London to Auckland

When it comes to food the experts love to say that in general terms, “You are what you eat.” I like to think that this is just plain wrong , otherwise at various times in my life I would have been a pie or a cake, and after one tour of the South Island by trail bike in 1979, a burger with the lot and stolen cherries. I enjoy good food. It’s one of the great pleasures of life. In fact, I love my meat so much that when I was young I decided that if I couldn’t become an astronaut, I’d become a meatorologist and work in a butchers shop.

I have never been that keen on vegetables. I knew a guy once who claimed to be able to see poisonous fumes coming off cucumbers. I can’t personally see them but I know they are there, and for the first 15 years of my kid’s lives I told them that I could only afford enough broccolis for them. I’m not bragging here you know. This is a sacrifice that any parent would be happy to make.

I am also not a great fan of offal, toe nails, scrotum, seaweed or animal sexual organs so working for Japan Airlines for 4 years in the nineties was a bit of a nightmare. An adventurous eater I am not!

I have tried most diet types during my life. The see-food diet where you eat any food you see and get heavier contrasts with the high protein low carb diet where you lose weight in the short term but suffer in the long term from constipation and lack of energy. Neither is ideal. There is no substitute for a well balanced diet and regular exercise.

Even though I understand all this, food is definitely a weakness of mine. As an example of where I am at food wise, if I had to choose a last meal it would be a 3kg fillet mignon with pepper sauce and fries. Dessert would be 3 helpings of blackberry pie with lashings of whipped crème. The whole meal would be finished off with a large pile of dark chocolate marshmallow easter eggs. Vegetables would not be invited to attend.

This would all indicate that some sacrifices will need to be made in order to ensure a successful London to Sydney ride.

Nutrition is a hot topic for the ride. We will be asking our bodies to work for up to 12 hours a day for six days a week. This is necessitating a review of what I eat leading up to and during the ride. There needs to be a general (possibly Field Marshall) change towards more healthy carbs, fruit, veggies and quality proteins and fats.

During the ride we will need to top up with carbs consistently during the day to avoid running our glycogen levels down to a level where we ‘hit the wall’ or ‘bonk’ and we will need to keep fluid intakes up. As soon as we get off the skis we will need to get into recovery mode in the first 30 minutes taking on some more good carbs to give our muscles the best chance of recovery before the next day’s workout.

Fortunately Marie Dufour who will be on the support boat with us and in charge of nutrition is something of a nutrition guru. (See Marie’s blog at: http://dufourcrunch.blogspot.com/) As Marie is both French and American we can expect a slightly refined performance from that which you can expect in an American restaurant. I can already see Marie putting an unidentifiable dish in front of me and saying” eat it, it’s good for you!”It is bound to make me miss my Mother who is guilty of doing just that for the first 20 years of my life.

And now let’s have a chat about alcohol.

Yes I have been known to take the odd glass of truth serum from time to time and if you really must know I am quite partial to a blended margarita (no salt) on a sunny day and it must have an umbrella in it! But from a peak physical performance aspect alcohol is not a great thing at all. The problem is that in each bottle of hard spirits there is a gorilla waiting. When you go to bed after drinking, he rips the buttons off your shirt, empties your wallet, does unspeakable things in your wardrobe and thumps you in the head ensuring that it throbs for the whole of the next day and, as you get older, the following day as well. I know gorillas exist because I have been attacked by them and I have witnessed other attacks. Once when I was on a rowing camp with Barrie my PWC riding buddy, a gorilla pushed him over in the bushes, fell on and broke a tent pole in his tent and thumped him hard enough to make him very sore and very quiet the next day.

Alcohol is not good, so as a result of these experiences dealing with large primates it has been decided to ban alcohol on board the support boat at all times, and in ports, to limit consumption to those beverages that only have small monkeys in them.

So that’s about it for now. I’m off over the road to an American Restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory to have a 2000 calorie salad. Bonn appetite!