Suffer-o-rama

This is what I brought with me on today’s ride, a 5 hour 80 mile endurance ride with 6500′ of climbing. Left to right:

• 1 sprouted whole wheat “hippie bagel” with cream cheese.
• 2 rice cakes
• blueberry something or other Lara bar
• 2 brown rice muffins
• not shown- 1 bottle of HEED

I ate all of it except the Lara bar. The brown rice muffins are out of Allen Lim’s book. This is the first time I have used them. They’re great- dense but not too dense and moist enough to be easy to chew and swallow. Making them killed our blender but I think it was just the blender’s time to go. The rice cakes are my own invention after reading Lim’s recipe for rice cakes that he made for the Garmin team a few years ago. Those have more fat than I’d like, and meat, which I wouldn’t eat on a ride even if I wasn’t vegetarian. So I came up with my own. They’re more like sushi than anything else as the rice is similar. The bagel is from Alvarado St. Bakery and it’s pretty dense for a bagel.

I’ve used the rice cakes before. They’re a bit difficult to eat with one hand but since the vinegar balances out the small amount of sugar they don’t taste sweet and provide a welcome relief from typical too-sweet commercial ride food. The muffins are easy to eat one handed. They are a little sweet but not too bad. The bagel isn’t too hard to eat with one hand, depending on what its wrapped in, but is difficult to get down when riding at anything faster than a mild endurance pace. It’s kind of dry and there’s too much chewing required. It’s also big and bulky- it took up most of one jersey pocket.

I’ve been trying more real food for riding, especially after reading Dr Lim’s book where he talks about putting his riders on a mostly real food diet. Gels make me ill. Bars are full of mystery ingredients, are too sweet and I’m allergic to nuts, so I can’t eat at least half of the bars out there. The same old flavors are getting tiresome.