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I’m very excited to have Nicole from Planning with Kids sharing some of her great tips and strategies for planning ahead to make sure you are getting everything you need in your week and you are never stuck for something to eat when you get busy or have to grab something between a run and work or getting the kids to school.

If you’d like to get Nicole to help you with streamlining more than just your food, you can sign up for her 7 week online course, Planned and Present.

A consequence of training quite a bit, is that you need to eat quite a bit. Nutrition plays such an important role in both performance and recovery for training and racing. I am not a nutritionist and have sought advice in the last few years to help me come up with the right nutrition plan for me. To be able to execute the plan, I have become very practiced at prepping and cooking lots of food to keep me fuelled for my training.

Each weekend I undertake a weekly prep session to make sure that I eat enough of the right foods to make sure I can train the way I want to. There are weeks when for whatever the reason, I don’t get a chance to do a weekly prep session or only do a very small session. I always find I don’t eat as well when this happens and it does have an impact on my training. I might find that towards the end of my end long run for example, that I feel like the tank is empty, when usually I wouldn’t feel like that at all. The upside to experiencing this occasionally is that it reinforces to me how important my weekly prep is.

Having been at this food prep game for a number of years now, I have learnt ways to make it as easy and as efficient as possible for myself:

1. Determine what to cook

I don’t plan out every single meal and snack I have across the week, but I make sure I have a pretty good idea of how it will go:

Breakfasts – I have a few different smoothies that I will have for breakfast, like this Choc Coconut Smoothie or something similar with big handfuls of greens and protein powder instead of eggs. Weekly prep wise I make sure I cut up and flash freeze plenty of bananas so I have plenty to make my breakfasts.
Lunch – my lunches and dinners are interchangeable. They contain a starchy carb, veggies, protein and a some fat. Think left over taco meat, sweet potato, avocado and broccoli. I will look at my week ahead and work out what starchy carbs I will need for my lunches and what veggies I want to have with them.
Dinners – I create weekly menu plans for the family dinners and I use this as the base for my dinners too. I try to eat what the family eats as much as possible but I do need to make some substitutions and additions to cater for my food preferences and the quantity of food I eat. For example when the family has Spaghetti Bolognese., I will sub out the spaghetti and have the meat with either rice or sweet potato and veggies.
Sweet treats – I do have a bit of a sweet tooth, so most weeks I will make something that I can have as a dessert or sweet treat. I often like to experiment with these and copy raw treats I have had out and about, so will write up a list of ingredients I will need to make it.
Condiments – I do eat a lot of veggies now but I am not one of those people that love veggies. I don’t jump with excitement at the thought of a plate of broccoli! To help me with my veggie intake I make a number of my own condiments like dukkah, garlic aioli, fresh salsa, kimchi, etc. Dukkah seriously makes everything taste better! I will look at what condiments I have on hand and generally make at least one each weekend.

2.Work out when to cook it

With five kids who have sporting and social activities, a husband who plays weekend sport and trains himself, to fit my long run in and food prep I need to plan out in advance when I will cook so it actually happnens. By Thursday I tend to know all the details for the commitments we have on the weekend and I can determine when I will have time for prepping food. By looking at this in advance it means that I can then make sure I have been shopping so I have all the ingredients on hand when I start to cook.

As I have cooked most of the items before, I have a rough idea of how long each recipe will take me. Food prep however tends to take longer than you think at it is always completed amongst the usual activities of family life – making kids something to eat, talking with the kids, helping with homework, resolving disputes etc, so you need to always allow for more time than you think you need!

There is a bit of art to working out what to cook when, so you can minimize the time in the kitchen and the amount of clean up you have to do:

Making recipes in bulk – I also incorporate weekly prep for the kids’ school lunches on the weekend, so planning out the meals I cook means that I can get a lot of bang for my buck from one meal cooked in bulk. For example I might cook up 2kg of taco meat (using my own seasoning) and this will be for:
- Dinner that night
- The protein element for my lunches
- Taco parcels for the kids’ lunches
I try to make at least two things each time I cook to save on set up, pack up and clean up time. Each time I cook, I have to wipe benches, stack dishwasher etc, afterwards so it makes sense to limit the number of times I have to do this.
I take into account things like cooking time or setting time, so I can make other things while that is happening. For example with kimchi, I need to leave the salted cabbage for a couple of hours, so will prepare that first off and when I have cakes/muffins etc for the kids’ lunches in the oven baking, I will wash and prep veggies to eat through out the week.
If I am using the food processor for a few things, I will work out if there is a recipe I should make first so I don’t have to wash it in between uses. For example if I am going to be making my own chicken mince (throwing chicken breasts into the food processor!), I will do that after I have used the food processor for grating veggies. I am happy to have grated veggie scraps in my chicken mince, but once raw chicken has been in the food processor it has to be washed.

