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Winter Weight Gain

12.08.2011 by Ray Niekamp // 2 Comments

Throughout the summer, my biking weight stayed close to constant. Oh, I gained and lost a few pounds here and there, but it was within a narrow range a little above 200. I was satisfied with that.

That was summer. Now, it’s winter. Even in frying pan hot Texas, we’ve got cold air coming down from the north, and I’ve been bundling up on rides lately. But I’ve also been eating the kind of comfort food that is so well suited to cold weather. And an unsurprising thing has happened since Thanksgiving — I’m once again putting on my winter weight.

This is a pattern that I’ve gotten used to over the years. I slim down in the summer, and gain it all back — and more — in the winter. The saving grace for me is that when I ride, I know I can knock off some poundage. Just yesterday, I came back from a brisk 18-mile ride, hopped on the scale, and found I was down three pounds from the previous day. Now, I know those three pounds were back on by the time I’d finished off supper, but it was nice to see the needle on the scale move in the right direction for a change.

My wife gets into the same rut. She complains every year that she’s getting heavier around the holidays. But unlike me, she actually does something about it. She’s a terrific cook, and about this time every year she starts making meals that are light on calories and long on flavor. I can eat to my heart’s content, and still have a good shot at dropping some of that excess turkey weight.

So, I guess winter brings me the best of all possible worlds. We get to keep riding our bikes, even though we’re bundled up a bit more than usual, I get to keep eating well, and with any luck, I’ll start the riding season in March or so at a weight not appreciably higher than it was when I ended the serious riding season in October. I’m looking forward to the next few months.

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Categories // food Tags // food, weight

A Secret (Drink Mix) Worth Sharing?

11.20.2011 by Jeff Hemmel // 8 Comments

Have trouble staying hydrated on rides? Guest poster Jeff Hemmel may have a solution.

Like I suspect most of you, I rely a lot on sports drinks. I may start my ride with a bottle of water but ultimately, especially in my Florida climate, I’m reaching for something more potent. And I don’t like any of them. The tablet-style mixes may be convenient but their fizzy “texture” makes me gag. I find other mixes weak and watery, with a strange artificial flavor. I’ve settled on cheap, Gatorade powder, although I find its syrupy sweetness gets old fast on anything but a short ride. It’s also packed with sugar and calories.

That’s why my curiosity was piqued last summer when the rumors started swirling about pros using a new, not-for-sale drink mix. Like many of us, pro riders were getting sick — literally — of their sports drinks, resulting in upset stomachs and dehydration. The riders in question happened to be working with Dr. Allen Lim, the renowned sports physiologist who worked with Garmin and later Radio Shack. Lim tried just about every drink on the market; none proved a winner. Cut a syrupy drink with water? It doesn’t work. The sugar might be right, but the electrolyte content gets too diminished. Lim called in a friend, Stanford professor Dr. Stacy Sims, and the two began to develop their own home-brew that had less calories, more salt, and featured absolutely no artificial colors or flavors.

All this wasn’t for resale — this was to hydrate pro riders, many of whom had drink-related sponsors. That’s how the drink ultimately got its tongue-in-cheek name: Secret Drink Mix. Only after more and more people heard of the mix and wanted to buy it did the pair ultimately offer it up for sale through a website so low-key you almost had to be a cycling insider to find it.

Apparently there are no anti-caking agents or preservatives, so they sell these tins to keep the stuff dry and from turning into concrete.

Interesting story, but what matters to the recreational rider is how it tastes…and works. The first thing I noticed about SDM was that it actually has a clean, almost refreshing taste. It’s not watered down, but light, with no syrupy sweetness that will haunt you after the first bottle. It tastes like fruit because, well, that’s what it is. Flavoring is provided by freeze-dried fruit powder. While the weather was still hot, I noticed a drank a lot more of SDM simply because I wanted refreshment, not because I knew I had to force myself to hydrate.

I also noticed I felt a little fresher after my longest rides. At first I chalked it up to my imagination, but then I noted those empty bottles. I think I was simply staying more hydrated. As Lim recommends, I was using my drink for hydration. Serious calories came from Clif Bars or the like. (There’s some interesting science to back up that assertion if you want to do a little searching on the Internet.)

