I Had It All Dialled In. That Was the Problem.

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I have a nutritionist. I have a protocol. I run supplement experiments on myself with a baseline period and a control, because I want to go faster and I’m not leaving a legal advantage on the table on the grounds that it looked like admin.

So this isn’t a piece about a fool discovering that vegetables exist. My nutrition has been dialled in for years — weighed, timed, logged, reviewed by someone qualified.

Which is precisely how I made the mistake.

Once you’ve spent a decade getting the sophisticated layer right, you quietly stop auditing the boring one. You assume the foundation is handled — it was handled, you handled it, you remember handling it — so you go looking for your remaining gains in the interesting 1%.

Then I spent an hour and a half with Dr Charlie Simpson, who explained, politely, that the interesting 1% is arithmetically about 1%.

Charlie is a senior lecturer in sport and exercise science at Oxford Brookes. He co-edited Advanced Rowing with Jim Flood, wrote The Complete Guide to Indoor Rowing, publishes peer-reviewed work on the physiology, and coaches actual rowers — which matters most, because he knows what people will and won’t do at six in the morning in the rain.

He’s firmly in favour of the one-to-one nutritionist, incidentally. His argument is that most of us already know what we should be doing, and the value of a professional isn’t information — it’s someone fitting that information to how you actually eat and train. So the money isn’t wasted. I’d just pointed mine at the wrong end of the problem.