London life through a sprinter’s diet
What GB athlete Toby Harries eats tells you more about the capital than you’d think
There’s a version of London that constantly gets written about: the galleries, the restaurants, the chaotic, dazzling, expensive everything.
Then there’s a side of London which can be found at the Sainsbury’s petrol station at the end of the road, where a GB sprinter quietly does his weekly shop because, actually, it stocks everything he needs.
Toby Harries runs the 200 and 400m for Great Britain and won bronze in the 4x400m at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
He spends roughly £120 a week on groceries – double the national average – and he’ll be the first to tell you that the secret to elite nutrition is not all that.
“I think a lot of people assume athletes eat a very restrictive diet,” he says. “Your typical chicken, broccoli, rice.” The reality is more practical, more diverse, and in a specifically London way, more improvised.
Toby trains at Brunel University, way out west. Lee Valley, the other major facility, sits on the complete opposite edge of the city. Neither is central, neither is convenient, and neither is particularly glamorous.
This is a recurring theme in how London treats its athletes: the infrastructure exists, but it doesn’t meet you halfway. You build the system yourself.
Compare that to the American college model, where, as Toby describes it, “Everything is provided. Their canteens are built around your nutritional profile, nutritionists on staff, world-class facilities on campus.”
In the UK, he says plainly, “it all falls on you.” Resilience, adaptability, and resourcefulness shape a particular kind of athlete whose direction is pivotal to stay ahead of the game.
To keep, or not to keep, that resilience is also why London loses plenty of athletes along the way.
The capital’s university culture doesn’t help.
Toby studied at UCL, where he found the running society more interested in drinking than training, and found himself spending his first year attending parties sober, silently absorbing social friction for choices that would have been unremarkable elsewhere.
“I got mocked for it,” he says. “Seen as boring, too professional.”
Loughborough, he notes, is a completely different story, it has a campus where sport is structurally central, not a subcultural footnote.
London asks athletes to carve out space for themselves in a city that wasn’t really designed with them in mind.
And yet Toby loves it.
He loves the pub, specifically the Spotted Horse down the road, and The Railway for sport watching, even while nursing a non-alcoholic beer, and watching his flatmates downing pints during rugby season.
He goes to galleries with his partner. He plays video games and watches films as an act of energy conservation.
“If you burn energy off the track, you won’t have it when you get back on.”
He shops at the petrol station because it works.
What Toby describes is a very particular relationship with London: affectionate, functional, unsentimental.
The city offers everything and optimises for nothing. You take what’s useful, you build what isn’t there, and you find your people in training groups and among old school friends who’ve slowly come to respect boundaries they didn’t initially understand.
The post-training snack is bananas and tangerines. The pub drink is 0.0. The grocery shop is a petrol station.
Athleticism, but make it London.
Audio-Visuals: Yasmin Smith and OJasbini Lohani
Words and Pictures: Dimitry Aresu