Written by Christopher Kelly
July 24, 2016
[00:00:00]
Chris: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name’s Christopher Kelly and today I’m joined by my beautiful wife, food scientist, colleague, Julie. Hi, Julie.
Julie: Hi, how are you?
Chris: We are just back from the BC bike race which is a seven-day stage race mountain bike race in Canada and we thought we’d record this podcast to talk a bit about how we survived that, how we got on, all the things that you did to make that happen. I’m looking at Julie as I speak because I think Julie did a lot of work to make that race happen for me as well as it did and it did go really well. For those of you who don’t know British Columbia in Canada, it’s a wet environment, it’s a rainforest environment. The training that I did in dry northern California perhaps wasn’t as appropriate as possible.
Julie: We probably should’ve spent the winter in England.
Chris: Yeah, we probably should’ve spent the winter in England. It does remind me a little bit of the riding in Wales actually, it’s very rocky, it’s very rooty, it’s very wet, it rained every day. It was definitely a difficult race. We traveled there by road, we drove in our VW Eurovan, the three of us including our two and a half year old daughter so that was fun and interesting. I think it was a very good experience for her wasn’t it, she’s definitely not shy.
Julie: No, she’s very precocious, she’s very outgoing, and she literally wants to talk to everyone all the time.
Chris: Which is really fun. But our diet didn’t change at all for the duration of the trip which was three weeks in total, which I thought was quite incredible and perhaps necessary. But why don’t we start by talking about how you went about deciding what we were going to eat during that trip and the shopping that you did.
Julie: Yeah, I mean think even before that, it’s important to point out that, while this is the event we were tackling, I think this podcast largely applies to anyone who is thinking about how to take your new lifestyle on the road. Whether that be traveling, if you travel a lot for work or traveling because you want to do some kind of endurance event and you’re going to need to make some sacrifices or some changes in order to keep going with this new lifestyle that you’ve started and I hope that this is just encouraging to you to know that you’re not crazy if you kind of go out of your way to maintain your lifestyle as you travel and take on these endeavors.
So yeah, for shopping when I was thinking about this event, I had the trump card of the fact that we’d done the race before. So we did the race before, so we did it three years ago when I was pregnant with Ivy, about seven months pregnant with Ivy. So I had a little bit of knowledge of kind of what the day to day would be like and what we would have access to so that was definitely helpful, but I did do a little bit more research this time just in terms of kind of where the route was going, what was around if there were shops that kind of thing just to get my bearings in terms of what I would need on the way there mostly.
So once we were through Oregon and Washington I knew we would be OK because I’d done that route before. So that was where I started was looking at what would be available to me and figuring out how much I wanted to bring with us so we decided to take, allow four to five days to get to Canada because we’re driving with our two and half year old, and as you may or may not know, they have about a two and half hour limit of how long they’ll sit in the car before they need to get out and do something else at least for a little while. So I broke it up into chunks, I measured out the length of time each day and really I just looked at number of meals.
I just looked at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and planned accordingly. And because I knew we had four to five days, that’s the amount of food that I brought. Mostly meat, protein sources was what I brought the most of, and then vegetables, fresh produce I brought enough to get us through about two and a half to three days.
Chris: Maybe we should describe our diet and that people a better idea of the types of foods that we brought with us. So my diet is a little bit different from the girls. I’ve been eating a very high fat, high fiber I think is important to point out, so lots of vegetables, moderate protein, very low carbohydrate as in sugars and starches diet and that’s been working really well for me on the bike in terms of training and I think it went quite well for me with the racing. So the vast majority of my energy is coming from the fats that we eat and some people say the key to diet is impossible to travel with or difficult to implement and I think we’ve just shown that that’s not actually the case. In some respects, the diet is extremely efficient in that you can carry a great deal of calories. I’m on the bike for three and half hours every day and that requires a huge amount of energy and that is a very efficient storage form of energy. Talk about the shopping that you did ahead of time ‘cause you did quite a lot of shopping before you left.
Julie: Yeah and we’ll link to, I prepared a couple of videos. I did one right before we left that kind of showed what I did to prepare before we left mostly the tools that I used but you get a sense of the food that I brought along. And there’s another video too that I made before we went to Iceland that could be useful to watch because it is a very similar preparation style. But yeah, I purchased, let’s see if I can even recall everything, I purchased a large seven bone chuck roast. It was six pounds, so I pressure cooked that and I made enough so that I would have three vacuum-sealed meals.
