Triathlon Nutrition Academy

Race-day gut issues followed Marie Stevenson through 8 years of triathlon, and she’s a family doctor. So how did she race the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Nice without them? Marie is a family doctor from Calgary, Canada, who has been racing triathlon for 17 years. She thought her nutrition was great, yet for 8 of those years she planned every run around where the portaloos were. She sh...

Two of the best triathletes on the planet came undone in the Kona heat in back-to-back years, so how do you fuel a hot race without falling apart on the run? After two decades of working with triathletes, I can tell you that most hot races are won or lost before the gun even goes off. As an age-grouper you’re out on course for hours longer than the pros, in the hottest part of the day, often...

Are you still training like you did in your 20s, going hard every session and wondering why recovery takes so much longer than it used to? This is one of the most listened-to episodes of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast, back by popular demand. I sat down with coach Joe Friel, co-founder of TrainingPeaks and author of Fast After 50, to talk about how masters triathletes can stay fit, fast a...

Why is your triathlon nutrition strategy still not working when you already know what to do? I asked the triathletes who just finished my Triathlon Fuel Camp what they had spent money on to improve their performance. 70% had paid for a bike fit, 66% had a coach and 50% had bought a power meter and faster wheels. Only 20% had ever invested in a dietitian or nutritionist, and 57% told me they were w...

If you have heard about the  Triathlon Nutrition Academy and wondered what it actually is, this is your answer in under 10 minutes. You already have a training system. You have a coach or a program, a week of sessions you love to turn green and the discipline to follow it. What most triathletes don't have is a nutrition system that is just as organised, and that is exactly what you walk out o...

What happens when you eat 1,000 more calories a day? For Curt, a 54 year old triathlete from Texas, it meant losing 8kg, ditching the daily nap and finally making it through a training day without bonking. That is not a typo, and it is not a fluke. Nine months ago, three brand new Triathlon Nutrition Academy athletes came on the show a few weeks into the program to share what it is really like on...

Can you gain muscle while losing body fat at the same time, or is body recomposition just a clickbait headline?   For years the advice has been that you have to pick one. Eat in a calorie deficit and lose body fat, or eat in a calorie surplus and build muscle. A brand new study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology in April 2026 says the picture is more interesting than that...

What does it take to fuel the hilliest 70.3 in the world? Six Triathlon Nutrition Academy athletes lined up at the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Nice, France on 12 and 13 September 2026. A 1.9km swim in the Mediterranean, 90km on the bike with around 1190m of climbing, a long grind up the Col de Vence, an 11km technical descent with both hands on the brakes, then a flat half marathon in the b...

Most triathletes are working their nutrition list backwards. They start at number eight and skip one through seven entirely. In  Episode 229 I walked you through the first four things I fix with every triathlete I work with. The big rocks. This is Part 2, and it picks up at number five. If you have not heard 229 yet, go and listen to that one first, because these next four do not work without...

You can get away with a fuelling gap over five hours. You cannot get away with it over 13. Stepping up from 70.3 to Ironman is the exact moment most triathletes work out that their fuelling needs attention. Julie Whitton is 13 weeks out from Ironman Western Australia, her first full distance race after a decade of racing halves. She is a paramedic with New South Wales Ambulance, she has been a shi...

Are you paying up to $5.20 a gel because that is what they hand out on course? Maurten, Precision Fuel and Hydration and SIS Beta Fuel are the three gels I get asked about more than any others. So I put them side by side and worked out what is actually in the packet, what each one costs you per 100 grams of carbohydrate, and whether that price gap buys you anything at all. No brand has paid me a c...

Everywhere you look, someone is telling you to eat more protein. If you are over 45 and your power is going backwards, more protein is not the fix you have been promised. Back in January the US dietary guidelines roughly doubled their protein recommendation, and that was overdue. But guidelines written for a sedentary population are a very different thing to guidelines for an athlete training 10 t...

Your legs are heavy, your easy sessions feel hard, and you are not improving despite training consistently. If you immediately thought overtraining, you are right. That is also the exact symptom list for under-fuelling. Researchers went looking for every training overload study that also measured what athletes were eating. 21 studies made the cut, and in 18 of them, 86%, the athletes were under-fu...

