Paleo Vélo

Here’s the second recipe from the Primal Blueprint Cookbook: Bacon Bison chili. It’s fantastic. Salad with walnuts and apple wasn’t bad either.

This is the first recipe we have made from Mark Sisson’s new Primal Blueprint Cookbook. The book is highly recommend by the way, since for a lot of people cutting out grains, pasta, bread, etc, means you need to re-learn how to cook. Tonight was soup and salad night.

Soup: Chicken Coconut Soup. Lots of herbs, lots of coconut milk. Hard to go wrong.

Salad: Arugula, cheese, raisins, etc.

Wine: Too indecent to feature here.

Coming next: Bison Bacon Chili.

Many of us wouldn’t think about eating 4-5 ice cream sandwiches or double fisting two seven-oz canisters of whipped cream, but what about a Snapple “Antioxidant Water” or a bottled green tea? These sounds healthful, right?

Men’s Health has a great photo series comparing sugary drinks to their sugary junk-food equivalent:

CLICK HERE

Ever wonder why 1 in 10 heath care dollars in this country is spent on diabetes?

I eat this almost every day, so it may be the last breakfast picture ever.

Two egg omelet (free range, omega 3, etc, etc) with onions and mushrooms fried in ghee. Add a little avocado and Tabasco on top, and you are set:

The more you read about toxic industrial food, the more you wonder why any of this should be surprising. We douse everything we eat with poisonous chemicals designed to destroy life, but tell ourselves its OK because our corrupt government has certified them as safe.

What’s wrong with our food production system when farmers themselves will not eat the food they grow for market (as described below)? Just think about that for a second.

Eat real food folks.

4. Nonorganic Potatoes

The expert: Jeffrey Moyer, chair of the National Organic Standards Board

The problem: Root vegetables absorb herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides that wind up in soil. In the case of potatoes—the nation’s most popular vegetable—they’re treated with fungicides during the growing season, then sprayed with herbicides to kill off the fibrous vines before harvesting. After they’re dug up, the potatoes are treated yet again to prevent them from sprouting. “Try this experiment: Buy a conventional potato in a store, and try to get it to sprout. It won’t,” says Moyer, who is also farm director of the Rodale Institute (also owned by Rodale Inc., the publisher of Prevention). “I’ve talked with potato growers who say point-blank they would never eat the potatoes they sell. They have separate plots where they grow potatoes for themselves without all the chemicals.”

The solution: Buy organic potatoes. Washing isn’t good enough if you’re trying to remove chemicals that have been absorbed into the flesh.

More Here

I recently ordered 25 pounds of grass-fed elk meat and it’s pretty tasty stuff. Tonight I had two elk patties atop a bed of organic cauliflower and carrots mashed up with lots of butter. Wine this time is premium Costco swill.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe.

I dispute that.

I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

– Frank Zappa, 1989.

Main Course: organic free range pork chop fried in ghee; organic steamed broccoli smothered in olive oil.

Salad: organic arugula, red onion, cucumber, green bell pepper, raisins, cheese; olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing.

Wine: Costco swill.

Burkina Faso is a semi-arid, landlocked country in the dead center of the bulge of West Africa. It’s located in the buffer zone (known as the Sahel) between the Sahara desert to the north, and the more tropical, coastal areas to the south. As you might expect given this geography and the lack of many natural resources, Burkina is one of the poorest countries in the world, typically in the bottom five on the UN’s development index.

While it has known relative stability in recent years, Burkina’s early post-colonial history was punctuated with multiple coups d’etat. Burkina’s most colorful leader was Thomas Sankara, the Che Guevara of West Africa.

Before being assassinated by one of his closest friends in 1987 (by the current president of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore), Sankara did much to popularize the use of bicycles. As anyone who has walked the streets of Burkina’s cities can attest, bikes and mopeds still outnumber cars by 10 to 1.

The Model-T of Burkina bicycles reflects the country’s colonial heritage, looking very much like an old French city bike, 650B wheels and all. While generally cheap and falling apart, these bikes see a lot of miles, and there were plenty of young guys on these who could keep up with me at over 20mph, at least for a good stretch!

Burkina also has the unique honor of hosting the only UCI legal bike race in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Tour de Faso. During my time in Burkina, I had the chance to see it pass through my town twice:

Before moving to San Diego in 2008, my wife and I spent two years living in Burkina’s second biggest city, Bobo Dioulasso. Since I was working out of my home and had some flexibility in my schedule, there were many opportunities to explore the countryside by bike. The main limitation was the 100+ degree heat, which typically required starting my rides at sunrise in order to return home before a complete meltdown.

