Recovery: The First Hour, the First Day, and Getting Back to Training

You crossed the line. You’re cold, you’re tired, and somewhere in the next twenty minutes you’re going to be handed a beer.

What happens between now and the next couple of weeks determines a lot more than how you feel Sunday morning. For most riders in northern Michigan, Iceman isn’t just a race — it’s a hinge point. The outdoor season closes, and what comes next is the trainer, the gym, or the pool. How you handle recovery now shapes how well that transition goes, and whether you arrive at next spring better or just older.

This is the last post in the series. Let’s finish it properly.

The First Hour

The hour after a hard effort in the cold is the one with the most leverage, and it’s also the one most likely to get away from you. You’re surrounded by people, there’s a festival going on, your hands don’t work, and food is the last thing you feel like dealing with.

Here’s the order of operations that actually works:

1. Get warm and dry first

This is not a nutrition point, it’s THE nutrition point. A shivering rider will not eat, will not drink, and will not absorb much of anything well. Your core temperature dropped during that race and it keeps dropping once you stop generating heat.

Dry layers, a hat, gloves, and something warm in your hands. Everything else waits ten minutes.

2. Something warm to drink

A warm drink does triple duty: fluid, calories, and core temperature. Hot chocolate, soup broth, coffee with sugar, warm cider — anything you’ll actually consume. The warmth matters as much as the calories, and you’ll get it down far more easily than cold food.

3. Carbohydrate and protein, within the hour

Target roughly 1 to 1.2 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight, plus 20 to 40 grams of protein.

For a 160 lb rider, that’s around 75 to 90 grams of carbohydrate and a solid protein serving. A recovery shake, a sandwich, chocolate milk and a bar, soup with bread and some chicken — it doesn’t need to be perfect.

The reason for the hour window: your muscles are more receptive to glycogen replacement right after hard exercise, and you’ve just emptied a tank you spent two days filling. The window isn’t as narrow or magical as it was once sold, but after a maximal effort in the cold, earlier is genuinely better.

Put it in your gear bag. This is the single most actionable line in this post. Whatever you plan to eat at the finish, pack it the night before and put it in the bag that gets transported. Relying on what’s available at a crowded finish festival is how an hour becomes three.

4. Fluid and sodium

You’re more dehydrated than you feel — cold suppresses thirst at the finish just as thoroughly as it did on course. Drink steadily rather than chugging, and include sodium, which helps you actually retain what you’re drinking. Soup is excellent here. So are salty snacks alongside your fluid.

5. About the beer

The finish-line beer at Iceman is a genuine tradition and I’m not going to tell you to skip it.

What I’ll tell you is the order. Alcohol impairs glycogen replacement and blunts muscle repair, and it dehydrates you further when you’re already down. The fix isn’t abstinence — it’s sequence. Get warm, drink something non-alcoholic, eat your recovery food, and then have the beer. Same celebration, a fraction of the cost.

And match it with water. One for one if you can manage it.

The Rest of Race Day

After the first hour, the main job is simply to keep eating.

Eat a real meal within two to three hours. Carbohydrate, protein, fat, vegetables — a normal, complete meal. Your appetite may be suppressed or it may be enormous; both are normal reactions to a hard effort.

Keep drinking through the evening. Aim for pale yellow by bedtime.

Don’t restrict. There’s a particular trap here, and I see it every year: a rider finishes, thinks about the carb loading and the race nutrition and the beer, and decides to “get back on track” by eating light the rest of the day. That’s backwards. You just emptied yourself out. Today is for replacing it.

Protein at dinner. Aim for 30 to 40 grams. Muscle repair runs for well over 24 hours after an effort like this.

Sleep. The best recovery tool available, and after a 5 a.m. alarm and a hard race, you’ve earned an early night.

The First Day After

Sunday is when the cold-weather effort reveals itself. Racing in 30-degree conditions costs you more than the same effort in mild weather — your body spent energy on thermoregulation, your muscles worked while cold, and the whole system took a bigger hit than your power file suggests.

Expect to feel worse than you think you should. That’s normal and not a sign anything went wrong.

Eat normally, or slightly more than normally. Glycogen replacement takes 24 to 48 hours. Protein needs stay elevated for a couple of days. Don’t start a deficit on Sunday.

Protein across the day, not just dinner. Three or four servings of 25 to 40 grams. This is the active repair window.

Keep hydrating. You likely finished the race down more fluid than you replaced Saturday night.

