Alan Murchison is the chef who left a Michelin-starred restaurant to feed Olympic cyclists. He spent over a decade running L'Ortolan in Berkshire to a Michelin star and four AA Rosettes, then walked away from the restaurant world in 2014 to build Performance Chef — the operation that now runs the food side of Specialized Factory Racing's mountain bike Olympic team, consults for British Cycling, and feeds World Tour, Formula 1, and Premier League athletes through the operations Alan has built around them.
He's also one of the few voices in the cycling nutrition conversation who can talk credibly about both sides of the table. He has the technique end — Michelin pass, multiple cookbooks with Bloomsbury, a recipe library written for performance rather than plating — and he has the metabolic end, with multiple World and European age-group duathlon titles and a rider's understanding of what 90 g of carbohydrate an hour actually feels like to land without destroying your gut. That dual fluency is the reason his work has shaped almost every fuelling guide on this site.
If you take one principle from him, take this: quality of food matters more than macros. You can hit your protein and carb numbers with a brick of chicken and a tub of rice and produce a malnourished athlete at the same time. The 30-different-plants-a-week target — echoed by Tim Spector, David Dunne, and now most of the credible nutrition science world — is the simplest practical lever for the gut diversity that supports recovery, immune function, and the volume of hard training a serious amateur is trying to absorb. Alan has spent the last decade writing the recipes that make that target reachable in a real kitchen on a Tuesday night.
The Cycling Chef books, the Roadman conversations, and the in-ride nutrition guides linked below are where his work shows up most clearly across the rest of the site.