I had to laugh a little at "their impact on performance remains unexamined" as the bicycle touring crowd has used plain boiled potatoes as a common fueling snack for as long as I can remember. When I did the Seattle-to-Portland ride 15 or so years ago all of the aid stations had tubs of them to hand out. This study seems to be yet another instance of Taleb's "lecturing birds how to fly" phenomenon.
There's a world of difference between touring at 180w and racing at 300w+. Tourists also use panniers and fenders and puncture-resistant tires, but you'd be ill-advised to leave them on if you're trying to win your local crit.
Haha, I came here to same the same thing, only I was riding STP... uh... oh god I'm old.. 26 years ago.
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.
> Those consuming potatoes experienced significantly more gastrointestinal bloating, pain and flatulence than the other groups, however. This may be a result of the larger volume of potatoes needed to match the glucose provided by the gels, Burd said.
In my longer runs I’ll consume a gel at the first hour mark and then ever 30 minutes. This can be for up to 4 to 5 hours. Gels allow me to consume a controlled amount of carbs without consuming too many calories. I’m not sure about cycling, but in ultra running gi issues are one of the main reasons for dnf’s. The funny part is on runs longer than 6 hours, I supplement gels with mashed potatoe burritos.
In 2007 I visited Boulder with a friend and spent a night or two at his cousin's place. His cousin was a trainer for a cycling team. My memory is a bit faulty after 12 years but as I recall he had been Floyd Landis's cycling trainer; if not his personal trainer then involved in his training in a meaningful way. I have a clear recollection of this because doping accusations had started surfacing not long before this and we questioned him about the accusations. Not too long after that he went on to be involved in Lance Armstrong's training; just before Armstrong's cycling career imploded. The point I'm trying to get to is that he told us his secret weapon was parmesan potato wedges in tin foil...
Be careful with wrapping potatoes tightly in aluminum foil. Metal foil is completely impermeable to air. If you’re not careful, anaerobic bacteria such as C. botulinum can grow on foil-wrapped potatoes and cause botulism [1]. It’s always a good idea to either puncture the foil or keep the foil wrapped loosely unless the potatoes are still hot (above 140F).
After years of struggling with eating during endurance sports, I have finally discovered the best approach: No food right before sports, no food during sports.
Ended up proving my point (mostly to myself) by doing half-Ironman on plain water.
Never eating on cycle or run again. Pure, pure evil.
This is a difficult thing to just say "I do this and here is what I did". People's body's can be very different. For example, pro cyclists burn fat and carbs differently than normal people do to years of conditioning( aka base miles). That high fat diet only works for super intense athletes. Try and let me know how your cholesterol levels end up. Haha
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 got my family's high LDL and cholesterol, which normalized for the 2 years I was on keto and stayed low after.
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.
When I was swimming competitively, we'd always eat enormous amounts of spaghetti the evening before and then eat virtually nothing except maybe a fruit or few pieces of candy the morning of the meet.
(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.)
If you go hard enough for long enough, you'll run out of glycogen. If you're not maintaining your blood glucose levels by ingesting carbohydrate, you'll go hypoglycaemic and turn into a wobbly mess of useless limbs.
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.
You can’t really bonk if you’re adapted to and in ketosis. Using only carbs for athletic performance is like having a hybrid car but disconnecting your gas tank.
While training for that, bonk was my second name. Nothing morbid, nothing human can't cope with.
I was not saying anyone can stand up from the bed and go long.
The last athlete I worked with pointed out that you can only absorb about 800 cal an hour but burn way more than that, so you simply can’t eat fast enough to avoid losing weight during an even like this, but you’re talking about burning an extra pound off by not eating at all during events.
What’s your bodily complaint that makes this difficult?
The last time I tried not eating on an endurance bike ride, I felt horrible and started shaking by the end of it. I suspect my glycogen levels got out of whack after about 5 hours of vigorous riding with no replenishment. Every body is different, and some need (and I guess tolerate) eating in the middle of the activity.
Adaption and experience turns that sharp cliff of bonking into a gentle slope, but you're going down eventually nonetheless. Five hours matches my experience as well and is also roughly the duration of a half-ironman.
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.
I dunno about "evil," but yeah - you probably won't die of lack of calories during an event like that. There's this whole "fat adapted athlete" thing going on in the ultra-marathon world that kinda proves the theory....
I've only done one "endurance" event, a 40 mile bike through hills. I did the whole "don't eat much" and then skimped on my break and goop in the last ten miles. I made it, but I crashed hard, metaphorically.
