We’ve had a little chat about bikefriends, now let’s talk
about another way bikers and their bikelives encroach into the lives of bikewives.
Food. Now, I know plenty of athletes, some pretty talented, some even at an
international level in their sports. And I’m not talking table tennis or golf –
I’m talking real sports, international
runners for example. None of them impose the same nightmare on their kitchens
as the biker.
I’m not a bikewife who cooks, and if you are, you really
have my sympathies. I can afford to ignore a lot of the biker’s bikefood behavior
because I don’t have to prepare it, but it still gets into every aspect of
bkiewifelife. I can’t even begin to
imagine the frustration of bikewives who have to buy and prepare this lunacy
for their bikers.
First of all, the bikefamily is subjected to all of the
latest fitness food trends, regardless of any scientific basis. The South Beach
diet (commonly called just “low GI” by bikers hiding the trend factor from
their bikewives), carbo-loading, the citrus diet, the list goes on. Let just
one of your little bikebuddies offer an ounce of an unsubstantiated report that
some food fad may have improved his most recent mid-peloton finish by a place
or two, and the whole bikefamily is signed up to the misery of the bland and
the boring. Yet somehow, when you get sick of it, suddenly there’s a diet
‘loophole’. So tell me, biker, how exactly
did that pizza and beer fit into the latest “Tour diet”?
The kitchen itself suffers too. The pantry is no longer a
storage space for the staples of a healthy family diet, but instead becomes the
repository for half-empty containers of all kind of mixes – not just the sticky
crap you put in the water bottles (which inevitably speeds up the mold process
when you leave your bottles in the garage or the back seat of the car), but
recovery mix, protein mix, off-season mix, turbo session mix; again, the list
goes on.
And there’s more. Gels, “Gu”s, power bars, you name it. Most
of it half-used, and all of it past its sell-by date. That may be because you
keep buying peanut butter Gu which no one in their right mind will like, not
even you at the height of a base mile ride bonk. Nope, you’ll bring that pack
of peanut flavored snot back home to keep in the pantry for the next long ride.
Supplement trends are fun too. As if the bike parts don’t cost enough, you have
to spend on the latest fad to maximize your performance. Yep, a little Creatine
is going to have you in the Cat Two’s this season for sure. That’s definitely all it will take. Now, in
cleaning out the pantry, I’m not sure why you also keep udder creme in there,
but maybe I better not ask.
 |
| A sample of the pantry store...yes, the Clif bar is open (yuck), and the oldest item was eleven months past it's sell by date! |
The cupboards are targets too. Part of the latest “this year
I’ll be Cat Three” diet plan is always a lot of kitchen equipment. A fat free
griller, because you won’t touch anything fried – at least not until next
Friday when you give in to a “cheat day” and fish and chips, or tell yourself
that stir fry doesn’t count if it’s fried in sesame oil. What was the latest
juicer in its day still sits in a cupboard, the crusts of some bizarre veggie
juice concoction still gracing the bottom of the jug. I’d love to throw them
away or garage sale them, except that I know there will come a time when the
smoothie/juicer/grill/whatever fad will roll around again. Please, though,
don’t let the next fad be going vegan, or I swear, bikewife and bikekids will
eat elsewhere.
Now, biker, explain to me why you buy all that stuff, then I
see you cramming your face with a mocha whip
and a chocolate muffin at the “rest stop”? And don’t tell me that muffin
was okay because it’s “low GI”. Sure, I know, you were close to a bonk, and
didn’t want to let your bike buddies down by slowing down the ride. Of course
you needed to refuel – so why do I find a half empty water bottle with $5 worth
of some kind of carbo powder left in the garage, and catch you putting a
handful of squashed energy bars back in the pantry? Oh right; they were the
peanut butter ones…
