Tour De Delaware Bay

Myself, my friend Dan, and my father made it back mostly unscathed yesterday afternoon from our loaded bike trip. According to my dad's odometer this is what we rode mileage-wise:

8/3 66
8/4 74
8/5 42

The last day was actually cut short because I had a second flat tire 11 miles from the end that we initially thought we wouldn’t be able to fix. A fellow cyclist ended up driving me back to our car and I came back and picked up my ride-mates. In the meantime my dad was able to get my tire fixed. I was kind of disappointed we had to cut that part out early, but all in all I'm very happy with my own personal performance over the weekend. It was very hot, around 100 degrees and very humid the first two days. I was almost always in the lead and according to both other riders, the strongest rider. At no time did I "bonk" or lose steam and I really felt like I could embark on another cross country trip and although I know my body would need some adapting, I would be able to do it. In fact, I impressed myself enough that I'm planning on riding a one day Century (100 miles) this weekend. It shouldn’t be to bad considering I already did 74 miles in one day with an extra 40 pounds on the bike and felt like I could have done more.

I ate as healthy as possible during the entire trip, with the exception of 1.5 beers I had at the end of day 2. Aside from that my meals were something like this:

Day 1:
Breakfast: banana nut muffin, special k with skim milk
Late lunch: chicken teriyaki sub at subway with some baked lays
Other: half of a power bar
No dinner because of the late lunch. We usually only eat two main meals while biking.

Day 2:
Breakfast:
-steak and eggs (which I ate less than half of because the place we landed for breakfast was really gross as was the food...)
-glass of orange juice
-protein bar
Late lunch:
-Steak with onions
-side of cucumber salad, apple sauce, and two shrimp my dad couldn’t eat.
As mentioned I also had 1.5 beers.

Day 3:
Breakfast:
-Coffee with low-fat creamer and no sugar
-yogurt
-sesame seed bagel with low-fat cream cheese
Late lunch:
Another steak with Onions :)
House salad (no cheese or croutons)
Other: Large Deli style dill pickle.

Aside from all of these things I of course drank a LOT of water. I also had a few small bags of salted peanuts because salt helps you retain water, which we definitely needed. I tried to stay away from Gatorade as it has a lot of sugar in it, but I did manage to have one or two bottles.

The end result of the trip is that even though my quads are a little sore today, I feel strong, and I feel like I could continue riding 50-80 miles a day if I had the time. My plan is to use this trip as a springboard to continue riding as much as possible, especially since it makes losing weight all that much more fun. At very minimum I ride the bike in the gym every morning for 30 minutes.

I'm really hoping to be able to post an improved follow up pic to the one on the right soon. I was thinking I would after I've lost 10-15 pounds total. Hopefully that will be within two weeks.

That's it for now!