The double session day is where athletes quietly underfuel

Twice-a-day training rarely fails on the training; it fails in the four hours between, when nobody is coached to eat.

Morning session ends at nine. The athlete goes to work or to class, eats something small around one because appetite has not returned, and reports for the evening session at half past five having replaced perhaps a third of what the morning cost. Nobody calls this a mistake. It is just how the day went.

Do it three times a week for four months and you have built a slow, invisible deficit that no training log records.

Energy availability is the boring version of a subject usually discussed only in the language of eating disorders, which is a shame, because most of the athletes affected have no disordered attitude to food at all. They have a schedule problem and a hunger problem. Hard endurance work blunts appetite for hours afterwards. The window in which refuelling is easiest is exactly the window in which the athlete least wants to eat, and the effort required to override that is a coaching subject nobody assigns to anyone.

What goes wrong is not dramatic. Glycogen turns up short in the second session, so the second session is done at a lower quality, so the athlete adds effort to compensate, so the deficit deepens. Hormonal consequences follow on a scale of months rather than days. Bone stress injuries appear in the shin and the foot in athletes whose mileage does not look extreme and whose technique looks fine, and the injury gets attributed to volume because volume is the only number anyone wrote down.

The tell I would look for is not weight. Weight moves slowly and lies. The tell is a training log in which the evening session is consistently worse than the morning one in a way that cannot be explained by the plan, plus resting heart rate creeping up, plus an athlete who has stopped feeling hungry after training and has started treating that as normal.

Here is the position I will defend. If you coach a squad that trains twice a day, the food in the gap is part of the programme and belongs in the programme, written down with the intervals, not left to whoever is organised enough to carry a bag.

Coaches will say that is not their job. It becomes their job in March, when the best athlete in the group is in a boot.