietary choices is not necessary; what they need is a commitment to the basic nutritional habits that support their health.
How the CSA and Farmer’s Market forces us to focus on the basics of healthy nutrition:
Benefit #1 - We get a variety of foods to eat that support our health, automatically. No choices, no decisions. It’s like an automatic savings plan with your bank….
As a part of our participation in the CSA, we get a full basket of fresh vegetables each week. I’ll be honest and say that during our first year of participation, we had many varieties of vegetables I had never tried or cooked. These new and different varieties is part of the benefit of the CSA. It forces us to use, cook, eat a whole new group of foods that I wouldn’t normally try if they were not handed to me in a basket each week. I also know that if I was left to my own devices to buy our vegetables from the grocery store, I simply wouldn’t choose many of these items, if I chose any vegetables at all.
Benefit #2 - Our diets naturally gravitate to a healthy diet plan because we need to use the food the farm delivers to us.
Nikki and I are just two people. And while we eat a lot of food during the summer to fuel our active lifestyle, we often find it difficult to work through the entire basket of food before getting our basket the next week. This is a great benefit for the make up of our diets as a whole because we end up filling more of our total dietary intake with these fresh and mostly organicaly grown food (a few items are still not certified organic).
Final thoughts:
The advice that I give athletes all the time regarding their swimming, biking and running is this: “Be consistent!” As a coach, there is no workout I can put into an athlete’s schedule that will “magically” boost their fitness and performance if they don’t swim/bike/run regularly.
When it comes to training for endurance sports there are no shortcuts. An athlete that is out there doing the work month-after-month and more realistically, year-after-year, is going to outperform the athlete that kills themselves for 6 weeks thinking they are doing every session necessary to be successful.
This same paradigm can be said about your dietary habits and behaviors as a triathlete. Get the basics done, week-after-week, year-after-year and you’ll be in a better position than if you spend all your time looking for the best diet to follow for 8 weeks or sports nutrition supplement to start consuming 3 times a day.
So start making a behavioral change by making a commitment to attending the local farmer’s market. Just the process of attending the market and sorting through the vendors and food options will begin to make you more aware about what you are eating. If you enjoy the food and the market enough, maybe you can decide to join a local CSA program too?
If you are looking for a CSA program in your area, visit - Local Havest. It’s a great place to start looking online.



