With three disciplines to consider, it's easy to make mistakes when you're eating and drinking during training and racing. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's easy to avoid triathlon's common nutritional pitfalls if you plan ahead

If transition is triathlon's fourth discipline, nutrition should be the fifth. Making fuelling mistakes could mean your race ends in disaster. And the longer the event, the more critical your food and drink strategy becomes. But it's not easy

One of the long-enduring and rarely questioned traditions associated with triathlon events of all kinds is the substantial pasta dinner the evening before race day. After all, who doesn't believe in the hearty, turbo-fuelling advantages of eating a

Q. I want to practise my nutrition for race day but my trainer says I should wait until a few weeks before the race so I get the maximum benefit - is he right?A. It's imperative that you experiment during training to find out what will work best

yourself before and after a session. (One kilogram of weight loss is equivalent to one litre of fluid.) Once you know your sweat loss you can prepare your fluid-replacement strategy for training and races.Pre-planningFor an event such as Ironman Nice ensure

brain, a proper nutrition plan may take a back seat.But proper nutrition is central to your training and to race success. By fuelling correctly and ensuring you're hydrated before, during and after training, you will perform and feel better and still

to the bowl of pasta you were planning for lunch. You don't need a nutritionist to tell you that refined, processed foods such as cakes, biscuits and pastries have little nutritional value, but many complex carbohydrates are also refined, which complicates

morning meal: the fat-phobic suggest skipping it until after your session; those planning a long session fuel up like builders; and those close to a race search for the perfect winning fuel.Whatever you're doing the idea is to keep your muscles

. "Training rides are prime opportunities to practise race-time eating and drinking strategies," says Eberle. Once you discover a winning formula, you'll approach your next triathlon with a foolproof plan.Change it: Test new foods on shorter rides before

Every day you are bombarded with images of food, facts about food and outright lies about food, and this constant barrage has to compete with what you already think you know about food. Sometimes you just want a few simple questions answered. So that's what we've done. With the r...