The rough stuff

I've had a trying week of working around a couple of minor medical maladies — unrelated to cycling and running, but a disconcertingly consistent source of fatigue and pain all the same. My mind is also swimming with seemingly dozens of project ideas that I am overanxious to dive into, and the result during my "workday" is near-constant distraction — I sit down neatly at 8 a.m. to start up one thing, only to jump to another, and then another, until suddenly I look up and it's inexplicably 4 p.m. and I wonder if I've actually done anything productive at all. One thing I am actually accomplishing is that I'm nearing completion of a Tour Divide manuscript I feel fairly good about. I still need to comb through it to incorporate a few more of my editor's very good ideas, flesh out a few areas and cull others, but it's close.

I've been mountain biking and running this week as well, but in shorter blocks of time with limited intensity. Thursday was the first day I felt healthy enough to embark on a longer ride, so I set out to find a trail near my house that I haven't yet tried, the Table Mountain Trail. Beat and I had tentative evening plans and I told him it would be "two, two and a half hours tops." About eight miles into Steven's Canyon I was hit with yet another medical malady — monthly hormone poisoning, which for me usually results in two or three hours of semi-debilitating waves of nausea. Bad timing. It wasn't terrible at first, so I pushed the cramps to the back of my mind and started up the singletrack.

The Table Mountain Trail is designated uphill-only to mountain bikes, which means unless I want to break a law, I'm committed as soon as I enter it. I should have known better when the first quarter mile involved a knee-deep creek crossing and a near-vertical push 100 feet up the muddy bank. But from the top of the bank, the root-clogged trail looked fairly rideable, so I continued. The steep trail only became more eroded as I climbed, until I was trying to keep my tires out of wheel-eating trenches as I mashed up a 15-percent grade on a trail surface about as wide as a pencil. All the while, the nausea kept hitting in blinding waves. Several times, I had to stop and take swift gulps of air to mitigate what felt like an urge to pass out. (Note: These episodes are normal for me but are so short-lived that they almost never hit when I'm working out. The strenuous nature of the trail also seemed to make it worse than usual.)

I walked and then trudged, and all the while the Table Mountain Trail just kept reaching for the sky. I don't know why I expected the trail to top out at 1,800 feet before veering onto the Saratoga Gap Trail, because that is not what happened. I continued to attempt riding the eroded mess between my nausea episodes, until I really did feel physically spent. I had no choice but to trudge up the trail as it rose to 2,600 feet. Two hours had already passed when I was only halfway around my loop on Skyline Boulevard. That's when the building thunderstorm finally opened up. A stiff wind drove the chill of the already 45-degree air (that's spring in California for you, I'm told. Eighty-six degrees one day and 45 the next.) Suddenly these harsh, tiny shards of hail started pelting from the sky. If I didn't know better I would have sworn it was sleet or freezing rain. Either way, it hurt. Stinging and cold. I was not happy. Not happy. I beat a quick retreat down the road.

Beat, who also has been sick all week (we think it's the infamous Fairbanks Plague that was going around up there) couldn't understand why I was so shattered when I walked in the door. "You were only out for three hours," he said. True, true. But sometimes you just need a really rough ride after a rough week to put things in perspective. I'll remind this to myself when I'm finally back to normal and the summer heat has returned. Being healthy in the sunshine really is pretty darn awesome.

Ride map here.

Beat's WM100 report

Beat just finished up his White Mountains 100 race report, with a spot-on observation about the competitive dynamic of these crazy winter races:

"65 racers collect at the Wickersham Dome trailhead to participate in the White Mountains 100. About half are bikers, half skiers and then there are the crazy seven, the foot people, “walkers” as the local news article had called us. That term is a sad mix of insult (at least in a 100 miler) and omen, evoking visions of elderly with walking aids that reflect just how we would feel in a day or so, when we would be reduced to just that — walkers.

The dynamic among the groups is interesting. From what I can tell, Bikers are here to compete most and foremost with other bikers, and to make sure the skiers know their place. Skiers come here to race each other, upstage bikers and hope for soft trails that would give them the edge to do so. Both think walkers are crazy and stupid for choosing such a poor form of winter travel, but there is a spark of admiration, an acknowledgement that indeed, walking is the most pure, the hardest, the most painful, the most mentally challenging. We, on the other hand, simply enjoy the fact that we get the most fun per dollar of our entry fee. Twice as much, usually."

Read the rest of Beat's report here.

