Rugby Sevens, Warrior Diet and Hydration

Since I'm brand spanking new to rugby, I wanted every edge I could get for the tournament this past Saturday. One thing I noticed while on the Warrior Diet was that I tended to have more energy during the day. Friday I hydrated with 4 quarts of water, cycled back onto the Warrior diet, eating only fresh fruits and veggies during the day, and carbo/protein loading at night with Amy's bean, cheese and rice burritos and a foot long provolone, avocado, cucumber veggie sandwich from Subway.

I went out to a great party that night, one of the best I've been in a long time. As a sign of some serious rugby love, I left the party early to get a bit of rest before the tournament. Still, considering that we were supposed to be down in palo alto by 8 am, this meant that I would be getting around 5 hours of solid sleep. I doubled up on Vitamin D, Magnesium and Rhodiola the night before to improve the quality of my sleep and help my body handle stresses better.

I woke up that morning before my alarm clock, feeling pretty good considering the limited sleep. As planned I was still feeling pretty full from the night before, so I had a cup of green tea and an orange for breakfast, met up with the team and headed down to Palo Alto.

The best laid plans. The route to Palo Alto is along the same route that I drive to work. During some point in the drive I went on auto pilot and missed my turn off for the Dunbarton Bridge. I circled back around and arrived at the pitch (playing field) just in time to find out that we were, of course, playing first, and my team was already on the getting ready to go in about 5 minutes. I scurried over to drop off my stuff and get ready to play as fast as possible, because they had me as part of the starting line up at prop for the first half.

A bunch of thoughts ran through my head about not being properly warmed up, and how that contributed to my back strain in the last game. As I took to the field, my body felt really fluid and limber, and I chose to focus on the areas that felt good vs the areas that felt stiff. The longer the half wore on, the better I felt, and managed to make two tackles. The seven minutes was over much quicker than I expected. They subbed in another player for me for the second half. We ended up winning the game 12-10.

The next game they moved me out to wing. The seven minute halves seemed a lot longer. As wing I spent a great deal more time running back and forth across the field. Thanks in part to a great pass from a teammate and the footwork drills they gave me at the Grizzlies tryouts, I was able to sidestep past a defender, find an open hole and sprint over half way down the field for my first try, We won this game as well, but I don't remember the final score.

We had a long break in between games 2 and 3 so the team walked down to McDonald's for for lunch. Surprisingly, McDonald's proved to be fairly compatible with my Warrior Diet. I got a fruit salad and a yogurt parfait. I didn't realize until after I got it that the fruit salad came with a little vanilla yogurt cup. If I had known this before hand I would have just gotten a few more of these instead of the parfait, which most likely had high fructose corn syrup in it (see the "Sugar the Bitter Truth Video"). I only ate the apple slices and not the grapes, due to the high sugar content of the grapes.

We headed back to the pitch to wait for our final game. Now, the weather report for Saturday says the high in Palo Alto for that day was 70 degrees. It felt like it was at least in the 80s, especially on the astro turf field that was baking under the sun. There are two main things that I would change about that day, with hydration being the first on the list. I ran out of water between games 2 and 3, only consuming around 3 quarts for the day. I should have had twice that as a minimum. I played the second half of the third game. I was able to sprint all out and chase down a breakaway, but got pretty winded doing so. After the game was over, my heart rate was still bounding along at sprint pace even though I was standing still. Normally my heart rate recovers very quickly, so this was pretty out of the ordinary for me. After about 5 minutes of waiting for my heart rate to recover, I finally decided to sit down. I knew my heart rate wasn't recovering due to dehydration. My heart was beating faster in an effort to compensate for decreased fluids in my system. If my heart couldn't pump a lot of oxygenated blood to my body with each beat, it would have to make up for it by pumping faster. Sitting decreased the workload on my heart by decreasing the distance my heart had to pump the blood, and how much it had to work against gravity. If that didn't work, my next course of action would have been to lie flat on my back with my feet elevated, further decreasing the workload on the heart. My heart rate did recover almost instantly just upon sitting down.

The second thing I'd change would be to do a better job of planning out my evening meal. Having a well balanced evening meal is a very important part of the Warrior Diet. I didn't feel hungry at all during play, but later that night it seemed like I became super hungry, all at once. Since I didn't plan it like I should have, I ended up scavenging whatever was around. The result was I ended up eating much later than I should have and had a very carb heavy meal. That combined with the dehydration caused me to feel pretty tired and run down both Saturday and Sunday. So for next time I'll bring more water and pack a sandwich to eat immediately after play is over.

All in all this was a great day, and a great experience watching my team play well and execute what we had done in practice. We won all of our games and were the highest scoring women's team at the tournament.