-Sauteed sweet & red potatoes, oatmeal with raisins and honey, an egg, banana and coffee make for a pretty delicious, healthy pre-race meal. Not totally Paleo, but you gotta make exceptions when things like glycogen loading are on the line.
-Speaking of coffee, I had an epiphany during today’s race. I’m way too anxious and tense during the first hour or so of my races, and my habit of downing 12 oz. of french press en route to getting a triple shot espresso at the local coffee joint a couple blocks from my apartment are by no means helping that, and most definitely aggravating it. When it comes to performance enhancement, caffeine is one of the most tested, most reputable and most legal (unless you eat a box of No Doz) substances out there. I can honestly say I have less respect for bike racing amigos who can’t get down with a good espresso, or object to meeting at a coffee shop pre-training ride.
But my pre-race coffee binging habits most certainly result in a bunch of chaos, tension, horse-pissing (and subsequent sore bladders) and anxiety. Case in point – after downing that triple shot, I freaked out and packed half of my apartment inside a messenger bag to take to the race. Then, while airing up my tires, I pulled the valve stem right out of the tube – resulting in an instant-flat. When we made finished the drive to Sublimity, OR, I had to pee so bad I could barely walk. And when it came to race time, well, I couldn’t relax for the first half the way I like to on a good hill climb.
Luckily, I’m not considering quitting caffeine ingestion. The solution, instead, lies in drinking green tea.
Green tea, you say? Isn’t caffeine the same no matter the source? Not necessarily. The caffeine in tea is accompanied by a neat little amino acid called L-theanine. According to always-correct Wikipedia.com, reduces skip”mental and physical stress, and improves cognition and mood in a synergistic manner with caffeine.” In my (and other tea enthusiasts) experience, it’s the central reason why green tea doesn’t bring on the jitters like a good cup or three of coffee does. In any case, I usually shift between coffee and green tea in my daily life so as not to give my body a break from the shock of back-to-back espresso shots. In the future, I resolve to ditch the coffee before racing, and taper caffeine consumption a little bit in the days before.
-Racing is a hell of a lot more fun when people aren’t crashing. I don’t think there was a single crash in any of the fields today (although I could be wrong – an ambulance was seen near the parking lot at one point), and the cat 3 field didn’t have any close calls to boot. In addition, we weren’t riding like a bunch of first time races, and there was no accordion effect in the pack.
-I keep forgetting it, but holy shit, I am a salty sweater. When I can remember to put some sea salt in my water bottles (in addition to other electrolytes), I don’t cramp. When I forget – game over. I cramped bad near the end of the race, and nearly didn’t finish. A teammate handing me his Gatorade provided near-instant relief and kept me in the game to the finish line.
-Climbing is a slow, grueling test of mental character, physical strength, body weight and slow twitch muscle fiber. Sprinting, on the other hand, doesn’t discriminate by weight, doesn’t start hurting until you approach the 500m mark or have to repeat the performance 5 times in a race, and doesn’t give quite the same puke-in-your-mouth feeling that climbing does (unless, of course, you do a kilo TT on the track). Climbing is for the most part very safe in a race situation, with the worst thing to go wrong generally being an overlapped wheel and resulting 8mph crash, but a sprint gone awry can damn near kill you. I love the meditative aspect of climbing by myself in the rain, but I love the cocaine rush of a good mass sprint where everything goes right even more. For this reason, I can’t wait for the sprinter’s races to begin.
-Vodka and beer is definitely a good idea after a race. I bet you don’t see that shit after swim meets or cross country competitions. Thanks, S and A, for generously getting me buzzed off your post-race refreshments. The sun, drinks and crowd heckling really topped off my day after some quality road racing.
-No matter how hard you try, you will not satisfy the inevitable post-race raging hunger pangs. I don’t care how many 1/2lb. burgers you down afterwards, that raging hunger will swiftly return in a matter of hours with an even worse vengeance.
-Pro-tip on post-workout recovery food: it’s really, really hard to beat the sweet potato on a nutrition level. If you bake the shit out of it, it’s sky high on the glycemic index (which is exactly what you want after a hard workout), pretty loaded with vitamins/minerals/antioxidants and damn tasty with some sweet soy sauce and/or Sri Racha. Don’t forget to pair it with a fat source so that your body absorbs the beta carotene.
