Kelly Holmes Talks Life After Athletics

12 November 2009

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Kelly Holmes achieved her Olympic dream in Athens in 2004 when she won both 800m and 1500m titles. She had had a long and successful career up to this point, despite being dogged by injury but it was Olympic glory that she had dreamed of.

Having now retired and made a Dame for her service to sport she works with the next generation of athletes as they try and achieve similar glory.

I caught with Kelly to talk about her On Camp With Kelly scheme and a new arm of that programme that involves teaching athletes how to cook and about nutrition.

- You are involved with the ‘On Camp with Kelly’ initiative so what’s it all about?

It’s my own initiative which I started six years ago it’s a mentoring and education programme which is supported by Aviva, which is obviously invaluable as I wouldn’t be able to do it, it’s for junior international athletes and it basically teaches them every single aspect of the educational side of high performance of being a world class athlete.

Part of the journey that we have gone through gives me the opportunity to mentor this group of young people; I started with some that were sixteen who are still with me know so I have gone through their whole life journey with them (laughs)

And what I did recognise was a lot of them are going into university and going from halls to shared accommodation and one of the issues and detrimental effects to performance is that they are not getting enough energy, food, nutritional needs and it’s then detrimental to their performances leading to injury and illnesses, and at a young age you shouldn’t be having all of these issues.

And so I decided that one of the next events that I wanted to host was a cookery school so I invited Ainsley Harriott along because I thought that these kids are going through a lot of pressures in their lives on the educational side and uni and having a mindset of an elite international athlete and transitioning into the seniors there has to be a bit of light heartedness but they still have to learn.

Ainsley was really good because I chose some foods that I had used as part of my diet Spaghetti Bolognese, Fish Pie, Muesli bars and breakfast muesli and he made it very practical and easy for them to learn from him and the basic skills of cooking.

The main thing is that these kids are on a budget but they still have to eat properly but how do they do that with limited time as well? They train early in the morning they do their education during the day and then train again at night and it’s very hard.

So we made thing that could be made in quantity so they could freeze it, so you can get your two weeks worth of meals by spending one day on cooking. It went really well and I’m so glad that we did it because the athletes themselves learnt a huge amount.  

- If you are not eating correctly how detrimental can that be to performances?

Well if you take it purely on females, I look after both males and females, but females the energy that you spend during excessive exercise if the energy is greater than the effects are menstrual dysfunction, so a lot of women lose their periods, don’t have them or have really erratic periods when they train excessively, osteoporosis is known and then there are stress fractures and bone density issues.

There are also disorders with eating you may have gone and trained so so hard and then you haven’t replaced that energy but still expecting your body to perform the next day so muscle repair doesn’t happen, they they break down they get these stress fractures and illnesses and part of that is because of lack of energy in their diets and lack of nutrition and replacing that energy.

As a middle distance runner stamina and speed is need so an optimal body composition is a lean muscle mass and low fat diet but you need to consume enough energy to be able to do all the training that you need. So it’s about getting a balance of what you need as a person and also what you need as an elite athlete and the body composition that that then entails.

So it’s quite scientific in a way but it’s not in terms of you just need enough food to train hard and the right foods to be able to recover; so carbohydrate food such as past and potatoes should be consumed by an athlete before training but you also need carbohydrates to replace the stores but you also need a higher quantity of protein to repair muscle damage. So it’s something that these kids need to learn and if you can break it down into simple terms saying this is how you cook what you need it becomes a lot easier and manageable.

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