[00:05:40]
Chris: So this is the secret weapon, I’ll interrupt you there, the vacuum sealer. I’ll link to this in the show notes. It’s a relatively inexpensive.
Julie: It was $80.
Chris: $80 electrical device that vacuum seals plastic bags so you can prepare food ahead of time using the pressure cooker or other means and then vacuum seal it into these bags. And then, does it require refrigeration once you’ve cooked?
Julie: Yeah, so you want to refrigerate it or freeze it, so that was the other thing that I did. So I pre-prepared some meals and I froze a couple and I left a couple unfrozen, and the idea behind that was anything that was frozen was just going to help everything in the cooler stay cold and it would last beyond those first five days that we were traveling and then the things that were not frozen and were just refrigerated we could eat during that week of travel.
Chris: So we do have a refrigerator in the Eurovan but we don’t ever use and it doesn’t work very well. In fact it only works when it’s well connected to electricity which is not very often and so we just keep a cooler, a regular cooler, just a cheap cooler, I don’t even know where we got it.
Julie: Just a Coleman.
Chris: Just a Coleman cooler in the van and obviously anywhere you stop for gas you can get ice and we’ll just throw a bag of ice in there occasionally and I doubt that keeps the food as cold as a refrigerator but it keeps it cold enough.
Julie: It does and especially, I think I used more ice last time because I didn’t have the frozen food in there but this time there was so much frozen food in there that I think the ice plus the frozen food, I mean it stayed frozen all the way to Canada so that was good. And then I let it defrost naturally because we wanted to eat it so that worked out pretty perfectly having kind of half and half frozen. So the other thing that I made ahead of time was a large frittata, so like a large quiche, which I think I demonstrated before, I think I made it in muffin tons last time but that’s a great thing just to grab a couple pieces of for breakfast or a snack so I made that. I also made pulled pork, yeah so we had pulled pork. So we had either stew or we had pulled pork, or we had quiche to kind of eat for whichever meal we wanted throughout the first week of driving.
Chris: And it’s so easy, especially first thing in the morning, when you don’t have as much time, you can just take one of these vacuum-sealed bags, cut it open.
Julie: And warm it up.
Chris: And then warm it up. So we have a very small two-burner gas stove in the Eurovan that works really, really well. There’s a propane tank actually in the van and it lasts indefinitely, and of course if you didn’t have the Eurovan you could do exactly the same thing with just a regular camp stove and that would work really well.
Julie: And the goal of the first week was we wanted to optimize our driving time, so I didn’t want to spend a ton of time chopping, prepping, and cooking in the van because if we stopped I wanted to just quickly warm something up and eat it. So the other thing I did was I pre-chopped a lot of vegetables, so just in little packs, and I also froze a few of those and then I left a few of them fresh. So I blanched some green beans and I vacuum-sealed those, I chopped some zucchini and I vacuum-sealed those, I also did some bell peppers and some onions. So the only thing that wasn’t chopped was maybe some greens and some salad greens and all I had to do was tear those with my hands to throw those into the pan.
So literally when we stopped and we wanted to have maybe dinner for example, we stopped at a truck stop for dinner one time and I just had to get out the pan and throw in some oil, I think it was coconut oil, and I fried up some of the vegetables and then added the meat on top of it and let that get warm and I served it over greens and that took us maybe ten minutes and then we could eat and get back on the road without compromising anything. It was exactly like a meal we would have at home but it was just very convenient, and I always kick myself when I do this because I’m thinking, I should do this more at home because it saves so much time.
Chris: It does save so much, the food almost becomes something you don’t really need to think about at that stage.
Julie: The downside is the plastic, it is a lot of plastic which is a bummer and I haven’t really haven’t found a way around that. I definitely bring a few glass jars to store leftovers in and at home I only use glass, so I guess this is where I draw the line in terms of compromise. Also I always put things into the vacuum-sealed bags when they’re warm or cool, not when they’re hot, so that’s the biggest compromise I guess is the plastic that you have to use to vacuum seal.
[00:09:58]
Chris: And then you also did the same for bone broth, you made a huge batch of bone broth.
Julie: I made two batches of bone broth. I had two chicken carcasses frozen. So I used those with a lot of vegetables and some extra chicken feet. I made two batches of bone broth, I cooled them.
Chris: Did you actually refrigerate before you sealed them?
Julie: One of them I actually refrigerated because I made it after the first one. The first one I just let cool and then I put it in and the second one was refrigerated overnight and then I divided it in. So I put these into like individual seals so I had really small pouches, so these were like serving size portions of broth that Chris could warm up in the morning. So he drinks it more typically than Ivy and I do for breakfast. Although I did make a few bigger bags that we could all share.
