Trial by food

If football is a game of inches, the IBR is a game of seconds.  Over the course of 11 days, wasted seconds become minutes which can become hours.  Anything done to save precious seconds can pay dividends later on.  In the 2007 IBR, I wasted a fair amount of time chasing down food.  This included at least three restaurant stops and time standing in line at various convenience stores.  This time around I’m considering eating only what I can carry on the bike and consume while riding.

This week I experimented with my IBR diet.  For 72 hours I ate nothing but what you see in the picture; trail mix, Clif Bars and one high-protein Ensure daily.   My total caloric intake each day was 1720 calories.  I ‘m happy to report there were no digestive tract emergencies and I never felt hungry.  I was however ready for a real meal on the evening of day three.  I got tired of the Clif Bars pretty quickly but looked forward to the trail mix every time (must have been the chocolate).  Still, I think this is entirely do-able for 11 days when supplemented by real food at each checkpoint and supplementing my stash with apples and bananas which should also be readily available between each leg.  I plan another, longer IBR experiment a couple of weeks.