At that time I was in deep keto with lots of training on water also.
Now I am on paleo (with eventual natural carbs and not watching my ketone blood levels anymore) and intermittent fasting - the effect is even better.
(After lots of experiments on myself I have realized that deep keto mode is naturally for prolonged fasting, so enforcing it with fats intake is a perversion)
Yeah I guess the study solely focused on carb regeneration during cycling.
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.
You can’t eat trail mix all day long, but in small quantities it’s a good change of scenery. Bananas and Gatorade aren’t that bad.
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.
No, it's not, but people don't understand that it's not the deficit that hurts. It's the lack of carbs. It's the _bonk_. Bonking during a ride sucks hardcore.
Yeah, you need to find out what works for you. Twinkies, stroopwafels, gels, donuts, chocolate scotheroos, rice cakes (great ideas in "Feed Zone Portables") all make it into my longer rides in different combinations. I do save the gels for last, though. Especially in the heat. I don't get tired of eating but I'm not hungry at all at the end of a ride.
True that! Personally, I need to not have sugary stuff during a long, hard day in the saddle. In fact, yesterday was kind of an experiment ( a rather painful, crappy experiment ).
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.
Was this ever in doubt? Ditto for candy bars masquerading as energy bars or whatever. Yeah. energy. Sugar. just go buy a bag of sugar and snort it or something.
er wait. (why am I skipping my chance to become a trend-setter!? sheesh.) boof it.
boofing sugar up your rear end has been scientifically proven to win all cycling races ever. You can google it.
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.
I decided to do some long-distance (all-day/multi-day) cycling in Europe as a complete amateur, and quickly became aware of the feeling of running out of glycogen, so I just loaded up on simple carbs like breads and sweets, and could instantly feel myself re-energized as I ate them through the day.
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 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.
The abstract speaks of "race fuel", so it sounds like this study is focussing not merely on "does it belong in that category" but more on "is it an effective alternative to professional race fuels"?
The riders in this trial aren't particularly fit - they're closer to non-athletes than elite athletes.
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.
I would like to know more about the potato puree that they fed the cyclists. We're the potatoes as palatable as the gel? A benefit of gels is they are easy to eat so you can focus on cycling/running/etc. What was the weight difference between the potatoes and the gels? It's much easier to pack a few 3 Oz gels than it is to pack the weight of a few potatoes.
Gels are palatable?!? No matter the flavour, I find them disgusting and, ultimately, a necessary evil.
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.
I do ultras at MAF pace 180-age=heart rate. I've dong 50K and 13M mountain race, each about 6 hours, I'm slow. I ate nothing, I came in about a 1/2 lighter, that's about it.
Serious/competitive cyclist here, I often use real food. Small two bite sandwiches, etc wrapped in foil. I've also done this with yams, steam a whole one and add salt, wrap the whole thing in aluminium foil. Put in jersey pocket. Super easy to pull out and take a bit or two and put back. Easier than gels actually.
Most elite soigneurs include some amount of real food in their musettes, if only for reasons of palatability and morale. Team Sky's rice cakes have become a firm favourite throughout the peloton:
The paper describes a potato puree, so presumably they're expected to cook+mash+season the potatoes the day prior and put them in a reusable food pouch. Definitely cheaper and probably more pleasant tasting.
You're clearly not imagining a pomme-puree, from a decent potato, dollop of butter (hopefully with some sea-salt), decent coarse grind of Tellicherry black pepper...
...I'm always bemused that consumers of "sports supplements" seem to delight in them being processed to shit (and are often eaten the same people who'll get picky over the provenance of restaurant food).
And I’m glad I’m not imagining it because room temperature butter that has congealed and separated from a starch sounds awful to eat while you’re strenuously exercising. Bemuse yourself to your heart’s delight - savory, buttery, starches don’t sound like a good idea when the blood has been shuttled from your digestive tract to your skeletal muscle and your body heat is several degrees above average.
you have to eat more of the potato per calorie than the gel. I'd much rather just shotgun a gross gel packet for 100 calories and taste none of it than have to slog through more potatoes.
... or you could just microwave a small potato and leave it in its natural, extremely handy, form! Get prewashed yukons and you don’t need to peel them.
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...
Good point. You can get fruit purée based energy gels, a potato based purée (complex carbs, proven by science!) using heirloom, ancient stock purple potatoes from the Andes would sell like ...
