What's better than French Fries?

I rode my monthly Santa Ana 200k yesterday. Like all long rides, I learned something. It's easy to learn new stuff - you just have to pay attention.

It was cool enough to ride during the day at last. At 8:30am it was a lovely 66F and stayed around 75 all day - briefly touching 80 at the coast. I even had a little rain - the lightest of mists, as welcome as morning dew to a thirsty rabbit (poetic, ain't I?). I had a moderate headwind for the last 30 miles to the coast - perhaps 10mph.

I'd made a deliberate effort to take this ride easy. Instead of riding straight through the first 60 miles I stopped and ate a double-double at In-and-Out burgers. For those of you who are not familiar with In-and-Out I pity you.

At the turn-around point at Huntington Beach I ate a lovely turkey and avocado sandwich and then turned around expecting a well-deserved tail wind. Well I did get the tailwind but for some reason I was bonking horribly so I could barely hold 12mph on the flat with a 10mph tailwind. Pathetic.

So the question is how can I bonk right after an ideal carb heavy meal. It's happened before but I still haven't figured out why. I kept waiting for the sandwich to kick in but it never did. It's like the sandwich had no nutritional value at all. After an hour of bonking I realized I needed more calories. Fortunately I had an Odwalla bar with me (my first ever). It was pretty good and got me to the 90 mile mark, although still a little slower than normal. I'll be buying some more.

At the 90 mile mark is the Lucky Greek - I've mentioned it before. I bought a large order of french fries and a large cherry coke. So now I can answer the question 'What is better than french fries?'. The answer is french fries eaten out of my top-tube bag and washed down with iced coke from my water bottle. Apparantly there's about 400 calories in a large order of fries and about the same in the coke and it was just what I needed to recover fully from the bonk and finish strong.

That's something inexperienced riders don't understand - you can recover from a massive bonk.

I think I had a tailwind all the way home. I swear it was fully 20mph for the last 40 miles of the permanent. Even though I had a headwind on the way out and bonked on the way back and stopped to eat a nice relaxed meal at two of my three stops, I still managed a sub 10 hour 200k which is about par for me even when I'm 'hammering'. Maybe I should be more relaxed about these things. Hammering doesn't seem to improve my time.