By Gavin Kentch
There are a lot of resources out there that will tell you what performance sports nutrition should look like. The building blocks and basic principles here are pretty well established by this point: eat a range of nutrients throughout the day, increase carbohydrate intake around long sessions, increase protein intake around weightlifting sessions, etc.
Today’s guest, Skylar Weir, a registered dietitian who offers a variety of nutrition counseling services through her business, Sky’s Rooted Nutrition, is, let me be clear, fantastically well qualified to speak to these best practices. If you have a personal chef, money for Maurten (the chef is probably cheaper lol), and the flexibility to structure your life around two sessions a day with ideal recovery, you should probably hire her to help you further optimize your gainz here.
If this doesn’t describe you, then you should listen to this podcast. Skylar will walk you through practical fueling solutions for a number of all too common, real-world training scenarios such as:
- You’re cramming in a workout first thing in the morning. You know that you can’t train on an empty stomach, but also, c’mon now, work or class starts at 8:30 a.m., and you’re not exactly going to wake up at 5 a.m., five days a week, to effect a complete macronutrient profile before training, are you? (Does the answer here vary for easy distance vs intensity? Yes. Does Skylar speak to both scenarios? Also yes.)
- You’re a student-athlete whose main workout is in the post-class 3 to 5 p.m. window. Maybe you can eat whatever you need to for breakfast, but you can’t exactly have a second lunch at 1:30 p.m. when when you’re in the middle of class. (Hint, for this and many other scenarios: “Snacks are a superpower for athletes,” Syklar observes.)
- You’re a hard-working master skier who’s tied to an office or kids all day long, with no choice but to train from, say, 6 to 7:30 p.m. When do you eat dinner? How and what? And how does the answer for this change for
Master’s mediumeasy distance vs intensity? Skylar, again, has thoughts on this. - You have survived the week in any of the above scenarios. Now it is the weekend, and you (a) finally have more leeway to fuel how/when you want to, but (b) are also going to log 2+ hours on each of Saturday and Sunday, because when else are you going to get in this much volume?
Again, Skylar has thoughts on all of these things. She more than understands the theory here, but her answers are grounded firmly in praxis. “Nutrition is about consistency, not perfection,” she notes at one point.
There is more. Skylar talks about the importance of increased carbohydrate intake for endurance athletes, but also the importance of protein, and how to make sure that the one does not crowd out the other. She does not write off the value of supplements, but she urges a food-first approach, with the supplements as the tip of the pyramid, and only if necessary.
Skylar specifically stresses the need for what she calls targeted supplementation. “So meaning you actually test instead of guess what you’re deficient in,” she notes. As someone who has 100 percent thought, “Hey, I’m vegetarian and I’m feeling sluggish, probably I need more iron,” I found her explanation of the dangers of blithe supplementation — “what can happen is these symptoms of iron overload can sometimes mimic these symptoms of iron deficiency,” she cautions — telling. (Spoiler alert, my iron and ferritin were low but decent, even for an athlete; the issue was actually that it was fall in Alaska, we were losing 40 minutes of daylight a week, and I simply wasn’t sleeping enough. At a time of high life stress. These things are often multifactorial.)
Skylar also addresses how these considerations change with age. A teenage boy’s body is not the same as that of a menopausal woman, and nutritional needs for each athlete change accordingly.
Near the end, there comes a question about the potential need for weight loss for some athletes, or what may be perceived as the need for this. I can quote you chapter and verse on RED-S; I have two daughters, age 9 and 12, and I consciously work very hard to ensure that the messages I give about food consistently sound in “you have to nourish to flourish” and “food is fuel for our bodies so that we can play and move and do the things we want to,” rather than anything more harmful. But. I know that many athletes think about their weight a great deal, for good and for bad, and I think it would be naïve to assume that these concerns are not out there.
So I personally appreciated the nuanced question on this and the extensive, thoughtful answer from someone who works a great deal with people experiencing symptoms of disordered eating. Understanding the “very specific reason as to why this athlete wants to go on this weight loss journey” is at the heart of Skylar’s answer, but there is far more to it than this.
As for addressing the very topic or not, Skylar says, “I also like to engage in it in a more open way, because I think where things get more dangerous with, you know, altering body composition or having this desire to lose weight as an athlete is when you’re doing it alone behind the scenes in a more potentially dangerous way. So I actually think there can be advantage to talking about it more openly and just making sure that we’re doing it in a safe and sustainable way. And recognizing like, what’s the why behind an athlete’s intention?”
Skylar also notes, “Joy is a nutrient too, and we can’t overlook that.”
You can listen to this episode above. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts here, on Spotify here, or anywhere else you get your podcasts (here is our RSS feed). As always, podcast content does not reflect the views of the Nordic Insights editorial side.
If you do not want to listen to this episode, you can find a 24,000-word transcript here. This transcript is machine-generated; I have not corrected it, though frankly it is distressingly accurate. Generative AI (i.e., computers making shit up) will appear on this site over my dead body, but honestly this transcript is pretty spot on.
Thank you, as always, to host Fast Big Dog for his assiduous interview preparation, to guest Skylar Weir for her time, and to audio engineer Nathan Shuttleworth for making this sound good, with a supporting shoutout to the anonymous listener who donated better quality sound equipment to the cause. And to you for listening!
Two things in closing:
1. Do you have specific questions about race-day nutrition or fueling? There will be a follow-up episode with Skylar on precisely these topics. Send questions to podcast (at) nordicinsights.news for future consideration.
2. You can find Skylar’s business, Sky’s Rooted Nutrition, here, and her Instagram page here. I can’t emphasize strongly enough that no money has changed hands surrounding Skylar’s appearance on this podcast; I find sponsored content abhorrent, and it will show up on this site around the time that generative AI does. Fast Big Dog had Skylar on the podcast because he thought that her perspective would be valuable to listeners and readers, and for no reason other than that.
All that said, and speaking personally here (Masters athlete, work and kids and life stress, training ca. 475 hours a year, spend an awful lot of my life eating in the car either to or from practice or kid pickup), I found this podcast insightful and relatable, and it made me consider hiring Skylar to address some of my questions in this area. If you would like to do the same, you can find her info above. I don’t have, like, a referral code here; there is no Nordic Insights listener discount or some such. But she is, in addition to her time on this podcast, running a business, which you can find out more about here if you would like.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
