Flutterby™! : Today's ride 2006-05-07 07:48:31.526346+00

Today's ride

2006-05-07 07:48:31.526346+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Today's ride was the beautiful Wine Country Century. I met up with a group from Marin Cyclists, including one guy who'd done the Devil Mountain Double in fourteen and a half hours.

So while I enjoyed the scenery, I didn't really spend much time looking. We flew. I did a lot of drafting. Clearly I have some things to work on in nutrition and hard rides, about mile 38 my calves cramped hard, and that was an off-and-on problem. We hit the 70 mile mark at an average of 18.5+ MPH, but I made the mistake of eating some fruit, and bonked on the next climb after that stop. One of the group got a flat, I caught back up, but dropped again shortly after.

However, my wildest dreams were roughly 6 hours. 5:45 bike time, roughly 6:20 wall time. Yeah, even a wrong turn and short detour near the beginning, with bonking hard and losing my drafting buddies for the last thirty miles, and dealing with cramps for 60 or so, I pulled in better than 17MPH for the course.

I'm happy. Sore and tired, but happy. And pretty buzzed on the endorphins, too.

On the other hand, I talked with Rob today and I'm totally cool that he wants to do the Tollhouse Century as a relaxed all-day stroll rather than a few hours of trading trafts at 20+MPH. Had a couple of scary moments with wheel overlaps today, and spent way too much riding the brakes.

If eating some fruit mid-ride is causing you to bonk, I find myself wondering whether you're dehydrating or just have no reserves. This article has some beginner-level tips, which I suspect you're past, but maybe not.

I'd suggest eating more (or drinking more energy drinks) earlier in the ride. If your glycogen levels are down, it's harder to catch up. And maybe you need to do something to increase the amount of glycogen you can store. Maybe a different post-ride diet is the answer, or maybe you need to start fueling up earlier.

Cool! Thanks, I'll go through especially those second two articles fairly closely.

What hit me is that after the fruit, when I got into even a moderate climb I felt like I was going to puke. So I was able to keep up with the pack until we hit a climb, then I lost 'em, then they had a flat and I caught up again, lather, rinse, repeat. At the final rest stop I grabbed a couple of salt packets and scarfed 'em straight, with lots of water, so I think that part of what I was dealing with was electrolyte losses.

Hmm. Do you normally eat a low-sodium diet? If your body is short on electrolytes, it can't use the water, which means you don't have enough water to burn fuel.

No, I'm normally pretty bullish on salt, my thinking being that if it's water soluble then anything extra (to a point) will just get washed out in urine. And I generally drink a lot of water.

I've been having a piece of pastry post morning ride, I'm thinking that I either need to verify that the primary sugar in that is sucrose and not straight fructose, or switch to something more complex.

And today has had a few muscles on the edge of going into cramps, so I definitely need to find some good electrolyte pills.