Plantbased Diet.

Diet is a polarising subject. Everyone has their own idea of what a good diet is. Since I was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes it is something that I have invested a lot of time into researching. I started with a book called Mastering Diabetes by a couple of Americans that are both diabetic. The book delves into the benefits of a high carb, low-fat plantbased diet. Basically, the oposite to what I was told by the medical professionals who were telling me that I need to have a low carb high fat diet, which I was never going to just accept this as gospel.

The minute I was diagnosed, I was researching ways that I could help myself stay healthy and ensure that I did not put myself at risk of all of the complications that can happen if you do not manage your diabetes well. Some examples of these are losing your sight, losing the feeling in your feet to the point where all the nerve endings die, and leading to having them amputated, kidney failure. These are the worst ones, and i will do anything that it takes to ensure that these do not happen to me. Diet and exercise are the key to ensuring that I steer well clear of these complications.

So, in this book, they talk about the power of eating mainly fruit and veg, so since then, I have been plantbase and cut out fats and oils where possible as they can affect the insulin sensitivity which is key to not having to take a lot of insulin which can also cause complications if you have to use to much. Recently, I have become even more strict with my diet as I need to lose more weight to lose. I can honestly say that this has worked for me, I rarely have to take insulin with my food, only taking basal insulin, which I take 5 units in the morning and night, so 10 units in total.

Another thing that I have watched is a Netflix doc called Game Changer, which is all about athletes eating a plantbased diet for performance and healing with plenty of examples of it working and science to back it. People who do not believe that a plantbased diet will work will always say that you can only get the protien needed for meat and whey protien, which is not the case as all protiens are found in plants. If you think about this, some of the largest and most powerful animals on the planet are plantbased elephants and gorillas being the best examples of this.

As long as you eat plenty of variaties, you will consume plenty of the right 9 essential amino acids.

The latest book that I am reading is called Eat To Beat Your Diet. It is basically about how eating certain foods can help you lose weight and heal your body, meaning that you can live longer and to be honest with the amount of training that I am currently doing if a plantbased diet was not good then I would not be able to perform and improve like I am and finally see the scales moving in the right direction but looking stonger.

As I said at the start, everyone has their own opinions regarding what the best diet is but if you are not as healthy as you could be and want to change it is 100 percent worth changing to a plantbased diet. I can honestly say that I do not miss anything about meat or dairy except maybe the occasional KitKat or a Boost LOL.

What is a mentor?

“A mentor may share with a mentee (or protege) information about his or her own career path, as well as provide guidance, motivation, emotional support, and role modeling. A mentor may help with exploring careers, setting goals, developing contacts, and identifying resources”.

A mentor can be someone that guides you, coaches you in person, but you can also have people that you follow from a distance such as famous successful people that have achieved great things in their field whether it be sports, acting, business etc.

I have all different kinds, I class my boss as a mentor and role model, I follow lots of different people in business and sports that I can learn from and then there are people that I have followed in cycling professionals and local racers like a guy called Colin Ward when I started cycling he was one of the best in Essex and could more than hold his own around the country. (And still can by the way).

He is amazing on a bike and he makes it look so easy and at times effortless, there were many a Time Trial where Colin has passed me, but he has always been so approachable at races and on the occasions that he used to come to the club I rode with Athlon CC for the Saturday group rides he always had time to talk. Colin now has his own coaching company, so if you want to be coached by one of the best, look him up. Tried and Tested Cycle Coaching.

Then there is a recently retired pro cyclist who is based in Essex that also used to come to Athlon rides occasionally called Alex Dowsett who again always had time to talk to you and give advise and as someone that has haemophilia is an inspiration to those that get told that they should not try to race. Really looking forward to his book coming out on the 28th September about his life, but he once told me that he would bring a book out about being a Time Trialist once he retired so hoping for it soon.

Some of the other people that I follow are Luke and Tom Stoltman, Tom has been the world strongest man twice, he has Autism but has found that training has really helped his confidence and Luke his older brother has been a massive part of Toms success. I find their story really inspirational and love their attitudes.

There are many more out there that I take things from the newest person that is up there is a guy called Andrew Kerr he has type 1 diabetes and has had it a lot longer than me and races bikes also. He recently started up the team Inflite Type One, which is a team that is for people with type one diabetes. And ever since I have been diagnosed with T1D, he has been a source of support and is always there with encouragement and guidance, and he is a pretty good racer as well.

Then there are those that you would love to be able to be like. One of my favourite cyclist was a guy called Fabian Cancellara. He was so strong on a bike that he made it look easy at times. He could just ride people off of his wheel without getting out of the saddle.

I 100% believe that it is important to have these people to look up to and try and take the bits about them that you like and try and put them into your own life.

