I was blithely oblivious to nutrition as a child. I lived on a diet of ham sandwiches and cornflakes. My mother (working full time, with six kids) took the path of least resistance – we ate what we didn’t refuse. Hence my younger sister lived on a singular diet of Coco Pops and Rice Krispies for two years – astonishingly, leading into a period where she became a miniature track sensation, picking up national medals for the 80m sprint. I was a chubby track kid, trailing in her wake. I liked running, but I also loved to eat. The athletics coach tactfully suggested that I take up javelin. Or shot putt, despite the fact that under the cushion of flesh lay a total dearth of upper body strength. I kept running anyway.

I’ve always loved to eat. When I went to France as a teenager, I embraced with joy the idea of eating as a social event – the long drawn out lunches and dinners, with many mini courses, discussion between, and the appreciation of beautiful food.

In my twenties I started endurance running so that I could eat more. Weight loss programs often use the number of minutes you need to run to burn off a glass of wine, or slice of carrot cake, as a sort of metaphorical stick to beat the fatty with. The reality is that sometimes the run is the carrot (cake) and sometimes the stick; the more I ran, the more the run became a means to its own end; being able to eat more was a happy bonus.

The truth is that running has replaced physical labour as a challenge in our daily lives. If you’ve ever worked on a farm or a harvest, you’ll know what a celebration – a sort of relief at the end of toil, as well as replenishment of the muscles – the harvest dinner is. I love the idea of run training as a social event; a physical bodily challenge, gathering for food afterwards as reward; a mixture of pride in ground covered and relief at the rest. Trail running works particularly well for this; the trail forces a slower pace, and the location means that the group often finishes somewhere beautiful after hours of running, forcing a stop off for food. At the end of any endurance race (long triathlon or marathon); you can generally guess that one of the thoughts floating around my head towards the end of the race is: What’s For Lunch? There is a running joke amongst friends about my tendency to co-plan my long runs with where I’m going to have lunch afterwards (I hate to leave important things to chance).

So you’ve got it - I run to eat. I love cake too much not to. But eventually along the way I figured out what I should be eating and I’ve also started to eat to run.

I admire the physicality of professional athletes, but although I eye Ironman and world champion Chrissie Wellington’s lean rack of ribs with envy, the reality is that my rack is closer to Christina Hendricks’ on the body fat scale. This clearly has implications for my run speed. I like the appliance of science, so January last year, in a fit of zeal, I bought Matt Fitzgerald’s book ‘Racing Weight’. Excitedly I calculated my ideal body fat, and worked out that if I lost a couple of pounds, it would improve my 10km run time by a magic couple of minutes. I then proceeded to lose...no weight. I just can’t bring myself to go hungry. One of the most striking food related images of professional athletes on film for me is Peter Reid, multiple Hawaii Ironman champion, in the film ‘What it Takes’, weeping miserably with hunger over a single green apple into his kitchen sink; admitting that he only kept one meal in the house at a time in an attempt to keep to his (underweight) racing weight during peak training; otherwise he would eat everything to hand.

How fast can I run? How much do I love to eat? How much am I willing to restrict my diet so I can run faster? The answer is – at my athletic level of what I like to classify as high end mediocrity – not at all. The more I train, however, the more in tune with my own diet – and importantly - my hunger, I have become. Food restriction is not an option. I obviously don’t have What it Takes in the starvation department. But eating mostly really good food is an option.

My bookshelf is stacked with cookbooks for athletes and healthy recipes. Some recent nutrition/ recipe book purchases have yielded some interesting results. Right now I’m Ironman training, which at any level takes up a lot of time and energy. For a while I was shattered. Even though my diet is now generally very balanced, my muscle recovery has always been bad. Lying in bed, muscles twitching and everything inflamed, post training, was pretty habitual for my first couple of (low running mileage) marathons. The Paleo Diet for Athletes (read: eat only eat meat, fruit, vegetables – and sweet potato for energy), despite some convincing arguments, didn’t convince me (What! NEVER EAT TOAST AGAIN???) but it did give me some good suggestions for mineral supplementation and general food balancing ideas. A few weeks later, with some diet tweaks, including some eye-wateringly expensive fish oil supplements, calcium, zinc, magnesium and zealous intake of post-training recovery protein and I feel remarkably better. Shake me and I rattle – but something is working. Clearly, no matter how well you eat, supplementation can yield results.

Even better, ‘The Healthiest Meals Alive’ recipe book has yielded a bizarre but delicious wheat, dairy and refined sugar free recipe for brownies. (Eggs! Dates! Chickpeas! Cocoa!) They’ve got unrefined carbs, protein and antioxidants... do chickpea brownies count as a nutritious meal choice?

Breakfast of champions. Don’t tell Kellogg’s.