Eating and Riding

One of my great loves, other than cycling is eating. I really love cooking and eating good food. Unfortunately the two often don't really work well together. Cycling takes up a lot of the time I could be cooking and eating makes me too fat to ride up hills. Beyond these somewhat difficult tensions there is the need to eat in order to ride.

Great, I hear you cry, I can eat heaps of stuff. Wrong! Or wrong for me at any rate. When I do a long ride I find it hard to take in enough calories to fuel the work without upsetting my stomach or binding up the works. Bananas are great but I can't live off them alone.

Here are a few of the things I like to eat while riding which don't give me too many problems with my stomach but are good fuel.

Fruit cake. Not just any fruit cake, it's got to be moist and tasty and not one of those nasty supermarket jobs which leaves my mouth feeling dry and gummed up. The best I've found is the "Golden Circle Boiled Pineapple Fruit Cake" it doesn't taste overly pineapply and it's always tasty no matter how dusty my mouth is.

Avocado sandwiches or rolls. These are also great because they're never dry and the avocado has just the right amount of sticky/squishiness to hold the whole thing together without making the bread soggy. Contrary to my intuition these hold up quite well in my back pocket for a couple of hundred k's on a hot day. If you're so inclined the avocado will hold a bit of ham or cheese in place in the construction quite well also. Lots of good calories to be had here.

Rice salad is a beauty. My favourite is really tasty and has lots of garlic. Not so good if you're planning on a bit of pash action after the ride unless it's the PBP. It's more of an off the bike eat at checkpoints although I have eaten it out of a container in my handlebar bag with a spoon while riding. The recipe goes:

2 cups cooked brown rice
1 red capsicum finely chopped
1/2 cup currants
6 spring onions finely chopped
Mix these together in a bowl

100g raw cashews
100g pine nuts
Roast these on a tray in the oven or in a frypan until browned

Dressing
1/2 cup olive oil (use the best stuff you've got)
6 tablespoons teriyaki sauce (the thin stuff, not the thick sticky one)
4 cloves garlic crushed

Add the nuts and dressing and stir - easy.

Did I mention bananas?

Cold pasta bake of any kind. I experiment a bit but I find that spiral pasta with a fairly thick sauce and cheese on top, baked, will go quite firm when cold. I cut it in squares, carry it in my pocket and eat while riding. I find I need to cook the past a bit more than I would normally to get it to bind into a nice lump.

Beer. A nice glass of icy cold beer (light if you want) every 100k or so is very refreshing and has an analysis not vastly different to a good sport drink. It tastes much better. If the pub has stout on tap, a black and tan is even better.

And bananas.

Baked polenta with a bit of leek through it for taste is another great pocket food.

You'll note I don't go for sweet things while I'm riding. I find I get sugared out very easily with sport drink and yummy slices and so on at checkpoints. I also find that the really sweet stuff can spike my sugar levels and then take me back down pretty quickly. I wouldn't recommend some of this stuff for the all out speed assault on a PB, I'd tend to stay a bit more plain (skip the beer), but for the average long distance ride I find these foods great.

I'm working on a few more good riding recipes . I'll pass them on as I get them right and test them on the road.