I’ve spent the past 2 1/2 years with elite swimmers, and it turns out that many elite swimmers have surprising eating habits. I only know of one swimmer — Erik Vendt — who is eating an all-organic diet. Not surprisingly, he says that it has made a huge difference in his general health and energy levels.

Actually, it is exactly when he is training most seriously that he needs the calories. For Michael, the average day includes miles of swimming, in which his body burns thousands of calories. The fastest way to replenish that energy is by eating massive portions of carb, protein, and fat-laden greasy American food — and yes, up to 10,000 calories a day of it. Not to say that he doesn’t eat healthy foods as well, but his body needs practically all the “unhealthy” stuff it can get to keep functioning. Hard to believe for the rest of us mere mortals, but true.

I used to be a collegiate runner (3 years ago), and I ate an incredible amount of pop tarts. I’m 5′4 and 108 pounds… and was then too. I totally believe it.

I was watching that little promo thing the other night and thinking about this too - but I was thinking that I doubt there’s a day in the week that he doesn’t swim like crazy, even when he’s not actively competing, so I would imagine that yeah, he actually does eat that much, and whatever he wants. When he’s got that much body to feed, and he burns as much calories as he does, and him being such a tried and true home-grown american, I feel like the quality of the food doesn’t much matter, as long as the calories are there!

Erock, you are so right. Even between seasons, we trained like crazy. Maybe we would run 10-15 miles less but it was still an incredible amoount of mileage. When you are an athlete like that, you take a week off one or two times during the year and then you get right back into it again.

Also, I ate lots of healthy foods training, too, but sometimes I just needed the calories. I would drink whole milk out of the carton, too. There were lots of whole milk and pop tarts flying off the shelves of my local grocery store at that time. I just gave my body what is was asking for. I actually had a wall of pop tart boxes…it was a book shelf that I filled with instant carb snacks haha… I forgot about that…

I don’t see why this is surprising. Five hours of Olympic level exercise (we aren’t talking about going for a 2 mile jog here) requires probably 10,000 calories.

When I’ve done serious biking (200 miles a week), I’ve had trouble keeping up my weight. I really had to force myself to eat and even then was dropping a couple of pounds a week. When you are doing five times as much, you just need ridiculous amounts of calories. The form they come in doesn’t matter- hence his sculpture like body.