Move a little. A short easy spin, a walk, some light mobility work. Not training — just circulation.

Be a little gentle with yourself about food. You may be ravenous for two or three days. That’s your body asking for materials it genuinely needs. Feed it.

The Week After

Most riders recover from an effort like this in about three to seven days, depending on age, how hard they went, and how deep the season was.

Days one through three: eat at or slightly above maintenance. Protein at the high end — 1.8 to 2.0 g/kg. Carbohydrate normal, not reduced. Light movement only.

Days four through seven: appetite normalizes, energy returns. You can start adding intensity back if you want to, though there’s rarely a reason to rush.

Watch for the signs you’re not recovered: persistent fatigue, elevated resting heart rate, poor sleep, lingering soreness past five days, low mood, getting sick. Any of those means more time, not more training.

Masters riders: give yourself more time than you think. Recovery capacity declines with age, and the single most common error I see in riders over forty is treating a good day in week one as permission to resume full training. The fitness isn’t going anywhere in another four days.

Coming Back to Training

This is the part that matters most for the next twelve months, and it’s the part almost nobody plans for.

In northern Michigan, Iceman marks the end of the outdoor season for most riders. What follows is the trainer, the gym, group indoor sessions, skiing, or some combination. The riding season ends; training doesn’t have to, and the people who understand that distinction are the ones who show up in April noticeably ahead.

Take a real break first

Before any of that: take Take a recovery week. Unstructured movement if you feel like it, nothing if you don’t.

This serves a physical purpose and a psychological one. You’ve been training with a date on the calendar for months. Removing that pressure entirely for a couple of weeks is how you arrive at winter training actually wanting to do it, rather than grinding through on obligation until you quit in January.

Nutrition during the break: eat normally. Don’t start a cut, don’t start a bulk, don’t start anything. Just eat like a person for your recovery week.

Then adjust your intake honestly

Here’s where people go wrong in both directions.

Direction one: eating like you’re still racing. Your training load just dropped substantially, and if your intake doesn’t move at all, the gap shows up over the winter. This is the common one.

Direction two: slashing intake because the season is over. Also a mistake, and the more damaging of the two. Winter is when you build — strength work, aerobic base, muscle mass you’ll carry into spring. All of that requires fuel. Riders who cut hard in November arrive in March lighter and meaningfully weaker.

The honest adjustment is usually modest. Carbohydrate scales with training volume, so it comes down somewhat on easy weeks and goes back up when you’re doing hard trainer sessions. Protein stays put or goes up, especially if you’re lifting. Total intake settles somewhere slightly below peak season, not dramatically below.

Winter training, specifically

If you’re lifting: this is the single best use of the off-season for nearly every cyclist, and your nutrition should support it rather than fight it. Protein at 1.6 to 2.0 g/kg, distributed across the day. Enough carbohydrate to actually train hard — lifting in a deficit is how you spend a winter getting tired instead of strong. Creatine at 3 to 10 g daily is well supported here, particularly for masters athletes.

Winter is when you build the strength that protects your bone density, your durability on technical terrain, and your power in the spring. Don’t undercut it with a diet.

If you’re riding indoors: trainer sessions are hotter and sweatier than outdoor riding, so sweat and sodium losses go up even though it’s November. Fuel the hard sessions properly. An hour of threshold work on a trainer is a real session and deserves real carbohydrate — a lot of riders underfuel indoor work because it doesn’t feel like “real” riding.

If you’re cross-training: skiing, skating, swimming, running, hiking. All of it counts, all of it needs fuel. The principles don’t change with the activity.

The vitamin D conversation

One northern Michigan specific, and it matters. From roughly October through March, we produce essentially no vitamin D from sunlight at this latitude. Combine that with a winter spent training indoors and deficiency is extremely common here.

Vitamin D affects bone health, immune function, muscle function, and mood — all four of which matter through a Michigan winter. Get your level tested and supplement based on the result rather than guessing. It’s a cheap test and an easy fix.

Winter is the right time for the projects you postponed

A few things that are difficult during race season and well suited to November through February:

  • Body composition changes, if you want them. A slow, modest approach over several winter months with adequate protein and strength training, not an aggressive cut. This is the window — not August.
  • Fixing an iron deficiency. If you flagged low ferritin during the season, now is when you have months to correct it rather than weeks.
  • Building better habits. Breakfast protein, consistent meal timing, whatever the gap has been. Habits built in a low-pressure winter actually survive into race season.
  • Gut training. If your race nutrition caused problems, the off-season is when you work on tolerance without a result on the line.

