Clean Run - April 2013 - 18

Eating
to

Win
By Alison Bryant

Agility articles often involve training techniques, handling
techniques, and course analysis. Some even discuss dog and
handler fitness and conditioning. But there are very few articles
that have discussed how the handler’s food choices affect their
agility runs.
I’ve been doing agility since 1995 and, frankly, I’ve never
thought about how my diet affects my runs until recently. Once
I turned 40, it seemed like I wasn’t able to “get away” with
treating my body poorly. For example, my typical agility day
menu looked something like this:

·
·
·
·

Two Diet Cokes on the way to the trial
Glazed donut when checking in
Hamburger or chicken sandwich with french fries for lunch
Birthday cake, or cookies, or some other goody that another
competitor brought to the trial

I usually did pretty well in the morning classes—I was fresh
and excited to be at the trial. I even did okay around lunchtime. But I hardly ever qualified in the afternoon. Often I
would scratch a couple runs or a dog or two because I was too
tired mentally and physically. This pattern seemed to get more
pronounced the older I got. I chalked my tiredness up to a long
day at the show.
The pattern got more noticeable when I started judging. Judging requires a lot of mental focus and sustained concentration
throughout a long day, with frequent visits to the volunteer
food table. The volunteer food table is filled with all sorts of
things to eat like donuts, granola bars, chocolates, hard-boiled
eggs, chips, sodas, and cookies. When I was judging, I figured
I could eat what I wanted because I would burn it off walking
around. So I went straight for the cookies, chocolates, and granola bars. Unfortunately, these were sugary, high carb snacks
18

that gave me sugar spikes with resulting crashes throughout
the day. Usually by the afternoon, it was difficult to focus and I
had no energy. I thought a day of judging made me exhausted.
Then in the fall of 2009, I started having trouble with low blood
sugar in the afternoon. After some research and analysis of my diet,
I realized that my diet was too high in sugar and carbohydrates.
The high sugar and carbs were essentially sapping my energy.

Carbohydrates, Protein, Fat, and Insulin
Carbohydrates, protein, and fat are called macronutrients. They
are what power our bodies. Our bodies need fat and carbs to
give us energy. Protein is used to build muscles and other tissues.
But protein can also be burned by our body as fuel. If we eat too
many macronutrients, we end up storing fat on our bodies. If we
don’t eat enough, we burn fat stored in our fat cells.
Fat can be directly burned by the cells in our bodies. It doesn’t
need any “pre-processing” to be utilized. Protein can also be
burned by the cells in our bodies. When carbohydrates or sugars
are consumed, they are converted into glucose which raises our
blood sugar. Sustained high blood sugar is very detrimental to
our health (as seen by the health issues associated with diabetes). Our cells utilize the blood sugar to satisfy energy demands.
However, depending on what you eat (sugary glazed donut),
your blood sugar may be higher than what is needed to supply
your cells. So sometimes, there is an excess of blood sugar because cells aren’t burning the sugar fast enough (i.e., you aren’t
active enough to immediately burn off what you just ate or there
was way more sugar in the snack than your body needs.)
To rectify high blood sugar (and to aid our cells in using blood
sugar), our bodies release insulin. One of insulin’s function is
to remove the sugar from our blood and burn it as energy. Another function of insulin is to convert excess blood sugar (glucose) to fat and stuff it in our fat cells. Insulin is really good at
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Clean Run - April 2013

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