What does one learn when trying to ride across America at an average of 110 miles a day in 31 days?
1. Eat Like a Pig
Eat as much as you can. Stop when you can’t swallow another bite. A 150 mile day at 15 mph can require 6,000 calories. To replace those calories, I had to eat 3 times what I eat on a normal day. I learned to eat whenever and whatever I could.
Eating this much food is not easy. Let’s say you’ve trained properly and you are eating all the right things. You pour nonfat milk on cereal, eat bagels, pasta, sautéed vegetables, lean meats, and so on. You’ve watched not only your quality but your quantity. That’s certainly what I did when I was training. It made me feel good and helped me trim away body fat. But during the ride is a whole different story. Not only does the quality of food suffer (entire states seem to be devoid of nonfat milk and vegetables) but the quantity of food that must be consumed is hard to fathom.
Take a typical day on the ride. Breakfast is several trips to the buffet table: 6 pancakes drenched in syrup, fruit, 2 servings of cold cereal, eggs, hash browns and sausages. You squirrel away a bagel for the road. Within two hours on the road, you eat your pocket food, the bagel or energy bar. At the first snack stop, 6 to 8 cookies hit the spot, downed by most of a bottle of water and then maybe some fruit. Lunch is a turkey sandwich, a bagel with honey and peanut butter and some salty chips. A bag of animal cookies goes in the pocket for down the road, to be washed down by a whole bottle of sport drink because dinner is 20 or 30 miles off. You arrive at the hotel and eat a handful or two of almonds so the protein will rebuild muscles but you’re already thinking of where to get a dinner. You could eat half a large pizza or get a sit-down meal. A restaurant with limitless salad bar is a joy to find. You tell the waitress to keep the bread coming. And which dessert is bigger? The Chocolate Delight or the apple cobbler with ice cream? A couple of pieces of Belgian chocolate are perfect back at the hotel while reading email before lights out. You arrive at breakfast the next day hungry. If it’s not a buffet, you get a normal eggs/bacon/toast/juice serving—the kind of breakfast that would normally make you skip lunch. But now you are watching the guy’s toast at the next table because if he’s not going to touch them…
Whoa! What a nutritional nightmare. You’re picturing that I will not fit in my bike shorts by the end of the ride. Not at all. My weight at the end of the ride was within 2 lbs of the weight I started with despite this seeming gluttony. Riders who watched what they ate, passed on the gooey dessert and the donuts ended up looking haggard, losing weight and complaining of tiredness. One rider lost 22 lbs but 5 to 10 lbs loss was typical.
What’s wrong with that? Weight loss is good, right? That is what we are trained to think and even fit and trim athletes seem to prescribe to this ideal. After all, you are just losing body fat, aren’t you? Now, I should check with a sports nutritionist before I go spouting off but just based upon my experience and reasoning, you can’t metabolize body fat fast enough to match the energy expenditure when cycling 15 to 20 mph. Once your body depletes its glycogen from the blood, it tries to produce glycogens from other sources. Your liver is a source for glycogen but you don’t want to go there. Waiting for fat to be converted to energy can’t help but slow you down. In fact, the point at which your blood has been exhausted of glycogen is what marathoners call “hitting the wall” and what long distance cyclists call “bonking.”
It wasn’t without a degree of shame that I overcame my inhibitions about eating lots of food and “bad” food at that. After all, eating a half pound Dunkin Donut apple fritter and a glazed chocolate donut is about as far from health food as you can get. Yet, my admittedly non-scientific results prove otherwise. The times I thought I was tired, I was only hungry. A sugar fix from donuts or cookies gave me quick energy, the carbs kicked in a little later and the fat was for longer term.
Could I eat like that forever—even if I was riding forever? No, I don’t think so. It was a diet that was high in processed food and very low in vegetables and roughage. That would have health consequences in the long term, I’m sure. I did supplement with multivitamins and calcium chews on the road, for what that’s worth.
