Eliud Kipchoge – Diet

The diet of the athletes in Kaptagat was quite a surprise to us. Like many aspects characterising the life of an athlete in rural Kenya, it was simple, frugal and repetitive.

It seems as though so many Western athletes obsess over macros, supplements and exorbitant protein consumption, tailoring their diets to facilitate peak performance in training and rapid recovery.

Not so in Kenya. During our stay we ate with the athletes on multiple occasions; what we observed may surprise you as well. Their diet is predominantly a whole food plant-based diet. Most of the food is locally grown, organic, direct from the surrounding farms.

The protein consumption of the athletes is also quite low. Most athletes rarely eat meat more than once a fortnight; it is considered an expensive luxury, especially by the athletes who aren’t under management. So, what is it that they are mainly eating?

There are several staples that most meals seem to revolve around:

Ugali: made from maize meal, it is cooked in water to form a sort of corn cake. This staple is very high in starch and is very bland, lacking much in the way of flavour. Many meals in the farm-stay were served with an almost insurmountable pile of ugali on the side.

Managu: a dark leafy green, somewhat like spinach. This is normally eaten after being sautéed in water and some oil, however some athletes we spoke to even cooked the leaves in milk!

Cabbage: prepared in a similar way to managu.

Beans: generally a type of red bean, probably the most protein-rich food we frequently saw athletes eating (other than milk, eggs and occasional meat).

Bread: the athletes seemed to eat bread quite often, as well as chapati (an Indian style flat bread similar to naan). They would frequently eat plain white bread for breakfast, including immediately after finishing the weekly long run (30/40km).

Rice: frequently combined with beans.

Eggs: often fried and eaten alongside a dish of managu and ugali. Potato: boiled and eaten alongside ugali.

Snacks: the most frequently consumed snacks were fruits, such as bananas. Many athletes also had a daily rendezvous at 5pm to drink a cup of porridge (millet, water and sugar) and hang out as the day concluded.

Drinks: lots of chai! Sweet milky tea that the runners seemed to drink all day. For most of the athletes, the amount of sugar consumed purely through chai would be over ten to fifteen teaspoons per day! There were very few electrolyte containing sports drinks consumed, most just had water. Some athletes would also drink sodas during the day.

In an average day, the athletes we lived in close proximity to would rarely consume foods outside the above list. A couple of the athletes in Eliud’s group would consume electrolyte powders following long runs, however other than this we did not see anyone consuming supplements, protein powders or recovery products.

It could be argued that the reason a lot of the runners ate this way is because they cannot afford to buy more expensive foods; many of them live on only a couple of dollars per day. However, when we discussed the topic they insisted the combination of ugali and managu is one of the secret weapons of the Kenyan athletes.

Many people would be alarmed by the simplicity of the dietary regime followed by the athletes, how low the protein content is, and how little meat is consumed by the athletes. However, with such a large number of elite long-distance athletes subsisting on a very similar formula, it’s hard to argue with the results.

The lack of variety in the diet was something that really surprised us. Another thing that I was continually struggling to understand was the lack of flavour in most meals. In markets that we visited there was a plenitude of spices and flavourful foods, yet these seemed to be completely absent in the diet of the athletes, and what we were served in our accommodation.

The diet was almost purely unprocessed fruits, vegetables, legumes and cereals. This alimentary regime is not unique to the athletes we spent time with, it is the diet adhered to by most people in Kenya. This same array of food is on offer in most local restaurants. The mountains of ugali served with each meal take a little while to adjust to, but by the end of our stay, the starch-laden fare that we were served in the farm-stay was something I looked forward to with great anticipation.

Something else that piqued our interest was that the athletes completed most workouts – including forty-kilometre tempo runs (averaging around 3:15min/km) – in a fasted state. Some may have had some chai or a small morsel of food prior to commencing, but the runs are completed without assistance from coaching staff – and there are no pauses during the workouts – meaning that athletes aren’t drinking during these long runs and most of the time the first calories consumed are after they get back to camp.

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