If you’re like me, you’ve been enthralled watching the Tour de France and the Paris Olympics. I found myself wondering about the strategies these high-performing athletes use to fuel their bodies before, during, and after extremely hard training sessions and competitions.

The webinar Fueling the Tour de France addressed my curiosity and solidified my observation that sports nutrition has indeed evolved into being a central component of the training and competing strategies of elite athletes.

In the past, Tour de France riders refueled minimally—perhaps a protein shake—soon after the day’s race. They waited until they got back to the hotel to eat three to four hours later. Today’s riders consume a significant amount of carbs right after each stage to speed up their recovery. Compared to their peers of 10 to 20 years ago, they also eat significantly more carbs. Result: They experience fewer episodes of hitting the wall, bonking, and becoming depleted completely. This hastens recovery; if you don’t dig yourself into a hole, you don’t need to dig yourself out of one.

Here are some interesting takeaways from the webinar that may inspire you to take a closer look at your fueling patterns, carbohydrate intake in particular. While you may not be a Tour de France cyclist, it’s likely you have the similar goal of becoming the best athlete possible.

• Tour de France losses are linked commonly to inadequate carbohydrate intake. While a cyclist may not win the tour in a single stage, he can lose it in a single stage.

• Fatigue related to training hard vs. fatigue related to underfueling is difficult to distinguish. Experimenting with eating more grains can help identify and resolve an underfueling problem.

• To optimize the availability of fuel (carbs) for muscles and the brain, rowers who train intensely should:

—carb-load a day or two before the endurance event.

—consume adequate carbs during the endurance event.

This will reduce the risk of bonking/hitting the wall and will improve stamina, endurance, and overall performance.

• Ideally, each competitive rower has a meal-by-meal plan and day-by-day approach that offers high-, medium-, or lower-carb meals according to the demands of the day. That is, not every day requires a high-carb intake. For a Tour de France cyclist, flat stages require fewer carbs compared to mountain climbs, with further adjustments needed for heat, wind, and rain.

• While some high-level endurance athletes have a support crew that helps provide food and fluids during long training sessions and events, the cycling Team Sky has its own kitchen truck with three performance chefs who guide food intake during the Tour. The four main meals are breakfast, on-bike fueling, post-bike fueling, and dinner. For rowers, the strategy is to surround your workouts with food.

• Overall daily targets are 2.5 to nine grams of carbohydrate per pound (five to 20 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram) per day to fuel muscles, more than 0.9 grams of protein per pound (two grams per kilogram) per day to preserve muscle mass, and minimal dietary fat intake (so athletes fill up on carbs, not fat).

• During hard efforts that last longer than 2.5 hours, the goal is to consume 90 to 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour. That’s about 350 to 500 calories from carbohydrates per hour—a lot more than most endurance athletes consume.

• Endurance rowers, take note: For a 150-pound (69 kilogram) Tour cyclist doing extreme work, nine grams of carbohydrate per pound (20 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram) translates to 1,350 grams of carbohydrate. That’s 5,400 calories just from carbohydrate alone—about the amount in a two-pound bag of uncooked white rice. No wonder Tour de France cyclists consume bowls of white rice for a pre-race breakfast!

• Consuming that much carb from food can be difficult. Hence, concentrated sources of carbs such as gels and chews can help athletes hit their carb goals.

• During endurance exercise, sports drinks facilitate the ability to consume 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour. Tour de France riders rarely go below 80 grams per hour. Endurance runners should choose hydration fluids that offer more than just plain water.

• Consuming a variety of carb sources enhances their transport out of the GI tract and reduces the risk of intestinal distress. Carb blends (such as sports drinks made with glucose + fructose) have limited variety, so don’t eat too much of the same commercial sports food. Standard carb-rich foods (banana, granola bar) offer a wider variety of carbs.

• Tour de France cyclists must train their guts to be able to  digest and absorb up to 120 grams of carbohydrate (around 500 calories) per hour comfortably. In training camps, they do not only on-bike training but also gut/digestive training. They practice eating as they would for a race. Gut training can take years as cyclists increase their intake of carbs per hour gradually. Simultaneously, they test different products they might want to use.

• Cyclists should plan to begin feeding early and for as long as they can manage if they know they’ll be unable to ingest much during the upcoming mountain climbs. Similarly, rowers who can’t eat much on race day should consider eating extra the day before.

• In the first 60 to 90 minutes of recovery, a Tour cyclist may consume cherry juice (carbs + antioxidants), quickly absorbed carbs, and a whey + carb recovery shake. When traveling back to the hotel, they eat a meal (such as salmon and pasta with extra salt) and sweets (cake, fruit).  If they have a hard ride the next day, they eat and refuel as much as possible. At the hotel, they snack, have a massage, eat another dinner, and go to bed with a full belly.

• At the elite level, some endurance athletes practice carbohydrate periodization (training with depleted muscle and/or liver glycogen stores some of the time) for selected workouts at the start of a training block. “Sleeping low” (with low glycogen stores) and then training on empty (no pre-exercise carbs) a few times a week can enhance cell signaling and induce adaptations that can improve performance. These train-low sessions get phased out as training intensity increases. (Note: Athletes not at the elite level should focus on the fundamentals of fueling adequately. No need to train low when there are easier ways to enhance performance.)Conclusion: Food is more powerful than many rowers think. If you have a hit-or-miss sports diet, think again. A sports dietitian can help you eat to win!

Whether your winter season is indoors or out, the end of fall racing is a great time to take care of your equipment so that it serves you well on the water.

