Katoraid
Since I seem to be on a roll with this blog thing I'm going to stay in-line with trying to be more helpful to the readers. Even though Terren's ass stayed in bed while we got stuck with water from his garden hose on Saturday I'm going to throw out a few thoughts on making your own sports drink.
This recipe for "Katoraid" came up on RBR recently so I will pass it along:
2.5 (100 mg.) potassium tablets, crushed
1 pack Kool-aid (any flavor)
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
Mix everything together. Makes 2 liters. If your using a 24 oz. water bottle, use 1/4 a cup mix.
Nutrition Facts for Katoraid : (for 710 ml, same as standard size Gatoraid)
87 mg. potassium
51 g. sugars
209 mg. sodium
191 calories
Nutrition Facts for Gatoraid: (710 ml, standard size Gatoraid)
80 mg. Potassium
42 g. sugars
300 mg. sodium
180 calories
Yeah, it's a lot of sugar so use at your own risk but that's what this shit is. Also, the electrolyte aspect of it is useless if you're exercising for less than an hour so you can leave out the potassium and salt which essentially means that Gatoraid=Kool-Aid + salt. The real question becomes, what do you want out of a sports drink? Is this primarily for exercise at the gym? If so, how long are you exercising for? What time of day? Riddle me that and I'll try to come up with something that works for you.
I've made my own concoctions in the past mixing a small amount of Accelerade with maltodextrin. The problem with maltodextrin is that you need to buy it in bulk to get a decent price. I happen to have 20 pounds of it left so for me I can experiment at will. I've recently started cutting my Heed with it on shorter rides. That way it makes the pricey stuff last longer.
Some people use honey water. Some people use nothing but water when exercising for 2 hours or less. That's pretty cheap unless you use Holy Water or yak sweat.
Or you can just find some powdered Gatorade and throw in the towel on the DIY experiment but where's the ingenuity in that?
Incidentally Terren lives in about the greatest biking territory in the state. You have no choice but to climb hills which makes you strong like bull! Go out and make a loop which includes W Valley Brook and Bissel, do it 5 times a week, and call me in 8 weeks as you'll be a climbing monster by then, dropping me like Michelle drops a buttered bagel down the hatch.
That's the extent of today's PSA. On to the Wednesday ride which is an endurance or L2 ride by Joe Friel's direction, using the hard/easy approach. Since I went hard yesterday the prescription is to go easy today so I can go really hard tomorrow. The Thursday plan is another Swamp TT and the virtual partner goes on for that one. Fun stuff, I look forward to it.
This is all based on not going too hard the day before, a concept which is much easier to say than do sometimes. Last week my L2 ride was mentally painful and it seemed like every tweak in my body came out as I plodded along. So the plan today was to split the difference between endurance and tempo. Not too taxing yet not totally devoid of juice. This is another one of those "beyond the scope of this blog" items that I may come back to in a week or 2 since I'm still torn on this part of my weekday.
As an aside I'm actually running a 23 as my biggest gear in the back which makes my insistence on staying in the 42 up front even dumber. This paragraph has no natural place in this post so I'm going to leave it right there. It has nothing much to do with today's ride other than the fact I started using more of my gears.
I did a good enough job staying in the ballpark today, with maybe a lean to the tempo side a little bit but nothing that's going to leave me in too much of a hole in the next 24 hours. I was in the saddle at 5:04 this morning and stayed there for 1:45, a decent total for a Wednesday morning. I don't have a ride link because I was pressed for time. I'm going to teach Nat how to do it so when I get to work I'll have my ride details to look at.
I'm still torn on the aim of this ride though. I know I said it was beyond the scope of this entry but I apparently lied. So here's a generic week summary right now:
Tue: Hard, hill climbs
Wed: Relatively easy
Thu: Hard, time trial or threshold
The concept here is this. You make gains because of your hard Tuesday and Thursday workouts. But can you go hard enough if your Wednesday workout is too hard?
On the flip side a lot of people say the easy rides are a waste because you're just riding around if you go at endurance pace for 2 hours and I tend to agree. So why bother with the Wednesday ride at all? If I had the time this would be a 3-4 hour endurance "no burn" ride and that would be that. As it is, the ride turns into a "light burn" ride but maybe/probably still too light to effect much change.
But then you don't need to be as fresh to get the most out of the threshold work. The main reason I'm even considering Thursday fatigue is because I want to do that swamp TT tomorrow which is probably the wrong way to look at things. Given that, I answered my own question and today's ride needs to be harder. It wasn't a total waste because there were a lot of hills and I did press more as the ride went on. But it also wasn't as effective as it could be, especially since I'm trying to dig myself a hole right now.
Well now that the problems of the world have been solved by pure reason all I have left to look forward to is the poor house that Gary and Tony are sending me to. Tony called yesterday to say my headset is pretty much shot. This on top of the skewer, brake pads, seat post, spoke, front and rear shock service, new housing, and who knows what else. Seriously this hobby can send you to the poor house fast. Didn't I just buy this bike a year ago for $2000?
The in-laws came back from Taiwan Monday night and brought me back some peanut candies and 7 bags of loose leaf oolong tea. In addition to my coffee elitism I'm a tea elitist as well. I roast my own coffee, grind it daily, and use a french press. I also only drink loose, whole leaf, oolong tea hand-delivered from Taiwan. Neither gets any sugar nor milk added. The non-descript bag of tea on my desk at work:
How. Exciting.
