Photograph by Matthew Hintz
Vikings nutritionist Rasa Troup
The 3,000-meter steeplechase is an Olympic sport modeled after what would happen if you had to run really fast from the steeple of one English or Irish town to another. It’s a middle-distance race, about 1.8 miles, but with seven jumps over hurdles into shoe-soaking water, as well as 28 leaps over immoveable barriers, which can knock you right down, like an Irish country wall—like life.
Rasa Troup competing in the Olympics
Rasa Troup ran the steeplechase for her native Lithuania in the 2008 Beijing Olympics—and you could say that, metaphorically, she’s never stopped jumping over walls in wet shoes. Nowadays, however, Troup is a Minneapolis mom running a sort of daily steeplechase of food: as head nutritionist to the Vikings; head nutritionist to the University of Minnesota women’s Gopher track team; and a dietician at the University of Minnesota Physicians. She also serves as head nutritionist for her two young children at home, in Prospect Park.
Since it’s that time of year when each of us re-examines our own nutrition, it seemed like a good time to check in with one of the country’s reigning performance nutrition specialists to uncover the secrets of what the Vikings really eat!Actually, we will never learn the secrets of what the Vikings really eat, Troup told me warily when I met her for lunch at Open Book near the Guthrie. It’s a spot where she ends up often, as it falls within the triangle formed by her private practice, U.S. Bank Stadium, and the university world of the Gophers. When I met Troup, she had ridden her bike, as she usually does. (She prefers walk-and-talk meetings, too.) She was wearing a maroon-and-gold Gophers track jacket over a black Vikings zip-up. What the actual Vikings eat is a closely held trade secret, Troup explained. We can’t be responsible should they fall into the hands of the Packers. (Shout-out to the Packers: Try a nightly fried cheese and lager diet; it might be right for you!)
Still, a few contours of Vikings performance nutrition can be discerned. In season, they eat breakfast and lunch at the Eagan Winter Park training facility in a cafeteria run by Geji McKinney-Banks, the team’s director of food-service operations, who consults with Troup. Troup tells me that before she was hired by the Vikings, in 2012, the cafeteria had already been cleaned up, ridding the tables of obvious performance-wreckers like fried pies. (A few years back, the Vikings even yanked the soda vending machines out of the locker rooms.)
At night, Vikings are on their own, and many retain private chefs who consult with Troup for their menus. Others depend on wives, girlfriends, or family members to take on the high-stakes meals. Troup helps some players hire the chefs to begin with. After that, she mainly ends up consulting one-on-one with players. Her daily schedule involves many individual meal consults, and she’s even taken Vikings players and their significant others on tours through the Eden Prairie Costco.
“The most important thing I ever say is: I am not the food police.”
Rasa Troup, Vikings and Gopher Track Nutritionist
The most important thing to know about Viking performance nutrition, Troup explains, is that there is not one Viking. Creating the nutrition for top performance in a hulking 315-pound, 22-year-old defensive lineman who hates Brussels sprouts is different than creating it for an agile 195-pound, 30-year-old running back who loves Thai food and hopes to reduce joint inflammation. Nor does Troup encounter a generic fast-running and lithe young Gopher woman.
Rasa Troup at the Great Wall of China
You, whose exercise regimen involves climbing the office stairs: You, too, could plan an individual performance-enhancing diet that follows your personal physiology and your actual personality.
“There’s so much misinformation about food,” Troup tells me, again and again, as we talk. The hardest part of her job? Misinformation. The thing the average citizen needs to know about food and tweaking their diet? They’re swimming in cultural food misinformation.
Take, for instance, a baby Viking. “When a young player first arrives,” Troup tells me, “usually they’ve already been a star for a long time. And now they’re in the business of football. Often they’ve heard a great deal of misinformation. From friends, from the media, from the Internet. Maybe a coach.”
The same experience occurs with the Gophers runners. A lot of athletes come to her with theories about allergies, about gluten, about fat. They suspect that Troup intends to banish them to a joyless dietary island where they eat flax seeds all day. “The most important thing I ever say is: I am not the food police,” Troup explains. “I will not tell you to never eat dessert. That is what they think I’m going to say; that is what everyone thinks I am going to say.”
In fact, Troup, who likes to go with her kids to Izzy’s ice cream, says she encounters athletes who aren’t getting enough carbs for top performance, just as often as she finds ones eating too many. When she adds restored bread and other gluten-full carbs to certain athletes’ diets, “they can feel like they’re flying. Every person’s body is different, sometimes very different. And I’m here to help you get 1 percent, 5 percent better. But we have to do that in the way that’s right for your body.”
Not that you need perfect nutrition to succeed in the first place. Troup was born behind the Iron Curtain, in Soviet Lithuania. “You would have these coupons for food, but there was no food to buy,” she remembers. “And then a certain cut of meat would appear and everyone would stand in line for hours, whatever it was.”
She continues, “I will never forget that one thing: Not every person has access to food. Sometimes today I meet athletes who grew up like I did, without a lot of good nutrition or control about that.”
Troup was 13 when the Soviet Union disbanded, and the bread lines started to disappear. By the time she was in high school both she and her brother had become elite athletes, she in track and he in basketball.
The University of Minnesota recruited her to run and she arrived at age 21, in 1998. Troup has become a Minnesotan since then: She enrolled at the U for grad school in nutrition, and married a Minnesota psychologist who was a track star himself: a two-time high-jump champion with deep roots in St. Paul.
Her food advice and her home food life really follow the basics: Eat whole, fresh foods. Soup, not Skittles. Chicken sandwiches, not chicken nuggets. She shops at the Seward Co-op, and makes sure her kids get fruits and veggies every day. They are not being raised on beet powder and amino-acid shakes.
When the couple takes their kids, now ages 10 and 8, to visit Lithuania, Troup feels happy that she’s raised them so that they’ll eat the local dark bread, and not scrunch their noses at that Lithuanian favorite, horseradish.
“The kids help me in the garden all summer, where we have kale and cucumbers and tomatoes,” she says. “And on the weekends, we make a big pot of chili so there’s something fast and good to eat when it’s so busy. But sometimes dinner might be a sandwich. I’m no more different and magical than anyone else.” Except that, unlike most of us in America’s food-deranged culture, she knows what she’s talking about.
Performance Secrets of the Vikings!
OK, we can’t tell you the performance secrets of the Vikings. We can, however, share six performance-enhancing foods Rasa Troup sometimes recommends to top track and football stars.
Tart cherries
Tart cherries: Whether mashed in juice or eaten whole, tart cherries reduce inflammation, which helps athletes recover more quickly and more fully, and may improve sleep.
Kombucha
Kombucha: With lots of B vitamins, kombucha contains probiotics and certain acids that help in the immune system and support G.I. health. Stick to store-bought if you’re the kind of sloppy kombucha brewer who might make an alcoholic one that spikes a drug test. Troup particularly likes Bootlegger Kombucha, brewed right here in Apple Valley.
Beets: Beet juice concentrate in smoothies works on the premise that our body can benefit from natural nitric oxide to increase blood flow to muscles.
Berries and vegetables:
Berries and vegetables
Packed full of antioxidants and phytochemicals, the un-patentable powers of good produce can enhance both your performance—and your life.
Salmon and other omega-3-rich foods
Salmon and other omega 3 rich foods
Concussions and other brain injuries may heal more quickly when the body is saturated with omega-3 fatty acids.Yes, Viking-appropriate gravlax counts. These also help with inflammations and brain and eye function.
Kimchi, sauerkraut,and other live ferments
Kimchi
Live fermented foods like kimchi help with gut health, immunity, and the all-important microbiome. If your tummy ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