First and foremost is the care and maintenance of your CoxOrb, CoxBox, and other electronic devices, like SpeedCoaches. Problems with your CoxBox may not be your fault, but they can irritate your rowers and interfere with your ability to run a practice safely and effectively. Take steps to ensure that your equipment functions properly.

“Make sure you’re regularly charging but not keeping it plugged in the whole winter,” said Jun Jeon, sports-performance sales manager at Nielsen-Kellerman. A good rule is not to charge the CoxBox or SpeedCoach continuously for more than two days.

Conversely, you also don’t want your electronics to sit untouched for months with the battery drained. Regularly charging and discharging the battery will help preserve its life.

“A lot of the troubleshooting or repair calls that come in are unfortunately the result of not keeping up with that charging,” said Jeon.

It’s also best practice to clean your CoxBox at least once a month (or biweekly if you row in salt water) and before it’s put away for any extended period. NK sells maintenance kits for the CoxBox, and you can also assemble your own. If your CoxBox is the newer style with three ports on the front, make sure to use the protective cap that came with the box whenever you’re on the water to prevent moisture from entering through the right-side Smart Connector port. Keep the cap on for storage as well.

Make sure your headset and wiring are coiled loosely and neatly for storage and travel and that you don’t lift or carry the box by the microphone cord when it’s in use.

“Be careful with where the microphone jack is,” said Jeon. “It’s where we handle it the most when we plug it into the CoxBox.”

When the microphone jack is handled gently, “there will be less static, and people will be more pleased with how the CoxBox sounds.”

Other coxswain housekeeping tasks worth mentioning:

Empty out the rest of your coxswain bag and replace wrenches, hardware, and tape that were used up (or went for a swim) during your fall season.

Clean and air out your waterproof gear and flotation suit, if you use one.

If you recorded your coxing throughout the fall season, label and organize your recordings digitally.

If your boats are de-rigged for the winter, note how each shell was rigged so you can help your coach and team re-rig efficiently.

With these tasks done, you’ve set yourself up to help yourself and your team get on the water smoothly when racing resumes.

Training and racing in rough water are part of rowing.

First, through coaching and drills, master stability, bladework, and power application on calm water. Over time, progress to maintaining your form in various degrees of difficult wind and waves.

Practicing in challenging water conditions will elevate your skill level, especially if you compete and train on water that is typically flat. The smaller the boat you’re in, the more refined your technique needs to be.

A major faux pas in bad water is tightening your shoulders, arms, and hands; the chop then travels to your upper body and disrupts your stability. Keep as light a hold on the oar handle as possible to allow the blades to stay at the proper depth during the drive and help you feel the water.

Loose shoulders let the arms absorb hitting the top of a wave, catching an edge, or adjusting the blade height on the recovery.

After the release, be sure to lower the oar handles enough to clear the waves and carry the oars higher off the water during the recovery. Practice plenty of rowing with the blades off the water and tapping drills or strokes on the square to improve balance. Keep the entry light and intentional so you can feel the blade set before you drive.

When waves are of varied height and amplitude, the blade can miss the water, forcing you to hold your balance until the blade gets back in the water. Be patient and focus on placing the next entry.

Gaining experience in adverse situations (as long as they’re safe) will provide the lessons for learning to work with the water.

On the surface, it may not seem like rowing and football have a lot in common. Perhaps rowing coaches and football coaches have even less in common.

On the collegiate level, football coaches are raking in millions of dollars, ensconced in their secure practice facilities, rarely putting in an appearance at any of those “mandatory” all-staff meetings for which the rest of us have to show up.

Similarities between the NFL coaching experience and that of our National Team coaches, for whom coaching an Olympic crew is often not even their full-time job, can seem essentially non-existent.

That’s why, over a decade ago, I was surprised to find myself devouring legendary football coach Pete Carroll’s book, Win Forever. And I’ve been even more surprised by how often I’ve returned to it in the years since.

I didn’t think of myself as a Pete Carroll fan when I picked up the book, but the success he had with USC and the Seahawks, making him one of only three head coaches ever to win a collegiate national championship and a Super Bowl, is undeniable.

My lasting takeaway from the book, and the reason I include it in the syllabus for the course on coaching that I teach at CRI’s Institute for Rowing Leadership, is how concisely Carroll articulates his core philosophy and the benefits he experienced by being able to do so.

There’s no long-winded back story or a pyramid hung up on the wall—just one clear idea: competition.

In the introduction, Carroll recounts how, after being fired by the Patriots in 2000, he was feeling lost and defeated. Inspired by another coaching great, John Wooden, who took 16 years to figure out his own immutable rules for success, Carroll set about defining his own.

He understood, as he says in Win Forever, that “one of the keys to success lies in knowing and believing in yourself.”  And what Carroll knows is that he is a competitor. He is driven by a single thought: “to do things better than they had ever been done before.”  And that’s how he decided to begin leading his teams.

It was shortly after defining this singular organizing principle that Carroll decided to leave the NFL and interviewed for the head-coaching position at USC. In the interviews, he unveiled his newly defined philosophy and, throughout that process, sensed a newfound confidence and belief in himself.

“I had never felt so prepared and well-equipped to deal with the challenges of taking over a program,” he recounts.

This, coming from someone who already had been coaching for nearly 30 years—four of them at the helm of an NFL team— speaks volumes about the benefits of defining and articulating your own guiding principles and values.

There’s no need to wait 30, or even 16, years to define your coaching philosophy. Think of what unimaginable successes Carroll or Wooden could have achieved if they had set about the work of articulating their values sooner.

Wherever you are in your coaching career, now is a great time to begin knowing and believing in yourself.