Alistair Brownlee: The Journey of the most successful triathlete

In this podcast, we connected with Alistair Brownlee, one of the most successful triathletes in history with multiple Olympic medals under his belt. Below are some highlights from the conversation.

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Growing up in an athletic household and completing his first triathlon at eight years old

Kyriakos: Alistair, good to see you. I wanted to start off with the early days and see how you got started. I have read that you started at eight years old is that correct?

Alistair: Yeah, so long ago. I don’t think anyone quite knows how I started or when I started now. But, yeah, my mom was a keen swimmer growing up, and my dad had been a runner and just very active.

My mum, at some point, decided to help us join the local swimming club, which was called Era Swimming Club. I remember really wanting to join the swimming club because she had won these medals, and I was kind of obsessed with this bag of medals she had and wanted to win my own. So I got told I could win medals like those at the swimming club, I think by some friends, and so joined.

I did my first triathlon at eight or nine years old

My dad had been a runner, and I really got into running at my local school primary school. Actually, it was earlier than that, I think probably six or seven years old and I did my first triathlon as an eight or nine-year-old, I think just because it was another thing to do. My parents were fantastic. I think they must have decided at some point it was important to expose us to as many different sports, actual arts, and academics as possible. And so we were trying all kinds of sports, and triathlon was one of those, and it just caught my imagination.

Generational talent — winning the triathlon world championships at eighteen years old

Kyriakos: Was there a time that you realized you would be the best?

Alistair: No, not really. Yeah, I guess to start off I was definitely not the best or particularly good at it.

I gradually got better through my teens, and kind of moved up the ranks both in running and triathlon. And I went to my first official triathlon event to the Junior World Championships as at seventeen years old. I was quite young in the under-twenty age group and I think came about fiftieth in Japan. I came back from that and my coach said you could never go that far away to be so rubbish, haha!

Training regime — experimenting with workouts from an early age to find a recipe for success

Kyriakos: Were you serious in your training back then or did you start afterward being more serious?

Alistair: I was pretty serious in my training. I had coaching and I had advice, but to be honest, I was really developing ways of training on my own. I was really learning how much physical activity I could do in a week, working out where I could fit in extra training sessions around school time.

A normal day could look something like a ride for an hour in the morning. On the way to school and then. I’d run in my lunch hour, which could be an hour run or a bit longer, and swim after school for two hours between half four and half six. And then sometimes ride home after that as well.

So I was really kind of mixing, training up, doing different things on different days, and just experimenting, really. I’d go to the pool and have a coach set by a swim coach and go to the track and have sessions set by my run coach, Malcolm, who became a long-time coach. But yeah, a lot of that was kind of experimentation and me working out how I could train.

The importance of Nutrition in triathlete training

Kyriakos: When it comes to nutrition, can you recall how your nutrition evolved from the very early days to today?

Alistair: Yeah, so I guess there’s a few different periods when I was at home up till around the age of twenty — I was eating with the family. I would sit down, and have meals. I would get up, have breakfast in the morning, go to school or university, have something at lunch, and eat. Then in the evening, as part of a family, I don’t think it was particularly super healthy and sport conscious but it definitely wasn’t bad, it was just a really good round of diet, which I think very much has informed my thinking for the, the rest of my life.

Probably moving into my twenties, I remember thinking I could probably eat absolutely anything. It really didn’t affect me and that’s maybe the benefit of being a young man. When I was at the best of my athletic career, I wasn’t giving nutrition an awful lot of thought, to be honest. And I kind of always separated nutrition between everyday life nutrition and performance nutrition.

Performance nutrition I was a lot more conscious about it. Triathlon is about an hour and forty-five long. You’ve got an hour window on the bike to get in, however much you want to get. Eighty-plus grams of carbs, plus the salt you need and the water you need for the race. It’s harder to get that when trying to run hard.

So I was very conscious of that, but I was much less conscious of my everyday nutrition. Apart from every single hard running session, my coach would bring a pint of milk for us to drink. And the pint of milk, obviously, the theory being the calcium and the protein in there are important for recovery and bones and reducing the risk of injury. And it being as close to the finish of the session as possible for both metabolic and anabolic reasons.

Carbohydrates and blood analysis testing to perform at the highest level

Kyriakos: How can you test carbohydrates, for example, the different sources, which ones are good for you?

Alistair: I did a type of testing where that included a number of different tests all following the same protocol with race pace, bike, and run over a period of a couple of hours. For each of those, we tried out different combinations of carbohydrates.

I can’t remember exactly what they were but you could have a standard twenty-eighty-twenty multi-dextrous fructose mix and slightly different mixes as you can imagine, on slightly different ways of delivery. And then you do the expired air analysis.

And blood analysis we could work out firstly how much I was metabolizing, obviously with the ratio of the inspired next by the air carbohydrate to fat but also looking at how much of the energy requirement I needed. This was based on the carbohydrate breakdown — both endogenous and exogenous also coming from fat. So, yeah, that was interesting. And since then, use a fairly standard race drink.

But, yeah, I do a very little bit of training. I don’t really push it out where it’s an ability to survive off low carbohydrates or metabolize fat a bit better. And by that, definitely, I’m not talking about a low-carbohydrate diet. I just think there are good merits when you’re doing aerobic training for the easy stuff and up to around your kind of ventilatory threshold. Just the theory of being able to push that out a little bit to help your body be a little bit better at burning fat there, if you can. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that you’ve got to do that without too many available carbohydrates.

Wearables — using heart rate monitors and power meters to regulate the training load

Kyriakos: What about wearables? Are you using any technology to help you with training? Are you using any power meters or heart rate monitors?

Alistair: Yeah, I use power meters and Wahoo watches and bike computers for actually kind of, I guess all kinds of reasons, actually. When you’re doing hard sessions. I’m using it as a pacing metric as a guide to how hard I should be pushing.

I’m also using it to ensure I stick to low-level easy training. For many of my sessions, unless it’s a specific session, I don’t actually use heart rate along with that, although I do sometimes if I’m looking into some specific stuff. I use some other sensors such as the CORE body temperature sensor.

Entrepreneurship and investments

Kyriakos: Last topic I think to discuss is entrepreneurship. You have been doing some investments, you have Brownlee Fitness. What have you been doing there?

Alistair: From the investment side, for a while a lot of my sponsorship deals were becoming types of investments and it’s something that I really enjoyed actually.

Then after my bachelor’s degree, I went on to study for a master’s in finance and it seemed like I could invest in the right early-stage businesses and it would kind of bring together all my interests. One is sport, health, and fitness, the other is trying to encourage and enable and help other people to be fit and active because, obviously, sports have given me so much.

Another one of those is helping people kind of achieve their goals which I think quite often are founders trying to achieve their goals of creating an amazing business and at the same time offering my kind of support and doing that with some other people as well. So it’s something I’ve really enjoyed.