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Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#131

Post by scheme271 »

bluGill wrote: post #86
cantSpellSober wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Steel is Real but the last Tour winner on a steel bike was in the '90s (and that's the subject). Bikes weigh no more than 8kg. The weight weenies are winning, carbon everything down to brake rotors. > I was allowed a modern click shifter and modern disk brakes Doubt you'd see a bike equipped with anything else at the Tour.

At the top level - which is pretty much the definition of a tour winner - grams make the difference between a win and loss, so of course they will not be riding steel. I'm not at top level and never will be. If I want to go faster there are many things I can do that are more effective than playing what my bike is made out of.

Somewhat. UCI has a minumum weight (6.8kg) for bikes and often teams have to add weights to their bikes to hit the minimum limit. You easily get lighter bikes but your bike needs to be 6.8kg to be race legal. It certainly limits how many bits and bobs on the bike get switched over to using titanium or carbon fiber.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#132

Post by hinkley »

burningChrome wrote: post #128
hinkley wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runners also warn about high fiber being bad. I keep being drawn back to our friend the Banana. I think pectin is easier on the stomach than insoluble fiber, but I have a lot of gaps in this part of my knowledge. The cheeseburger calls to us all. Some of us are just "better" at resisting the call.

>> The cheeseburger calls to us all. One my trainers when I was in college told me that when you crave foods, its not your lack of willpower, its actually your body telling you it needs certain nutrients. He told me when you crave chocolate its because your body needs carbs, so if you get some carbs, your chocolate cravings will go away. I'm guessing the idea you crave a cheeseburger is the same thing, his body was i…

Protein and fat, but probably mostly salt.

One year I bumped into a friend of a friend at the checkin for a 3 day bike tour and we decided to 1) ride together and 2) see how fast we could do it. Short rests, riding hard, drafting the entire way. All day, in the Labor Day sun.

On day two after we pulled up to the stopping point, we got set up and then crawled back on our bikes to ride to the other side of this small college town to find the Dairy Queen for a bacon cheeseburger. It's not the best tasting beef I've ever had (that was in New Orleans), but it was the best tasting burger.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#133

Post by hinkley »

burningChrome wrote: post #128
hinkley wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runners also warn about high fiber being bad. I keep being drawn back to our friend the Banana. I think pectin is easier on the stomach than insoluble fiber, but I have a lot of gaps in this part of my knowledge. The cheeseburger calls to us all. Some of us are just "better" at resisting the call.

>> The cheeseburger calls to us all. One my trainers when I was in college told me that when you crave foods, its not your lack of willpower, its actually your body telling you it needs certain nutrients. He told me when you crave chocolate its because your body needs carbs, so if you get some carbs, your chocolate cravings will go away. I'm guessing the idea you crave a cheeseburger is the same thing, his body was i…

In a completely unrelated anecdote, one day on a club ride we were almost to the turnaround point for the day. The town was on a hill on the far side of a river valley and it was a relatively nasty hill. One of the older guys was falling off the back and I and a few other people heard him yell something but we couldn't make out what it was, so we dropped back to see if he was okay.

He had yelled "CHEESEBURGER!" as a rally cry.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#134

Post by avs733 »

nradov wrote: post #82
WXLCKNO wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 250w average during a 5 hour ride I'm burning like 1000 calories per hour or something mething close. Glycogen reserves are 2000 calories from a quick Google search, so that's 3k calories I need to make up for or 600 per hour. I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I'm missing but 400 definitely makes more sense than 200

What you're missing is fat metabolism. If you're metabolically healthy (which you must be if you can hold 250W for hours) then you can make up the difference by converting stored fat into glycogen.

what is also missing is the ability to process calories in.

900-1000 calories might mean that in is optimal - but think about eating a full meal from mcdonalds every hour while massively extering yourself.

