Experimental Ride Fuel

I have made it no secret that I am very impressed with Nishiki brand sushi rice, prepared with sugar while fluffing, as the ultimate ride fuel. I have been looking for a better way to carry it with me on rides though.

I had an epiphany tonight, and decided to try grinding up the cooked rice, as grinding up the dry rice and then cooking it didn't work at all. I think this is going to work. I'll use a Hammer flask to hold the gel, just like Hammer Perpetuem - a product I won't use because it contains carnosine, a snake oil from the Area 51 of nutrition.

Carnosine might work, it might work great, it might also leave your body in ruins. I'm not getting paid a boat load of money to ride, so I'd like to stick to food that's proven beneficial to mankind for a few tens of thousands of years.

I used a wand mixer and my stainless steel Starbucks cup, but think something larger is needed. I also was using 5-day old refrigerated rice, which was a bit dry and hard. In my next attempt I will grind the rice while it is still warm and soft.

I may add a little more sugar, and even try adding some coffee, as the rice I used today, while it tastes nice and sweet eating whole, tasted a lot more earthy once ground and in the flask. A good thing maybe, as on long events all those commercial ride fuels start to taste sickly sweet.

If you want to add a powerful, natural antioxidant to this rice, add acai powder or juice. I experimented with it quite a bit a few years ago, and it works. It does tend to bring on sudden cramps when you run out of it, but since it's been used for thousands of years by natives in the Amazon, I think it's fundamentally safe. The cramping may well be due to the increidble levels of strength and energy it supports. Wow, what a ride!

I have two goals in making my own ride fuel. The 1st, is to reduce its cost. Second, a friend challenged me a couple of years ago to find natural foods to use as ride fuel, as he was increasingly concerned with dangerous ingredients, mystery ingredients, and outrageous lies of all sorts made by sports nutrition companies. ( EFS, for example, claims sucrose (table sugar) and dextrose, a synonym for glucose, are complex carbs. A flat out outrageous lie, as a 10 second Google Safari will reveal.)

I could, of course, just order a 50lb bag of maltodextrin from GPC in Mollines, Iowa, but there's nothing natural about corn flour that's been treated with enzymes and then cooked in high heat to break the complex carbs down into something technically not sugar, but very close. As we've seen with HFCS, these seemingly harmless chemical changes can have some nasty and unexpected side-effects.

For pre-ride fueling and on ride fueling, the rice allows me to go as hard as I like and never get indigestion, cramps, or bloating. Pretty great stuff!