With the weeks and months of training now just a wincing memory, the wait is over for the women on Canada’s Olympic team. The Beijing Games may be starting on Friday (August 8), but the athletes must still carefully control one of the most important aspects of their daily lives: their diet.

Junk food, excessive amounts of chocolate, and serious sessions with beer are all out of the question for these finely tuned specimens; they leave that to the rest of us. Instead, each day they carefully monitor everything they put into their bodies as they strive to reach peak physical condition at just the right moment. And the Olympic Games is one such moment.

Melanie Oliver, the Canadian Olympic team’s sports dietitian, has counselled the athletes on what to eat once they arrive in China. For her, the key to success lies in clock-watching.

“Sports people are more conscious of the need for timing, in terms of digestion time,” she said, on the line from her office in Montreal. “Athletes need appropriate digestion time before training and competing.”

Vancouver-born Lauren Groves is one of the three Canadian women taking part in the triathlon, one of the Games’ most gruelling events—expected to be even more so in the heat and polluted air. Not surprisingly, she takes special care with the minutiae of her diet.

“I usually have three breakfasts, because a lot of my training is done in the morning,” Groves told the Georgia Straight by cellphone after a training session in Victoria. “I find that breakfast food is the easiest to digest, and the most simple. I always start every morning with a couple of pieces of sprouted-grain bread with some almond butter and a cup of coffee. That’s pre-swimming. Then post-swimming, I’ll cook up some scrambled eggs and have some fruit—maybe some more toast!

“And then, after the second workout in midafternoon, I’ll have a bowl of goat’s milk yogurt with some fruit added, or I’ll make a turkey sandwich. I’ll just make sure that I’ve got a little bit of protein and some carbohydrates. I try to eat really simple foods, and I need to know the ingredients in everything I eat to make sure it’s whole foods.

“With dinner, I’ll have a really big salad, as that’s where I get my vegetables,” the 26-year-old continued. “There’ll also be some kind of grilled chicken or fish, so sometimes they’ll [our cooks] make buffalo burgers for the red meat. I usually don’t have beef. Buffalo is very lean and high in iron.”

When rower Darcy Marquardt of Richmond talks about food, it’s worth taking note. Competing in the women’s eight this time around, she won a world championship in the pairs event with Jane Rumball in 2006.

“I pay an incredible amount of attention to what I eat and drink,” she said from after training in London, Ontario. “Over the past five years, I’ve really taken it upon myself to really educate myself and use as many of the services that we have available to us, like nutritionists and dietitians, to help me not only with meal timing, but making sure I get enough calories and the right amount of all the food groups. I feel so much stronger than I did, and I definitely attribute it partially to my eating habits.”

When the Canadian team packed for the long flight to China, you can bet that a good chunk of suitcase space was used for their favourite foods. For Marquardt, it was a good supply of oatmeal and peanut butter for her breakfasts. Groves may have considered one less tracksuit or two to make room for coconut water, known as nature’s electrolyte drink because of its high levels of potassium and sodium.

For Kara Lang, a 21-year-old forward on the Canadian soccer team and a vegan for five years, the components of her diet are essential to her preparation, and are sometimes hard to come by. Luckily her roommate, midfielder Amy Walsh, shares her preferences.

“We’ll both bring our Vega protein powder [for protein shakes] and our organic peanut butter from home, and protein bars and trail mix and nuts and stuff like that,” Lang said by cellphone after a morning training session in North Vancouver. “In the past on trips to China, it has been a bit hard to get things.”

The whole Canadian Olympic team has had the importance of hydration before, during, and after training and events drummed into them early on in their careers, and there will be boxes of electrolyte-enhanced drinks accompanying the team, including Gatorade, Accelerate, Emergen-C, and e Load.

Finding the right pre-race meal could make the difference between a podium finish and being among the also-rans. But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. “Balance is a big thing; there’s no magic recipe—and whatever is magic is illegal,” Oliver says, laughing.