With so much to consider in planning for a coast to coast bike ride, inexperienced cycle tourists rarely give how, where and what they will eat while in transit the kind of in depth analysis it really needs. And yet, those who have made a success out of such long haul riding know that food, properly procured, prepared and consumed, ultimately stands at the epicenter of such a journey. While cars rely on the remains of old dinosaurs to get them from one point to another, how well you eat, what, where and when you eat all have a very direct bearing on the success or failure of your ride. This is so because the monstrous breadth of your physical output, day in day out, will require an equally gigantic measure of food intake on almost an hourly basis.

Before I take you through the actual daily mechanics of eating for the huge amount of energy you will need on your TransAm, first I will relate some of the more memorable food related moments from my own coast-to-coast rides. One thing that made them special was the fact that I was able to eat, eat, eat with no concern for weight gain. I am recreating them for you here so that you will know what you can look forward to with regard to one of the biggest parts of your ride -- E A T I N G!

In 1979, there was the BikeCentennial group I caught up with outside of Yellowstone and the restaurant meal I shared with them. Road Barbarians, all of us, muffins gently wafted from one end of the long table to the other whenever a request was made for one. We joked about how we were totally out of our element as we looked at a menu with food that didn't list peanut butter, granola or bananas. Our slap stick comedy continued as someone noted that the fresh linen napkins didn't also do double duty as work rags. The laughter that accompanied our enormous portions made everything we ate taste so much better.

I have never since eaten a stew like the one that Paul Phillips cooked in the rarefied high mountain air of Grand Lake, in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. Up around eight thousand feet and after buying a healthy round of vegetables at a country store in the small town of Granby, we settled into our campground in almost ritual like fashion. Ahead of us was the world's highest mountain highway, Trailridge Pass at 13,000 feet, and we wanted to be prepared.

Toward this end, I did a safety check on my bike and readied my next day's finger foods while Paul used his Swiss survival knife to cut our onions, carrots, squash and turnips into campstove sized chunks. As his vegetable smorgasbord then cooked on the flame below, a sectioned piece of French bread wrapped in tin foil warmed itself on the pot above. By the time we added peanut butter (a TransAm staple) and the two cans of beans we had cooked in the fire we had started in one of the nearby open pits, we were ready to eat our way into the mountain that stood before us. Each bite was supercharged with the power it would give us in the next morning's ascent. The tea Paul brewed served to make our ensuing victory complete -- in our mind's eye.

We went to sleep, full, happy and feeling the love we had blessed our next day's climbing with. We were ready. And power we did. Driven by Food!

I recall the many feasts that farmers in the Midwest prepared for me and how I ate and ate and ate much to their astonishment and pleasure. This was so, because corn on the cob in this area of the country was plentiful and could always be used to make up for any of their other food offerings my ravenous appetite had pressed into short supply.

Though mindful of all of the above, my favorite eating spot was still the sidewalk. Usually in front of the store where I bought my lunch foods. With jars, wrappers, my Swiss survival knife and water bottles all strategically positioned within easy reach, and my maps spread all about me for reading material, I must not have made for a worthy sight for the town fathers. As I looked out on small town America, even the hustle and bustle of some of the bigger cities through which I passed, I found joy in being a detached observer to the only way to live I had once known.

These were some of the happiest moments of my rides as I looked out on the busy world from which I had escaped. Fully engrossed with their own lives, few took the time to find out what I was all about. And as a result, I was able to I simply sit back and watch as store shoppers scurried from car to store and back and delivery persons came and went.

A closer look at my second ride, since I had become more aware about food, will reveal the impact health food stores had on the actual route I took. Since college towns usually also house one or a few such purveyors of clean such fuel, I found myself riding from one to another on my way across the US.

I found that shopping for my food at grocery stores was the most cost, time and performance effective way of making either of my rides real. After we go through this list, I will show you how much I bought of each such edible and how I prepared what I ate as well as what time of day I did so based upon an average day on the road.