2. Prepare on the Hills
In Marin County, where I live, if you can’t do hills, you can’t get out of your neighborhood. The Marin landscape is all hills. Every 50 mile loop you can create will have thousands of feet of climbing. Marin’s Mt. Tamalpais (2600 ft) is one of the tallest mountains along the California coast and I rode up it as often as I could. Riding a Marin mile gives you more exercise than miles in most other parts of the country. I had been worried about getting over the Rockies with their snowy peaks and elevations of over 10,000 feet. “Gotta get over the Rockies” became a mantra on my training rides (as well as motivation to lose all possible body fat). In retrospect, I was over-prepared. In the first place, the highest elevation on the trip was going over the Continental Divide (7,200 ft). Secondly, you start the mountain climbs a base that may be already 4,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level. (Why don’t people ever talk about that?) And lastly, all the roads I took up the mountains had lower grades than what I had gotten myself used to. I estimate 6-8 per cent grade while at home long stretches of 10 per cent are not uncommon. So while I wouldn’t say getting over the Rockies was a walk in the park, it was not the challenge I was expecting
3. Regulate with a Heart Rate Monitor
Bike racers will always train with a heart monitor (hrm) but rarely use them on road races. Therefore, I debated leaving mine at home. I’m SO glad I didn’t. My heart rate monitor (hrm) allowed me to regulate my intensity throughout the ride the same way it did during my training. I could determine my maximum sustainable heart rate in the morning and on a good day, I could stay within 5 beats of it the rest of the day. On hills, I might go above by 10-20 bpm but the higher intensity on hills is also something I can maintain. Using the hrm let me know when I was overdoing it, such as when I tried to latch on to a paceline that was going too fast. It also kept me from slacking on descents and flats with the wind on my back. On a few days where there was a mighty tailwind, I could easily do 20 mph but because of my hrm, I could fly at 24 to 26 mph.
4. Get Low and Narrow
I try to use every trick to cheat the wind. I position my handle bars as low almost as low as they will go which keeps my head low and my chest out of the wind. With headwinds, I ride with my hands close to the center of the bars and elbows tucked in reducing my frontal projected area even further. I can gain 1 to 1.5 miles per hour this way. I figure that is free speed.
5. Downtowns are Dying
The route I took across the country took me through countless small towns. The picturesque, thriving towns were few and far between. Much more common were towns with boarded up windows and stores with “Closed” signs. Sometimes, entire downtowns were deserted. I joked about them being neutron bomb test sites but it was sad to think so much of America could have been abandoned. The heartland of Norman Rockwell with pies cooling on the windowsills, swimming holes and country stores with pickle barrels has all but gone out of existence. Yes, there are more Wal-Mart's and strip malls but they don’t make up for all the stores and businesses gone under.
6. Carry One Additional Layer
The Weather Channel lies. Days that have not a drop of rain on the Doppler will have sudden flash thunderstorms. A day with a high of 90 degrees could have a mountain top that is forever in cold fog. I reserve one jersey pocket for one additional layer, either a wind vest or a rain jacket that will keep the weather from ruining my day.
7. Thick Heavy Tires
Forget light, expensive racing tires. When riding across the country, you’re better off with thick, cheap tires. And fill them all the way up to the maximum recommended pressures to avoid pinch flats. I got only 5 punctures. I used one pair of Specialized Armadillo tires for the whole ride. They certainly have my personal endorsement.
8. This Can be One Boring Country
I never thought I could fall asleep while riding my bike. I came close on this trip. Another cyclist told me he had fallen asleep and ran into a cornfield. Everyone thinks that this country has beautiful sights—and it does. There’s the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and lots of others. But in-between those points are long, straight featureless roads and a sameness of surroundings that can stretch for hours. Do you remember being bored out of your mind taking interstate rides in the family station wagon? It’s worse. It takes even longer on a bike and you can’t even make faces at cars behind you.
Now don’t get me wrong. I did find enough beauty to warrant almost a thousand photos. There were great mountains, flowers, rock formations and the like. I’ll remember the waves in the wheat fields and the treeless deserts. But there were whole days that didn’t warrant my camera to be turned on. One day’s wheat field looked like the next, and so on. The straight roads flat smooth roads through Arizona and New Mexico made me feel like I was pedaling without progress as if I was on a stationery bike against a big diorama.
9. Take Time to Dwell
In terms of personal journeys, this was an epic one. Though many days I was in a hurry to get through the ride and end up in the hotel, I knew I would regret not stopping enough times and enjoying the journey. Many historical sites were ignored. Dozens of curious locals were not talked to. Even a quaint bike museum was given short shrift. While the goal of this particular trip was to get across the USA in the minimum amount of days, I would advise others to take a few more days and dwell on the unique and interesting sites as well as meet people along the way.
10. Know When You’re Done
Unless you are a die-hard adventurer, riding your bike across the Unites States is a signature, memorable and life-defining trip. You don’t need to do it again, do it with a different route, go around the world, do it on a unicycle, etc. You are done. Remember, you just took a lot of time off: time off work, time away from your family and/or loved ones. That’s not including all the time you took to train for this, which is probably equal to the trip itself. Now that is a lot of debt you have incurred. If your job or family and loved ones don’t mind you being away for all this time, you have other problems to consider. But if you were missed, keep in mind that the only reason you could take a whole month off go away to do your own thing was because every body indulged you. To put it very bluntly, they catered to your selfish interest. You have to make it up. Coming back from this ride and telling people you’d now like to plan for Mt Everest is not going to make you very popular.
