Can what you eat affect running majorly? (Read 792 times)

No, it doesn't really, unless you don't have enough to eat or don't believe in eating vegetables or drinking water.

I have to disagree with Adeel too. When I went vegan my running and energy improved immensely.

If you stop eating animal products, everything else being equal, you're not going to drop a minute from your 10k time. That's what a major affect on your running means. If you're undernourished or eating complete garbage, you'll have some bad runs, sure. However, having eight years of experience running and training seriously, I've never noticed that a breakthrough performance or a clunker of a race came about because of what I ate or didn't eat, with rare exceptions: a lot of yogurt before a race doesn't work well. I've tried eating really well and I've tried not caring much about what I eat, except for not eating exclusively at KFC. The original poster's sub-par races are not the result of not getting enough zinc or magnesium or something to that effect. That said, yes, you do need to eat well to train well and race well. If you eat very badly, it's not easy to train hard, and you'll often show up flat on race day. For the original poster, however, his problem has nothing to do with what he did or did not eat.

Yes, especially if you are training at a high level. But this doesn't mean that you should turn to nutritionism. What it does mean is that you should look to eat a well-balanced diet, with protein, greens, etc. My freshman year in college, I was a vegetarian, but an unintelligent one. The cafeterias in the dorm didn't provide many options for healthy vegetarianism and I ate a lot of pasta and salad. My training suffered--I started eating chicken once or twice a week and it made a huge difference. The moral is a simple one: reflect on your diet and if there are any obvious things that you can do better, then do them. In my opinion, it's best not to worry about micro-scale stuff like calories, grams of protein, etc., but to focus on the big picture and to eat a rich variety of foods.