Given the paucity of paved roads in the country, riding in Burkina means mixed surface rough riding, as the only way to make a loop is to combine stretches of pavement and dirt road. This is no place for 700×23 road tires! The bike I first brought over with me was a Surly Cross-Check with 700×40 tires, set up as a single speed:

For the most part, the bike did very well on the backroads of Bobo Dioulasso:

Many of the roads I explored took me out through different fields and plantations:

As I was pretty much the only white guy in those parts riding a bicycle, I drew some pretty interesting stares from the folks in villages that I rode through, and the few times that I had to change a flat created sizable crowds (of course, just about any white person in a small village is an event, whether biking or not).

In general, the scenery in the countryside of Burkina Faso doesn’t exactly make it destination-cycling worthy, but occasionally you do get a nice shot or two:

Though much of Burkina is flattish, after my first year there on a single speed Surly Cross-Check my knee started to bother me a bit. So, I did the only sensible thing you could do and designed a Titanium S&S coupled, Rohloff-equipped adventure bike, which is still my main rough riding bike today. The bike was built by Black Sheep bikes in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I picked it up when I was back in the states for vacation one year:

You’ll also see young Zayzay in this photo, the Burkina dog that we brought back with us to the United States.

Heat aside, biking in Burkina was a lot of fun, and was the perfect way to get out of town and explore the countryside and small villages off the main roads. I miss being able to be “in the bush” after only 25 min or so of riding. I also miss being able to do so much mixed surface rough riding right from my front door. Here in San Diego, you have to work a bit harder if you want to enjoy low to no traffic dirt roads.

For those not into distance events, “Perpeteum” is a powder you can mix up with a little water and, in theory, it can serve as your only fuel for long-distance events. In essence, you can get your 250-300 calories per hour from the water you drink. It’s quite convenient, even though it can be a strange feeling not to take in any solid fuel.

I’ve used the stuff for a number of long-distance rides, including double centuries, and it works quite well. It’s basically a carb-based fuel so you can sustain aerobic outputs for long periods of time, but unlike junk like Gatorade, it includes a little fat and protein. Fat is important fuel for long-distance efforts that involve time spent in the sub-aerobic zone. Protein is essential to endurance events unless you like cannibalizing your own muscle tissue.

So what could be more paleo than slurping a sugary cocktail for hours on end while performing chronic cardio? That’s a joke, folks.

But it does raise the question: Can the Paleo diet and fitness principles be reconciled with moderate to high amounts of high-octane aerobic exercise?

Well, not 100%. But for those of us who can’t give up longer rides, there are a few principles we can follow:

(1) Even for substantial amounts of cardio, athletes really don’t need the insane amounts of carbs that many eat. Buckets of pasta just aren’t necessary to train for and do well in something like a double century bike ride. This can be a conceptual hurdle for athletes accustomed to constantly porking out on carbs, but try cutting back and see how you do.

(2) For moderate training rides, I find that sticking to the normal paleo diet and adding a banana or two works just fine. You don’t need to add gels or other sports products.

(3) On the day before a big event, eating a sizable portion of potatoes or sweet potatoes seems to work wonders. If you are eating low-carb much of the time, your body absorbs glycogen at a faster rate when it experiences a potato bomb. You will gain weight since your body stores water with each gram of glycogen, but this goes away after the big event if you go back to a paleo diet. You can read more about this in the Paleo Diet for Athletes.

(4) On the day of a big event, all bets are off. My thinking is that if you are doing aerobic activity for 10 hours, you can eat a steady diet of sugar because you are burning it all off. Thus, you don’t have to worry about insulin spikes, weight gain, and all the other insidious effects of a high-carb diet. If I’m riding a century, Perpetuem is on the menu for that day. But if I am riding at an event where I can choose things like bananas and potatoes at rest stops, I’ll take them over Perpetuem and gels.

(5) Right after a big event, try to take in some carbs and protein within 30 minutes of finishing. You have a short window in which your body is especially receptive to replenishing its glycogen stores. Eat a baked potato in this window and you’ll feel a lot less depleted the next day.

(6) Let experience be your guide. If you are on the Paleo diet, doing a lot of training, and finding yourself feeling lethargic and depleted all the time, add some potatoes/sweet potatoes and a little more fruit into your diet. You’ll find the balance required for the level of training your are doing. But get over the habit of thinking that you need to suck down a few gels every time you do a 1-2 hour workout.