Facing the fuel

Since the White Mountains 100, I have been giving more thought to exercise nutrition. I realize this is a complex issue and I personally believe that everyone has different needs and inclinations that they largely must discover for themselves. The personal philosophy I have developed over years of trial and error is fairly simple: If I am out and about for the better part of a day, I need calories. Salt, too, but mostly calories. My method for getting those calories mainly involves listening to my body, and when that fails, cramming in whatever is available.

In my early days of cycling, I was constantly battling with low energy. I carried gels and energy bars because I believed those to be the "right" foods, but when it came time to stuff one of those smashed, waterlogged, half-frozen chunks of tar in my mouth, I decided I would rather pedal around in a daze than eat my food, so I didn't eat. Some suggested I try liquid nutrition, so I sampled all kinds of milky syrupy nutritional supplements: HEED, Gatorade, Perpetuem, Cytomax, the list goes on. These products all made me feel vaguely ill after a few sips, and since my water supply had been contaminated, I refrained from drinking as well. Yes, there was plenty of low-level bonking in my early days of cycling.

As the years went by, I found energy foods I vaguely enjoyed, but often they turned on me at inopportune times. These include Shot Blocks, Clif Bars, Luna Bars, Honey Stinger Bars, Odwalla Bars, etc. Tasty one mile, and foul the next. Because of increasing warnings about the importance of electrolytes, I continued to contaminate my water with products such as Nuun and CarboRocket. These were tolerable sources of electrolytes, but during long rides they revealed my weakness: I really don't like drinking flavored water when I am working out. It's not just the sugar, nutrients and calories; I don't like my water to taste like anything but water. To the point where I will avoid drinking it if I can.

While training for the Tour Divide, I made my first real breakthrough. I understood that three-plus weeks on the trail meant I would probably be running a calorie deficit no matter what I ate. I also understood that I would often have to carry two-plus days of food in my small pack, necessitating calorie-dense options. Finally, I understood that food availability would be limited to mainly convenience stores, and I'd have to learn to digest whatever I could get, whenever I could get it. In short, I would have to become an opportunivoure.

In all my years of cycling, I have found one thing that I have always been able to eat, enjoy, and process into energy, every time, without fail — Candy! Gummy snacks, peanut butter cups, Snickers bars, M&Ms, jelly beans, chocolate, various nuts and espresso beans covered in chocolate, and quite possibly my favorite, Sour Patch Kids (OK, these technically count as gummy snacks, but I felt they deserved a category of their own.) I'm willing to acknowledge that heavily processed sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) is a dubious source of energy, but it was energy all the same. I'm not exaggerating when I say that candy, brownies and other processed sweet foods probably supplied as many as 60 percent of the calories I consumed in 24 days of the Tour Divide. I didn't die. I lost 15 pounds, developed two cavities and became severely addicted to sugar, but I didn't die.

These days, I try to adhere to a happy medium. I continue to use natural energy bars, Shot Blocks, unsweetened dried fruit and occasionally gels, because these reportedly utilize a better combination of carbohydrates and nutrients for longer, cleaner-burning energy (high octane fuel). I also often bring candy bars on rides, just in case the natural energy bars morph into unappetizing bricks, as they often do in my mind. (Because any fuel is better than running on empty.) I do eat (mostly) healthy at home, with lots of fruits, vegetables, lean meats, low-fat dairy and grains (I prefer the old food pyramid diet. It seems to work well for me.) I supplement my lack of electrolyte-supplying liquids with Endurolytes, but in all honesty, I rarely take them. I acknowledge that I live in a warm climate now, and will probably need to start paying more attention to electrolytes. But they haven't been too much of an issue in the past, not in my typical exercise weather and moderate levels of intensity.

But now I'm back to questioning my nutrition strategies. The big bonk in the White Mountains 100, the fact I now live in a warmer climate, and my ambitions in trail running have left me wondering if I need to sample new sports nutrition strategies. I still buy into the "Calories in, calories out ... it really can be that simple" philosophy (note that my views are largely influenced by the fact I was able to continue turning pedals for 24 days of subsisting on absolute crap during the Tour Divide, therefore I believe many of our bodies aren't as choosey as we'd like to believe.) However, I acknowledge that there are levels of efficiency and effectiveness within the simple act of stuffing food in my face. I'm not necessarily looking to get X-percent faster. I'm just looking for new ideas. I'm going to spend some more time thinking about it. And yes, I am asking for advice. But if anyone tells me to try Hammer's new Perpetuem Solids, I am going to go out and buy a case of peanut butter cups.