F & B on the bike

Just chatting to a mate (hat tip Oli) who prompted this post about food and beverage plans while on the bike.

Caveat: I’m not a medical professional or spirts nutritionist so I’m sharing my experience not providing advice.

My goal is to avoid dehydration, hyponatremia and insuffient energy to ride on (bonking).

Oli and I have a similar approach with the strategy of taking on food and drink (beverages) little and often.

I have two alarms set on my cycle computer, the Garmin Edge 530.

Drink

Every 10 minutes my DRINK alarm goes off and I take a big sip on the water bottle. In that bottle I carry 750ml of water with 1.5 SIS Hydro tablets to give me a good mix of necessary electrolytes.

Eat

Every 30 minutes my EAT alarm goes off and I’ll truffle down a Soreen bar or a muesli bar, banana or anything else edible. As we are riding multiple days its not feasible to start with enough snacks for the entire event in our bags or we’d be carrying a larder’s worth of food on our bikes. Therefore during training I practiced with petrol station stops to grab what ever semi useful food I could get. The reasoning was to teach my gut not to be picky and see if there was reasonably good stuff easily found at common stores. I ended up finding chocolate coated muesli bars. No doubt towards the end of the day my taste buds and stomach may get a little harder to bring to the party.

Super hydrating – why I’ll never do that again.

A while back I run a couple of marathons. First the Sydney one and then London marathon.

Both times I super hydrated which was an idea I had read about. But after my London experience and news stories from multiple endurance events, never again!

Super Hydrating means drinking an excessive amount of fluids (obviously not alcohol you party animals) the night before the race. I chose to drink water. Of course that means you’re going to the toilet a lot. Every 15 minutes for me at one point.

When I was travelling to the London marathon my train got delayed at a signal for more than 40 minutes. With hundreds of marathon runners on the train there were no toilets I could use. My face literally went green as I held in my bladder. Painful and not smart. The chance of an embarrassing accident was also very real.

After that experience I also started hearing about cases of people needing medical attention at marathons and endurance events where they had suffered hyponatremia. This is when you dilute your sodium levels to a dangerous level. I think my super hydrating approach was a dangerous path towards that outcome so now I’m conscious about taking on a healthy ratio of electrolytes in my fluid.

I good way to work out your fluid replacement needs is to weigh yourself before an hours exercise and then again afterwards. Don’t eat or drink during that period. The weight loss will be mainly due to sweating and that gives you a target for how much fluid you should aim to consume each hour to counter it.

For me I will aim to have at least a 750ml bottle per hour of water mixed with my electrolytes (SIS Hydro).

Also I want to avoid caffeine after lunch time when doing a stage event because the caffeine can inhibit my ability to fall asleep that night and sleep is critical to muscle recovery for the next day’s effort. I’ll talk more about my experiences and thoughts on caffeine in a follow up post.

Post event fuelling

After the days effort I’m looking to recover and rebuild. My main thing is protein to rebuild muscles that have broken down during the event so if I’m at home I use SIS Rego Rapid Recovery powder (chocolate flavour of course).

As I’ll be away from home each night for the next 9 days I’ll look for things like eggs and beans. I’ll also target some of the protein shakes you find at petrol stations and supermarkets.

Oh yeah, I’m vegetarian so that shapes my food choices as well.

Plenty more details to delve into with further blog posts but I’ll sign off for now as I’m about to scoff down a Feta and Grain salad with a side of Soreen as part of my pre event fuelling 😎