EATING FOR THE TRIP: THE WEEKS BEFORE AND THE TRAVEL DAYS

The Technique

1. Decide what the weeks before the trip are actually for. Most riders drift into a trip without ever making this call, and the body composition and energy they turn up with is whatever happened to fall out of a busy few months. Make the call on purpose. In the final block before a trip, the job of your eating is to support the training you are doing and to get you to the start line with full stores and a settled gut. It is not the time to change your body. If you want to shift body composition, that work belongs months out, well clear of the trip, and it belongs alongside a training load you can actually recover from. Write the date of departure on a calendar and mark the last four to six weeks as a support block. Everything you decide about food in that window should be judged against one question: does this help me train well and recover well.
2. Understand why arriving under-fuelled is the classic failure. The common story goes like this. A rider books a big trip, decides they want to look sharp in the photos, cuts food hard for a month, keeps training, and arrives lighter and visibly leaner. Then day one is a five hour push in deep snow at altitude, or a full day of hard riding in heat, and they fall apart by early afternoon. What has happened is that they spent weeks running on less energy than their training and daily life were asking for. When available energy stays low for a long stretch, the body protects itself by trimming the things it does not consider urgent, and that shows up as poor recovery between sessions, a low mood, disrupted sleep, more niggling injuries, getting sick more often, and in some people changes to hormones and to menstrual cycles. None of that is a good state to start a hard trip in. Being three kilograms lighter is worth nothing if you cannot ride the last two hours of the best day.
3. Build the ordinary day before you worry about anything clever. A day that supports hard training is not complicated. Most meals hold three things: a solid protein source, a solid carbohydrate source, and plants for colour and fibre, with some fat from cooking oils, nuts, dairy or oily fish. The lever that matters most in a training block is carbohydrate, because that is what fuels hard riding and hard sessions, and it is the thing people quietly cut when they are trying to be good. If you are training hard and feel flat by the third session of the week, the fix is usually more carbohydrate around your sessions rather than more discipline. Put a real meal after your two hardest sessions each week rather than a snack. Eat breakfast even on days you do not want it, because skipping it moves all the eating late and tends to wreck the following morning. Keep the pattern boring and repeatable, because a plan you can run for six weeks without thinking beats a plan you abandon in ten days.
4. Take nutrient adequacy seriously in a general sense, and iron in particular. Hard training on a limited or repetitive diet is the setting where gaps quietly open up. Iron is the one worth knowing about, because low iron produces exactly the symptoms riders blame on fitness: heavy legs, breathlessness on climbs that used to be fine, and a slide in recovery that no amount of extra training fixes. Riders who menstruate, riders who have cut out red meat, and riders who have recently ramped training all sit in the group where it is worth a conversation with a doctor and a blood test rather than guesswork. Iron from meat, fish and poultry is absorbed more readily than iron from plants, and plant sources such as legumes, tofu, wholegrains and dark leafy greens are helped along by eating vitamin C rich food in the same meal. Do not start iron supplements on your own reading, because too much iron is its own problem. The general principle for everything else is simple: eat a wide range of real food, get sunlight, and if you have restricted a whole food group for any reason, get advice about what that group was doing for you.
5. Practise your trip food while you are still at home. Your gut is trainable, and it is also stubborn about surprises. If you plan to eat a certain bar, gel, drink mix or homemade snack on the hill, eat it during your hardest training sessions in the weeks beforehand, in the same amounts and at the same intervals you intend to use. This does two things. It tells you whether the food sits well when your heart rate is high and you are bounced around, and it slowly gets your gut comfortable taking food in while you work. Riders who never do this are the ones who discover on day two of a trip that the thing they packed twelve of makes them feel sick. Do the same with anything you plan to drink. If you are going to use an electrolyte drink, taste it and use it at home first, because finding out you cannot stand the flavour when it is the only option in the lodge is a genuinely miserable way to spend a week.
6. Treat travel days as a planned part of the trip, not dead time. A long haul travel day is often the worst eating day of the whole trip: early start, missed breakfast, whatever is open at the airport, one plane meal on someone else's schedule, hours of sitting, and a late arrival with the kitchen closed. Plan around it. Carry your own food in your hand luggage, chosen for things that survive being squashed and do not need a fridge, such as nuts, dried fruit, oat based bars, crackers, a firm cheese if the flight is short, and a couple of pieces of fruit. Check the biosecurity rules for where you are landing, because fresh fruit, seeds, meat and dairy are the usual things confiscated at the border, and Australia and New Zealand are strict in both directions. Eat a proper meal before you get to the airport rather than gambling on the terminal. On the plane, take the meals when they come even if the timing is odd, because turning them down usually means eating nothing for another six hours.
7. Move your meal times toward the destination and arrive hydrated. Two things reset a body clock better than anything else you control on a plane: light and meal timing. As soon as you board, set your watch to destination time and start eating on that clock rather than the one you left. If it is the middle of the night where you are going, skip the meal and sleep. If it is breakfast time there, eat breakfast even if your body says otherwise. Hydration on a long flight is mostly a matter of drinking steadily rather than heroically, because cabin air is very dry and you lose water slowly for the whole flight. Carry an empty bottle through security and fill it after, then keep drinking small amounts across the flight rather than a litre at the end. Alcohol is the thing to leave alone here, because it costs you sleep quality on the flight and adds to the fluid loss for no benefit. Coffee is fine if you use it deliberately to hold yourself awake into the destination evening, and a poor idea if it is just habit at the wrong hour.
8. Manage food risk in remote and tropical country before it manages you. The single fastest way to lose a day of a trip is a stomach upset, and in remote or tropical destinations the risk is higher and the help is further away. The basic rules are old and they work. Drink water you trust, which means sealed, boiled, or treated with a filter or tablets, and remember that ice, salads washed in untreated water, and cleaning your teeth at the tap are all the same water by another route. Eat food that is hot and freshly cooked rather than food that has been sitting out. Be careful with buffet food that has been warm for a long time, with raw or lightly cooked seafood, and with fruit you did not peel yourself. Wash your hands before you eat and carry a hand sanitiser for when there is nowhere to wash. Introduce unfamiliar food gradually rather than eating three unusual meals on your first day in country. Talk to a travel doctor well before you go about vaccinations, malaria, and what to carry for traveller's diarrhoea, because that is a medical conversation and not one to have with a search engine on the road.
9. Sort your dietary requirements and write a plan for the last week. When a trip cooks for a group, the kitchen is usually working out of a remote lodge with a food order placed long before you arrive and no shop within hours. That means dietary requirements have to be told to the operator early, in writing, and in useful detail. There is a real difference between an allergy that could put you in hospital, an intolerance that makes you uncomfortable, a religious or ethical requirement, and a preference, and the kitchen needs to know which one they are dealing with. If your requirement is unusual or severe, offer to bring some of your own staples, and confirm what will be available rather than assuming. Then build the last week itself, and keep it simple. Keep training light and familiar, keep meals to food you have eaten before, lift carbohydrate slightly in the last two or three days if you have a big first day, drink to a normal pale urine colour, skip alcohol, protect sleep, and do not try a single new thing. The last week is not where fitness is won. It is where it is protected.