Chris: And I loved that. That lasted us a long time.
Julie: It did, it lasted us through the whole race. You had that for breakfast almost every day plus the race. So that was two weeks of bone broth that I made, I think there were almost twenty packets of bone broth. And I froze most of that except for the four or five days’ worth. So I just let it defrost slowly so it was ready. So that worked out really, really well.
Chris: And that was just fantastic. We didn’t really eat out at all.
Julie: I went to Whole Foods a lot in Vancouver because we were staying in North Vancouver with friends because it was close by but once we were in the sunshine coast and we were really traveling around, I relied just on regular grocery stores and markets.
Chris: And then we had a lot of protein with us, especially the wild planet sardines and olive oil, and I’ll link to that in the show notes because those have become a staple. I eat one of those pretty much every day.
Julie: And Ivy loves them too.
Chris: And Ivy loves them too. I mean one day we had those for breakfast and I just cracked open the can, poured out a little bit of the olive oil out. Replaced the olive oil with vinegar, so you’ve got a salad dressing in there and the two of us ate a can each.
Julie: That was a day we were really low on food.
Chris: We were really low on food.
Julie: It was one of the last days.
Chris: So that was really great. And the coconut oil, coconut butter I should say, was good as well. I ate quite a lot of that, I should link to that too. And also the U.S. wellness meats, we bought some of those frozen.
Julie: I think we ended up with one and half leftover.
Chris: But for those of you don’t know the U.S. wellness meats, they make the organ meats, organ meat sausages, but you would never know it was organ meat in there.
Julie: They taste like hot dogs.
Chris: They just taste like hot dogs. They’re really, really good and Ivy loves them, I love them. I eat them nearly every day, and I highly recommend those to everyone.
[00:15:38]
Julie: So that was a good rundown basically of the snacks that we brought. I also brought several packages of pork rinds from U.S. wellness meats.
Chris: It’s kind of a treat, we’re not sure about anything, especially deep fried protein, so we eat those for taste and are bored in the van, rather than something satisfying a demand for energy.
Julie: Yeah, we also brought a lot of trail mix for Ivy because she really enjoys that. I also brought her a few Epic bars, that’s another kind of travel treat only thing she gets once in a while. That’s a really easy protein I can throw in her snack box.
Chris: I’ll link to those as well. The race itself, I’ve done this race once before and I think I did better last time.
Julie: It’s so hard to say.
Chris: It’s so hard to say, so many things changed. So I did the race in 2013 and I finished 15th over. And I’m pretty sure they opened up some more spots so there’s 600 people in the race this year.
Julie: There were 500 the year you did it.
Chris: You think there were 500, OK. So I came 29th overall this year but a lot of things have changed. So in 2013, the race was my primary focus from probably December through to July which is when I did the race, so the date hasn’t changed. In 2013 I did nearly 400 hours of training which works out to about 14 hours per week average. And that’s just time on the bike, that doesn’t include strength training I was doing quite a lot then. And then later on I discovered James Wilson’s programs which includes TRX and kettle bouts and I seemed to get really good results with those, so a lot of training.
This year I did 270 hours of training in the same period, so that’s just under ten hours per week, and that represents a 32% decrease in training time, and I still came to 29th overall. I was very functional. There was one day in particular in 2013, I think it was either the third or the fourth day, and I remember this being the most tired and conscious I’ve ever been in my life, and our friend Chad came to the van and said, OK the race starts in 30 minutes are you going to get out of bed now? And as someone who’s suffered from insomnia their whole life, like still being in bed like 30 minutes before a bike race was just unthinkable to me.
Julie: Yeah, I was really worried when he decided to go ride because I thought something was really wrong with him. And I’ve never known him to sleep past 4 a.m.
Chris: Well, I did manage to get my kit on and I turned up at the start line. There was definitely a lot less pressure to get to the start line. There was more people. Once you’ve done the first day, they seed you, so you have a color-coded dot on your number plate that means you can rock straight up to the start if you finished fast in the first race. And I can remember looking down at my resting heart rate and it was 36 beats and that’s really low for me, it doesn’t normally go that low, it doesn’t normally go that low anymore. And I don’t think I got my heart rate above 140 beats throughout the whole three and a half hours of the race that day. And now I feel like I can’t do anything without getting my heart rate above 140 beats. And in the first two days, I actually averaged greater than 162 beats which is zone five for me for two hours. And I think that experience from 2013 made me a little bit gun-shy so doing a stage race, racing every day for three hours is very different from just showing up one weekend doing one race and then having the rest of two weeks to recover. And so that was definitely in the back of my mind and I don’t think I went quite as hard for that reason.
