I’m Ian.

I am an athlete - albeit a rather slow, tired, and overwhelmed one due to the life phase of young kids and career that I currently find myself in. But my mind remains the same determined, driven, and disciplined place of hard work and integrity as it was when I started this journey into health and performance around age 10.

I had three primary driving forces in my life: no 1) was ‘Dad,' no 2) was ‘John,' and no 3) was ‘Steve.' My Dad always found solace in sport, firstly as a rugby player until he became fed up with the ‘beaten up’ feeling every Saturday afternoon, then as a masters Scottish sea kayaker, then as an avid sailor, including a single-handed transatlantic passage a few years before his passing. He became my athletics coach and physical mentor throughout my life. ‘John’ was a little shit! He was a bully who isolated me from my other class members at school and extracted my self-worth - he propelled me towards self-expression in the form of running, and when I started winning, the bullying suddenly stopped - sport is a wonderful equalizer! ‘Steve’ (Cram) was a lad from North-east England, who won the World Championship's track and field 1,500 m race in 1983, the first year of my 20-year athletics career. He was the man who inspired me to reach for the Olympics, even though the Olympic Gold eluded him, despite multiple World records and jaw-dropping victories.

As an athlete, I always wanted to understand my body. Instead of following my parents into teaching or my uncles into accountancy, I studied physiology and sports science, a brand new discipline at Glasgow University. It was a risk because the only real outcomes of such a professional path at that time were to become an academic scientist or an overqualified personal trainer. After completing my MSc in North Carolina, I choose the latter option because I could control my hours and center my life around training and racing.

By this stage in my life, due to hard work, I had excelled at every academic endeavor I had given attention to, so I applied this same practice to my sport. Although I trained strategically, with the benefit of 20-year hindsight, I now realize that I did not train intuitively. I was not listening to my relatively quiet inner voice, only to my dominant ego voice. As a result, I probably spent most of my career in a semi-overtrained, physically ‘strained’ state. I discovered the hard way that to become a top athlete or even just an athlete with longevity, you need to combine a strong work ethic with a large degree of self-knowing and understanding - that represents my current ongoing pursuit in life.

Injuries and illness are the antitheses of a happy sportsman or woman, and I had my lion’s share of them. To cut a long story short, despite 20 years of effort, my Olympic dream was elusive - my only brag right is that I still hold my Scottish club 1,500 m record 20 years later! What I took into my work career, though, was an extensive experience of living an athlete's life - it started out as a 10-year old identity, and I recognize now that as a perpetual life state. The nourishment of athletic identity is one of the fundamental underpinning values of athletic4ever and what we will endeavor to bring to you.

My specialty is nutrition. As an athlete, I ate copious amounts of wholewheat bread and pasta; such was the times' prevailing paradigm. But I was never too impressed by the quantitative lens utilized by ‘experts,' and my gastrointestinal tract suffered awfully as a result! It seems that we have been arguing about how much carbohydrates we should consume (or not) for 50 years now. I decided instead to ski off-piste and undertook a degree in nutritional therapy. This British qualification brings the practices of integrative and functional medicine into a food-centric qualitative health intervention. For a while, I thought I had departed from my love of sport within my new lecturing, writing, and clinical practice career. But it was merely an opportunity - an opportunity to bring a fresh (but ancient) way of thinking into an antiquated sporting paradigm.

For 15 years, I’ve dedicated my life to form a bridge between these quantitative and qualitative ways of working, and I now feel that time is on my side. With a plethora of research behind them, real food examples like beetroot juice and cherry extracts are slowly filtering into the vocabulary of sports nutrition, along with the literary accounts of allied professions, such as nutrigenomics and the microbiome project. It is exciting times, and I recently launched the Centre for Integrative Sports Nutrition to train sporting practitioners to think in a more complex and dynamic way. Within this work, our central assumption is that health is an underpinning requirement for performance. In other words, let’s tend to the complexity of factors that contribute to each of our personalized lives. If all of our cylinders are lubricated with love and attention, our body may be capable of hitting its top revs, whether for short-term athletic gain or sporting longevity.

I plan to nurture a life balance that entitles me to enjoy my continuing love of running, cycling, kayaking, and hiking in beautiful places, and I invite you to join me on my journey. My commitment to you is to share inside knowledge of how our cells resonate with the foods and nutrients we feed them. Together with the mind and body learnings from Mike and Frank, you will have no choice but to be athletic4ever.