I decided to ride my bike to work, something Rose has been bugging me to do for a while. It’s only 12 miles but it is up hill both ways which is why I was hesitant at first, not really because there are hills involved but because the hills are on high traffic streets and there’s really no way to get back up to South Hill without going on a busy street.
Anyway, I planned to leave early with plenty of time just in case, for some reason, it took me much longer than I anticipated. I figured 1 hour, max.
Here’s how I was stupid, very stupid: I’ve left before plenty of rides without eating anything but packed things to eat on the way or knew that I could eat when I got where I was going. I knew there would be coffee and donuts and such so I was worried about eating when I got there. Of course, the point is that not eating before a ride in the day is different than not eating before going on a ride in the morning when you haven’t been eating in the last 10-12 hours.

So I bonked on the way up the hill to Milton.

When you bonk on the bike what happens is that you’ve used up all your body’s stores of glycogen and so you don’t have any energy so your body steals it from your muscles. Generally, I need about 100 calories per hour when I ride to keep my glycogen levels where they need to be so I don’t run out of juice. Of course, since I had just woken up I had no more stores and it didn’t matter that I was going to have pleny of carbs and sugars at work, I needed them then and now, before I left.

It’s never happened to me before and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience as well as taking the rest of the day and night to fully recover. I was going up the hill thinking, “wow, I really haven’t ridden in a while (that was true, it had been a month) but this is really hard!”. My vision was swimming a little and it was hard to concentrate on the road. I tried swallowing a few bites of Cliff bar and some Gatorade and that must have helped me get the last few miles to school. I finally feel better and at least I know what it feels like, which is incentive to never let it happen again.