[00:23:11]
Julie: It was also a huge change in weather. So the first year we did we got so lucky and it was sunny the whole time and this year it rained every day.
Chris: I’ve not ridden a mountain bike in that rain since I left the UK. So probably 15 years since I’ve ridden a mountain bike really in the rain at all. And it does rain here in northern California but people tend not to ride or at least I tend not to ride when it rains and that helps the trails, they get quite messed up if you ride when it’s very wet. Whereas in British Columbia, the trails, I think more effort goes into building them because it’s a rainforest and it rains all the time, they go to great lengths to make that the trails drain properly, so that the rain doesn’t affect the riding as much as you think, but having said that, on the first day it was really raining.
And when we hit the first single track it was really sloppy and it was really hilarious. All the local guys were not too bothered by the mud but everyone else and I’d say that’s most people, a lot of guys from Europe and all over the rest of the world, I think 36 countries are represented in this bike race. They’re all panicking as their front wheel disappears up to the axle in sloppy mud and you’ve got to kind of pull it up again to get it over the next root as you descend down the single track and it was a mess. And I’m glad that I was near the front because I’m sure it just got uglier as you got near the back of the field.
Julie: I think what I get asked a lot when I talk to athletes when we’re talking about food and nutrition is how you fueled, what did you eat, how did you get through this race?
Chris: That was interesting. So, my intention was to supplement with key tone salts, canna in particular, and I just didn’t want to do it on the day. And then I also brought soup starch and I just didn’t want it, I just didn’t want it. And I think this is because when you go to race you just want to do what you’ve been doing in training and if you intend to consume calories on the bike while you’re racing you should probably do that in training. And I’ve got to the point now where I never eat anything, even on the longest of rides and I feel just fine. And of course that’s what I wanted to do in the race and so I ended up consuming zero calories every day for all of the seven stages, so that’s a total 18 hours of racing on muddy single track and I didn’t consume a single calorie during that time.
And what else was strange was, because I’m not eating sugar, I don’t get thirsty, so I don’t need water either. And then in particular on the first day was two hours and forty five minutes and I didn’t touch my bottle of water so it came back completely full as I started. And I know I only consumed two liters of water total, so that’s four bottles over the entire 18 hours of racing, and I think this has got to be, I’m wondering whether an elite athlete if they were to take this approach, might be able to get a winning advantage from it because certainly it was an advantage for me, for not carrying that water, it’s heavy.
And then also there’s two aid stations on every single stage and I would just blow straight through them and you might have to work really, really hard to get back to your group if one of your guys didn’t stop at the aid station so I really think this was an advantage. And I also wondered the effects of not eating on gut health, so I can link to a study in the show notes for this episode that shows the exercise, especially the heat created by exercise. And consuming a whole bunch of calories during that time when you’re exercising is surely only going to exacerbate that problem. So, I think for that reason it may be an advantage not to eat. Having said that, there was one thing that really concerned me and that was the smell of my kit when I got back from the race which maybe you can describe better than me.
[00:28:05]
Julie: Oh god, I don’t know if I want to, I’m trying to forget it. When you got back it was just this. So the first time you did it there was also a smell which I cutely named the kitty smell because it just smelled like cat, you know when somebody has a cat it smells like the cat sprayed in there one or two times, that was the kitty smell. And it’s changed, it’s not like it used to be, now it’s kind of fishy and just kind of, and you were also really swampy so it was just raining every day. This is horrible.
Chris: In a Eurovan, can you imagine it, the three of us in this tiny little Eurovan. So there’s multiple things going on here. And this may not be surprising given my diet, I’m consuming so much of my energy from fats, so carnitine is required to metabolize those fats so that might be a reason why I need extra carnitine. So there’s a genetic component plus the supplementation but that’s somewhat unpleasant, but I can’t smell it all so it can’t be that strong.
Julie: Uh, that’s not true.
Chris: But perhaps, more concerning to me, was my kit smelled of ammonia.
Julie: Yeah, so after the dust settled them he just started reeking of ammonia.
Chris: Yeah, so the ammonia, I could smell that on my kit immediately after the race even, and that’s concerning to me. So, I’m wondering about protein metabolism and you remember that amino acids have an amine group that contains nitrogen and when you metabolize those proteins it pops off the amine group and you’re left with the nitrogen that has one parking spot left for a hydrogen atom and if that parking spot is occupied then you’ve got something called ammonia, and ammonia is toxic to the central nervous system and symptoms of ammonia toxicity include lethargy and brain fog, it’s toxic.