Common Mistakes

Trying to get lean in the four weeks before a trip. Fix: move body composition work to months out and make the final block a support block for training.

• Cutting carbohydrate through a hard training block and blaming the flatness on fitness. Fix: put real carbohydrate around your two hardest sessions each week and judge how you feel by the third session.
• Testing new bars, gels or drink mixes for the first time on day one of the trip. Fix: eat and drink exactly what you plan to use during your hardest home sessions first.
• Assuming iron is fine because you feel mostly alright. Fix: if you are training hard and recovery has slipped, ask a doctor for a blood test rather than starting supplements on your own.
• Turning up dehydrated after a long flight and a couple of drinks. Fix: carry a bottle, drink steadily across the flight, and leave alcohol until after the trip.
• Telling the operator about a serious allergy on arrival. Fix: put it in writing at booking, state whether it is allergy, intolerance or preference, and confirm what the lodge can actually provide.
• Eating three unfamiliar meals on the first day in a remote destination. Fix: introduce new food gradually and keep the first day boring.

The Drill

Build a one page departure plan and a travel food kit. On one side of a page write the last seven days before you fly: training, main meals, the two or three days where you lift carbohydrate, and the day you stop drinking alcohol. On the other side write your travel day hour by hour from the taxi to the lodge, marking every point where you will eat and what you will eat there. Then physically pack the travel food kit and weigh it. The standard is that you can get from your front door to your bed at the destination without ever being forced to eat whatever happens to be in front of you, and that every item in the kit is something you have already eaten during a hard training session at home.

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