By: Blonde Two

During the winter my cold water swimming habit gives me the perfect excuse for shorter swims but, now that summer is well and truly here, the water is warm enough for me to stay in longer and get in a bit more distance. It takes me a while to swim a kilometre so I don’t do it every day (usually around 500 metres) but, when I can fit it in to the Blonde schedule, a kilometre swim leaves me feeling epic… and hungry!

Which was why I decided one morning to investigate how many calories I would need to eat for breakfast in order to replace the kilometre-worth I had just swum off.

The answer was complicated and depended on my weight (significant), my metabolism (lazy), my speed (feels fast to me) and my swimming stroke (front crawl). I tried a few swimming and triathlon websites and came up with a figure of around 500 calories.

If this is accurate (who knows) then that morning I would have got away with eating 100 grams of bacon, nine boiled eggs or one and a half cups of muesli (but not all three). As my breakfast is more usually the left overs from the night before (cold curry a particular favourite), I resolved to stop thinking about how much food I could eat, and concentrate instead on how much I had enjoyed my swim.