How I Fuel Now and My School Day

A little while back I wrote a post on how I would eat to meet my training, diabetic and general daily requirements.  My routine is now vastly different from when I was back home and so I thought it might be interesting for anyone who read that post to see how it has been changed.

4am: Wake up and fight against the cold of London winter. Also try to fight off the fear of being at school, exhausted and having to manage 10 - 25 disrespectful and immature, low intelligence school boys for an hour at a time.

If my motivation wins the battle, I will get up and have 250ml of yogurt. One day I will get onto natural or greek yogurt. Maybe when someone pays me to do tri.

5am: Catch a bus to swimming or jump on the bike trainer. I still swim with my two water bottles, but the water is now a 2L since we always swim indoors and it's more steamy and humid.


I catch something like this to swimming


7am: If I've swum, then I'll get a takeaway bacon and egg roll from McDonalds or sub from Subway (convenience and speed) while I head off to work.

8:30 School starts. 20 mins of form class or whatever you want to call it. At the moment I do "interventions" for the kids in their senior year and are tracking to fail. Then there are 2 x 1hour classes where I might drink close to a full water bottle here and there.

10:50 Hot cross bun time! 2 of them, sticky on top. Sticky = sugary. Oh and more insulin.

Two more 1hour classes.

1:10 Lunch time! I always love lunch as I'm super hungry. I usually have a microwave meal or a salad, or both, purely for convenience of it (speed, cost). As I get more organized and the renovations of the house we're living in are done, it will progress to a pasta salad.

Kitchen RHS

Kitchen

Kitchen LHS

Stairs of death. Bike is carried down THEN cycling shoes put on at the bottom.

The builders leave their stuff everywhere. There is some in the man hole and some under the floorboards!

One 1hour class and the teaching is done for me by 2:55 - most days. Tuesday and Thursday we essentially do another session with senior students to help with their finals which can run til 4pm. On days that don't and while it is sunny only til 4:30pm I try to run from school to a nearby park and back straight after school.

3:00 I usually spend the next two hours running or preparing for classes. In Australia, most teachers bail straight after the bell and would do this sort of thing at home after training, but here most staff stay until 6pm. It is a massive inconvenience and really defeats the purpose of why I chose a career in teaching. My agent tells me regularly "That's how it is here." She doesn't realise that me saying I don't like = I will leave and you won't get any money from me if you don't find me something that works! Maybe she's just saying "Why the hell did you move here?!". There is no misunderstanding that British revival in Olympic sports only came via training in any country other than Britain. Brits that spend large amounts of training outside Britain won more Olympic Gold than those training in Britain.

5:00 - 6:00 On the way home I get a croissant or even a pretzel on the way home. It's not really "fuelling" per se, but it gets some more food in. By the end of the day I will have usually gone through at least two bottle of water, sometimes three.

5:30 - 6:00 I will either do the run I have finished and a gym session followed by dinner and bed by 9 (hopefully), or I will have swimming in the evening. My two weekday evening swims are from 7-9 or 8-10. Depending on the time frame I have to work with, I might eat a full dinner beforehand or a really light meal. Even a couple of pieces of toast. Dinner is still largely the same as it was in Australia. That's a big upside for moving to England, it's good the food we're used to, not like the Braised Dog Meat with a side of Clenbuterol we were served in China!

After Wednesday night's swim I walk across the road to the Chinese take away and get the bus home. If the bus driver doesn't get lost (he did the first time), I'm home before 10.  Friday night's swim is a mile from my home, so I grab a chocolate milk for the walk home (which usually includes a few minute bus ride for convenience) and in bed by 11.

So that's what I'm doing on weekdays at the moment. My weekends haven't got a routine yet. Between having a cold and damaging my ribs, I haven't yet done a full Friday night to Saturday night or training yet.

 The zookeepers were getting all excited because of how interactive an armadillo and a sloth were being. Says it all about  London Zoo doesn't it. They were more interesting than the tiger. At least the lioness was interesting when I snuck up on her and went "boo". She got a fright...I wasn't sure what was about to happen, but it was fun.

My next post will be a little bit "Week in the life of". I'll try to get photos of all my training spots and give brief descriptions of the people and coaches, so there should be a bit more colour. In two weeks, I will be off to Alicante, Spain for the school holidays. I will try to do a little swimming and running and get some pics of that too.