So my concern is that I’m doing lots and lots of protein metabolism, so I’m not consuming any carbohydrates but at the same time I’m exercising at an intensity and the protein metabolism is picking up the slack, so most likely I’m liberating amino acids like alanine from my skeletal muscle to produce glucose for my brains and other organs that are requiring it, and the ammonia is undoing so much protein metabolism that the urea cycle cannot keep up. The ammonia ends up being sweated out and onto my skin where it then ends up in my kit and that’s what you can smell. So, this is something that Karen Clark as a professor of biochemistry in Oxford University has said to me that those amino acids that you supplement, those are the world’s most expensive carbohydrates.
Why don’t you just supplement with the carbohydrate? And it’s an extremely valid point and it make me optimal for me to continue to use soup starch, but at the same time you get this advantage in that you don’t think about food on the bike while your racing, you don’t have to deal with carrying food on the bike while you’re racing, and then you don’t get thirsty so there may be a tradeoff to be had there. And another I noticed is, especially on the first day. Is I just have a massive energy crisis just 30 minutes after the bike race, so I feel fine at the end, I’m washing my bike.
[00:32:36]
Julie: That seemed to go away as the week went on. I really only remember the first day you being that way.
Chris: I wonder whether it’s just because I went so much harder on the first day than on the other days, but the symptoms are I just need to take a nap. Like I need to get my body horizontal and I nap for half an hour and then I’m pretty much fine and it passes and there are no other symptoms, of course that could be anything. It could just be fatigue from the bike racing. But I’ve never known such incredible fatigue apart from maybe that one day when I couldn’t get out of bed but that was different.
Julie: That was different. Before, it was just an inability to recover, it took every ounce of energy that you had left over to, you had to spend that recovering because you could not get up and do it again tomorrow. This was different, you come back, you’re tired, you eat a little something, you take a nap, and then you’re fine.
Chris: And I think overall, the dietary approach even though it didn’t improve the race result, it definitely improved my overall experience of the race, like I had more fun, I was enjoying the downhill’s more in British Columbia, they really know how to build trails and a lot of them are flow trails so they’re specifically designed for the type of racing that we’re doing and they’re just so much fun. And when you’re hyperglycemic and incredibly tired.
Julie: And only thinking about when your next meal is going to be.
Chris: Exactly, you don’t enjoy those types of trails so much. So maybe my overall experience was enhanced. So part of the race is you transfer from one stage to the next and often that involves a ferry ride where we spend some of the race on the island of Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and then you transfer over to the sunshine coast and it’s really, really beautiful. The ferry crossings are not long and anyone would enjoy it whether you’re racing or not.
Julie: Yeah it’s beautiful.
Chris: And I would spend that time on the ferry with Ivy, and there a couple of times in particular where there’s 600 really tired bike racers, it’s kind of stinky, lying on the floor literally, drinking coca cola and all Ivy wants to do is meet every single one of them.
Julie: Every single one.
Chris: And I really enjoyed it, I was following her around saying hello to everyone, meeting people, finding out where they came from, finding out how their day was, and I really enjoyed that, and I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that before on a high-carbohydrate diet, and so maybe that’s an advantage that I care more about now as a hobby pro. No one’s paying me, no one’s sponsoring me to do this bike race, I don’t get any reward for getting a better result.
Julie: Maybe the better result is being able to enjoy the rest of the race that you’re not racing, getting to spend time with Ivy and me after the race and actually enjoy the camping and the traveling and all the other components of the race that aren’t necessarily racing your bike. And that was definitely an improved result for us is having you human throughout the rest of the race.
Chris: Right.
Julie: Because before it was just me, so I could just walk, whatever, go by myself, just occupy myself.
Chris: Yeah and that’s what happens. In the early days, in 2013, I was the best paid pro athlete that anybody knows and by pro athlete I mean that I was being paid a pro salary by a hedge fund and was allowed the kind of hours to train and recover a professional athlete would and 99.999% of the people listening to this podcast don’t have that luxury, they have jobs, they have kids, they have obligations and so, feeling good outside of training is a clear advantage, but there was one high point I want to mention during the race which was the stage in north Vancouver.
And it’s somewhat strange to me that one of the best stages is the one that’s closest to a very urban city which is Vancouver. But that stage really was fantastic and it was obvious that the locals there had put a great deal of effort into making those trails what they were. And the reason that was obvious was because they put up photographs of themselves working on those trails that we were racing on which I thought was very cool, and the stage was tight, real tight, it was quite short, it was only an hour for the winning rider.
