Recovery eating

It's now been three days since I finished RAWROD, and I am still hungry. Sunday I didn't eat too much, and I didn't really feel so much like eating, as I think my system was still recovering from the stress of Saturday's ride. Monday, I felt OK and even tried to ride my road bike. After 19 miles, though, I felt completely worked. And wanted to do nothing but eat for the rest of the day. Yesterday, it was the same story--I didn't even get out on a ride or any other exercise. I just wanted to eat.

I can tell I was not as fit as I should have been for a ride that big, because recovery seems to be taking a lot longer than it should. Reminds me of when I ran my first marathon--I didn't feel back to normal for three weeks.

Part of being hungry nonstop for three days has got to be my body telling me that it's trying to put the molecules back together but needs some raw materials to work with. Which is why I should be eating egg white omelettes, oatmeal, free range chicken breasts, broccoli, blueberries, and things like that. But I'm not. Not that I'm eating really bad stuff, but each of the last two nights--when I shouldn't have eaten anything except maybe a blueberry smoothie with protein powder--I've killed off the post-dinner evening cravings with ice cream.

Ice cream for the last two nights notwithstanding, I usually try to eat pretty healthy, which includes supplementing my diet with some of the nutrients it lacks. To the tune of 8 or 9 pills a day. I've read from multiple sources that fish oil is supposed to be one of these supplements. So a while ago, I bought some fish oil capsules and added them to my daily regimen.

Problem is, as good as fish oil is supposed to be for your heart, it's at least that bad for your mouth. It doesn't taste bad going down--in fact, it doesn't taste like anything except what you're drinking to swallow the capsules. But the flavor of the fish oil comes back up, repeatedly, for the rest of the day. The worst possible solution is to drink diet coke in order to get rid of the fish oil taste--it leads to a horrible drink-burp-gag cycle. Nasty. And since I'm not quite ready to give up the diet coke, the fish oil is going to have to go. I'm sure my body will figure out some way to recover from long rides without it.