A Final Word

The riders who show up strong at Iceman year after year aren’t doing anything exotic. They eat enough, they fuel their hard sessions, they recover deliberately, and they treat winter as a building season instead of a holding pattern.

That’s the whole series, really. Nine posts and the message hasn’t changed much: food is a training input, not an afterthought, and the people who treat it that way get more out of the work they’re already doing.

Thanks for riding along with this one. Go eat something, get warm, and enjoy the off-season — you earned it.

Gina Render is a certified Performance Nutrition Coach that works with a variety of athletes and active individuals both locally and remotely to help them meet their goals. As a wife, mom of two teens avid mountain biker, and strength athlete, she understands the demands that come with balancing life and sport. From sport-specific fueling to general nutrition, she’s your partner and advocate to empower you to Adventure More. Contact her at gina@adventure-more.com.

Race Week and Race Morning: Executing the Plan

Everything up to this point has been preparation. This post is about execution — the last seven days, and specifically the four or five hours on Saturday morning that determine whether all of that preparation shows up in your legs.

Race week is where I see good athletes undo months of good work. Not through anything dramatic. Through small, well-intentioned decisions: an extra hard ride because they felt good, a new supplement someone recommended at the expo, a skipped breakfast because of nerves, a wave time they didn’t plan their eating around.

None of these are catastrophic on their own. Stacked together, they’re the difference between a race you’re proud of and a race you spend the drive home explaining.

The Taper Week Mindset

Here’s the thing to internalize: you cannot gain fitness in race week, but you can absolutely lose a race in it.

Every training decision in the final seven days should be made with that asymmetry in mind. The upside of one more hard session is approximately zero. The downside is real. When in doubt, do less.

The same logic applies to food. Race week is not the time to clean up your diet, drop a few pounds, try intermittent fasting, cut out gluten, or start any other project. Whatever you’ve been doing that’s been working — keep doing it, with the specific adjustments below and nothing else.

Monday Through Wednesday

Eat normally. Normal portions, normal carbohydrate, normal protein. Your training volume is dropping, and there’s a temptation to drop calories to match. Don’t. Reduced training is when your body does its repair work, and underfueling that process is how people arrive at the start line flat.

Hydrate consistently. Not aggressively — just consistently. Pale yellow urine, drink when thirsty, salt your food normally. There’s no benefit to showing up overhydrated, and plenty of downside.

Protect your sleep. This is the highest-return thing available to you this week. The night before a race is almost always poor sleep for everyone, which means Monday through Thursday nights are the ones that actually count. Bank them.

Stop reading about nutrition. I mean this sincerely. Race week is when riders get anxious and start researching, and the internet will happily sell you a new protocol seven days before your event. Whatever you’ve practiced is what you’re doing.

Start thinking about fiber on Wednesday. Begin dialing it back gradually — smaller salads, fewer beans, less raw vegetable volume. A gradual reduction is far more comfortable than an abrupt one.

Thursday and Friday

The carb loading mechanics are covered in detail in the previous post, so I won’t repeat them here. The short version: two days of high carbohydrate intake with minimal training, low fiber, spread across five or six feedings rather than three big meals.

What I want to add here is the logistical layer, because Friday is a surprisingly difficult day to eat well.

The expo problem

The Ice Cycle Expo and packet pickup at the Grand Traverse Resort is a genuinely fun afternoon and a nutritional minefield. You’ll be on your feet for hours, you’ll be distracted, you’ll be sampling things, and the food available won’t necessarily match what you need.

The fix is simple: bring your own food and eat on your schedule. Pack what you need for the hours you’ll be there. Treat the expo as something you’re fitting around your eating plan rather than the other way around.

On samples: be disciplined. Every brand there wants you to try something, and some of it is excellent. But the day before your race is the worst possible time to introduce a new gel, drink mix, or bar to your digestive system. Take the samples. Put them in your bag. Try them next week.

Friday dinner

The giant pasta dinner is a tradition, not a strategy. If you’ve loaded properly across Thursday and Friday, you don’t need a massive final meal — and a moderate one means you sleep better and start Saturday without a brick in your stomach.

What you want: familiar, moderate portion, carbohydrate-forward, low fiber, low fat, not spicy. A restaurant you’ve been to before, or food you brought with you. This is not the night for the new place everyone’s talking about.

Eat early enough to digest. Three hours before bed is a good target.

