Dai Greene is current World, Commonwealth and European 400m hurdles champion. He's hoping to complete the set in 2012.
"When I first started out in athletics I didn't know anything about diet, and it wasn't until a couple of years later that I realised I needed to think about what I was putting in my body. I've had epilepsy since I was 17, and by 2006 I was worried my medication was making me drowsy and affecting my training. The tablets didn't actually stop me having seizures, I had them when I put stress on my body – drinking, going out late and getting up early, eating rubbish, so I decided to come off the medication and change my lifestyle instead. Before, I'd been living for the weekends, but athletics had given me a reason to change.
I've tweaked how I eat in the past year – I've basically tried to plan ahead a little bit more, so I'm never in a situation where I come back from a competition and have to get a takeaway. It's all about filling the freezer. Eating right just helps your capacity to train; the more recovered my body is, the better I perform. You wouldn't put the wrong fuel in a car and expect to get a quality performance out of it. If I eat badly I have poor concentration and I feel lethargic – and the stopwatch never lies.
Breakfast for me is two slices of toast with peanut butter and a cup of tea, as well as a protein shake. Lunch is a pasta dish with lots of veg, dinner is usually a pasta bake or a lasagne, and then later in the evening I'll have a light meal like eggs on toast. I have snacks throughout the day as well, but they aren't as structured, so it's things like peanut butter or Nutella on toast for a hit of carbohydrates. The kind of thing I would've had in my student days but the difference is now I'll have it because I need energy as opposed to because that's the only thing in my cupboard.
I've just had four weeks off so I've been tucking in to bacon sandwiches, fish and chips, the odd takeaway and a lot more chocolate than usual. I went on holiday to Mauritius as well and really took advantage of the 'all you can eat' buffet – I was eating chocolate pancakes for breakfast and loving it. In the winter, because it's all about getting the volume of training done, you can allow yourself to be more relaxed nutrition-wise, but during the summer, as the season's starting, I have to watch what I eat.
The food at the World Championships in South Korea was terrible. It was like school dinners but worse; barely warm, bad cuts of meat, the bolognese was just tomato slop. The night before the final I had lasagne with cold wedges and a protein shake to boost me up because I was seriously losing my appetite. After I won, the first thing I did was order pizza – now that's the food of champions!"