I have recently been watching everything that I can about successful people in all walks of life the latest was Michael Jordans The last dance on Netflix which was really good for seeing what can be achieved if you work hard but obviously have some natural ability.

One of my favourite films is a film Will Smith was in called The Pursuit of Happiness. It was about a guys struggle to become a successful businessman. In one scene his little son is saying how he want to be a famous basket ball player and he shoots him down and the kid gets upset and the dad then says to the boy don’t ever let someone tell you that you can’t do something not even me.

If there is something that you want to achieve, then go for it. If you work as hard as you possibly can to achieve something within reason, then why can’t you achieve it. The only certain thing is that you will not achieve anything if you do not even try.

Henry Ford said that “If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.” So believe in yourself and work at it every day, and you never know what you can achieve  “Shoot for the moon because even if you miss, you will land amongst the stars”.

You only fail after you give up. Until then, it's called learning.

The most successful people are normally those who have failed the most but dusted themselves down and learnt from it and tried again and again until they succeeded.

If you set yourself goals, it is inevitable that at some point, you will not achieve them, is this failure? I do not believe so, I believe that you can only truly fail at something when you give up trying. Something that I have tried to drum into my kids since they were born, and I say it all of the time, keep trying and never give up! You may have to reevaluate your goals or adjust them at times, but if you use these times as learning rather than thinking of them as a failure, then you will keep going until you achieve your goals.

You may fail a workout or not get the result in a race that you wanted. Does this mean that you are a failure? Hell no, it will not feel good at the time you will doubt yourself. This is normal and a natural response, but where successful people are different, they will use this to drive them on they will find a way to learn from it. My most recent example of this was when I raced in the Essex Roads road race in July and ended up having to pull out because of my levels going too high due to my diabetes, at the time I was distraught and really was doubting if I could achieve the goals that I had set myself whether I would be able to get fit enough to race and compete and win races.

Since that race and the doubts that I had in myself, I refused to let myself give up and have used that feeling as a driving force to get better and ensure that I do not ever feel like I did that day again, in my last two races after I gained enough points to upgrade to a CAT 3 licence. Whilst having type one diabetes does make it harder to do anything, it is not a reason to stop trying. You just have to plan better, train smarter, and leave no stone unturned. For me, that is working on my diet, my strength and conditioning, and also my breathing and mind, I 100% believe that if I can train consistently, eat well and work on my mind with visualisation and calming techniques I can achieve my goals.

Dream big, keep trying never give up and always believe in yourself

I have already written this once but it disappeared when I saved it 😥

You Can have the best plans in the world but without consistency, it will mean nothing you will never reach your full potential.

I can count on one hand how many sessions I have missed this year due to illness or other commitments. Now finally I am starting to see the benefits of this consistency with how I am riding especially over the last week with some really solid sessions completed.

Now I need to get really consistent with my diet as this is a major gain that I can make in my performance I am currently just under 84kg and should be around 73-75kg. This will massively help me with my overall speed on the bike and my health.

My FTP which is the power that I am able to put out on the bike for around an hour is currently sitting around 300 watts, but likely to be a bit more as I have not done a test for a while. I was a fair bit higher than this 3 years ago before all the injuries and then diabetes hitting me and I honestly believe that I can get back to that and better if I can stay consistent and lose the weight that I need to lose.

Where I struggle most to stay on top of my diet is when I work away I spend a lot of time in Premier Inns which means Table Table or Beefeater restaurants, and for someone that has a plant-based diet this is not ideal as the menus are in all honesty rubbish.

The options that I have are a Vegan burger that is probably more processed than a McDonald's burger and is around 1400 calories before anything else is on the plate. Then there is a mushroom BBQ stack again 1200 calories all in and I am not really a fan of mushrooms. I would complain to Premier Inn however I doubt that they would do anything, so I have bought myself an Air Fryer so I can cook my own food in the hotel room or at the site that I am visiting.

This, I believe, is going to make all of the difference and be the marginal gain that I need to push my performance to the next level. I will be able to roast veg and jacket potatoes and anything else that I can think of, stop me from buying any food that I should not be eating.

The Masters National Crit Championships happened yesterday at Darley Moor, I was going to enter and actually wish I had now because there were people in that race that I know that I could have hung with that finished in the bunch. That is a lesson learned. Just do it next time, even if it is just for the experience.

I have 3 races left planned, which I am treating as training races and training throughout without resting/tapering for them. I will use them for mainly trying out new tactics with no expectations of winning, as the pressure is now off and I have my CAT 3 licence.

Diabetes wise, it has been a bit strange again where I have not really been having to take any insulin with food, and my levels have been dropping at night meaning I have been back to limited sleep and where it happens so often I am kind of pre-empting it so I wake up around the times that my low levels alarm goes off.

