Fuel Your Ride

Athletes know that proper nutrition is important, but finding the right balance can be complicated. Fuel Your Ride is a comprehensive guide to performance nutrition for cyclists and provides all the tools you need to customize a unique nutrition plan to achieve maximum performance. This book teaches riders everything from what to eat on race day to avoid the dreaded bonk to how to lose weight while consuming enough nutrients and power hard training rides. Fuel Your Ride combines the expert advice of numerous nutritionists, coaches, and professional cyclists to present a simple, clean, and whole foods approach to eating complete with easy-to-follow recipes that include delicious and nutritious vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options. In addition to chapters on in-exercise food and hydration, supplements, and weight loss, special attention is placed on what to eat and the best time to eat, taking into account the different nutritional requirements for training rides, race performance, and recovery. Fuel Your Ride provides cyclists with the comprehensive nutritional information you need to efficiently power your rides and perform at your very best.

Molly Hurford has taken her years of experience, both as an athlete and a journalist, to create a comprehensive, easy to follow, no BS guide for fueling the cyclist. Merging this experience with the expertise of dietician Nanci Guest makes this a go-to guide for any cyclist looking to improve their overall nutrition and fueling for performance.
- Stacy Sims, MSc, PhD, Exercise Physiologist-Nutrition Scientist

"As a mountain bike racer who loves to eat, I know first-hand how much of an impact nutrition has on training and racing performance. But as this terrific book illustrates nutrition doesn't have to be boring. If you want to feel great, ride fast and avoid the bonk, this is the book for you.”
- Evan Guthrie, Pro Mountain Biker for Norco Factory Racing in Canada

"Whether you've been riding bikes your whole life or are just getting started, this book has so much high quality digestible information about how to improve your overall diet for a better ride and a better life! If ever a nutrition book could be described as a riveting page turner, Molly Hurford has done it with Fuel Your Ride."
- Olivia Dillon, Pro Road Cyclist

Auteur

Molly Hurford is a writer-at-large for Bicycling magazine and a level 3 coach with USA cycling. Prior to working with Bicycling, Molly was an editor at Cyclocross Magazine. She lives primarily on the East Coast but spends most of her time on the road chasing races and good cycling weather.

Nanci Guest, MSc, RD, CSCS, is a registered dietitian with both the Ontario and BC College of Dietitians. She is a certified personal trainer and certified strength and conditioning specialist, was the director of sport nutrition and head dietitian for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, and is the current dietitian for the Pan Am games. She lives in Toronto.

Échantillon de lecture
CHAPTER ONE

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

N utrition doesn't start on the bike. Every single person--racers, nutritionists, and coaches--I talked to said this over and over, so it's worth repeating. On your race day, or that epic endurance ride you have marked on your calendar, your breakfast and ride fuel are only a small part of the equation. How you've been eating for the past few months plays a huge role, not just in body composition, but in how you digest, how you use energy, and how you perform. You wouldn't start training the morning of a race, would you? So why should your nutrition start then?

The first thing we want to focus on is where we are now. Without knowing how well (or poorly) you're eating, it's hard to know what to tweak to fix your diet. And when it comes to macronutrient breakdown, most people are surprised by what the breakdown actually looks like for their daily diets. Hint: Carbohydrates and fat sneak in more often than you think, whether you cook a lot at home or eat at restaurants for every meal.

What is a macronutrient? Macronutrients make up our food, and the big three are fat, protein, and carbohydrates. They work together to keep our bodies running. Carbohydrates fill up glycogen stores so we have energy to function and to ride; fat provides energy as well and helps to protect our cells and dissolve certain vitamins, while protein builds and repairs muscle--not just bodybuilder muscle, cyclist muscle, too.

In the next three chapters, we're breaking down these three into bite-size pieces (pun emphatically intended) so you know just how much of each to eat, the best time to eat each one, and the best options in each. Macronutrients aren't created equal; there are good and bad fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Let's get started so we can cut out the bad and begin focusing on the good.

YOUR BEST BIKE BODY

This is the big question for cyclists. What the heck is a bike body anyway? Is it one where your quads are so huge that you need specially tailored jeans to fit over your bulging muscles, or is it one so slender that even the tightest of skinny jeans are sagging off of your thin frame? Unfortunately, there's no one right answer, and like much of nutrition, it's all about the individual, as Smart Athlete coach (and slim but reasonably muscular elite racer) Peter Glassford explains.

"It's a complicated question--it depends on the sport you want to participate in," he admits. "There are a bunch of different sports within cycling, from ultra-endurance road cycling to multiday stage events to a track cycling event that may only last a couple of minutes. So there is a wide range of body types in cycling, not just skinny arms and huge legs."

Thank goodness.

But there are a few generalities that he shares.

Road Cycling: A road cyclist will typically be leaner, with not much muscle, low body fat, and much less upper body strength. Keeping weight low is even more important when you're doing more hilly rides and races versus flatter criterium races--to be successful, you have to watch out and keep weight low and muscle to a minimum. Not that strength training or consuming protein is bad, but you don't want to overconsume protein or do activities that tend to bulk up the upper body.

Mountain Biking: For mountain biking, on the other hand, you need a bit more muscle and upper body strength to navigate the varied terrain. It is common to see a mountain biker with a little more weight than your average road cyclist.

Track Cycling: This one is pretty variable, but generally, you'll see a more muscular sprinter body, similar to a running sprinter. It's very much power based, so having more muscle in the legs is key. They tend to be a bit bigger, but still pretty lean.

Glassford adds that when it comes to women, while the body types are similar to those we just described, there's a higher tendency toward outliers in the field. Just look at a women's professional field, and you'll see what he means. Tall, short, muscular, slender--there are so many different body types that can fit the winning bill for professional women's cycling. Even among the women interviewed for this book, there are huge discrepancies. "You see a much wider variation than you do in the men in terms of body types," Glassford says, and he's completely right.

But that just leads to the next point. Ride and eat right and your ideal cycling body type will find you. You can't change your DNA, but you can make your body most effective by--no surprise here--doing what you want it to do, and gradually letting it change. You wouldn't lift Olympic weights to get ready for a marathon, so why would you push heavy gears on the track if you're hoping to be a climbing specialist on the road?

"The sport takes care of it--whatever discipline you do the most of is how your body will start to develo…