from bonk to bile burgers

are you chewing up your past again?

Monday has become ride day.

I ride with Zeke.

This week, Sauron was also on the trail.

Ten years younger and half a foot taller, Sauron knows how to put on the miles.

After riding in BC for a full three weeks, he popped of the plane at Stanfield International and rode 40k home.

He and Zeke both fly along on our 80k rides dragging me spinning and grunting after them.

On Monday, Sauron wasn’t himself. He hadn’t eaten before the ride. At sixty kilometers, he started to bonk and we went to A+W for some soft drinks and fries.

I am no stranger to the bonk - it’s that time when you’ve used all of your calories and sugar and the strength drains from both your legs and will simultaneously.

Bonk time is when I lie down on the trail and call for the crows and coyotes to descend upon me and liberate my soul from my flesh.

That is to say dear reader, it sucks to bonk out.

At times like this, Zeke has magic candies fortified with caffine.

Typically they do the trick for about forty minutes.

Then?

Then Mr. Bonk is back dropping his sweaty sweaty balls on my forehead telling me to pack it in and cuddle up with some deer tick filled bushes.

Needless to say that in order to progress with my endurance riding I had to find a way to deal with Mr. Bonk.

My solution?

Pasta salad.

Typically I have two or three zip lock baggies filled with the stuff on any ride over four hours.

But on this day?

We stopped for fast food.

It’s good training stopping for fast food. On epic rides of 24 hours or more, fast food is often the only food available as we spin through the night.

There’s an issue though.

When I eat fast food, it takes about an hour of riding before it stops making encore appearances in my mouth.

Sure, I like A+W fries as much as the next guy, but eating them and re-eating them for an hour and a half gets pretty old, pretty fast.

Sure they’re chunky, but they’re no longer crispy.

And the salt that was so appetizing not long ago is no longer there. Instead? The fries end up with the consistency of wet, slimy, hollow wood.

Potatoes flavoured with belly bile?

Not my idea of a great meal.

And despite this, I’ve been trying to eat this crap along the way.

I’m not sure if it’s helping or not.

Sometimes it seems like the efforts and calories that my guts use to digest these little starch bombs when combined with the efforts I expend to keep the food down is far greater than the calories the food give me.

It’s hard to say whether or not the ‘juice is worth the squeeze’.

How could I know?

I’m sure there’s some sort of cycling science out there about this.

But Zeke had a better idea.

Do what I do. Eat a huge supper, then hit your trainer and do intervals till you can keep the food down without puking.

It seems reasonable.

In order to go further faster, I still have to ‘dial in’ my eating.

Life is an ultra marathon event.

So frequently the stuff we need to sustain us doesn’t get a chance to be fully swallowed or integrated as we fly on to the next thing.

So dear reader, the question I have today is thus:

How do you digest and integrate enough of the junk while you’re spinning off onto the next thing without constantly needing to puke up the past and chew up your life experiences again and again?

How can you keep moving while fueling yourself with the things that you need to sustain you?

If you have any answers to this you likely have stronger stomachs than I do.

Perhaps that’s the key - more stomachs!

Keep pedaling you cows.