A very hard job awaits the cyclists who start the Tour de France today in Bilbao. No, it’s not pedaling. Is to eat. digest the rice cakes (rice cakes), basic in his diet on the bike. Endure the monotony of flavors and textures of gels, bars, jelly beans, shakes. Metabolize 9,000 calories of food daily.
For three weeks they will cycle four, five, six hours a day, they will climb mountains, they will attack, they will sprint, only the fittest will survive. It will be hard work, but for this your bodies, perhaps the most perfect organisms, your muscles, your blood system, your heart, your lungs, are already prepared. All of them, the best, the champions, and the gregarious, lead a lifetime of training to that end. They are machines. They are moved by motors that, for example, need to produce almost 2,000 watts to produce the 450 watts of average power that they transfer to the pedals in the ascent of the Tourmalet. Engines to be fed.
“Cycling and life, health, is a matter of energy. The recovery process is a matter of energy, the process of adaptation to training is a matter of energy. In everyday life, we are drunk on energy, supercharged, and we have to move to expend it. But cycling is the other way around, it is the need for energy. If you generate 2,000 watts, it means that you spend tremendous energy on a daily basis, and you have to eat that, there is no secret”, says Aitor Viribay, from Leza, a physiologist and nutritionist for Ineos, one of the best teams on the Tour . “You have to eat, and a lot. During the hardest stages, up to more than 120 grams of carbohydrates per hour, 500 or 600 grams that fill the stomach at the end of the 200 kilometers. And you have to digest, metabolize and oxidize them so that they become glycogen, muscle fuel, without stopping pedalling. Before the stage you have to have breakfast and then dinner, and not only carbohydrates and sugars, but also proteins, and fibers, and even fats. “It’s as simple as that. A cyclist on the Tour may need to eat up to 5,000 calories on the stage and 4,000 more afterwards. And eating 9,000 calories a day sure is hard work.”
“Arduous, boring, not at all pleasant and sometimes even contraindicated.” Dani Lasa completes the list of sad adjectives that accompany an activity in sports nutrition, eating, in which people seek not only to eat so as not to die, but also pleasure.
Dani Lasa, chef and former head of R&D at the Mugaritz restaurant, knows what he is talking about, and not only because of his job as a chef. He was born in Oiartzun, the cycling town of the recently deceased Txomin Perurena, a myth of Basque cycling, and Lasa has eaten fried eggs with chistorra at three in the morning at the Perurena bar, open until dawn. He belongs to a cyclist family —his uncles, José Manuel and Miguel Mari, were professional runners, and very good ones, in the 70s—, he was an amateur cyclist, he remains in magnificent shape now that he is 48 years old and he still remembers how moved he was, more than ever, the day that Indurain was eating in Mugaritz. Slim, wiry, he competes in mountain races. “In my cycling days, I did not see anyone who ate with passion. They said, this is a procedure, I have to put in calories, I have to put in carbohydrates, I have to put in vitamins, I have to put in amino acids, I have to put in everything, and then I’ll give up. They turned the food into just fuel. And now I live in my flesh, I suffer what it is like to put a gel with fructose and glucose, continue taking carbohydrates constantly, and that boredom in my mouth, and I say to myself, we could make this something more pleasant, or not so boring , No?”.
Viribay, Ineos physiologist and nutritionist, due to his relationship with runners, had the same concern and some more. He was concerned that sports nutrition was not pleasant on a sensory level, an element that helps the cyclist psychologically, but also his stomach comfort, which greatly influences his performance. Diarrhea, an increasingly common event in the peloton, can end hopes of a good classification, or poor digestion. The digestive training that cyclists undergo does not fully solve the problem of discomfort, often caused by the characteristics of the food itself. “There are certain foods that we have understood to be adequate and, going a little further into the analysis of their composition, we have seen that they are not,” says the Ineos specialist. “For example, cycling has been using rice cakes, but rice, when it cools, makes a resistant starch that is not as absorbed in the body, and it is more of a fiber, a type of fiber. It is something very positive at the population level because you go from a more or less simple sugar, quite simple, to fiber, but it is not what you need on the bike ”.