3. Storing the food

How much food I have to store varies each week. I generally don’t put anything in the freezer and find that most food lasts until Friday if I store it well. I use glass containers with lids where possible. You can find some good advice on food storage times here, but you need to make your own decision on how long you store your food for.

For things like cut veggies sticks (carrot, capsicum, celery etc), I have found using glass jars with lids with a few drops of water at the bottom keep them fresh for 3 – 4 days. We have a comparatively small fridge, so I always do a clean out each weekend of anything old (if there is anything left) to make room for the new and start all over again.

Nicole Avery is a Melbourne mum to five beautiful kids aged 8 to 18, who loves running, CrossFit, tea and spreadsheets. She has run 5 marathons, the most recent being the Great Wall of China Marathon with her husband to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. Nicole is the creator of the Planned & Present e-course, a 7 week online course designed for mums to help them streamline the known repetitive tasks of family life, so there is more time for the fun bits of life – like running!

Today we are so thrilled to have the ever inspiring Nicole Avery from Planning with Kids join us to share her top tips for endurance training when your house and your heart is full. Nicole is living proof that when you put your mind to something and do the work, the outcomes can be simply amazing. We are all long time fans of Nicole and her work here at Operation Move. Read on, we think you’ll be joining the fangirl movement pretty quickly too.

I ran my second marathon a couple of weeks ago, the lovely Great Ocean Road Marathon. At about the 30km mark I wasn’t thinking it was so lovely! But a couple of weeks have passed and so has the soreness in my legs and my love of long distance running is still there.

I am not a running expert or nutritionist so I am sharing these tips from the basis of my experience. I have trained for three marathons, but have only run two. (For the record I ran Melbourne in 03:11:28 and the Great Ocean Road in 03:30:56.) In my first attempt to run a marathon in 2012, about six weeks before the event, I pulled up terribly after a 30km run. It took a second opinion and two weeks to find the cause. Long story short, I had put a crack in my inferior pubis ramus. You can read a little more about overcoming the injury here.

In hindsight now, this injury was one of a classic novice runner. I was running too much, too fast for what my body could take. I had only been running distances beyond 7km for eight months and it had put undue stress on my body (I have since been introduced the more sane approach of Train slow, Run fast).

I was quite devastated and in a lot of pain. I couldn’t even stand on one leg to put on pants. The physio said it would be a minimum of six weeks before I could start running again. The reality was I did not start running until after Christmas. But this experience taught me a lot and in some ways was the turning point for making significant changes in my life. I found CrossFit, which led me to taking a wholefood clean approach to my diet and I have never been stronger, fitter or healthier in my life.

So from a relatively newbie marathon runner here are my tips for successfully training for a marathon:

1. Be prepared to make sacrifices.

For background, I have five kids aged 15 to 5 and run a small business from home. I also have a husband who works reasonably long hours and isn’t home until around 7pm week night and who is also very active himself. He completed his first Ironman in March, is currently still playing local footy and intends to run the Melbourne Marathon this year.

In deciding to run a marathon by default I am deciding to sacrifice other activities. I love this quote from Seth Godin and think it applies to all aspects of life:

To fit my running in around family life, I run very early in the morning. For the longer training runs I have my alarm go off at 4.30am on a Saturday morning so I can be out and back by the time I needed to get the kids off to their sporting activities. So invitations for a fun Friday night out with the girls are something that I decline.

I watch no television, not because I am a TV snob, but because running takes up time and energy. I either don’t have the time to sit and watch it or some nights I don’t have the energy, as I need to go to sleep.