Friday night prep

Race morning should require zero decisions. Before you go to bed:

  • Kit laid out, including every layer and your gloves
  • Bottles mixed and in the fridge
  • Pocket food counted out and in your jersey or in a bag ready to go
  • Breakfast prepped or at minimum planned down to the item
  • Gear bag packed for the bag drop
  • Alarm set, with a second one
  • Everything loaded in the car except what’s in the fridge

If you’re staying in a hotel, confirm what breakfast access you actually have and at what time. A surprising number of riders discover at 6 a.m. that the hotel breakfast doesn’t start until after they need to leave.

Race Morning: The Timeline

The defining logistical feature of Iceman is that it’s point to point. You start in Kalkaska and finish near Traverse City, which means a shuttle or a second driver, a gear bag you won’t see again until the finish, and a stretch of time between leaving your lodging and actually racing that’s longer than most events.

Build your eating around that reality, not around an idealized race morning.

Breakfast: three hours before your wave

This is the anchor. Three hours before your start, give or take, eat a familiar carbohydrate-focused breakfast — low fiber, low fat, moderate protein.

Options that work: oatmeal with banana and honey, bagel with jam and a little peanut butter, pancakes, toast with eggs, rice with whatever you normally put on it. Whatever you’ve practiced on your long rides.

Target roughly 1 to 2 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight. For most riders that’s somewhere between 80 and 150 grams. For a 160 lb rider, that’s a bowl of oatmeal with a banana and honey plus a glass of juice, roughly.

The wave problem

Iceman waves spread across a wide window. If you’re in an early wave, three hours before means a genuinely uncomfortable hour for breakfast. If you’re in a late wave, three hours before might be mid-morning — and you’ll have been awake for five hours by then.

Early wave: You may be eating at 5:30 a.m. Nobody wants to. Eat anyway, keep it easy to get down, and lean on liquid calories if solid food is unappealing that early — a smoothie, a carbohydrate drink, applesauce pouches. Something is dramatically better than nothing.

Late wave: Do not eat breakfast at 6 a.m. and then nothing until an 11 a.m. start. That’s a five-hour fast before a hard race, and it’s one of the most common unforced errors at this event. Eat a normal breakfast when you wake up, then a second smaller carbohydrate-focused feeding about two to three hours before your wave. Bananas, a bagel, a bar, drink mix. Keep topping off.

The last hour

  • Small carbohydrate top-off 30 to 60 minutes out if you want it — a gel, a few chews, some drink mix. Optional, not mandatory.
  • Keep sipping fluid, but don’t overdo it. You don’t want to be hunting for a porta-potty in the last ten minutes.
  • Caffeine, if you use it: 30 to 60 minutes before the start, at a dose you’ve practiced. Roughly 3 mg per kilogram of body weight is a well-supported range. If you don’t normally use caffeine, race day is not the day to start.

The cold-start reality

It’s November in northern Michigan. The start area is cold, you’ll be standing around in it, and three things follow from that:

Your bottles will try to freeze. Mix them warm, use insulated bottles, keep them inside your jacket until the last possible moment. A frozen bottle at mile ten is a bottle you’re not drinking from.

Your gels will stiffen. A cold gel is genuinely hard to get out of the packet with gloves on. Keep them in an inside pocket against your body, not in an outer jersey pocket.

You won’t feel hungry or thirsty. Cold blunts both signals. You have to fuel on a schedule, not on sensation. This is the single most important thing I can tell you about racing Iceman.

Stay warm until you start. A throwaway layer, a garbage bag, a jacket you hand to someone — anything that keeps you from shivering in the staging area. Shivering burns through fuel and raises your stress before you’ve turned a pedal.

What Goes in Your Pockets

Work backward from your realistic finish time and your per-hour target:

  • 1:45–2:15: 80–90 g/hour. Mostly liquid and gel — you won’t have the hands or the heart rate to chew.
  • 2:15–2:45: 70–90 g/hour. Gels, chews, drink mix.
  • 2:45–3:30: 60–75 g/hour. Add real food if your stomach handles it cold.
  • 3:30+: 50–70 g/hour, strictly on a timer.

Count it out Friday night. Actual items, not a vague intention. Then add one extra — a spare gel costs you nothing and covers a dropped one, a longer-than-expected day, or someone next to you who’s in trouble.

Set an alarm on your head unit or watch. Every 20 or 30 minutes. Eat when it goes off, whether you want to or not. This one habit prevents more bad races than anything else on this page.