Cold rice, the need to eliminate fiber from the rice cake has united Viribay and Dani Lasa through Mikel Zeberio, one of the patriarchs of Basque gastronomy, at the origin of a group, From lab to field (from the laboratory to the field). It is a cultural and health company, which also includes Juan Carlos Arboleya, food physicochemist and director of the Master’s degree in Gastronomic Science at the Basque Culinary Center, who also worked in Mugaritz.
They, and the Ineos chef, James Forsyth, have embarked on the task of marrying sports nutrition with molecular cuisine and haute cuisine. “The power of the project lies in what we have always done up to now: look from a very chemical plane, on a molecular scale, what texture, what functionality, can you give to an ingredient, but always taking into account all the culinary part from the beginning . And that pairing, that tandem, is ready to jump in and start talking with sports nutritionists and physiologists”, says Arboleya. “In sports nutrition, technology always has to go hand in hand with the more cultural and gastronomic part, which is the kitchen. My task of taking a molecule and saying, well, we are going to synthesize it in this way so that it can be absorbed by the body and generate sports performance, it would not make sense if the culinary part were not close by”.
When Viribay asked Dani Lasa about his problems with starch and rice, and told him that rice was very good for energy through metabolism, but fiber was bad at that time because it is fatally digested, the cook replied What do we have to do, Aitor? “And he told me that these resistant starches had to be broken down, and converted, instead of complex polysaccharides, into mono, di, oligosaccharides, simpler chains so that it could function as a quick gel that the cyclist puts on ten minutes before attacking. And, furthermore, potatoes would be better than rice, but without clear starch”, explains Dani Lasa, who recalled then how during the last 10-15 years in Mugaritz they had already been introduced to fermentation processes that do nothing more than precisely that. “What saliva does when you put a cooked potato in your mouth is to start breaking down its starches, which can be amylose, amylopectin, which will sound familiar to all of us because of the content that is in the rice, that is in the potato, in the sweet potato, in cassava, in many sources of carbohydrates. In saliva you start to break them down, you use amylase, glucosidase, that is, different enzymes, and what we do is start to break it down through cooking processes and exposure to these enzymes, and you keep simplifying it”. And he launched into his experimentation with the same clarity of ideas, molecular knowledge and daring with which in Mugaritz he began to use cod skin gelatin to replace butter in emulsions and the same philosophy with which he has been preparing kombuchas with teas for months grand cru, as valued as Burgundy vineyards, from exclusive gardens from around the world and with the double fermentation technique from which champagne is born. “And if we can reduce the acidity of the kombucha, it would be ideal for cyclists, because you can’t continuously add acidity to the stomach or intestines while you’re doing the sport,” says Dani Lasa. “Kombucha is made through a scobywhich is the acronym in English for symbiotic culture colony of bacteria and yeast, a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. And many of them are probiotics. For me, kombucha, in a way, illustrates or crystallizes the whole metaphor of tradition.”
With enzymatic cooking, the starch of the rice and tuber is converted into a mass, a raw material with which to prepare the dish, the rice cake haute cuisine that the cyclist can carry without spoiling in the pocket of the jersey at any temperature. “We incorporate crunchy elements to make them more fun when eating, and so that in that crunchy you can put seeds, nuts such as almonds, or other elements that are also enriched with fats, proteins, amino acids, which would not be more than a potato”, explains Dani Lasa. “We get a much more accessible raw material for the metabolism, but for me, as a cook, a raw material to start cooking, and to arrange or incorporate the flavors we want, sesame or even protein flavors.”
In today’s cycling, performance depends on eating very, very well on the bike, and adequate food. In the Ineos they have a comfort scale and certain markers, such as fermentation by expired hydrogen, which reveals malabsorption. No alarm has gone off. The rivals see them so happy that in the morning they approach Viribay and ask him, what is your secret?
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