Fluff: Stronger, Faster, Better with Breakfast

Back in the days when I was rowing, we didn’t have things like Vega Sport to help us train. Instead, we ate breakfast. Every day. The team would traipse into the dining hall in all of our spandex-clad finery, effectively emptying the place from other diners (somehow the natural early risers were never very happy to have us disturb their peaceful English Muffin private time in the morning). And oh, we would eat.

Eggs, waffles, sausage, bacon, cereal, cantaloupe, grapefruit, toast, bagels- and I’m talking about the breakfast for just one person. On occasion, I even grabbed some ice cream out of the cooler as dessert from breakfast, to be eaten on the way to my early class. Hey, ice cream is basically just frozen hot chocolate, right?

quads of steel back then- yikes.

That was the thing about crew, and the thing about eating when you are an athlete of any kind- getting up at 4:30am to train, and then training again in the afternoon makes for aching muscles and an incredibly demanding stomach.  Not only can you eat a big breakfast, you have to eat a big breakfast. Knowing far more know about good nutrition now than I did then, I definitely eat differently when I’m training for something (less ice cream for breakfast, for one). But I’ll probably never be back in a place where I’m training four hours a day for my sport, and a part of me misses the license to eat with wild, crazy abandon.

However, this year’s alumnae regatta is fast approaching, and I just bet we’ll give ourselves permission to be stronger, faster, and better with breakfast, at least one more time.

ALUMS WIN AGAIN THIS YEAR!