Olympic Cross-Country Skiers Eat 8,000 Calories a Day. Its Exhausting.
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — For the cross-country skier Martin Moeller, the biggest challenges of his sport are not the freezing cold, the hundreds of hours of training or the grueling toll of competition. It’s eating. And eating. And eating again.
“I actually do get tired of eating,” said Moeller, who lives in Greenland and skis for Denmark at the Olympics. “I always have to be thinking about what I will eat in two hours.”
Few sports ask as much of the human body as cross-country skiing, which engages virtually every muscle group — legs, arms, abdominals, back — for hours at a time. One of the enduring images of the long-distance cross-country events is the sight of athletes collapsing at the finish line.
That scene will no doubt repeat itself on this final weekend of the Pyeongchang Olympics as the men and women compete in their respective long-distance events — 50 kilometers for the men and 30 for the women.
Skiers can train four to five hours a day at their peak, covering 60 kilometers or more and pushing their bodies to the limit. As a result, cross-country skiers, on average, also have the biggest fueling demands of any Olympic athletes — winter or summer. While other sports certainly have their big eaters (Michael Phelps was famous for his enormous meals, which were not typical for most swimmers), scientists say the effort to stay in calorie balance is most daunting for cross-country skiers.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-country-skiing-food.html?
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