So I just recovered from being sick, The Open was finished and this weekend was the first local Mountain bike race, and better yet the weather was going to be nice. The weather actually turned out to be the best day we've had so far this month!
Since I need time in on the bike, I decided I would race the Marathon category, which is a 4 to 4.5 hour race, in total I ended up riding 5 hours, with a practice/warm-up lap. Overall my performance was good, I rode harder than I thought I would be able to for 3 hours and then for the last 1.5 my legs cramped up and I went into survival mode just to keep moving, not a great finish, but I was glad to find out what my legs could do and where I was at for the year. I was actually really happy with how I performed.
Sadly I revereted back to sugar gel packs and drinks for this race, I do have Paleo recipes to replace these, but I just wasn't organized enough to get everything ready this week. I will be posting in the future as I switch to all Paleo nutrition on-the-bike!
I expected to be hungry after the race, but my hunger was uncontrollable! I'm talking ridiculously uncontrollable. I would eat until I was full, then an hour later I would eat until I was full again and so on, I did this for several days and it was frustrating because I knew I was overeating, but why, and how come I couldn't stop?
Despite gaining weight by the day, the good part is that this pattern is identical to what happened after the indoor tri, (although much more severe) Wow! I'm an engineer and it's a good thing being able to identify a repeatable pattern, especially when you have somewhere you can go to help identify and fix it: I immediately went to the PIB VIP group on Facebook and posted this problem.
I got some good responses, and even more awesome I got a direct response from Justin via video blog, he had been getting a lot of endurance questions recently, and with my question, he decided it was time to post a capture-all response.
To put it simply, I wasn't eating enough carbs, seems way too simple, but there was no way I would have been able to identify this myself. It was now about 4 days after the race and I was still suffering the constant eating, although perhaps a bit less frequently, so I decided I would go home and eat some carbs, better late than never. Here's the response I posted to the group after doing so:
I don't think I need to say anymore! Only real bummer is that I wish I could have identified this issue the week after the Indoor Triathlon. Then I could have made a lot more progress in the second half of the challenge. Now I'm only days away from the end of the challenge, my performance has flat lined and I've gained back a couple pounds. Even with the anti-progress, I'm still way ahead of where I was at for the start of the challenge, but I really wanted to post some amazing results and win this thing!
That's the competitor in me speaking, stepping back and looking at the big picture, this discovery is monumental! "revolutionary" as I quoted above, this unlocks my future potential and looking at the long term, I now have all the puzzle pieces figured out to apply the PIB system to Endurance Cycling which is my primary sport/hobby/passion! Sure I would like to have won the AMFAT challenge (and who knows maybe I still will), but this knowledge is a far bigger prize!
Just for the sake of arguement, lets say I hadn't figured this out and did win the challenge, that actually would have been really bad, a great short term battle won for sure, but I would have lost the war... In that scenario I would never have even known I had lost the war. That is what makes this discovery so great, it was something that I didn't even know I needed to figure out!
So for the rest of week (after eating lots more carbs), I was feeling better by the day, but was I still drained for my benchmark WOD's, so they are nothing to get excited about for performance gains. Well, actually I've made a lot of performance gains, but they are just not apparent in the benchmarks. So stay tuned, I'll be posting my final essay for the Competition soon!
The essay I wrote is like a term paper, quite a few pages, graphs, pictures, and lots of pictures (yes, before and after photos)!
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