Julie: It was run like a timed trail, right.
Chris: It was run like a timed trail, right. So it could’ve been slightly better organized in that they could’ve called up people in the order in which they were placed in the general classification which would’ve been useful. So I showed up far too late in the startup line and I ended up behind a whole bunch of people who were quite slow and it was difficult to pass them on the double track to the top of the first climb, but the descent after that was just ripping. It was so good, those trails were so well designed and in the final descent I got into a group of about four guys of very equal ability and we had so much fun whipping that trail, the whooping and the hollering.
I was placed second at one point and the British guy in front of me nearly lost it on one of the wet, slippery bridges, so this is one of the defining characteristics of British Columbian riding is they build these skinny bridges over the creeks and any unridable type obstacle, and obviously in the wet they can get very slippery and in general they put chicken wire or something over it so it’s grippy but this particular one had nothing. And the guy lost the front wheel first and then he lost the rear wheel and I thought he was going off this bridge into the ditch for sure and somehow he hung on to it and that feeling of adrenaline and then you realize that you’re OK and it’s just like a massive feeling of euphoria.
I didn’t know exactly how he felt but I just sort of knew from my previous experience, it was just such fun times. Three other guys were just celebrating the fact that he didn’t just eat it. I crossed the line and this guy came up to me and he said, are you Chris Kelly. And I suddenly had this massive wave of fear that something had happened to you or Ivy.
Julie: Oh no.
Chris: It’s normally not a good thing when a stranger comes up to you and says, are you Chris Kelly, then he said, oh I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while, I’ve just been working my way through the archives, I’ve really been enjoying it, my name is Hans. I was just like, oh thank god, that was such a relief. So hi Hans that was an amazing experience for me, not only for the ride that happened in north Vancouver but that sense of relief and the pleasure in knowing that somebody was listening to the podcast.
Julie: You should’ve come to find us at the van Hans I would’ve made you dinner.
Chris: Yeah, sorry, he won’t want to hear that now. I know that he recently moved to British Columbia and was really enjoying.
Julie: We’ll let you know the next time we come up.
[00:40:01]
Chris: So I’ll talk a bit about the supplements I took because I took a crap ton of supplements.
Julie: Yeah, it took a quarter of our closet space in the van so you better talk about it.
Chris: Yeah, trying to choose the supplements in the van was like trying to choose a child. I simply must have this.
Julie: I bought him like two different sizes of plastic containers and he had to fit them in there to be able to fit them into the van. He saved one for his chocolate stash but that’s another story.
Chris: Yeah, so I did consume quite a lot of fat fiber, MCT powder and I mixed that with just an organic non-Dutch cocoa powder.
Julie: Raw.
Chris: Raw powder and you can buy that in any goods, hippie supermarket, I believe you can buy it in Whole Foods, and I mix that in a 2:1 ratio so two parts cocoa with one part fat fiber and that makes a rather phytogenic, very tasty, slightly stimulatory hot drink for me. The abromine seems to works very well for me as a mild stimulant, it helps me concentrate but it doesn’t interfere with my sleep in any way so that drink as become a little bit of a staple.
Julie: A little bit of a staple. You lost your MacBook over it, that’s another story.
Chris: Oh yeah, I might as well tell you now that you mentioned it, this is kind of a horrifying thing. One of the nice things about this drink is you can just put a heaping tablespoon of the powder into your standard steel flask with a screw top lid and then just walk into any place that has hot water which even a gas station has hot water and so we stopped at a coffee shop and Julie handed the barista my clean canteen with the powder in and she filled it up full of hot water and she just rested the lid on top of the canteen, and Julie set it down on the table and I picked it up and shook it and of course the lid was on.
Julie: I never grab it by the lid because I’ve had that happen before so I always grab the canteen itself. So I didn’t know otherwise I wouldn’t fixed it or spilled it myself.
Chris: Yeah, so you’ll notice that normally I do a podcast every week and there was a big gap in the podcast because I lost my MacBook to that incident, it got hot cocoa beverage all over it
Julie: All over it.
Chris: All over it and that was the end of that. So new computer for me, that was a $1200 mistake but I’m grateful that nobody was hurt because there was a couple of girls sat at the table directly behind us and you think about the motion you go through when you shake a clean canteen or something in your hand like that, I could’ve easily thrown boiling water into somebody’s face and the water was hot enough to scald because it got onto my leg and it burnt me through my sweatpants.