This recipe for "Katoraid" came up on RBR recently so I will pass it along:
2.5 (100 mg.) potassium tablets, crushed
1 pack Kool-aid (any flavor)
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
Mix everything together. Makes 2 liters. If your using a 24 oz. water bottle, use 1/4 a cup mix.
Nutrition Facts for Katoraid : (for 710 ml, same as standard size Gatoraid)
87 mg. potassium
51 g. sugars
209 mg. sodium
191 calories
Nutrition Facts for Gatoraid: (710 ml, standard size Gatoraid)
80 mg. Potassium
42 g. sugars
300 mg. sodium
180 calories
Yeah, it's a lot of sugar so use at your own risk but that's what this shit is. Also, the electrolyte aspect of it is useless if you're exercising for less than an hour so you can leave out the potassium and salt which essentially means that Gatoraid=Kool-Aid + salt. The real question becomes, what do you want out of a sports drink? Is this primarily for exercise at the gym? If so, how long are you exercising for? What time of day? Riddle me that and I'll try to come up with something that works for you.
I've made my own concoctions in the past mixing a small amount of Accelerade with maltodextrin. The problem with maltodextrin is that you need to buy it in bulk to get a decent price. I happen to have 20 pounds of it left so for me I can experiment at will. I've recently started cutting my Heed with it on shorter rides. That way it makes the pricey stuff last longer.
Some people use honey water. Some people use nothing but water when exercising for 2 hours or less. That's pretty cheap unless you use Holy Water or yak sweat.
Or you can just find some powdered Gatorade and throw in the towel on the DIY experiment but where's the ingenuity in that?
Incidentally Terren lives in about the greatest biking territory in the state. You have no choice but to climb hills which makes you strong like bull! Go out and make a loop which includes W Valley Brook and Bissel, do it 5 times a week, and call me in 8 weeks as you'll be a climbing monster by then, dropping me like Michelle drops a buttered bagel down the hatch.
That's the extent of today's PSA. On to the Wednesday ride which is an endurance or L2 ride by Joe Friel's direction, using the hard/easy approach. Since I went hard yesterday the prescription is to go easy today so I can go really hard tomorrow. The Thursday plan is another Swamp TT and the virtual partner goes on for that one. Fun stuff, I look forward to it.
This is all based on not going too hard the day before, a concept which is much easier to say than do sometimes. Last week my L2 ride was mentally painful and it seemed like every tweak in my body came out as I plodded along. So the plan today was to split the difference between endurance and tempo. Not too taxing yet not totally devoid of juice. This is another one of those "beyond the scope of this blog" items that I may come back to in a week or 2 since I'm still torn on this part of my weekday.
As an aside I'm actually running a 23 as my biggest gear in the back which makes my insistence on staying in the 42 up front even dumber. This paragraph has no natural place in this post so I'm going to leave it right there. It has nothing much to do with today's ride other than the fact I started using more of my gears.
I did a good enough job staying in the ballpark today, with maybe a lean to the tempo side a little bit but nothing that's going to leave me in too much of a hole in the next 24 hours. I was in the saddle at 5:04 this morning and stayed there for 1:45, a decent total for a Wednesday morning. I don't have a ride link because I was pressed for time. I'm going to teach Nat how to do it so when I get to work I'll have my ride details to look at.
I'm still torn on the aim of this ride though. I know I said it was beyond the scope of this entry but I apparently lied. So here's a generic week summary right now:
Tue: Hard, hill climbs
Wed: Relatively easy
Thu: Hard, time trial or threshold
The concept here is this. You make gains because of your hard Tuesday and Thursday workouts. But can you go hard enough if your Wednesday workout is too hard?
On the flip side a lot of people say the easy rides are a waste because you're just riding around if you go at endurance pace for 2 hours and I tend to agree. So why bother with the Wednesday ride at all? If I had the time this would be a 3-4 hour endurance "no burn" ride and that would be that. As it is, the ride turns into a "light burn" ride but maybe/probably still too light to effect much change.
But then you don't need to be as fresh to get the most out of the threshold work. The main reason I'm even considering Thursday fatigue is because I want to do that swamp TT tomorrow which is probably the wrong way to look at things. Given that, I answered my own question and today's ride needs to be harder. It wasn't a total waste because there were a lot of hills and I did press more as the ride went on. But it also wasn't as effective as it could be, especially since I'm trying to dig myself a hole right now.
Well now that the problems of the world have been solved by pure reason all I have left to look forward to is the poor house that Gary and Tony are sending me to. Tony called yesterday to say my headset is pretty much shot. This on top of the skewer, brake pads, seat post, spoke, front and rear shock service, new housing, and who knows what else. Seriously this hobby can send you to the poor house fast. Didn't I just buy this bike a year ago for $2000?
The in-laws came back from Taiwan Monday night and brought me back some peanut candies and 7 bags of loose leaf oolong tea. In addition to my coffee elitism I'm a tea elitist as well. I roast my own coffee, grind it daily, and use a french press. I also only drink loose, whole leaf, oolong tea hand-delivered from Taiwan. Neither gets any sugar nor milk added. The non-descript bag of tea on my desk at work:
How. Exciting.
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