The ultimate test is what happened after I used up my free sample. As it’s not cranked out by a sports drink behemoth, SDM is expensive, about $1 per bottle. I went back to Gatorade, but now knew what I was missing. So yup, I actually bought a pound of mix. As a family man with other things to pay for, I plan to ration it for bigger rides or the occasional race. It’s that good. The only other minor downside is the mix’s ratio. It’s 500ml per 16 ounces of water. Most water bottles hold 21-24.

SDM also comes in these single-serve packs. They’re pretty generous…threw in a handful of other flavors with my order.

For those of you not satisfied by your drinks, I’d suggest you give it a shot. There are codes on the Internet (SDMFACEBOOK) good for about 15% off. Reviews have been quite positive.

 

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Categories // food Tags // hydration

Drinking Enough

07.31.2011 by Ray Niekamp // 4 Comments

One of my continuing problems on the bike is drinking enough liquids to keep me fueled during the ride. In early July, I complained about running out of gas out in the country. The problem, I figured, was a lack of high mileage rides. A few days later, a biking friend of mine suggested something else.

“It sounded to me like you weren’t drinking enough,” he said.

My wife nodded in agreement. But then, she’s always after me to do a better job of staying hydrated and fed on longer rides. I thought about what had happened that day, and concluded that my friend was probably right.

I used to have dual water bottle cages attached to my seat. But I got rid of them last year, because I didn’t like the way they scrunched my seat bag. That left me with one bottle cage on my down tube. I usually carry a 16-oz. bottle, and always felt it was enough. But that’s on rides close to home, where I can always get a refill.

On that early July ride, we had no facilities for refills. No one’s house, no convenience stores, not even a spigot on private property we could sneak water from. I was babying my 16 ounces over a 41-mile ride. That won’t do it.

So, I decided to reform. On a solo ride two weeks later, I decided I would use prompts to remind me to take a drink. Instead of setting my trip computer to distance, I kept it set to elapsed time. Every 10 minutes, I tried to take a drink. Those 10 minutes became a ballpark figure I could work around — sometimes I drank after only eight, more often I drank after around 12. I planned on stopping at a convenience store at the 22-mile point in this 38-mile ride. I bought a bottle of Gatorade G2 there, and downed half of it while resting. I added ice to the water bottle and mixed the rest of the Gatorade with the water. A Clif bar went down nicely during the rest stop, too. I finished the ride relatively fresh.

Emboldened by my new system, I was ready to apply it to a longer ride yesterday (Saturday). The ride was going to be 44 miles. It was a route I had never ridden, but there would be support. The ride leader indicated that a convenience store was about 20 miles into the ride, but we would have to go off course a little bit to reach it.

This time, I didn’t go by time to determine when to drink — I went by miles. I determined to drink every three miles. It worked, too, mostly. I never missed by more than a mile. I had gotten out the seat-mounted water bottle cage at put it on the previous day. I half-filled two 16-oz. bottles the night before and put them in the freezer. That morning, I topped them off with water, so my water supply was relatively cold.

My bike with the seat-mounted water bottle cages. (Pic is from the first time I carried them, over a year ago.)

At the convenience store, I bought my usual bottle of Gatorade G2, and I could stash it in the down tube cage, since that wasn’t taken up by water bottles this time. At a rest stop at a picturesque country church, I trashed the empty G2 bottle and topped off my water. I had been munching on a Luna Bar for a while, and that helped, too. Even though the ride turned out to be 48 miles instead of 44, and finished with a series of challenging hills, I felt good at the end.

Then came today. I was leading a B ride with the club. It was a 30-mile round trip on a route featuring rolling hills. Again, two iced water bottles. Again, I tried to drink every three miles. But today was different. Because of the hills, I had trouble finding a good spot to drink. Flying down hill, I wanted to keep both hands on the bars. Going uphill, I needed both hands to help me pull up the slope. At the 15-mile turnaround, I realized I had drunk only twice. I downed the rest of my first water bottle.

At a convenience store two-thirds of the way through the ride, I got some ice and filled the one bottle I’d drunk from. The break helped, and I drank a lot from the other bottle. I was pleased to note that I finished strong.

“Eat before you’re hungry, drink before you’re thirsty.” We’ve all heard that jillions of times. But it bears repeating.  I have a pretty good idea of just hat I have to do to stay adequately fueled. From here on out, it’s just a matter of making sure I do it.

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Categories // food Tags // food, water

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