Julie: That wasn’t a very fun day.
Chris: Not that wasn’t a fun day, but the cocoa beverage in general works really, really well for me. So I consumed a great deal of fat fiber, probably had three of those drinks per day. And then the catabolic blocker amino acids that we sell, I’ll link to those in the show notes too, I consume a lot of those, probably 15 tablets per day. And I think that makes sense given the gluconeogenesis situation that I described earlier. I would much rather that I was metabolizing those essential amino acids rather than alanine that’s liberated from my bicep even though I think that’s probably still happening as well.
So that made sense, the catabolic blocker was another supplement. And then pharmanac, I’ll link to the podcast I did with David Aiello, who is the immunologist from Stanford who started Bioadvantex who are the manufacturers of pharmanac and pharmanac is an N-acetylcysteine. And my goal in taking it was to improve my glutathione status and then improve my recovery for that reason. And I would take pharmanac first thing in the morning. One of the things David would talk about is when you take NAC orally it take four hours for it to increase the NAC in the blood and there are actually some studies and maybe I can dig those up and link to them, that show you can increase exercise performance by taking NAC during activity but it’s kind of hard to time it right if it takes four hours to get into the blood stream. So I would just take that as soon as I got up knowing that the NAC would hit my blood supply some point during the race, and then I would have another tablet as soon as I finished the race.
And of course, I don’t have any control I have no idea whether that really helped with my recovery, the biochemistry makes sense. And I would not recommend this to people who are training and the reason is exercise is an antioxidant and by taking antioxidants or precursors to antioxidants you may blunt the effect of training. So not something you’d want to do every day during your regular training, but if you’re doing a seven-day stage race it makes perfect sense to me to supplement with an N-acetylcysteine. And then another supplement I took a lot of was the phosphatidyl cacumen and I took that both in the capsule form called mareva which is made by Thorne and then also powder form which is called intrament and intrament includes alglutamine, partially hydrolyzed guagome which is a prebiotic and also aloe and some boswellia, so some herbs that are anti-inflammatory, and the idea there was to kind of soothe some of the inflammation that was going on in my gut after the race and again I don’t really have much of a control but I certainly didn’t have any GI symptoms.
[00:45:36]
Julie: That’s what I was going to say was that’s another comparison between this year and years previous and really just regular races that you would do periodically. I think that was a good sign, I was kind of waiting for the other shoe to fall the whole time. Because that’s usually your telltale sign, you just have GI distress. You know, loose stool and the lot.
Chris: Super robust my digestion and I won’t get into the details too much but you can probably guess. But yeah it was really, really robust and that is never the case for me especially when I’m traveling. So that was great I was really happy with that. And I think actually, while I’m talking about guy health in general, I should talk about what works for breakfast.
Julie: Because people ask that all the time what you eat before the race.
Chris: Yeah, what do you eat for breakfast? And I went through a couple of iterations with my breakfast and my initial instinct is to eat exactly what I eat at home which is very high fat breakfast that consists usually of bone broth, some kind of protein, often the U.S. wellness meats, the organ meat, some vegetables, and maybe my hot cocoa beverage, and in general that worked for the racing but I noticed if it got too high fat then I would suffer during the race. There was one day in particular where we had bone broth and then the U.S. wellness meats pork sausage which is super tasty.
Julie: Yeah, the breakfast sausage.
Chris: Yeah, the breakfast sausage and it’s very fatty and I felt like I really suffered during the race with a lot of burping, it was like coming back on me, it felt like it wasn’t digesting. And that makes sense you’re in a bike race normal physiology is for the adrenergic receptors in the gut to be activated that causes vasoconstriction, the blood supply to the gut is cutoff and so you’re just not going to be digesting things in the same way as you normally would and then you put in the two macronutrients that are most difficult to digest which are fats and protein so guess what it doesn’t go anywhere. So although the high fat diet works very well for me in general, over the long term I’m not sure it works great as a breakfast before a bike race.
Julie: So I think what ended up working really well was the broth. So I found a Whole Foods, we had stopped back in North Vancouver and I went to Whole Foods again but they had these pre-packaged pre-chopped vegetables and one of them was like a fajita mix and then another was like a scramble mix. So you would one to make fajitas and the other to make a scramble with eggs and they were great because they had peppers and purple onion and then maybe some kind of green, and then the other one had spinach and mushrooms and purple onions and peppers, and so those were perfect. So I could grab a handful of that, sauté them gently, then add the bone broth to that, let it simmer, and then a small piece of the U.S. wellness meats to it so it was quite low protein actually and that seemed to be the perfect breakfast for you. So it was probably a cup to a cup and a half of broth, with like a cup to a cup and a half of vegetable, and then maybe a quarter cup of meat.
