One of the most common mistakes I see with endurance athletes has nothing to do with training. It is the belief that being lighter will automatically make them faster.

There is enough truth in the watts per kilo argument to make it dangerous. Power to weight ratio matters on a climb. Carrying excess body fat will slow you down. But the leap from that to deliberately under-eating while training hard is where things go wrong quickly, and I have watched it happen more times than I can count.

Georgia Hamblett is 25 years old. She is an age group aquabike athlete who competed at the European Age Group Championships this year. She has also spent most of her athletic life navigating a complicated relationship with food, and she joined the podcast this week to talk about it with a clarity that most athletes twice her age have not found yet.

The gap between looking fine and being fine

Georgia was training around 20 hours a week at university while managing an engineering degree. From the outside she looked like she was eating well. She was eating considerably more than her non-athlete friends. But she was still under-fuelling for the volume she was doing, and because her metabolism had adapted and she could complete the sessions, she did not recognise the problem.

What she noticed instead was what was happening the rest of the time. Her mood was poor. Her energy outside of training was almost non-existent. She could get through the sessions but had nothing left for anything else. It was only when she started fuelling properly that she understood how significant the gap had been.

This is something I hear regularly from athletes who have been through it. You get used to operating in a depleted state. The body adapts. You stop being able to tell how under-resourced you actually are until something changes and you feel the difference.

What endurance culture gets wrong

I have coached athletes who were chasing a six pack while preparing for an Ironman. I have seen others attempt aggressive dietary restriction during a heavy training block. Two significant physiological stresses applied simultaneously, one from the training load and one from severe restriction, and the body has to absorb both. The result is usually the same. Energy crashes. Mood drops. Sleep deteriorates. Performance goes backwards. And the athlete cannot understand why, because on paper they are doing everything right.

The harder truth is that endurance sport culture has a complicated relationship with food. We praise leanness. We share images of athletes who look a certain way and draw conclusions about what they must be eating. We confuse restriction with discipline.

Georgia made a point that stayed with me. When she moved to Northern Ireland and started racing at a local level, she looked around at the athletes finishing at the top of the results and noticed they were not the smallest athletes in the field. They were the strongest ones. That observation shifted something for her.

Check out the recent podcast with Georgia:

​The Long Way Round: Georgia Hamblett on RED-S, Aquabike and Starting Again​

Fuelling as a performance tool

The athletes who perform best over the long term are almost never the ones eating the least. They are the ones who have learned to fuel the work they are actually doing, maintain enough muscle to stay robust across a long season, and treat food as a resource rather than something to be managed and minimised.

Georgia's coach is Natalie Lawrence, herself a past podcast guest who competed at Loughborough and has been open about similar struggles in a high-performance environment. The coaching relationship Georgia describes is one built on trust and honest communication, the kind where she does not need to hide what is going on and where the training is built around what her body can actually support.

That last point matters. A training plan that outpaces what the athlete can fuel and recover from is not an ambitious plan. It is a plan that will eventually produce the opposite of what it promises.

Aesthetics and performance are not the same goal

Sometimes they overlap. Often they do not. The athlete who arrives at a start line lean from genuine fitness and proper fuelling is in a completely different physiological state from one who arrives lean from restriction. The times they produce and the recovery they are capable of afterwards tell different stories.

Georgia is competing at world championship level in aquabike at 25. She got there not by chasing a number on the scales but by building a relationship with food and training that she can sustain. That is the version of this story worth paying attention to.

A NOTE FOR ANYONE WHO RECOGNISES THIS

If any part of this article resonates personally rather than just professionally, it is worth talking to someone who specialises in this area. In the UK, the Beat Eating Disorders helpline is available at 0808 801 0677. In other regions, your GP is a good starting point for a referral to specialist support.

The Battle Ready approach is built around training that the body can absorb and recover from properly. If you want a programme structured around what you can genuinely sustain, find out more about SWAT at [Battle Ready SWAT link]. Find out more HERE:

Thanks for being part of the tribe. I’m here to help you stay Battle Ready! Simon