tired after long commute yesterday

[PotomacCyclist]

To follow up on getting hungry when you’re just starting to do longer workouts, I think it’s part physical but also part mental. Of course you’ll burn calories on long rides. But when your brain isn’t quite used to long rides and workouts, it may think your body needs more food than it really does. It senses the drop in glycogen and thinks that you need to go into survival mode. That’s why beginners often feel very hungry after long workouts. The brain doesn’t quite understand yet that a single long workout isn’t going to starve you to death.

I remember when I first started doing long runs a few years ago. After I would get back home, I would eat everything in sight, maybe nonstop eating for 30-60 minutes. I wasn’t running that long, but my brain didn’t know that. It thought that I was on the verge of starvation when that wasn’t the case at all. An otherwise healthy person on a healthy diet is not going to starve from a 90-minute run.

As I gained more experience, I stopped getting so hungry after long workouts (bike and run). While I still like to get some calories after those long workouts, I no longer feel like I have to eat half a grocery store.

***
I also remember my quads getting sore during my first longer rides. Partly from fatigue but partly from glycogen depletion. When you aren’t quite as fit, you tend to burn glycogen faster during easy rides and workouts. That was the case with me. A moderate 2-hour ride would cause that deep-seated dull ache in my quads. It would go away once I got home and ate something. In recent years, I rarely get that dull muscle ache, even during much longer rides. I certainly feel stress in the legs when I’m doing a hard hill workout, but I can tell that it’s different from the glycogen depletion that I used to experience in my first year.

A lot of these minor issues tend to fade away with more experience and better endurance. Your body gets better at burning fat during low and moderate-intensity rides. It’s kind of neat how that works. I used to be somewhat intimidated by the thought of a 2-hr. ride or a 75-minute run. Even a 25-yd. swim wiped me out when I first got back to swimming several years ago. Now I can bike or run for hours. Even with swimming, if I brought gels with me, I could probably swim for hours too (if I kept to a moderate pace).

[maverick]

i’m looking forward to getting to where i can ride for hours, maybe even do a century!

[MV Clyde]

@KLizotte 26431 wrote:

Yesterday was also pretty dreary and coma inducing if you ask me.

Yep….

[Birdstrike]

Or plenty of raw oat or wheat bran baked into muffin mix. Hand grenades.

[Terpfan]

@maverick 26486 wrote:

i’m looking forward to getting to where i can ride for hours, maybe even do a century!

Speaking of which, I’m thinking of attempting my own self-created century down to my fiancee’s sister’s house in central VA. I’ve never done the century although I found 50-60 miles to be not too problematic and I’ve ridden a century between two days without much problem. The tricky part I think will be staying on course since I won’t want to be pulling out my phone every 2 miles to make sure I’m going the right way. If I can do it and report back successfully, then I promise anyone can do it.

[Author]

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