Chris: Yeah and that worked really great for me and for some reason intuitively…
Julie: With vinegar of course.
Chris: With vinegar.
Julie: Achilles heel.
Chris: Yeah, it’s not really my Achilles heel, it’s how I make the low fat diet palatable so when I first switched to a high fat diet I found it very difficult to eat enough calories, partly because I didn’t find the diet particularly palatable, and vinegar is what makes it palatable to me. Like a salad dressing and it’s highly palatable so I don’t have trouble getting calories when adding vinegar. So intuitively to me, you would’ve thought that vegetables wouldn’t be a great thing to have before a race but in general it seems to really help me.
It slows down the transient time, I never having any running straight to the bathroom because you’ve eaten too much fat and you can’t digest it all at once type incidents with vegetables and it’s probably because of the fiber and that’s why the MCT or powder doesn’t cause GI distress because it’s slowing down the transient time, so that really worked well. And I’ve written about this on the blog before and I’ll link to this article but when I first started supplementing with the creatine, my 62 power went up by 11% and on the trails that translates into the ability to clear those slippery roots and rocks so you’re behind a long trail of guys and they’re all trying to clear some obstacle and you’re the one guy who manages to power around the outside of all of them and clear these roots and rocks and that’s because you still have the ability to hold back.
[00:51:54]
Julie: Turn on the gas.
Chris: Yeah to turn on the gas 600 watts for 20 seconds and that’s what it takes to clear that obstacle so that’s really, really useful. And then I also supplemented with Niacel, so basically everything that I’m doing is using NAD. So anything that I can do to improve my NAD to NADH ratio I think is going to help. So I took 500mg per day. Yeah that was it that was all the supplements, that’s not too many supplements.
Julie: It’s actually way less because you were in the middle of like a killing phase.
Chris: Yeah exactly, last time I was in this bike race, I’d done a bunch of stool testing and I’d found a pinworm, and I’d found yeast overgrowth, and I found this weird amoeba I’d never heard of. So I was taking fistfuls of supplements to kill all these different bugs whilst doing the bike race.
Julie: It was nuts.
Chris: And I still came 15th overall.
Julie: I still prefer this way overall, minus the weather.
Chris: Minus the weather. I kind of long for it, we’re back in Bonny Dune.
Julie: It’s hotter than hades.
Chris: Yeah, it’s hotter than hades. We’re outside right, it’s a beautiful blue sky, the trails are dry and dusty and I kind of long for that, those wet, awesome trails.
Julie: Yeah, I definitely foresee some time in our future in BC.
Chris: So yeah, overall I would say a success and I would recommend the BC bike race to anybody who’s been thinking about it. It’s sold out already this year so by the time you listen to this podcast for 2017 it is sold out and that never used to be the case. It was the ten-year anniversary this year and when I first signed up for it in 2011, they used to have a tiered system where if you signed up quickly then you got a better price and then the price went up as time went by and now it just sells out in the first day. Maybe start thinking about it for 2018, it might take you that long to train for the damn thing because its 18 hours of racing over wet and roots and rocks so it’s definitely not an easy race. So yeah, all mountain bikers listening to this podcast you should consider it a bucket list item. If you want to know what it looks like, I just bought a bunch of pictures that the photographers took on course and the forest there is just amazing fluorescent green.
Julie: It’s just pre-historical.
Chris: Yeah, you expect a T-Rex to appear behind a bush at any moment, and you think sometimes the reason why the picture looks so good is because it’s a talented photographer but you could take a picture that looks like that with an iPhone. The lushness of the forest is totally beautiful.
Julie: It’s what it would be like here if it ever rained.
Chris: So yeah, this has been fun. If you’re interested in doing some testing and finding out what’s going on inside your body then please come to the front page of our website, nourishbalancethrive.com and you’ll see a button there and if you click that button you can schedule online for a free consultation and you can either speak to me or Amelia and we can talk to you about whether our program meets your requirements and whether it’s a good fit for you and we can talk about how we can solve some of your problems or maybe improve your performance using some of the types of testing that we do. And if you have any questions that we should answer in a future podcast then you’ll find a comments section in the show notes for this episode, so yeah if you leave the comment there, other people will be able to see it too. I will be answer those questions in a future podcasts. So yeah, that’s it, thanks so much for listening.
[00:55:22] [End of Audio]
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