What To Eat To Climb Better - Banana Oatmeal Choco Smoothie

Rock climbing is not as important to me as it used to be. However, each time I find myself climbing, I enjoy it very much.

And, to my surprise, it seems that a part of my physical (and mental) ability to climb relatively well never fades away. Even though I don't train as I used to - on my hangboard, in the gym or simply just climbing at the local crags.

Why is that?

What To Eat as an Athlete - Shrimp & Crab Claws with Vegetables Salad

Food... Oh boy!

I love it but I hate cooking. This doesn't mean a good and healthy meal is something to skip but if it takes you hours of your day to make it... well, then you should reconsider what's more important to you: food or the rest of the things you could be doing...?

So if you're like me and don't particularly enjoy cooking but you do like to prepare something fast that's filled with vitamins, fiber and protein, here it is:

Vegetable salad and shrimps in oil (or crab claws)

Or, I guess you can call it shrimp salad if you like.

What you need and how to prepare it

1. Buy the shrimps or crab claws from your local supermarket or from a specialized sea food market. You may wanna choose them pre-cooked and preserved in oil - that saves precious time. (Are they organic or not...? - that's not our business with this article. This is for the regular guy who's not fussy about supermarket food). Cost: $ 2.7 per pack (200 grams) - for the reference this was in May 2011 - Romania (Europe).
2. Get your fresh vegetables from peasants if you can. This is possible in Romania in most of the cities and towns as peasants here are also small farmers who sell such produce. What vegetables? All sorts: radish, lettuce, spring onion, dill, cucumber, green pepper, hot red pepper, tomatoes, ramsons (wild garlic leaves) red onion, etc. Cost: $ 5.
3. Other things to make it more interesting would be: lemon and extra virgin olive oil. Cost: $ 5 for the cheapest olive oil (500 ml) and the cost of a lemon is negligible.  
4. You know how to do a salad, don't you? I guess you also know how to open a pack of shrimps. Se pictures below for a suggestion on serving and portioning. :-)

There you have it. An easy meal for the outdoor athlete. Food like this is good to have especially during the warm season when you want to be energetic and light. And eating lots of vegetables is never a bad thing for your nutrition in general.

• Shrimp are high in protein and low in calories. They also contain omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, vitamin D (good for your bones - climbers know they need this) and selenium (gives you energy boost). Source: Peertrainer.com

Eat well and go cycling, climbing or trekking. Cheers!

What To Eat as a Cyclist - Wholemeal Bread Crumbs

I'm fortunate enough to be loved by my sweetheart. She cooks for me sometimes (especially if I do the dishes, sweep the floors, feed the cat, clean the dust off the furniture and do other manly domestic work). But otherwise I a man in the house and I can go climbing and cycling whenever I want (after I do the dishes, feed the cat, sweep the floor, etc).

If you don't enjoy the freedoms that I do you're missing out a lot!

So here's a fast and easy meal you can prepare without compromising your cycling oriented nutrition - bread crumbs with garlic and dill. Now...the only reason I could enjoy this was because I was a good boy and did all the manly work in the house. I suggest you either be a good boy like me and hope that your sweetheart will notice (and reward you with bread crumbs) or you can simply be a man about it and prepare the meal yourself (in the kitchen that is - a man in the kitchen... a true man...).

How to Make Garlic Breadcrumbs

You will need a few slices of whole grain bread, four garlic cloves, butter, olive oil, half a lemon, fresh green dill and salt. The wholemeal you can get in specialized bakeries or even in supermarkets these days. We own a home bread machine and we make it ourselves adding all kinds of seeds to it - sunflower, poppy, sesame, brown flax seed.

1. Cut the slices of wholemeal into small pieces/cubes.
2. Stir bake them in a Teflon pan, on a medium/small flame, (no oil, no salt) until they get brownish .
   
3. Add some butter (a table spoon) on the crumbs - add it in small portions. It's important that the butter melts on the bread instead of melting by touching the hot pan.
4. Stir them for another minute with the butter melting. Add olive oil. Again the oil should be poured on the crumbs and not in the pan (as much as this is possible).
5. Add the garlic pulp (made with garlic smasher). Keep stirring for another two minutes.
6. Add the lemon juice and the chopped dill.
   
7. Add salt.
   

You can then enjoy this as a meal in itself or you can add the bread crumbs to a salad or serve them with a light vegetable soup.

What you'll get from this meal is:

• carbohydrates - No. 1 daily fuel for your muscles and brain
  
• fibers - from the bran in the wholemeal
• vitamins - vitamin C from lemon and lots other vitamins if you serve it with salad or vegetable soup
  

Other recipes for bread crumbs here.

In the spirit of "don't waste too much time cooking sophisticated stuff and get outdoors faster instead" me and my sweetheart wish you - Bon Appétit!


Eat well and go cycling!

Are You a Fat Cyclist?

Coz if you are, fat that is, you're not the only one.

I myself gain and consequently struggle to loose about 2 kilos (4.4 lbs) per week so I feel fat pretty often. :-) That's because I like to indulge myself with pork - as you can see in the MTB video "And Mustard Please..."

What you can do for loosing weight is what the Fat Cyclist did for himself:

I had known I needed to lose weight, but hadn’t really done much about it. As I pushed my bike up the road, I realized I had not tried one very successful diet tactic: humiliation. I resolved to start a blog, embarrassing myself by proclaiming my weight on a daily basis, no matter how bad I was doing.

I urge you to read Fatty's blog here and start getting in shape. You can also bring your contribution to the fight against cancer by riding 100 Miles of Nowhere.





