Post 3: Eat Carbs for En Guarde

The night before every tournament, I go for a big pasta dinner; it's become such a habit I never really thought about why. Turns out there’s a good reason behind it: your muscles store carbs as glycogen, and that's the fuel reserve your body pulls from all day once you’re on the strip. A fencing tournament isn’t just one quick all-out bout; it's pools, then a DE bracket, sometimes stretching up to six hours, so having full glycogen stores in your body going into the tournament matters more than most people realise.

The meal itself doesn’t need to be complicated: something carb-heavy like pasta, rice, or bread, with a moderate amount of protein. You should also aim for lower fats and fibre because they have a slow digestion rate, which can leave you feeling heavy the next morning. It’s also not the night to try something new. An unfamiliar meal before a tournament is a bad time to find out it doesn’t sit well with you. For an away tournament, that sometimes just means picking the closest thing to that from whatever’s near the hotel instead of the “ideal” plate.

Interesting trivia: at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Usain Bolt didn’t trust the local food after an early meal upset his stomach, so he stuck to almost nothing but McDonald’s chicken nuggets for all ten days he was in China, an estimated 1,000 nuggets total. He still broke three world records and won triple gold at the Olympics (Bolt, 2013).