Drinking in the cold

You dehydrate more in cold weather than you’d guess — you’re still sweating under all those layers, you lose a meaningful amount of fluid just through breathing hard in dry November air, and cold suppresses thirst so completely that most riders simply forget to drink. Plan on roughly 500 to 750 ml per hour, which for most people is about a bottle an hour, and put electrolytes in it rather than running plain water — somewhere in the range of 300 to 600 mg of sodium per bottle, toward the higher end if you’re a heavy or salty sweater. Mix your bottles warm before the start and insulate them however you can; a bottle that’s frozen at mile twelve is the most common hydration failure at this race, and it’s entirely preventable. Then drink on the same timer you’re eating on, a few swallows every 15 or 20 minutes, because waiting until you feel thirsty in 30-degree weather means waiting until you’re already behind. One caution in the other direction: don’t overdrink. More is not better, and there’s no advantage to arriving at the finish sloshing.

Slush Cup and Sno-Cone Riders

Slush Cup: You’re likely racing later in the day, which makes the late-wave advice above your main concern. Don’t let a long morning of spectating turn into an accidental fast. Breakfast when you wake, a top-off two to three hours before your start, and a small snack in the final hour. On course, one bottle plus 40 to 60 grams of carbohydrate if you’ll be out over an hour — and take it before the climbing, not during.

Sno-Cone: Normal breakfast, snacks available all day, something warm to drink, and a parent who feeds them before they ask. That’s the whole plan.

The Finish

Don’t skip this part — it matters more than people think, especially if you’re racing again soon or you simply want to feel human on Sunday.

Within the first hour: carbohydrate and protein together. Roughly 1 to 1.2 g/kg of carbohydrate and 20 to 40 g of protein. Have it with you or in your gear bag rather than relying on what’s available at the finish.

Something warm, immediately. You’ll be colder than you realize. Hot chocolate, soup, coffee — warm fluid does more for you right then than the same calories cold.

Dry clothes before food, if you have to choose. A shivering rider won’t eat, and getting warm is the first step toward recovery.

Then enjoy yourself. The beer at the finish is one of the best parts of this race. You’ve earned it. Just eat something real first.

The Race Week Checklist

  1. Keep training short and easy. Resist the good-legs temptation.
  2. Eat normally Monday through Wednesday, including enough calories despite less training.
  3. Start reducing fiber Wednesday.
  4. Load Thursday and Friday per the plan you practiced.
  5. Bring your own food to the expo. Pocket the samples, don’t eat them.
  6. Moderate, familiar dinner Friday — not the giant pasta feast.
  7. Prep everything Friday night so race morning requires no decisions.
  8. Breakfast three hours before your wave, with a second feeding if your wave is late.
  9. Set a fueling and drinking alarm, and obey it.
  10. Have recovery food waiting in your gear bag.

None of this is complicated. It’s just a lot of small things, and the riders who do well on this course are generally the ones who handled the small things while everyone else was improvising in a cold parking lot.

You’ve done the training. The plan is written. Race week is just execution.

Coming up in the final post: post-race recovery. What to eat in the first hour and the first day, how to come back from a hard effort in the cold, and how to set yourself up for the rest of your season.

Gina Render is a certified Performance Nutrition Coach that works with a variety of athletes and active individuals both locally and remotely to help them meet their goals. As a wife, mom of two teens avid mountain biker, and strength athlete, she understands the demands that come with balancing life and sport. From sport-specific fueling to general nutrition, she’s your partner and advocate to empower you to Adventure More. Contact her at gina@adventure-more.com.

It’s Almost Iceman Time!

Can you feel it? That excitement that starts building as Iceman gets closer? The cooler mornings, the changing leaves, the conversations about training, tire choices, weather predictions, and whether or not it’s going to be an Iceman or a Niceman.

It’s almost time!

Thousands of riders, one incredible course, and a whole lot of nervous energy waiting to be unleashed on the trails of Northern Michigan. Whether this is your first Iceman or your fifteenth, there’s something about this race that gets your heart pumping before you even cross the starting line.

And this year, I want to see us bring the ENERGY!

Ladies, I’m talking to you!

To the women who have been putting in the miles, juggling careers, families, responsibilities, and everything else life throws our way…THIS IS YOUR TIME!

To the women who signed up for their first Iceman and are now wondering what on earth they were thinking…YOU BELONG HERE!

To the women who are chasing a podium, a personal best, or simply hoping to make it across that finish line with a smile and maybe a little mud on their face…LET’S GO!

