Well, this is what I hope this post will be. It has to be quick since I’m a bit tight for time right now. And it should be good, otherwise you might not come back to read more! So here goes nothing…

Three excellent days of riding are in the books. Long ride on Monday. Tempo and sprint work-out on Tuesday. Long ride today with an hour of tempo tossed in for fun. Tonight I’m out for a mountain bike ride with Skip from KingsBridge. Should be a good one. Great way to spend the evening. The wind seems to have dropped a bit and it is just the perfect temperature from some evening riding.

Tomorrow is a sweet recovery day. 90 minutes of just easy riding. Think I’ll need it for sure. And then Friday things ramp up again and close off perfectly on Sunday with a five hour ride. Lots of riding.

And if there is one thing that all this riding requires, it is fuel. I haven’t been doing a very good job lately of fueling my body. I got caught up in the same trap I found myself in last year. Afraid of carbohydrates… I know it doesn’t make sense – I’m an endurance athlete – I need carbohydrates. But call me a victim of popular culture I suppose – I read women’s fitness and food magazines and websites. And I got a bit silly. Convinced that I should be eating like these women who aren’t spending four hours a day on their bikes. So I severely reduced my carbohydrates. It was okay for a while. But then I started to get tired. Sleepy. I bonked that one fateful day. You’d think that would have been a wake-up call… So now after some stern words from Marc, I’m working on adding more carbohydrates into my diet. But it is so hard. I have an inclination to eat some vegetables or some cottage cheese rather than have rice or bread. So today, knowing that I’m riding twice and that I’d just finished a three hour ride, I added two pieces of cinnamon raisin bread to my lunch. Small steps. It is fascinating how even though I know that I need carbohydrates to fuel my sport and my body, I became brain-washed and a bit disordered with my eating. Problem is when I look in the mirror I see my abs popping out and my lean muscles – I like this, so I kind of got caught up in it. This is a hard thing to fight. But I’m doing it. I want to get the best out of my body so to do this I need to give it what it needs. Fat. Protein. Carbohydrates. Peanut butter…

All this to say – eat. Female bike racers especially – eat the food. We all want to be skinny bike racers but not all of us are meant to weigh 110 lbs and we’re not climbing mountains so we don’t need to be super skinny. It is so easy to get caught up in the cyclist trap of trying to be as lean as possible, forgetting that our bodies need fuel to keep us doing the sport we love.