That is where the rest of my performance jump will come if I can get my sleep and recovery dialled in. It will all add up to some really big gains, and I will be flying and well on the way to achieving my goals for next year.

Anyway you beautiful humans, dream big, keep trying never give up and alway believe that you can achieve.

With hitting my main goal for this year in becoming a CAT 3 racer, it is time to start thinking about next seasons goals so planning can start, and also I can start visualizing those goals. visualizing how I will achieve those goals and what it is going to take to achieve them, and visualizing how it is going to feel when I achieve the goals that I decide on.

It is said that visualisation techniques can help by making you feel ike you have already been in the situation, helping you react better to what happens but visualizing what it is going to feel like when you achieve the goals gives you the feelings that you will feel therefore helping you to work that bit harder to get to that feeling for real.

When you are deciding on your goals, they have to be difficult enough to challenge you but also realistic. Once you have decided on the goals that you want to achieve, it is time to reverse engineer them. What is it going to take to achieve them? From that, you them create smaller process goals that will help you achieve the big ones, the training that you are going to need to do, do you need to lose weight (in my case yes I do) so how are you going to fuel your training but also lose or control your weight, is there equipment that you may need to get. In racing bikes, can you make yourself more aero therefore faster so it could be that you need to become more flexible to get into a more aggressive position, so you need to have a flexibility program.

Then, for me or anyone racing with Type One Diabetes you have to plan how you are going to manage your levels whilst training and racing, but this is not easy as every day is different, for instance this week my levels have been dropping without having to take any Rapid insulin with food which should not be the case because my body should not be producing any insulin. Hopefully, the more I race and try new things, the easier management will become.

I have decided on some of the goals, and it is a fairly obvious one is a race that started me on this journey of writing this blog, the Essex Roads Road Race, I have to race well and complete it but I do not just want to race well I want to podium in it. I know that when I am fully fit and at a decent race weight, so 10 KG lighter than I am now I am more than capable of achieving this, and yes, that sounds cocky but if you do not believe that you can achieve something that is exactly what will happen you will not achieve it.

There are a few other races that I would like to podium in the biggest being the BMRC National Crit Championships. This will be a difficult one as there are some fantastic racers out there, and I have ridden with a few of them in the past but I do believe that if I get my weight down and get back to my full fitness I can be in the mix and if the Stars a line then you never know what could happen, one thing that you can be certain of is that if you do not try then you will not achieve anything. When it is my time to go, I do not want to be looking back at my life thinking that I should have had a go at this and that, I want to be laying there saying we gave it a bloody good go but if I have my way I will have achieved a fair few of my goals.

Dream big, keep trying, never give up, and always believe that you can achieve

Race day at Gravesend circuit, I left home at 8 am for a 2 hour 30 minute drive, not before Drew my son gave me the power from his legs by a dragon ball cartoon technique. I got there in plenty of time, so I got myself ready slowly, listening to relaxing music so as to raise my stress levels to high (this really does seem to be working). My levels have been pretty good over the last few days and remained that way for the race morning.

I have ridden the course a lot in the past, so I know it pretty well. It is quite a technical course with a couple of hairpin turns and 90-degree turns that you can lose a lot of time in if you dont know them and the lines to take.

It was a small field with only 12 racers in the CAT 4 race which is disappointing to be honest as there are far fewer races lately so you would think there would be far more people taking up the oppurtunity to race. Anyway, a small field makes the racing a lot harder as it is impossible to hide in the wheels and take less wind and save energy. The race started pretty fast, and as I said, because the field was so small, it meant that because of some gaps in ability, gaps were forming so I had to work hard to get round people and close the gaps. With 15 mins gone, my positioning was poor, and 3 were getting away on the front. Again, I had to go around people to try and chase on to the group getting away.

One other guy came with me, but because one of the guys in front was his teammate, he would not work with me to close the gap which I get but as I had no team mates in the front it would have benefitted them to have 2 up there. I got really close but just couldn't get on. I held the gap for a while, but eventually, the gap started to go out, so I had a chat with Dave, the rider with me to ask him to work with me so that we stayed away from the riders behind us. I think by this point, I had already created a big gap but was starting to get tired and nervous that I would blow completely.

I needed to finish a minimum of 6th to get my upgrade to CAT 3 and it turned out that Dave needed to finish 4th to get his upgrade to CAT 3 so we did a deal that if he worked with me I would let him have the 4th place. Deal done, we worked well together for a while, but my levels were starting to go up, and my energy was going fast, Dave started to take on more of the work which I am eternily grateful for.

We now had a massive gap, almost a full lap on the guys behind us, and could see that we were catching one of the 3 that was up front, we tired to put a bit more effort in but both of us were pretty cooked so just couldn't get there. So there it is not quite how I wanted to do it, as I wanted to win, but the goal is achieved and that is the main thing.

