By now you are probably a lot more in tune with your eating habits and what your body needs. Hopefully some of those adjustments were easy to make and I’m sure some were hard. But with practice everything gets easier; and, as with physical activity, diet activity is a conscious effort.

With your training on the rise, your intensity on the rise, summer coming, and those winter pounds melting off, you should be starting to look and feel like an athlete ready for his or her A event.

I don’t know about you, but when summer comes and it’s hot out I tend to eat less hot meals and more cold salads...and comfort foods like soup aren’t even available (something I don’t agree with). So, this is a natural process our bodies experience, like a bear out of hibernation we naturally fluctuate our fat content - winter is cold, summer is hot. It’s important to know this so that you can give the
body what it needs while still working with the ‘plan’ that we have.

Food for thought:
- Hot foods don’t require the body to heat them up to body temperature
- Spicy foods may make your stomach upset
- Have you noticed a more sensitive stomach?

All of these concepts and warnings are based on the load or fatigue your body is going through. Professional athletes never stand, but sit; never do extra activity, but rest; and don’t add any extra fatigue or strain to their bodies as they are already under enough load and struggling to recover for the next training session. You may sometimes wonder why pros are so quick to towel-down and put on
their track suits even when the temperature is pretty warm. Why are they wearing hats/beanies in the summer? All of this is to minimize the impact of changing temperatures on an already comprised constitution or immune system.

How does this relate to food? We want to keep the digestive process simple and not over-exert the system. It’s about maximizing the distribution of nutrients into the body.

Consider now the word BLAND because that is what you should move your diet towards. You are tapering to your event, by physical effort and by diet.

- Cold drinks are hard on the body and stomach
- Spicy food is not good
- Salt: what kind, can it be better?
- Water: what about a low sugar Electrolyte Mix (try Ultima)
Your body is an engine, so think about the quality of fuel going into your gas tank

– and what about oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, etc? There’s a lot to consider.

Training Nutrition
Concept of Sugar, Carbohydrate, and Timing In and Out of the Stomach During mixed training (long and hard), which is like racing, we need to provide a steady flow of sugar stored as glycogen in our bodies. It really doesn’t matter what kind, but at what rate your body can access it. Typically an untrained human body stores enough extra glycogen for 1-1.5 hours of moderately hard exercise. During training we can improve endurance, though it has been debated how much. What is certain is that we do increase our body's ability to absorb what it needs from what we feed it. So, train your body by eating regularly during exercise. Practice what you plan to execute.

Source: BC Bike Race - Andreas Hestler

Andreas is one of the most recognized athletes in the global endurance mountain biking scene and is a highly-respected ambassador of the sport and British Columbia. He has exploded in the epic stage race arena over the past few years and, for three years running, has won the TransRockies Challenge...each time with a different partner. The BC Bike Race is a seven day mountain bike stage race from Victoria to Whistler, BC, Canada