Potatos are as effective as carbohydrate gels for prolonged cycling performance
physiology.org
physiology.org
Last time I rode, about 10 years ago, they were still going like hotcakes. They keep rotating out the sports drink of the year, but I swear: all a body needs for endurance cycling is water, boiled taters, and bananas.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191018125512.h...
No thank you.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/cooling-resistant-starc...
Well, that and a generous helping of Michele Ferrari's special vitamins.
Food prior to very long endurance Activites is good to stop the gastrointestinal events during the event. So I do agree with the benefits there however gels unlike solid food better absorb and replenish carbohydrate stores so you can maintain higher/intense efforts for longer. Otherwise you could "bonk". But yeah... It all depends on the activity, duration, intensity , pre-training and food consption etc...
I race/ride bikes as well. So 250-300mi or 15hr each week on the bike( more if I didn't have a day job).
I went from having my GP threatening to put me on Crestor to asking for blood work every month for a while to accepting it was working and probably not going to be the death of me. Apparently dietary cholesterol doesn't really affect blood level.
I'm not an athlete, but I do about 10 miles a day. Nothing special.
(As far as I know it's a total nonsense myth that eating food before swimming is dangerous. We frequently at large meals before practice and nobody ever cramped up and drowned. But from a performance standpoint in a race, having an empty stomach seemed beneficial.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liCRrheKIOI
Finishing a 70.3 on plain water is just about feasible if you're not particularly fast, but a reasonably quick amateur is going to end up bonking in spectacular fashion, let alone an elite athlete.
Yet all that carb horrors are lies.
What’s your bodily complaint that makes this difficult?
But you can do both. Water for everything up to a longer (but not the longest) Sunday ride, carbs for multi-day (you won't replenish glycogen in one night), for true all day riding and for the occasional short all out competition.
What you can't do is run on water all the time, then suddenly add carbs and expect it to work out well: when I started venturing beyond my "water only horizon" (which was more like three hours at the time) it felt very much as if the body would shut down all other energy paths once carbs were available and won't be able to restore them once the carbs run out and then you need to refuel as fast as a carbs-only athlete and that's just impossible for someone used to water.
Now I think that a more accurate model is that when carbs become available, an athlete not used to that will increase energy throughput by more than what the extra carbs can supply and exhaust the other sources during the sugar high. After that it is impossible to apply carbs fast enough to compensate. But avoiding overexertion during the sugar high is easy to learn and then you are an energy generalist, going for hours when water will be enough and adding some carbs on those special occasions.
How do you prep beforehand?
In practice, eating savory carbs is great for the first half of a long ride. But when you’re riding 100-200km, you get so tired of eating.
I typically eat solids foods for the first 70k or so. But after that, when you’re eating every 20 to 30 minutes, you just don’t want to eat.
That’s when you turn to gels and things that are small and packed with carbs.
Relying on just solid foods is not feasible for those long distance rides.
However, you can’t just rely only on gels and sugary stuff either.
Yesterday I rode 150km with 3000 meters of climbing. My friend and I had a small breakfast of local food before hitting the road. Started eating at about 35k in, because we climbed a thousand meters at that point.
During the course of the ride I had two bananas, two sticks of Yokan, and an SIS energy gel. We also grabbed a quick bite at 7 of a fantuan. But the majority of the ride was sweeter carbs to keep going.
I wanted to puke after forcing down that last yokan before the final climb. My friend and I wanted nothing with sugar after that ride.
The point being, there’s a fine balance that has to be made for the long rides. Food is important, and I’m experimenting with different recipes for the savory foods throughout the first half of a long ride.
We didn’t have this fancy stuff. And honestly for a couple days of touring? Autocannibalization isn’t that bad. Post rehydration, I think the worst I ever lost was three pounds, and I’ll bet half of that was still water weight. A deficit of 5,000 calories isn’t gonna kill you.
Gels are great for the last 1/3 to half of the ride though. Straight energy and easy to take in. But even so, I have had gels that made my stomach feel like ass during the ride, so I tend to stick to SIS gels. They're the mildest, packed with carbs for the size, and dont have any coloring.
That study was paid for by the California Raisin Marketing Board. I wonder if this one is paid for by a potato group or they had a more neutral source of funding.
Then, I think it was a few days in I'd been just downing pure carbs, was in the middle of nowhere on the bike and started rapidly feeling deeply unwell: zero energy, brain fog, heart racing, felt like I was about to vomit and then die.
Pulled off to the side of the road and somehow the thought came to me "... electrolytes?"
Luckily I had a small packet of electrolyte powder which I mixed with a tiny bit of water and downed. Recovered almost immediately.
Just an FYI - relying on carbs alone only lasts for so long.
You NEED vitamin C to breakdown complex carbs.
You can actually survive WITHOUT vit C if you eat only meat. If you were eating a ton of carbs but not also supplementing Vit C you probably drained yourself of it.
And from the looks of it, yes.
>(VO2PEAK)of 60.7 ± 9.0
No fkin way you're doing a credible comparison with >10% VO2s. And I very much doubt the sanity of anyone that thinks this is comparable.
Gels and drinks are used in part because they rapidly deliver glucose, but also because they're highly digestible when you're a) working at the limit and b) consuming vast amounts of energy. A rider in the Tour de France will typically consume over 6,000 kilocalories per day and still lose a substantial amount of weight over the course of the race; to replace their calorie intake from energy gels and bars, they'd need to eat several kilos of potatoes.
Agreed on the ease of packing. You'll still need additional water to wash them down, though. On the other hand, although potatoes are mostly water, you might need to drink some more in order to swallow them.
But in all seriousness, barfing will happen more to certain people; but almost always after they stress their body out more than it’s used to.
It's a scientific study about the potency of potatoes for a use case, not some one-liner advice for someone on the internet to dismiss with a snarky BS comment, and then add a condescending and incredulous "ok", as if he, in all the 2 seconds that thought about it, knows better...
The information could also be used to make new gels based on potatoes...
I have to go file some trademarks!