1. Eat Like a Pig
Eat as much as you can. Stop when you can’t swallow another bite. A 150 mile day at 15 mph can require 6,000 calories. To replace those calories, I had to eat 3 times what I eat on a normal day. I learned to eat whenever and whatever I could.
Eating this much food is not easy. Let’s say you’ve trained properly and you are eating all the right things. You pour nonfat milk on cereal, eat bagels, pasta, sautéed vegetables, lean meats, and so on. You’ve watched not only your quality but your quantity. That’s certainly what I did when I was training. It made me feel good and helped me trim away body fat. But during the ride is a whole different story. Not only does the quality of food suffer (entire states seem to be devoid of nonfat milk and vegetables) but the quantity of food that must be consumed is hard to fathom.
Take a typical day on the ride. Breakfast is several trips to the buffet table: 6 pancakes drenched in syrup, fruit, 2 servings of cold cereal, eggs, hash browns and sausages. You squirrel away a bagel for the road. Within two hours on the road, you eat your pocket food, the bagel or energy bar. At the first snack stop, 6 to 8 cookies hit the spot, downed by most of a bottle of water and then maybe some fruit. Lunch is a turkey sandwich, a bagel with honey and peanut butter and some salty chips. A bag of animal cookies goes in the pocket for down the road, to be washed down by a whole bottle of sport drink because dinner is 20 or 30 miles off. You arrive at the hotel and eat a handful or two of almonds so the protein will rebuild muscles but you’re already thinking of where to get a dinner. You could eat half a large pizza or get a sit-down meal. A restaurant with limitless salad bar is a joy to find. You tell the waitress to keep the bread coming. And which dessert is bigger? The Chocolate Delight or the apple cobbler with ice cream? A couple of pieces of Belgian chocolate are perfect back at the hotel while reading email before lights out. You arrive at breakfast the next day hungry. If it’s not a buffet, you get a normal eggs/bacon/toast/juice serving—the kind of breakfast that would normally make you skip lunch. But now you are watching the guy’s toast at the next table because if he’s not going to touch them…
Whoa! What a nutritional nightmare. You’re picturing that I will not fit in my bike shorts by the end of the ride. Not at all. My weight at the end of the ride was within 2 lbs of the weight I started with despite this seeming gluttony. Riders who watched what they ate, passed on the gooey dessert and the donuts ended up looking haggard, losing weight and complaining of tiredness. One rider lost 22 lbs but 5 to 10 lbs loss was typical.
What’s wrong with that? Weight loss is good, right? That is what we are trained to think and even fit and trim athletes seem to prescribe to this ideal. After all, you are just losing body fat, aren’t you? Now, I should check with a sports nutritionist before I go spouting off but just based upon my experience and reasoning, you can’t metabolize body fat fast enough to match the energy expenditure when cycling 15 to 20 mph. Once your body depletes its glycogen from the blood, it tries to produce glycogens from other sources. Your liver is a source for glycogen but you don’t want to go there. Waiting for fat to be converted to energy can’t help but slow you down. In fact, the point at which your blood has been exhausted of glycogen is what marathoners call “hitting the wall” and what long distance cyclists call “bonking.”
It wasn’t without a degree of shame that I overcame my inhibitions about eating lots of food and “bad” food at that. After all, eating a half pound Dunkin Donut apple fritter and a glazed chocolate donut is about as far from health food as you can get. Yet, my admittedly non-scientific results prove otherwise. The times I thought I was tired, I was only hungry. A sugar fix from donuts or cookies gave me quick energy, the carbs kicked in a little later and the fat was for longer term.
Could I eat like that forever—even if I was riding forever? No, I don’t think so. It was a diet that was high in processed food and very low in vegetables and roughage. That would have health consequences in the long term, I’m sure. I did supplement with multivitamins and calcium chews on the road, for what that’s worth.
