Springfield !!

 

That was a long day. 106 miles, almost 7 hours of biking pretty hard. According to my power meter I burned about 4000 cal today.   Stopping at Moes Tavern later  

Last night we had a catered dinner and, tired of over eating heavy food all the time, I went with chicken breast and veggies and salad. I woke up this morning hungry and stayed hungry all day long. Couldn’t catch up.  I won’t make that mistake again!  

I don’t have a picture of it, but halfway through the day I looked down and saw my jersey and my shorts were caked in salt deposits. That’s how you know you’re sweating like crazy and need to hit the electrolytes hard. 

This is an unusual aspect of a cross-country bike ride.  You just eat all the darn time. You wake up and eat a breakfast two or three times as big as what you might eat at home. And then during the day you’re drinking energy/rehydration drinks. And having snacks at the sags and supplementing with gels and energy bars, and the occasional fun surprise. Like today,  chocolate pie. And then you get to your destination, and you cram in 300 cal worth of protein to start rebuilding the muscle damage you’ve done. And then a few hours later you eat as much as you can stuff in your stomach at dinner. And despite all that, everyone is losing weight.

So there’s a fine line between allowing all the exercise to reshape your body in a positive way and under-consuming and making yourself miserable.  You have to keep eating and drinking even when you’re sick of it or you will really suffer on the road.  When I’m done with this, I might fast for a week, just so that I want food again.

The ride itself was okay. The first 30 to 40 miles were rollers through hilly tree lined terrain. That was nice. Our first sag was at an ag extension office for the university of Illinois. We rode across the Illinois river bridge. 

On the Illinois River Bridge

And then turned onto the highway and fought headwinds and crosswinds for 30 miles.  Boo.   Then it started to get hot and humid, and no one was particularly enjoying it.

The last 20 miles were much nicer, and we were serenaded by the cicadas on the way into Springfield.  There is a sound that a cicada makes when it is flying through the air and thumps heavily into the chest of a cyclist. It pauses, and then makes this sort of indignant…BRRRRAAPPFFF… before flying off.  I mean, I get it, they’re busy. They’ve been asleep for 17 years and they have just a few days to eat, mate, and die. It’s a packed agenda.

Speaking of cicadas today I learned this from the indispensable website cicada Safari.

“Periodical cicadas are best eaten when they are still white, and they taste like cold canned asparagus. Like all insects, cicadas have a good balance of vitamins, are low in fat, and, especially the females, are high in protein.”

If I get low on calories again, I’m definitely going with cicadas over another Gu gel packet.

CICADAS EVERYWHERE

As far as I can tell, we are right at the dividing line between brood XIII (blue) and brood XIX (red).  Or wait, maybe this is an electoral map?

We are starting to see more and more political signs along the road. Some of them quite inventive and hallucinatory.

Time to head down to the dinner trough.  Soooeeeyyy!