Is carb loading a myth? A paper published in June has social media convinced that it is. A comment landed on my socials this week saying exactly that. It didn't appear out of nowhere. There is a new paper doing the rounds, the headlines have picked it up and sprinted into some pretty heavy clickbait territory, and they have taken it somewhere I don't think the authors ever wanted it to go. So I'm...

You can eat really good food all day long and still have no idea how to fuel a triathlon. Dr James Anderson is a dentist, a Triathlon Nutrition Academy athlete and one of the most organised humans you will ever meet. Smoothie bags prepped in the freezer. Snack bags packed for every work day. Quality food, every single day. He was still eating the wrong things at the wrong time for three sports, an...

Want to build your own carb loading plan? Grab my complete Carb Loading Masterclass here: https://www.dietitianapproved.com/carb-loading A giant bowl of pasta the night before your race is not carbohydrate loading. Not even close. In two decades of working with age group triathletes, Taryn has never met one who carb loads properly. This episode fixes that once and for all. It breaks down the scien...

Thinking about putting Challenge Roth on your bucket list? Three TNA athletes just raced it, and they are telling you exactly what to get right before you sign up. Three TNA athletes share what it really takes to race Challenge Roth, from importing race nutrition into Australia to riding through Solar Hill. Real lessons on fuelling, logistics and pacing for anyone with this iconic full distance ra...

Pros are fuelling at up to 200 grams of carbs an hour. Should you be chasing that number too? High carb fuelling is the hottest topic in endurance sport right now, and the numbers keep climbing. INEOS Grenadiers are fuelling their riders at up to 150 grams of carbs an hour on big Touar de France stages, and pro triathlete Cameron Wurf recently said he took on 200 grams an hour on the bike in a rec...

Swimming more laps won't make you a faster triathlete.  A three-time Olympian who used to swim 80 kilometres a week is here to tell you why. Brian Johns is a three-time Olympian, former short-course 400-metre individual medley world record holder and now Head of Coaching Science at FORM. He's spent the back half of his career figuring out why some swimmers keep improving and others stay stuck...

Is your calorie tracking app actually working against you? You're logging everything, hitting your macros and training hard but your long sessions are falling apart, the scale won't budge and you're exhausted in a way that sleep just isn't fixing. The app says you're on track. So what's going wrong? In this episode, Advanced Sports Dietitian Taryn Richardson breaks down why calorie and macro track...

What does it actually take to finish your first Ironman at 22 years old - and cross that finish line with a smile? Lily Godding is a TNA athlete, a rugby rep player and a chef who had never raced a triathlon three years ago. On the weekend, she crossed the finish line of Ironman Cairns 140.6 in 13 hours, 21 minutes and 54 seconds. In this episode, Taryn sits down with Lily just days after the race...

Are you actually going to hit the start line ready - or are you going to arrive having done all the training but undone the work in race week? Taryn is recording this one live from Cairns, where the TNA crew has flown in from all over the world to race the 70.3 and Ironman. Every single one of these athletes had their race nutrition dialled in months ago. Not this week. Not over last night's bowl...

Hydrogen water is all over your feed right now. Tablets, bottles, little machines bubbling away on the kitchen bench, all promising less soreness, faster bounce-back and recovery at the cellular level. But does it actually do anything for you as a triathlete, or are you about to drop sixty bucks on fizzy water? In this episode I give you my honest, no-BS breakdown on hydrogen water. What it actual...

You’re doing the training. You’re showing up consistently. But if your legs constantly feel heavy, your energy crashes every afternoon and you can’t seem to bounce back between sessions, your recovery nutrition could be the missing piece. In this episode, Advanced Sports Dietitian and Triathlon Nutrition Specialist Taryn Richardson breaks down the three biggest recovery nutrition...

Do race day nerves throw you completely off your game? Maybe you second-guess your pacing, panic when things don’t go to plan or let pressure spiral into poor decisions around fuelling and performance. In this episode of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy Podcast, Advanced Sports Dietitian Taryn Richardson sits down with performance psychologist Dr Haley Perlus to unpack the mental side of tria...