American long-distance runner Emily Sisson is giving fans and followers a glimpse at what her typical day of training looks like—spoiler alert, it’s intense! Sisson, 32, shared a video of herself wearing black shorts and a sports bra, running beside the road in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. “Should I keep doing GRWM? Anyway here’s my 7 mile tempo from Sunday 🏃🏼♀️,” she captioned the post. At one point she also shares her hip mobility routine. Here’s what Sisson’s training, diet, and wellness routine looks like.
Sisson has oatmeal with milk for breakfast most days, as she tends to be low in vitamin D. “I typically do my first run or workout at 9 or 10, and I like to wake up two hours beforehand,” she told Runner’s World. “I’ll get up and make coffee, which is a must for me every day. I have a Nespresso machine and an AeroPress coffee maker to play with. On race days or really hot days, I tend to drink a little less coffee to not upset my stomach; I’ll get my caffeine fix with RunGum or a shot of espresso instead.”
Sisson focuses on nutritious, high-quality whole foods for the most part. “I can’t handle things with lots of preservatives or that are very processed,” she told Ucan. I notice that I don’t feel good when I eat those types of foods. We try to cook most of our meals and eat a pretty balanced diet, with lots of whole foods – 90% of the time we’re eating whole and unprocessed foods. At the same time, there’s nothing that I say is off limits. If I want a donut or a glass of wine, I’ll have it.”
Sisson loves cooking protein-based delicious dinners. “My husband, Shane, and I usually plan our dinners ahead of time, and we make it the most filling meal of the day,” she told Runner’s World. “We love cooking veggie stir-fry with rice, spaghetti bolognese with beef and a bunch of vegetables, chili, or some sort of vegetable dish with wild-caught salmon. I don’t always have meat or fish at lunchtime, but I often eat them for dinner, because I know I need the protein and nutrients. My favorite meats are pork tenderloin, chicken, and grass-fed beef.”
Sisson runs in the evenings and mixes up her prerun fuel. “I usually do my second run around 5 or 5:30 p.m., and I’ll have a prerun snack about an hour beforehand. I like to switch up what I eat, depending on how hungry I am that day,” she told Runner’s World. “Popcorn (the plain kind, not the super-buttery movie theater stuff), toast with peanut butter, veggies like baby carrots and snap peas, smoothies, and pancakes are on my regular rotation. I’ll listen to my body to see what I’m craving.”
Sisson has developed a love for marathon training. “I really enjoyed my first marathon in London [2019], I found it to be so fun and I found that I really liked the training, I liked doing longer stuff and more tempo work,” she told Ucan. “I also feel like there’s so much room for improvement there, whereas on the track, I know there’s room for improvement there too, but I think it’s a smaller window. If I commit to the marathon, I’m curious what I can do. I think that’s what has intrigued me. I feel like I haven’t really tapped into that yet and the training’s hard. but I find it fun. Like a new kind of challenge.”