Food not so glorious food

I've been getting a lots of emails and tweets lately with links to items about food or diet. Runners food specifically. Like we have our own aisle in Sainsburys. (In local Sainsburys I do have my own aisle. It's the fruit and veg one. No one else seems to bother with it. But I digress).

All this talk of food has made me think about just how much of the whole marathon prep revolves around food, or fuel. But in general, web articles and magazines are quite unimaginative about what they suggest. Pasta, bananas, low-fat protein...yadda, yadda.

For a record, I hate ready meals or most forms of processed foods. I'm a bit weird, and prefer to know what I'm eating as far as possible. I can cook, so it seems a bit pointless to eat something out of a bit of plastic when I cook myself the same thing, except fresher, with less salt and more flavour. I'm also really suspicious of low-fat versions of fatty things - e.g. low-fat cheese. If cheese is making me fat, I just eat less cheese. Cheese with the fat taken out of it cannot be good for you - something bad will have been inserted at some point to compensate for the essential element of that foodstuff.

So my whole marathon training diet is juggled around fruit and veg I like, eggs, fish, chicken, pork and a bit of beef the night before a race. It seems to energise me. I eat yoghurts, and pasta, and tinned tuna, which are obviously processed. But for the most part, I try to make everything I eat from scratch. For instance, I make a lot of soups. But I am desperately trying to avoid eating too much of a good thing this time round, because I have a track record. I get bored of food. I get so bored, that it reaches the point that I never want to see that foodstuff again.

Since I started training for my first marathon in 2009, I have turned myself off the following 'runners foods':

Jaffa Cakes - I still mourn the fact I have not eaten a Jaffa Cake since October 2009. I loved Jaffa Cakes until I started running marathons. Now, they are dead to me. Dead to me, I tell thee.
Cereals - admittedly this is probably quite a good thing to be off health-wise but still, these used to be a convenient low-fat breakfast foodstuff, with some fruit added. Now they are milk or yoghurt covered instruments of torture .
Bananas - I ate a banana after the Berlin Marathon last September. I went off them. I tried another one yesterday. It's official - I hate them. My Room 101 would be full of slightly overripe bananas.

Items in the danger zone currently include crumpets, porridge and rice pudding.

I am now becoming terrified of turning myself off more foods that I used to enjoy. I need more variety. I need ideas. And I need them now. Before the bananas get me again.