Rest day food intake

[monnet]

Brace yourself, there's a bit of a lead in, stick with me as advice would be greatly appreciated.

A typical cycling week for me involves commuting every day (80miles a week), chaingang on Tuesday (ca 43miles), a 30miler on my own on Thursday, clubrun on sunday (65-80miles) and an occassional ouing on a saturday. Obviously this adds up. SO this week I was out on the chainy when I just didn't have the power to push over a hill and got dropped. No problem, they all race and I'm pretty new to the chainy scene. However, I shouldn't have been dropped where I was, I normally have the power so I put it down to over training and needing a rest. I checked my diary and saw I'd ridden 11 days straight and 21 out of the last 24 days. As I'm not in the office this week I decided to rest for at least 3 days.

Now, food. I have a healthy, cyclists appetite. And I eat good food (fruit, veg, cook from scratch, not much fatty stuff etc). When I'm riding, I find my body doesn't want to eat unhealthy stuff and also stops me overeating/eating for the sake of it. The first thing I noticed in this rest phase is that I didn't need my mid morning snacks (sandwich and fruit). BUT, after lunch I become an eating machine unable to stop myself-furit, cake, biscuits, toast, puddings).

So, the questions are: is this typical of you guys? Is my body just taking a chance to fill up on what it's been missing? Should I be paying close attention to what I'm eating in this period?

I'll be back on the bike this weekend and, FWIW, I'm 29, a lean 5'9'' and about 62/3 kgs so I'm not concerned about putting weight on, I'm just interested in how my body is refuelling itself.

TIA

 

[pjm]

Yes this is perfectly normal. If you want to do a serious 'calories in - calories out' assessment to check you are eating the righ amount, then you'd do it based on a weekly calorie intake/expenditure rather than a daily one. It goes without saying that some days you will eat more and some days you will train more, trying to balance your intake/expenditure on any one day is not necessarily any more sensible than trying to balanc it out in any one given hour. Of course that is subject to a degree of common sense, starving yourself for 2 days then spending the next day stuffing your face with pork pies is clearly not a sensible strategy.