I also have pretty much given up alcohol. I don’t like how I feel running even after one or two drinks and for the one rest day I have a week, I don’t want to wake up with a foggy head.

2. Have a plan.

Running a marathon places a huge stress on your body and isn’t something that should be taken lightly. When I ran my first marathon last year, as I was approaching the MCG, (where the Melbourne marathon finishes), I ran past one unconscious runner who has being attended to by paramedics and then inside the MCG a runner just in front of me staggered and collapsed less then 100 meters before the finish line. It was unnerving to witness and while I don’t know their exact stories, the most common reasons for non-finishing in marathons is lack of preparation.

Having a plan makes sure you are adequately prepared and you can find many excellent free ones online for whatever type of runner you are. Having a plan takes the thinking out of it for you too. You can just check in with it daily to see what you need to be doing. If you have to think too much about what you need to run, it is less likely to happen.

I uploaded my plan to Google Drive and then shared it with my husband so he could add his training plan to it. We had a number of months of cross over when he was training for an Ironman and I was training for the Great Ocean Road marathon. As the Ironman was the bigger of the two events and a first for him, he had priority on the available training times. He would enter in advance for a couple of weeks at a time to the Google spreadsheet what he was doing, where he was doing it and the time needed. I would then work out when I could fit my long runs in.

3. Look for opportunities.

Sometimes family and/or work life gets busy and can interfere with the great plan! This is where you need to be flexible and open minded to find opportunities. I have grown used to attending the kids sporting activities in my running gear! This might be because I time my early morning run for maximum sleep. I get up to give me just enough time it so I run, stretch, make a refuel smoothie to go, apply deodorant and get to the kids’ sporting event on time.

Other times it is because I will run while they are playing sport. During the boy’s soccer or football games, it can provide an opportunity for a pace run or interval training and still squeeze in some time to actually watch them play.

I am now a devoted lover of CrossFit, so finding time for both has required adjustment. I will run to CrossFit (4.25km each way) 3 or 4 mornings a week to make sure I have enough kms in the bank and make the best use of my time.

I can almost measure time in terms of runs. Have 30 minutes up my sleeve? Can run some hill intervals up and down my street. Got 20 minutes before school pick up? Take the dog for a run around the block. 10 minutes before the kids wake up? Work on planks for core stability. Once you are switched on to looking for running opportunities and have some go to running exercises, it is easier to fit in everything you need to do.

4. Incorporate strength training.

When training for my first marathon I didn’t incorporate a solid strength-training element to my plan and it is something many runners leave out. CrossFit now fits that slot for me and increasing my strength has been incredibly beneficial for my running. The improved stability in my core has allowed me to run more efficiently and it helps me keep form in the later stage of the marathons when fatigue really starts to set in. (See this post on Runners World for core exercises for runners.)

5. Have a recovery plan.

I have actually made the mistake of not having an adequate recovery plan twice! I am going to nail this part after Melbourne 2014! I sought advice on my recovery a week after the Great Ocean Road as my legs were still sore and I wasn’t performing at CrossFit as I usually would.

I have learnt that a proper recovery plan doesn’t just look at physical activity either. It takes into account the need to refuel your body adequately and not just for just the day after the marathon, but for the immediate week following.

I also think massage is an essential part of recovery too. After the Melbourne Marathon, free massage was offered to all runners and the difference I felt before and after the massage was incredible. After Great Ocean Road the only massage available you had to pay for which I was happy to do, but after lining up for 45 minutes and then being told it would still be another hour, I gave up. I think this played a significant part (along with the hills) in my longer recovery after the marathon. I did however have a remedial massage booked in for the following Tuesday which helped enormously.

You cannot underestimate the toll running a marathon has on your body. The type of recovery plan you need, just like your training plan needs to meet your individual needs and I can highly recommend creating this before you run the marathon.

Training for and running a marathon does take commitment and sacrifice. It does also change you and it is worth every bit of the sweat and tears you invest in it.

What tips would you add for training for a marathon?

Nicole Avery is a Melbourne mum to five beautiful kids aged 15 to 5. Nic is slightly addicted to spreadsheets, tea, running, CrossFit and currently on a journey to improve her diet and run her third marathon. She blogs at planningwithkids.com.

Food preparation tips to fuel your training