Fitness Swellness: A chat with decathlete Brianne Theisen Eaton

June 6, 2014

Yesterday, at my weekly Nike Training Club class, decathlete Brianne Theisen Eaton joined our class and I grabbed five minutes to chat with her after our killer workout (just so you know, even Brianne, professional athlete and all, said the class was tough and that her legs were shaky. Here are five things I learned from Brianne, who, in case you don’t know, is married to decathlete Ashton Eaton:

1. Eat protein. “I always eat after a work out and it has to have protein in it because of the breakdown of the muscles. During a competition because we are out there for 12 hours, I’ll eat bars or I’ll bring cooked chicken along, rice. And most of the time, I eat  healthy wholesome meals, and not a lot of sugar.” The 25-year-old decathlete also loves to cook. “I’m the kind of person who hates eating the same thing all the time, so I’m constantly looking for new things to cook. On Sunday I like to plan out all the meals for the week, so I can get the groceries and get things together.”

2. Get at least eight hours of sleep. “If I don’t get eight hours of sleep, I struggle. I’m in bed by 10 and up by 7 every day. I don’t nap regularly, but if I’m tired after practice, I lay in bed, and watch Netflix and fall in and out of sleep.” Her go-to shows? The Desperate Housewives series, reality shows, and any crime scene investigative shows.

3. Training with regular travel is tough. Her solution to making sure she gets enough sleep with her regular travel schedule (she’s been traveling 120 days since the beginning of this year)? “We’re big believers of Nyquil. Whenever we go to Europe we try to sleep as much as we can on the flight, because you usually get there in the morning, so you want to stay awake all day…I find that the more often we go to Europe, it’s easier to adjust, though.”

4. Focus on the positive end-result when it comes to exercises you hate. “I hate lifting weights. When I go into the weight room, I’m like ‘ugh’ because it’s usually on my recovery day and so I’m tired from the day before.  I negotitate with my coach, ‘I’ll put this side on if you put that side on., Weightlifting is hard to get excited for and when youre lifting really heavy, you have to get amped up so sometimes I have trouble with that.” To get it done, though, since it’s not as though she can skip her training, she focuses on how it’s helping her, and her competition. “Music helps, too. We usually put it on “today’s hits” on Pandora.”

5. The couple that trains together stays together. “We have the same goals, same meets, same schedule, eat the same things, so all of our values align, which is really helpful as we’re influencing each other and not pulling each other away from our goals. He’s not like ‘hey. let’s go to the bar tonight.’ We’re both in bed at 10. And being able to travel together; a lot of professional athletes, it’s hard on relationships because we’re gone so much. If I was gone 120 days this year already, well, that’s tough on a relationship.” Brianne does say it can be tough, too, though. “The benefits outweigh the disadvantages in a huge way, but sometimes I don’t think we have a lot to talk about, we are at practice together all day. Sometimes if we go out to dinner and we’ll be texting or we’re looking on Twitter–sometimes we don’t go out to dinner to have an experience, we just go out, eat and come home. We work out almost every day together, and we have the same coach, so when I have a bad day, he knows. At times I wish we had different things to talk about. But that will eventually happen!”

 

 

 

Filed under: Fitness Swellness

Tags: Ashton Eaton, Brianne Theisen, decathlon, fitness, fitness motivation, professional athlete