'Flavour doesn’t make you fast' - George Mills reveals the food he takes on his monastic regime

'Flavour doesn’t make you fast' - George Mills reveals the food he takes on his monastic regime

Evans Ousuru 21:59 - 07.03.2025

George Mills has given an insight on his monastic regime and the feeding routine he normaally undergoes before major competitions. His diet choice ill however, surprise you.

George Mills has revealed the meal regime that he normally takes ahead of major championships.

Last summer, when he won a­­­ ­European Championships 1500m ­silver medal in Rome, his ­celebrations consisted of nothing but a kombucha followed by a lengthy run the next morning.

Mills has been speaking ahead of European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, where he is set to compete in 3000m on Saturday.

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He says he is eating boiled chicken and plain rice without any seasoning for lunch. “Flavour doesn’t make you fast,” Mills told The Guardian.

The monastic regime does not end there. Asked whether he has any guilty pleasures, he shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m a simple guy. I love to train, hang out with my friends and teammates if I’m able to. That’s a good life.”

When George Mills is not pushing his body through 120-mile training weeks at his sparse altitude camp in Dullstroom, South Africa, he could teach Benedictine monks a thing or two about abstinence .The 25-year-old arrives in the N­etherlands confident he can win a medal. Even if he knows that ­beating the double ­Olympic ­champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen will be tough, he is not entirely ­discounting it.

“Obviously he’s a phenomenal ­athlete. Everyone’s got a target on their backs and in this sport no one is invincible. If you do everything right yourself and you’re 100% on the day, anything is possible. I got a taste of a medal in Rome last year. Now I want, at every championship I turn up at, to be competing for medals. That’s the aim.”

The European Indoors will be Mills’s first major competition since the Olympics in Paris, which did not go as planned. The week beforehand Mills was left severely weakened after he caught Covid.

After crashing out of the 1500m in the semi-finals, he was tripped in the 5,000m heats, reinstated and put through to the final, but looked out on his feet as he finished 21st.

But 2025 is a new year and Mills believes that a hard winter’s training with his teammates at the OAC (On Athletics Club) Europe has made him an even better athlete.

He admits he likes nothing ­better than being in Dullstroom, which has an altitude of 2,100m – making it South Africa’s highest town – and a population of only 558 people.