Nutrition

As I slowly become acquainted with the practices of more serious cyclists - the sort who refer to the clothes they wear while riding as their "kit" - I learn that nutrition is just an important element of cycling as spandex, fancy equipment, and inscrutable jargon. As someone who refers to his riding outfit not as "kit" but as "jeans," I don't pretend to know about nutrition. For me, the essential pre-ride comestible is determined largely by the time of day: early mornings require coffee, daytime rides require, maybe, a ham sandwich, and nighttime rides call for beer. So I don't try to do any strategic energy-building with my meals (like carb-loading).

But I can appreciate the relationship between eating and ritual (see, e.g., Thanksgiving, Passover, etc.), and the value of ritual in athletic and sporting activities. The great Wade Boggs, for example, ate chicken before every game, and he was a very good hitter. I don't think the particular nutrients in chicken raise batting averages (Tony Gwynn, Boggs's contemporary and another great hitter, had no such routine) but for Boggs, obviously, there was something about the chicken-eating process that led to good results.

This morning, desirous a pre-work longish ride and knowing that riding between Bridgeport and New Haven in pouring rain is, well, sometimes a little bit miserable, I felt I needed something more fortifying than my regular eggs and cheese or cereal. So with the power of ritual and chicken in mind (thinking not just of Wade Boggs but of Cerrano from Major League who needed to sacrifice a live chicken to get the team out of its slump (and who was played, I now realize, by Dennis Haysbert a.k.a. President Palmer from 24)), I fried and ate the left over giblets from a whole chicken I had roasted on Sunday night. Giblets, of course, are the innards of the chicken, usually delivered in a wax paper bag neatly tucked inside the chicken's body. (If you entertained any notion that the giblets thus packaged were at some point attached to the accompanying carcass, let me disabuse you of that: This particular bag contained two hearts.) I figured that these would give me Wade Boggs-like tenacity, and on top of that, by eating the chicken's vital organs I hoped to capture some of its life force.

Honestly, I cooked and ate the giblets because I like giblets, especially chicken hearts. (My wife thinks this is disgusting, but that's really because SHE SECRETLY HATES AMERICA.) But I did hope for a little extra kick. And you know what? It worked. I felt strong, albeit damp and sweaty. Unfortunately, I did not have any more chicken hearts to bolster my life force supply later in the day, so after getting very damp during the ride and sitting for two hours in an inexplicably air-conditioned meeting room, I was freezing my giblets off while waiting for the train back to New Haven. What is the lesson here? ALWAYS BRING EXTRA CHICKEN HEARTS WITH YOU WHEN THE WEATHER IS INCLEMENT. ALSO, BREATHABLE RAINWEAR, IF POSSIBLE.