This is another nutritional analysis from another website. This particularily website is…ahem…a bit less family oriented? Bonus points for those who know who Brooks and Fahey are…
Dave
You are one of many victims of bullshit and salesmanship.
Eating and riding. Classic bullshit and misinformation. It mostly all boils down to a couple of things. Calories in must equal calories out to stay the same. Less calories means weight loss. The key is how you loose them. Where the calories come from is not all that important as long as you take your vitamins and eat more or less OK. I used to hear about all the idiots riding 100 miles on one bottle but I never actually met one. I though maybe it’s because I live in really hot weather compared to Europe so I need more liquids, nope, that’s not it. I really do need more water. Hmmmmm. Makes you think a bit. Maybe the BS is just that. Maybe common sense works. Maybe heart rate is meaningless. (“Heart rate does not correlate reliably to effort” - Extremely competent expert in the Exercise Physiology world) Maybe everything I read is really written by hired “experts” to sell me something I don’t need.
You eat what you need on a ride. You drink more. If you want to loose weight you learn to go into the “Ketone-Zone” where you start to consume fat from your body. You can smell it on your breath, like kerosene. It happens minutes before you hit the Bonk wall but most people never notice, and if you don’t feed your machine the minute it knocks on the door you dive deep deep down into the hellacious dreaded Bonk you have become so familiar with. If you learn to feed the body just enough when it raises its head, you can get by with a little dial-it-back and eat. After a few minutes you recover and go on your merry way like nothing happened. Every time you do it your body gets better at adjusting and adapting and eating itself. After a few weeks you can stretch the time period out and your body learns to eat itself more efficiently. It’s a weird almost hallucinogenic mind/body state you get into and it’s hard to recognize at first, but if you think back, you’ve been riding long enough to know it well, almost like an old friend. If you feed it wrong it attacks you and rips your kitchen apart and drinks all your beer, rapes your pets and you and leaves you on the ground wanting to eat the dirt and grass on the side of the road. Feed it right and it settles down in the parlor for a while and doesn’t make a lot of noise.
So, when your friend knocks on the door, you feed it. Ahh, but you must feed it correctly. Timing and content are everything. Miss your window and you are screwed. Sugar will stave it off for a while but it will return with a greater vengeance. This is OK if you are at the end of the ride and the sugar will get you home to collapse into a large chair without the energy to pick you nose or wipe your butt, in fact, this is a good thing. But if you are on a ride you have to feed it cookies and protein. Very little sugar. Ham and cheese sandwich good, Twinkies bad. Dial back the effort until things are feeling more on this dimension, then you are getting your system trained.
I used to do 100+ mile rides with a bread/proscuitto/swiss cheese sandwich and a couple of bananas which I ate in the first 50 miles. If I had nothing to do after the ride, with 50k to go I’d tank up on 3 or 4 cokes for the sugar and caffeine and hit the showers feeling the monster coming on like a landslide and smelling it on my breath. Then I’d settle into a nice bonk-induced state at home for about an hour, content that fat was getting consumed and I had the best cheap high anyone could ever get and I didn’t have to drop a half-slice of windowpane to get there. If I timed it right I’d get all tingly and start seeing weird things before I got out of the shower. When I felt better about an hour later I’d tank up on solid food like a burrito or a bowl of soup and meat with a beer just to keep the buzz on a bit longer. Train the animal to take the fat it needs from the body.
This is of course all top secret and no cycling sport hack will endorse it. If you talk to the TOP people in the world of exercise physiology they will agree completely. I have. Unfortunately it doesn’t help to sell any products so no one will publish this type of information. Mention “Brooks and Fahey” to charlatans in the exercise world and they either run hiding or don’t know who they are which means they bought their degree at the corner store.
It’s never torture. It was always fun. I really miss that aspect, the long rides day after day. I’d do 2 weeks of back to back rides in January more than 100 miles per day, rain or shine. Some days 140+ mile hammer sessions with the last 50 miles at max output. Days before that session were 60+ miles of rolling hills on the fixed in a 63 inch gear a few days a week.
Heart rate monitors are for idiots and fools. They are useless. The only reason they work at all is they introduce structure into most peoples lives for the first time. They are for the weak. The strong do not need them. Perceived Exertion (PE) is the only term that matters. You have to listen to your body in every way imaginable. You have to provide your own structure and your own schedule. If rides with others work into your schedule, great. If not, you have to do your own program. If you are a slave to others regimens and schedules you are not training, just riding.
Whorebait (Long story behind that nickname involving racing, mexico, and hookers)
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