The Basics:
Oatmeal (box prepackaged servings)
Peanut Butter (16 oz., sesame butter if you can find it)
Peanuts (shelled)
Almonds (if you can find them)
Bread
Honey* (preferred: barley malt or rice syrup)
Oranges**
Bananas
Apples
Raisins (16 oz. box)
Beans (canned)
Sunflower Seeds (in shells)
Distilled Water (gallon)
Dried Fruit (one 16 oz pkg)
Tortillas
Herb Tea (in box)

Occasional Optionals:
Fruit Juice (one quart)
Sardines/Tuna (canned)

Worthy Energy Bars (from Purest to Less Pure):***
The Organic Food Bar
Clif Nectar organic fruit & nut bar (NOT Clif Bar)
Ruth's Hemp Foods
Larabars
Odwalla Bars
Think Thin Low Carb Bars (Sweetened with Malitotl, a sugar alcohol low on the glycemic index)

As you can see, none of the foods mentioned in the main menu above require refrigeration. Nor are they packaged, with the exception of bread and water, such that you cannot squish them into your panniers or trailer bags. With regard to bread and water, I simply affixed these items to the outsides of my packs with bungie cords.

I found that so that I would not spend the entire day riding with a container of water and bags of unprepared food hanging off of my packs that the best time of day to buy groceries was near the end of my riding day. In order to do this, I would stop at a market in the last town before I planned to bed down for the night. If, however, while reading maps during my lunchtime break, I could see that there were no towns within close proximity of my projected night's stay, I would go back in and buy food for dinner and the next day's breakfast. Before we go inside to actually make our purchases, though, a minor word of caution is in order here.

Even though you are generating a tremendous volume of heat while out on a TransAm, and can run sugary foods through your system faster and with less harmful side effects, you would still do well to keep simple sugars out your body. That of course is up to you but I know my performance was far more consistent and effective the more disciplined I was in this regard.

In order to follow my advice about sweeteners when shopping in grocery stores, I highly encourage you to read labels. Know what other names sugar hides behind. When you look at peanut butter, for example, and you see dextrose listed as one of the ingredients, beware. Yes, you even have to watch out for peanut butter. In regular grocery stores, I found that the Adams brand did not have this artificial sweetener.

If you want to begin your day with a warm meal and don't mind firing up, maintaining and then cleaning your camp stove, expect to go through 3 or 4 of the small instant oatmeal packets a day. Add however many raisins you may need and your morning breakfast can become a ritual you will really look forward to. In lieu of oatmeal, especially if you are in a hurry to get on the road as per the discussion in the previous chapter, you can just eat more sandwiches and fruit.

With regard to the camp stove itself, however, it is not a necessity. I have gone long stretches without using mine but it does add a touch of home to the ride since you can also finish off your evening or breakfast fare with a pot of tea, even hot cider (notice I didn't say coffee but if you must.....). If you do use one for breakfast, however, it does mean as I have said above, you will be hitting the morning road just a little bit later.

Here I would like to digress back to the Performance Boxes we talked about in Chapter Ten for a few moments. I found that on both of my rides, it was best to be on the road as early as possible. In such a way, besides beating some of the day's heat, I was also able to get far away from town and all the cars the morning commute would bring. I especially found it helpful to do so whenever my riding found me in high desert or prairie lands or in the more populated areas of the east and midwestern states.

One of the ways that I was able to accomplish this was to reward myself with food. But not until I had fifteen or twenty miles in my legs. Forestalling the reward in such a way made me wake up in a hurry as I moved far more quickly to break my camp back on to my bike. It also forced me to have my finger foods ready the night before when I was often so tired all I could think of was sleep.

As for tea or oatmeal or anything you buy that comes in small boxes, in order to transport such items, once you get them to your camp you will want to break then down. Get rid of the containers they come in and place them in reusable baggies. In doing so they will take up less of your precious cargo space.

In terms of finger food, for my rides these would include the fruits I list above: oranges, bananas, apples and raisins as well as nuts. These were all readily available at most of the grocery stores I found along the way. If plums or peaches or apricots were in season, I made sure to add those to my shopping cart. A day on the road usually meant I would need a bunch of bananas, a 16 ounce box of raisins and six to seven pieces of fruit.

In terms of readying what I would eat for the next day's ride so that I could keep my wheels rolling, I began by jumbling the raisins and peanuts into a gorp concoction. Once combined into one of the baggies that I used over and over again, I had the perfect mobile snack food. I also found that oranges were the best road fruit because they didn't bruise or make a mess when stuffed into my packs. The trick here, however, was being able to eat them while still in transit. For the other fruit I simply placed them in an area readily accessible to my hands but oranges were a different story.

