Derval O’Rourke: ‘You see sportspeople on Twitter showing off the healthy food they’ve made’

More than a decade ago British rower Steve Redgrave and his band of merry men were training one morning when they were visited by a journalist from the Observer. He got there about 7.30, by which time they were already back in from their first pull on the water and were busily tucking into a tin of brown scones and a pot of jam.

"What's the thinking there?" asked our man, expecting to be told that the scones had been baked with whey protein or some such. "The thinking is they were free!" laughed Redgrave before flicking his thumb at one rower. "His mum made them last night."

Running food
Derval O'Rourke spent her career being asked about her chosen pre-race meal by people with hope in their eyes as to the secrets her answer would reveal. She had to disappoint them.

“The only advice my nutritionist ever gave me was to eat whatever will stay down. Whatever your stomach can handle, just eat it. And people would be going, ‘Really? That can’t be right. There has to be more science to it than that.’

"But often on the day of a championship, if I was racing early I would have a bowl of Crunchy Nut corn flakes. Now, for the rest of the year I would never, ever have allowed myself to eat a sugary breakfast. Not a hope would that have been part of my diet. But on the day of a championship, I'd just be looking for something that would stay down."

Fast food
O'Rourke, whose cookbook Food for the Fast Lane is on its second print run, was aiming at a second life that would have something to do with food from as far back as 2010. At the Europeans in Barcelona that year, she got talking to a Norwegian distance runner who had written a cookbook for her country's Olympic Federation.

The lightbulb flashed above her head so brightly that she immediately rang her coach and told him that this was something she wanted to do when she retired from racing.

From that point on, she wrote blogs and tore recipes from magazines such as Men's Health. To clear her head after the London Olympics, she spent a month in a cookery school around the corner from her house, all so that she'd be ready to do this when the time came.

"Good sportspeople make good cooks, that's what I've certainly found. Because they're the people who try to tick all the boxes and it's in their personality to want to do things well. So they start off wanting to eat well so they can perform well but then most people get to the point where they don't want to eat bland food so they learn how to add flavour to the goodness.

'Healthy food'
"You know the way there was that sort of food porn with indulgent food? I see that happening now with healthy food.

"You see sportspeople on Twitter now the whole time showing off the healthy food they've made. Jerry Flannery is always at it, tweeting his amazing healthy snacks or his latest protein bar that he's made. I think it's really funny because I would have been at that point a few years ago and now everybody's catching up."

She recipe-tested about 180 dishes and ended up with 92 in her book, albeit one of them is for dog treats. She left it in as a joke presuming the publishers would make her take it out but nobody batted an eyelid.

“I try not to be preachy. You can’t beat people with a stick to be healthy. It’s not sustainable. You have to give yourself some flexibility. I want to eat healthy food because the dishes are tasty and a lot of the time they’re easy.

“I had this rule that you need to be good most of the time but if you’re not good all of the time, it’s really not going to make much of a difference.

“So if you’re able to look back at the end of the week and go, ‘I was good all week but on Friday night I ate a pizza,’ you’re probably going to be just fine. You just have to be balanced.”