I was speaking with Dave, the guy I was with in the race, and he said that he had asked his teammate whether he would have minded if he had worked with me to get on to the front group and he said that he wanted us to catch them so he had a teammate up there with him. For me, that would have been the ideal situation as I could have sat on a bit more. Never mind, it is what it is, I learnt plenty from that race about being in the right position when it matters.

Looking at my numbers for this race, they are ok but not great, so some work to be done, I am trying to decide whether to close the session and now really work on losing the weight as I still have so much work to do. I currently weigh 85kg and want to be around 72-75kg for next year, and with a lot more power, I think my FTP is around 300 watts at the moment, I know there is more to come.

I can now see what my levels were like during racing and training, which is hopefully giving me some insight into how my levels react at different levels of effort, or though it seems that no day is ever the same and during racing they go up faster.

So I have to do some thinking about what I want to do for the rest of the year. There are a few races that I can do, but I could just concentrate on getting myself in the best shape for next season as I have some big goals to go for and some races that I want another crack at in better shape like the Essex Roads one that I fell apart in.

Dream big, keep trying, never give up, and always believe you can achieve, and we go again.

This week has been another week of lack of sleep with my levels constantly going low through the night. Last night I decided to try not injecting any insulin, there are 2 types of insulin that I have to take Levemer which is the long-lasting one that acts like your basal metabolism, and Novo Rapid which is the fast acting Insulin that I am supposed to take with a meal normal just before. My levels still dropped but not as quickly and the other problem I have is my body seems to have gotten used to getting up at the ridiculous times that I have been.

I have been taking my Basal insulin 5 units in the Morning and 5 units before bed and if I am honest the Rapid insulin is just a guess. A lot of the time I do not have to inject much if any Rapid but then when I get stressed or during intense exercise my levels can shoot up like in the Essex Roads race a few weeks back.

One thing that has worked for me from the start, if my levels have gone up is to go for a walk which has always seemed to help me get my levels under control. No week or even day is ever the same and how much insulin I need to take changes all of the time, which is really frustrating.

Sleep is overrated! well people that cant sleep will tell you that, I would love to be able to sleep well but currently my diabetes is making that impossible. For the last week my sleep has been pretty rubbish with only 1 good day, the last couple of days have been particularly worse with Saturday into Sunday my alarm for low glucose starting at 3am and me giving up and getting up at 5am. Then Sunday into Monday well as I type I have pretty much been awake since before 12am, I got up smashed 10 jelly babies in the hope that that would keep my levels high enough to sleep and in theory that should have shot my levels up but nope nope nope it was not to be and the alarm was back sounding at 02:30 with me giving in and just getting up at 03:30. With out even thinking the words I said to myself as I got up was "Fuck My Life" which is how I was feeling, feeling sorry for myself, but even though sleep is a massive part of recovery from training it is what it is and letting it get to me is not going to change anything is it. 

After eating the jelly babies my levels only went up to around 5.8 and then started dropping again, there are 20 grams of carbs in 4 jelly babies so with me eating 10 thats 50 grams of carbs with no insulin which should see me spike considerably. The only thing to do is reduce the amount of long lasting insulin (Levemer) which seems to change every week, I have been having to take 5 units in the morning and 5 at night to keep my levels consistant a little while but that will be more like 3 units at the moment.

On the plus side I have had a really good week on the bike with the training rides in Exeter and Newport and then a rest day Friday and then into a tough race specific training session that on paper was hard but I smashed it with way harder number hit that what was prescribed. Sundays ride was a 3 and a half hour ride with some endurance efforts, I started to struggle towards the end but managed to get through with only one of the intervals that I could not hit as my legs would not let me.

There is a cycling magazine called Cycling Weekly which comes out every Thursday and it Publishes the results of some of the races around the country, I normally have a look to see how people that I know or know of have got on. This week I was looking and realised that the race that I was in was in there and that there I was in the CAT 4 race in 3rd position, only the second time I have been in there. The first time was years ago, again a 3rd place, but in a time trial race Back when I was a lot stronger and faster. Hopefully, plenty more additions will have my name in them, and with some first place results, actually, not hopefully there will be many first place results to come. A phrase that I say to the kids alot is "If you think you can't then you are right you can't but if you think you can you are also right you can" so I have to live by my own example hey. 

I have a few recovery days ahead of me with some easy zone 2 rides and then a hard sesion on Wenesday, I am then away for work Thurday and Friday in Avonmouth and then back to racing on Saturday with a race down in Kent. It is a circuit that I really like and is a good one to get away in in a break so I will be looking to improve on my 3rd place in the last race and with my current form there is absolutely no reason why not.

Dream big, work hard, keep trying, and never give up, and always believe that you can achieve.