SILVER CITY, N.M. — Jason Donald stands 6 feet 2 inches and weighs 164 pounds. He often eats 5,000-6,000 calories a day. Yes, you, too, can eat all day and fit into your college trousers. All you have to do is ride your bike 500 miles a week, through snow, rain and blistering heat and hope the semi driver buzzing your left pedal at 70 mph isn’t in a lousy mood that day.
Donald, 27, is a professional cyclist, and while the life is grueling — living out of a suitcase, half the year in Europe away from family, mental pressure that nearly matches the physical pain — there is one big plus. You can eat, eat and eat some more.
The cyclist’s diet has fascinated me ever since I covered my first Tour de France in 2003. How in the world do you pump in enough fuel to cycle 100 miles with three or four 6,500-foot mountains thrown in for good measure? Then do it again the next day? And the next?
You don’t need a knife and a fork. You’d need a shovel and a trough.
Last week, I came to this scruffy little town at the base of the Gila National Forest to cover my first cycling training camp. Team Slipstream/Chipotle, the Boulder-based “expansion team” that should be a lock for this summer’s Tour de France, is here for two weeks of biking and bonding. And eating.
I observed them two days and kept waiting for the Barilla truck to back up and dump a payload full of pasta into a swimming pool tub of boiling water, or cyclists moaning from a 3,000-calorie meal.
“I eat the same thing everybody else should eat,” said Donald, a Winter Park native and Middle Park High grad. “Fruits and vegetables and a little protein. People would be surprised at how normal my diet is.”
I certainly was. Overweight Americans, who constitute two-thirds of our population, could learn a lot from cyclists — and not just how to take a hairpin mountain turn at 30 mph. A cyclist’s diet isn’t anything weird, intriguing or scientific. It’s all about balance.
A cyclist needs a ton of food. However, if you look at his meals they’re merely the foundation for a good, healthful life, not just a strong mountaintop finish. The typical breakfast for Tom Danielson, a Durango native and a former teammate of Lance Armstrong, is oatmeal or muesli with a banana or an orange along with some bread and almond butter.
Donald’s typical lunch is a big salad with raw vegetables and vinegar and oil dressing. Then he’d have two halves of a twice- baked potato and an 8-ounce steak followed by a little dessert.
The team invited me to dinner last Wednesday night, and it was simply lasagna, chef salad with oil and vinegar dressing and fresh bread. That’s it.
The difference between them and us is they eat a lot more often than we do. But if you’re keeping pace, you’d better have a good bike or gym membership, my friend. After they cycled 70 miles in four hours — about the same route I drove in three — I saw them refueling with Chipotle burritos.
“These guys eat so much anyway, their nutritional needs are taken care of,” said Allen Lim, the team’s physiologist. “It’s all about eating a decent amount of carbs, protein, decent fruits, vegetables and fiber. I encourage athletes to eat a wide variety of foods. Eat whole foods, fresh food. If you open it from a package it’s probably not good for you.”
Cyclists also eat while cycling, which I always thought is an interesting trick. Balance bars are hard enough to open with scissors, let alone while riding. But Lim has his own recipes for snacks on the road. What’s the wild formula? Nothing.
“It’s real food,” Lim said.
They include ham or turkey sandwiches with jam or cream cheese; toasted waffle sandwiches of peanut butter, bananas and/or Nutella chocolate; sushi rice with bacon, eggs, parmesan cheese, olive oil and a little salt; and boiled potatoes with salt and cheese. He cuts them into brownie-size pieces, wraps them in foil and has a real meal on wheels.
There are also plenty of nutritional supplements and goos and protein drinks and energy bars. Lots and lots of energy bars, particularly Clif bars. On long rides, they’ll eat one an hour. The most popular bar among cyclists?
“The best one is a Mojo,” Danielson said. “It’s the closest one to real food.”
Unfortunately, many Americans prefer a Snickers bar. Yes, cyclists also eat Snickers, but they’re riding up Mount Evans while they’re eating them.
“People just don’t care,” Donald said. “That’s the whole problem. They eat whatever tastes good. They want sugar, salt and fat. To me, that doesn’t taste good.”
So next time you’re hungry, don’t go to McDonald’s. Go to a farmers market and the energy bar section of a 7-Eleven near you. And ride your bike.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