2. Prepare on the Hills
In Marin County, where I live, if you can’t do hills, you can’t get out of your neighborhood. The Marin landscape is all hills. Every 50 mile loop you can create will have thousands of feet of climbing. Marin’s Mt. Tamalpais (2600 ft) is one of the tallest mountains along the California coast and I rode up it as often as I could. Riding a Marin mile gives you more exercise than miles in most other parts of the country. I had been worried about getting over the Rockies with their snowy peaks and elevations of over 10,000 feet. “Gotta get over the Rockies” became a mantra on my training rides (as well as motivation to lose all possible body fat). In retrospect, I was over-prepared. In the first place, the highest elevation on the trip was going over the Continental Divide (7,200 ft). Secondly, you start the mountain climbs a base that may be already 4,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level. (Why don’t people ever talk about that?) And lastly, all the roads I took up the mountains had lower grades than what I had gotten myself used to. I estimate 6-8 per cent grade while at home long stretches of 10 per cent are not uncommon. So while I wouldn’t say getting over the Rockies was a walk in the park, it was not the challenge I was expecting
3. Regulate with a Heart Rate Monitor
Bike racers will always train with a heart monitor (hrm) but rarely use them on road races. Therefore, I debated leaving mine at home. I’m SO glad I didn’t. My heart rate monitor (hrm) allowed me to regulate my intensity throughout the ride the same way it did during my training. I could determine my maximum sustainable heart rate in the morning and on a good day, I could stay within 5 beats of it the rest of the day. On hills, I might go above by 10-20 bpm but the higher intensity on hills is also something I can maintain. Using the hrm let me know when I was overdoing it, such as when I tried to latch on to a paceline that was going too fast. It also kept me from slacking on descents and flats with the wind on my back. On a few days where there was a mighty tailwind, I could easily do 20 mph but because of my hrm, I could fly at 24 to 26 mph.
4. Get Low and Narrow
I try to use every trick to cheat the wind. I position my handle bars as low almost as low as they will go which keeps my head low and my chest out of the wind. With headwinds, I ride with my hands close to the center of the bars and elbows tucked in reducing my frontal projected area even further. I can gain 1 to 1.5 miles per hour this way. I figure that is free speed.
5. Downtowns are Dying
The route I took across the country took me through countless small towns. The picturesque, thriving towns were few and far between. Much more common were towns with boarded up windows and stores with “Closed” signs. Sometimes, entire downtowns were deserted. I joked about them being neutron bomb test sites but it was sad to think so much of America could have been abandoned. The heartland of Norman Rockwell with pies cooling on the windowsills, swimming holes and country stores with pickle barrels has all but gone out of existence. Yes, there are more Wal-Mart's and strip malls but they don’t make up for all the stores and businesses gone under.
6. Carry One Additional Layer
The Weather Channel lies. Days that have not a drop of rain on the Doppler will have sudden flash thunderstorms. A day with a high of 90 degrees could have a mountain top that is forever in cold fog. I reserve one jersey pocket for one additional layer, either a wind vest or a rain jacket that will keep the weather from ruining my day.
7. Thick Heavy Tires
Forget light, expensive racing tires. When riding across the country, you’re better off with thick, cheap tires. And fill them all the way up to the maximum recommended pressures to avoid pinch flats. I got only 5 punctures. I used one pair of Specialized Armadillo tires for the whole ride. They certainly have my personal endorsement.
8. This Can be One Boring Country
I never thought I could fall asleep while riding my bike. I came close on this trip. Another cyclist told me he had fallen asleep and ran into a cornfield. Everyone thinks that this country has beautiful sights—and it does. There’s the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and lots of others. But in-between those points are long, straight featureless roads and a sameness of surroundings that can stretch for hours. Do you remember being bored out of your mind taking interstate rides in the family station wagon? It’s worse. It takes even longer on a bike and you can’t even make faces at cars behind you.
Now don’t get me wrong. I did find enough beauty to warrant almost a thousand photos. There were great mountains, flowers, rock formations and the like. I’ll remember the waves in the wheat fields and the treeless deserts. But there were whole days that didn’t warrant my camera to be turned on. One day’s wheat field looked like the next, and so on. The straight roads flat smooth roads through Arizona and New Mexico made me feel like I was pedaling without progress as if I was on a stationery bike against a big diorama.
9. Take Time to Dwell
In terms of personal journeys, this was an epic one. Though many days I was in a hurry to get through the ride and end up in the hotel, I knew I would regret not stopping enough times and enjoying the journey. Many historical sites were ignored. Dozens of curious locals were not talked to. Even a quaint bike museum was given short shrift. While the goal of this particular trip was to get across the USA in the minimum amount of days, I would advise others to take a few more days and dwell on the unique and interesting sites as well as meet people along the way.
10. Know When You’re Done
Unless you are a die-hard adventurer, riding your bike across the Unites States is a signature, memorable and life-defining trip. You don’t need to do it again, do it with a different route, go around the world, do it on a unicycle, etc. You are done. Remember, you just took a lot of time off: time off work, time away from your family and/or loved ones. That’s not including all the time you took to train for this, which is probably equal to the trip itself. Now that is a lot of debt you have incurred. If your job or family and loved ones don’t mind you being away for all this time, you have other problems to consider. But if you were missed, keep in mind that the only reason you could take a whole month off go away to do your own thing was because every body indulged you. To put it very bluntly, they catered to your selfish interest. You have to make it up. Coming back from this ride and telling people you’d now like to plan for Mt Everest is not going to make you very popular.