Training your gut matters and I've never seen anything that suggests much beyond 400 calories per hour is possible during meaningful exertion.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#135

Post by avs733 »

notesinthefield wrote: post #106
avs733 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am far FAR from the tour de france but I do train for and run ultramarathons. When I started the general guidance seemed to be about 200 calories (50g of carbs) per hour during training and races. I followed that or a little above for a long time, and constantly had problems both physically and cognitively near the end of races. It took about a year to get used to fueling heavier (for me...about 400 calories per ho…

Since my first ultra, Ive been fascinated by the idea of adapting to increased fueling and have tried to apply periodization principles to how I eat. 23 miles into a 33 race, I completely stopped being able to process food at around 150-250 cals/hr (mostly carbs and some fats)

speaking from experience - I puked during a fair number of runs in the process of getting there. I mix calories in my hydration with gels just to try and get the balance right. Its not stable but its better after about 4 years of work. I have ound that if I don't do a good job of eating, what you describe happens about 6-10 miles AFTER I stopped caloric intake.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#136

Post by vbarrielle »

matthewowen wrote: post #69
knallfrosch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since everyone is taking them, they're not the discriminator between the world class champions and the merely Tour-de-France participants.

There is a common refrain about the Armstrong era "all the top guys were taking them so it's fair" but it's not really accurate. Because yes, the people at the top were all taking them, but that's because the clean guys that _would_ have been at the top otherwise aren't there: the prevalence of doping meant that you had to dope to even be in the conversation at that level, and so the clean athletes that might have wo…

You're spot on, and there's another point that makes doping unfair even if it was widespread. There is a max hematocrit rule, but riders had different pre-doping base hematocrit levels. Those with the lowest level could benefit more from doping before reaching the limit. In a way, the less gifted would be more advantaged by EPO.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#137

Post by eric-hu »

alistairSH wrote: post #78
gosub100 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to me, there's a distinction between taking a drug that increases availability of red blood cells vs taking steroids or meth.

Isn't that really sport-dependent? EPO and other red-cell increasing drugs provide a massive gain for endurance athletes (runners, cyclists, XC skiing). Steroids are a massive gain for strength athletes (sprinters/athletics, contact sports). Both can be used "safely" or "unsafely" depending on dosage, combinations with other drugs, etc.

My understanding of steroids is that they increase muscle mass all over the body. And that it's a long term health issue for the heart, because having a heart with excess muscle is actually bad long term. A few lifting YouTubers I follow have made videos on the subject. It seems like there's "less unsafe" steroid use, but there will be a life expectancy sacrifice with any level of use.

I don't know what the story is like for EPO and other red-cell increasing drugs. Would be curious to hear yours and a few others' understanding of the cost/benefit.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#138

Post by vbarrielle »

jerlam wrote: post #100
skeeter2020 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the distinction? What about taking something when you have a cold, or nutritional supplements? It seems weird to draw an arbitrary line between things that make a body perform by stimulating natural production vs directly using synthetics.

Seconded, there is no clear line between banned drugs that help you cheat and drugs that fix medical conditions. There are drugs that are allowed if you have a doctor's note, and there are drugs that you can use only up to a certain amount. Asthma meds for cycling, some of which are steroids, are one of the more popular examples: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/the-truth-abo...

WADA rules do not ban a drug just because it is performance enhancing. Otherwise caffeine would be banned.

Two out of three factors have to be present to ban a drug:

- be performance enhancing - present a health risk - violate the spirit of sport

The third one is a bit harder to define but there is a WADA code defining the spirit of sport.

Most banned drugs are banned because of the first two.

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#139

Post by jeffrallen »

philshem wrote: post #124

> "The food I make is all transparent," says (chef) Blandy. "There are no rich sauces, it's all plain, simple cooking with a light amount of seasoning, light amount of oil, fresh herbs and citrus. That’s some top-notch nominative determinism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

Aptronym: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym

Re: Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road

#140

Post by awad »

timeon wrote: post #68
n4r9 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the point is that in cycling - relative to other sports - money gives you an easy edge. You can afford much better equipment, nutrition, coaching etc... . Compare that to (say) football in the UK: you just need a £5 ball and a few friends, and if you show promise you can track into your local team's programme and get top quality coaching at minimal cost. It depends on the culture as well. From what I read abo…

Peter Sagan started career winning on Tesco bike that he took from his sister. But I think most accessible sport is running. You just need some shoes. Open the door and you are good to go (run). For games like football you also need the ball, playground and other people.

There's even a subset of runners that would argue you don't even need shoes!
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