My mountain bike downhill video where I get fat...


Enjoy the bike satire!

What To Eat as a Mountain Biker & Climber - Steamed Rice, Tuna Fish and Salad

It has been stressed a lot all over the place that sportsmen should ingest carbohydrates on a regular basis in order to be able to do their stuff - cycling, trail running, climbing or whatever. 

Here I propose a cool meal that you can easily prepare in less that 30 minutes. This meal consists of carbs from rice, protein from light white meat - tuna fish, fibers and vitamins from vegetables. It's a complete and healthy meal that can be part of your nutrition balanced diet.  

List of ingredients for two portions of steamed rice and tuna fish (like I'm a chef or something...):

• two rice bags - you can find those in the supermarket - punctured plastic bags/Chinese style rice
• two tuna fish cans (in olive oil/in brine/in tomato sauce)
• cucumber
• tomatoes
• lettuce
• onion
• green pepper
• radish

How to prepare it? Fairly simple!

Add approximately two liters of water and some salt in a pot; put it on fire and add the rice bags when the water is boiling hot. Keep the rice boiling for 15 minutes while you're preparing the salad.
When the rice is boiled - the bags are almost popping - take the bags out of the water, hold them 30 seconds above the pot as to let the water drip out and put them on a plate.

Rip the bag and let the rice out - it's steaming and it's looking nice. Add some butter on it and also some soup base (Vegeta, Knorr or other mixture of spices and various vegetables). Open the tuna can, add it to the rice, add the salad and you're good to go!

This is a cheap meal but this doesn't mean you're not eating healthy. The carbohydrates will give you the power you need for your strenuous exertion. The protein in the tuna fish will build up and replace used muscle tissue. And the fibers and vitamins form the salad will keep you fresh and healthy. Nothing is cooked too much (apart from the rice being boiled) so you won't loose any nutritional value from this food.

The pictures below describe the process of preparing this sportsman's meal.

Eat well and go outdoors! Cheers!

What To Eat in order To Improve Your Cycling and Climbing Performance

Apart from eating pork, I try to keep a certain balance in my eating habits. Before reading further though, you should know that my knowledge on nutrition is rather limited and it's based on my experience as a climber and mountain biker.

What I came to realize is that you cannot improve on anything without at least a little effort on your side. This also applies to your performance in sports which is a result of multiple factors, diet being one of them. You have to make decisions regarding what you eat, how much you eat (I have problems here...), when you eat and, let's not forget, what you drink.

A basic rule in general nutrition is never skip breakfast - thumbs up for this rule! You've heard it many times so there's no need to stress on that but you should know that as an athlete you'd better have cereals in the morning instead of eggs and bacon. Also if you're working on loosing weight, they say (Nestlé says) you're more likely to get slimmer if you eat cereals early in the day than if you skip breakfast altogether.

My recommendation is to consume cereals in the simplest form available - just hard pressed dull flakes, non processed, with no added sugar, no fancy packaging. If all these conditions are met then you can also expect to pay less for those cereals as the cost doesn't include expensive advertising - which does nothing more than interrupting your favorite TV show every 20 minutes...

Oats, wheat, rye, cornflakes mixed with raisins, bananas, kiwi will do just fine for your sporty lifestyle. You can have them with milk, yogurt or tea. I prefer tea as it's lighter and allows me to add lemon and honey to it. The lemon tea brings in a constant supply of vitamin C protecting me from infections - I haven't had a cold or flu in a long time (and I sleep outside in winter tours).

The beauty of eating cereals is that you don't have to cook anything. You don't have to slice, fry, boil, etc. You just take the yogurt out of the fridge, add oats, eat up, grab your bike and go to work. I'm a lazy bastard, that's why this works for me. I don't like to cook and when I do, I do it just to spoil my girlfriend - the Greek salad you see at the beginning of this post fulfilled the purpose.

Drink plenty of liquids. Especially during your training but as well when working or chilling. Being hydrated is as important as breathing when involved in physical activity. A good way of satisfying both thirst and hunger is to include soup or broth in your lunch. Nutrients will be faster absorbed by your body when they are carried by liquid. More than that, you won't put your digestive system to work as hard as when you give it steak (not that I have anything against steak).

Keep your meals small and eat fruits and vegetables between them. Food is fuel but if take in too much food you will wear down your body instead of making it run more efficiently. The smaller the amounts of food the better the assimilation and digestion. Plus you'll get a sensation of lightness and availability of your body to perform.

Eat carbohydrates within an our after ending your physical training. In strenuous sports - like climbing or uphill mountain biking - you are depleting your glycogen reserves, that is the body's carbohydrates resources, stored in muscles and liver. As it may take up to 24 or 48 hours for your system to restore those reserves, you need to refuel as soon as possible after finishing your workout, usually within an hour. This helps you recover faster and gets you back in performance mode sooner.

So let's summarize all the above:

• eat carbohydrates starting with your breakfast - cereals
• drink lots of liquids - water especially
• eat fruits and vegetables - get your fibers, minerals and vitamins
• small meals - light feeling
• eat carbs as soon as you end your training

P.S. or Disclaimer: I don't lead a scientific sporty life and I'm not obsessed with organic food. I also drink beer and eat dark chocolate. The text presented above is of informative value. Performance in sports is acquired by fine tuning a mix of elements: training, diet, rest, motivation, etc. You may eat loads of wheat and drink three gallons of Gatorade a day and still be fat and sluggish. It's all in your power not to suck at sports so get on with it!

Eat your porridge and kick ass!

My daily breakfast - oats, rye, raisins and tea with lemon