The First 300 Mile Bike Week--How Long Will Your Metabolism Burn?

What better way to follow up your first 150 mile bike ride than with a run and a 50 mile bike the next day?

This is the mindset to which I'm slowly adapting in my quest to become a rad ultracyclist. It worked last weekend.

Coachubby, Robyn, and I did our first 150 miles straight on Saturday. Boo ya. Out of respect for our quads from the muscle-destroying DA (disappearing ass) ride we did the weekend before (which actually took 10 minutes longer...and was 30 miles shorter), we rode relatively flat--all the way from Redondo Beach to San Buenaventura State Beach in Ventura (sight of the Breath of Life triathlons, where coachubby and I met) and back.

We picked up a fellow Ironman along the way, who immediately fell in love with Robyn (who wouldn't?) and decided to ride with us all the way to Ventura and back. His planned 80 mile ride must've ended up in the realm of 120 miles. Oh, what men will do to spend 6 hours staring at a perfectly toned female tush.

(In this guy's favor, he was very fun to be around, and pretty much pulled us the entire 60 miles from Ventura back to Santa Monica. What's not to love about him? Robyn has his number.)

My question, which would better be addressed to Roch Frey and Paul Huddle instead of to cyberspace, is: Is it possible that such a weekend of long, slow, never-ending biking could result in a sped up metabolism lasting...I don't know...4 days?

Needless to say, this week is a rest week. My quads are finally, on the fourth day of rest, showing signs of life. They may wake from their quad coma by day 7. (Unless I ski bumps all day the next few days. Mammoth, here I come!)

And while conventional wisdom says you should eat for the activity you've done on a certain day, is it possible that all that riding is just now catching up with me?

My mind has been short circuited. Perhaps I didn't get in enough in my 200-mile weekend. All I could think about Sunday night (besides the heartbreaking Cardinals loss) was BBQ potato chips. Monday, it was Dreyer's Loaded Cookie Dough Ice Cream. Tuesday, it was cookie poops (homemade sugar cookies from my German grandma...she gave me enough to feed an army...or just myself). Yesterday, it was chocolate cake.

These cravings have resulted in the disappearance of 1 entire bag of Lay's chips on Sunday, one 1/2 gallon of ice cream on Monday, approximately 50+ cookie poops on Tuesday, and a hearty piece of chocolate cake last night.

If you've seen any of these things, please don't report them to me. I've heard they exist in multiples, and if my strung-out cyclist's body lays an eye on them, there might be more freak disappearances.

I'll go along with the theory that your metabolism continues to burn at a higher rate after exercise...and that after 8.5 hours of cycling, that period is not just a few hours, but several days. I also believe that chocolate cake goes straight to my torn quads and sticks them back together with frosting.

Frey and Huddle would probably rip me a new one for this self-serving conclusion. But my stomach's happy. We'll see how the scale reacts at Monday's weigh-in.

Cycle on!