While neat for carrying, getting them peeled and then eating them could mean a sticky mess if I hadn't taken the time to prepare them before hand. So in order to keep their juice from dripping on to my handlebars and shift or brake levers as I rode while on my upright journey and since I could not get both hands free to break them down on my bent trek, I peeled them at night (usually two or three) and then split the fruit into bite size slices. These were then loaded into zip lock bags and placed in an area easily accessible to my hands as I rode.

On my bent ride in '86 I found that since I didn't have a handlebar bag to eat from, I used the panniers that hung from the rack behind my seat for this. If you are on a bent and this is the way you plan to go, make sure the panniers you ride with, at least the one that will carry your road food, have zippers for easy access and are not secured by a drawstring which will be harder for you to open and close with one hand.

Other food preparation chores also included making most of my sandwiches ahead of time. Here is where one is reminded of the decadence one must force on him or herself. Since the mantra is not 'Think Thin' but 'Eat Lots', you can really pour it on. One of my favorite monster high calorie sandwiches was peanut butter, honey, bananas and raisins. And it was easy to gulp down five or six of them during the course of a day. Since this also required a full loaf of bread, as well as a jar of peanut butter and a bunch of bananas, I used the package the bread came in to store three or four of these extra jumbo, high calorie feasts. The first two or three I ate right at the store where I made them for my lunch break.

Sometimes I would make sandwiches out of peanuts and raisins using peanut butter as the glue to hold it all together. Where I could find tortillas I rolled the nut butter and lengthwise sliced bananas all into one.

On my first ride, an old hobo who had just hopped off of a rail car in Nebraska convinced me that I could eat canned, precooked beans without having to reheat them. He pointed out that it was safe to do so if there was no meat in them. I also used refried beans, then, as a sticking agent on my bread or tortillas to hold many of my other road meals together which sometimes also included tuna and sardines.

As for drinking water, besides my one gallon collapsible bag which I only filled if my maps showed that I was headed for desolate areas such as in the deserts and high prairies of some of the more western states, my bike carried four one quart water bottles. In such a way, every night, I was able to fill them with the contents of the one gallon jug of water I bought at the last stop I made before I bedded down for the night.

And if mountain climbing was on the agenda for the next day's riding, I always made sure to have plenty of sunflower seeds on hand. Filling my mouth with a small handful and then using my teeth to shell them one at a time kept me distracted from the task at hand if flies or cars chose to accompany me. I'll never forget the road into West Yellowstone where I had both. While the airborne bugs got bigger and bigger the closer I got to the park, the vehicle herds that droned up the hill pulling everything from boats and rolling tents to dirt bikes and even more vehicles also grew in size.

As the flies feasted on my sweaty arms and legs, each and every internal combustion vehicle present seemed to be spitting their noise and stink on me as they slowly ground past. The mind numbing rumble that their motors produced, reverberated off of the mountain walls made bare by the earthmovers that had long ago stripped them of life.

Throw in sweltering heat and I needed something to grind my teeth on. Sunflower seeds saved me and my ride on that particular stretch. And I always pressed them into service whenever there was a lot of traffic on the road or the climbing was made arduous by head winds.

Hopefully with all of the above I've given you some new ways to look at nourishing yourself for your TransAm. It is my hope that with just a little creativity that you now know that you don't have to rely on restaurant food for tasty meals that you can much look forward to. As well, you should now be able see what kinds of foods you will need to eat and how, when and where to eat them so that you can keep your wheels rolling on a day in, day out basis once you hit the road!

* In my regular practice of life, I do not eat honey because it is too much like simple sugar in terms of the insulin reaction it would normally engender. However because finding substitute sweeteners such as barley malt or rice syrup was nearly impossible in small town America and because TransAm cycling burns most any food very quickly, I found I could get away with using it to sweeten a lot of that which I ate.

** In my regular practice of life, I do not eat oranges because they are just too acid. And yet in an extreme activity like TransAm cycling, I found such excess tolerable.

*** These bars are not sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, a dangerous sugar found in most energy bars. Instead, most rely on the grain sweeteners, rice syrup and barley malt, which are more expensive but produce a far less frenzied burn when in the body.