First of all, an enormous vote of appreciation and thanks to all of the readers of Tuned In To Cycling over the years who have provided helpful comments, support and motivation for me to write a book about cycling nutrition. It’s finally happened. Nutrition for Cyclists: Eating and Drinking Before, During and After the Ride is now available for purchase at Amazon.com.

The book grew out of the nutrition posts here on Tuned In To Cycling and, like those posts, combines suggestions and recommendations for what to eat and drink before, during and after a ride with information about how the body responds to endurance athletics.  To help you decide whether or not you’d like to purchase the book, I’m posting the book’s Introduction here which will give you a good idea about what’s in the book and how it relates to the posts that have appeared on Tuned In To Cycling.

If you decide to buy the book and you think it is useful for other cyclists and worth a 4 or 5 star review, I would greatly appreciate it if you would leave a review on Amazon.  Positive reviews are a huge factor in helping a self-published book find an audience among the millions of ebooks published on Amazon.

Here’s the Introduction to  Nutrition for Cyclists: Eating and Drinking Before, During and After the Ride.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Here’s a quote from former U.S. President John F. Kennedy that many cyclists know well.

Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.

Anyone who has spent any time on a bike knows that it’s true . . . . until it isn’t.
Here’s another saying cyclists know well.

Eat before you’re hungry, drink before you’re thirsty.

Short of a catastrophic accident, nothing can turn a pleasant, joyful or exhilarating bike ride into a nightmare faster than failing to provide your body with the nutritional support it needs to carry out the ride. Nutrition for Cyclists is designed to give riders of all experience levels useful information about meeting the nutritional demands imposed on the body by endurance athletics. Good nutrition can help you get the most out of your ride no matter what kind of ride you like to do.

Finally, one more saying that everybody knows.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Nutrition for Cyclists contains recommendations about what to eat and drink before, during and after a ride. That’s the “give-a-man-a-fish” part. However, no book can give you a recipe for what to do in every possible nutrition-related situation that might arise when you’re riding the bike. Even if a book like this were possible, would you want to memorize it so you would be prepared for anything?

Nutrition for Cyclists also contains a good deal of information about how your body works when you’re engaged in athletic activity. That’s the “teach-a-man-to-fish” part. The more you know about how your body processes food and drink, and about what can happen when there is not enough food or drink for your body to process, the better prepared you’ll be to understand what’s happening to you on the bike.

The short-term goal of Nutrition for Cyclists is to get you started with recommendations about eating and drinking before, during and after a ride. The long-term goal is to give you information about nutrition and endurance athletics so that you will be able to make informed decisions about what’s happening to you on the bike and what you can do to make it better.

The information presented in Nutrition for Cyclists is based on research findings reported in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of human physiology, and nutrition and sport science. The internet is awash with assertions, recommendations, and unsubstantiated claims about exercise nutrition. Some of this advice is supported by sound research. Much of it, including a number of widely cited and uncritically accepted ideas, is not. As will be discussed in the next chapter, focusing on information that is well supported by sound research does not mean that everything in Nutrition for Cyclists is “right” or “true”. It means that this information is the best we have given the current state of scientific research on exercise nutrition.

Nutrition for Cyclists grew out of a series of posts on Tuned In To Cycling, a blog I started in the spring of 2008. While Tuned In To Cycling has posts on many cycling-related topics, the posts on nutrition have proven to be the most popular with cyclists from all over the world. Some of the content of this book has been copied verbatim from the posts on Tuned In To Cycling, some of it is a revised or rewritten version of what’s on the blog, and some of it is new. Everything in Nutrition for Cyclists was checked against the current research literature. If a section of the book has been lifted verbatim from the blog, it means that research published between the time the original post was written and the book was published did not demand changes in the information that had appeared in the blog.

For both new readers and followers of Tuned In To Cycling Nutrition for Cyclists provides the convenience of a self-contained source for nutritional information that is organized into sections devoted to what to eat and drink before, during and after a ride. Also, publication as an ebook means Nutrition for Cyclists is conveniently available anywhere you have a Kindle or any other device with a Kindle app.