I want to see more women taking up space in this sport. More women confidently rolling up to starting lines. More women encouraging one another, celebrating each other’s accomplishments, and reminding the next generation of female riders that mountain biking isn’t just something we can do. It’s something we can absolutely ROCK!

And here’s the thing. You don’t have to be the fastest woman out there to be a strong one.

Strength looks different on everyone. Sometimes it’s standing on a podium. Sometimes it’s conquering a climb that intimidated you last year. Sometimes it’s showing up after a season that tested you in ways you never expected.

Trust me, I know a little something about that last one.

But regardless of what brought us to this starting line, we’ve earned our place here. Every single one of us.

Now, let’s talk about something else that’s been on my mind.

Competition.

I love it. I love the adrenaline, the challenge, the little voice in my head that says, “Shut up legs, let’s GO!” I love pushing myself and seeing what I’m capable of. And I love being surrounded by people who feel the same way.

But somewhere in all that excitement, we need to remember something.

Being competitive and being respectful are not mutually exclusive.

You can race hard without being reckless.

You can want to win without putting someone else at risk.

You can pass another rider without making them feel like they need to dive into the bushes to get out of your way.

And for goodness’ sake, you can communicate without acting like the fate of the entire universe depends on getting around someone in the next three seconds.

We’re all out there chasing something. For some, it’s a podium. For others, it’s a personal goal, a finish line, or simply the experience of being part of something bigger.

None of those goals makes one rider more deserving of respect than another.

Let’s call out our passes, give people room when it’s safe, be patient when the trail gets congested, and remember that the person in front of us is someone’s spouse, parent, child, friend, or teammate.

Nobody should have to leave Iceman with an injury because another rider decided their race was more important than someone else’s safety.

And here’s my favorite part about mountain biking: We can be fierce competitors and still cheer each other on.

I’ve experienced it firsthand. Women encouraging women in the middle of a race. Strangers offering a few words of motivation on a tough climb. Riders recognizing someone else’s effort, even while giving everything they’ve got themselves.

THAT is the energy I want to see at Iceman.

The kind of energy that makes a first-time racer want to come back next year. The kind that reminds seasoned riders why they fell in love with this sport in the first place. The kind that makes our mountain biking community something worth being proud of.

And ladies, don’t be afraid to bring a little extra fire this year.

Ride confidently. Be bold. Take the line when it’s yours to take. Challenge yourself. Encourage the woman beside you. And if you see another female rider out there digging deep, give her a little encouragement. You never know how much she might need to hear it.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: There is room for all of us in this sport.

The fast ones. The cautious ones. The seasoned veterans. The first-timers. The women in their twenties, forties, sixties, and beyond. The riders chasing big goals and the riders simply grateful to be there.

Every single one of us adds something to this incredible community.

As for me, this Iceman will look a little different than I originally imagined when the season began. But my excitement hasn’t changed. If anything, this year has reminded me just how fortunate we are to do something we love, surrounded by people who understand exactly why we do it.

So…Race hard. Ride smart. Lift each other up.

And to all my fellow ladies lining up for Iceman this year…

LET’S SHOW THEM WHAT WE’VE GOT!

See you at the start line!

Thank you to Heather Newman @goodtimesally_mtblife for being our 2026 Iceman Cometh Challenge Trailblazer.

Carb Loading, Done Right

Carb loading might be the most misunderstood thing in endurance nutrition. Half the riders at Iceman will do some version of it, and a solid chunk of those will do it in a way that makes them slower, heavier, and more uncomfortable on the start line than if they’d just eaten normally.

The good news is that the actual protocol is simple. Simpler than what most people are doing. The modern version doesn’t require a depletion phase, doesn’t require a week of misery, and doesn’t require you to eat until you’re sick.

The loading itself happens in the final 48 hours before the race. The planning, though, should happen well before that — which foods, how much, bought and in the house before race week turns into a logistical scramble.

What Carb Loading Actually Is

Your muscles store carbohydrate as glycogen. Under normal eating, you’re carrying a certain amount. Carb loading is the deliberate practice of eating substantially more carbohydrate than usual, while training very little, to push those stores above their normal ceiling.

Done properly, you can raise muscle glycogen well above baseline. In practical terms, that’s a bigger fuel tank for race day — one that delays the point at

last third of the race becomes an exercise in survival.

That’s the whole mechanism. It doesn’t make you fitter. It doesn’t raise your threshold. It extends how long you can hold the fitness you already have.

Who Actually Benefits

This matters, because the answer isn’t “everybody.”

The benefit shows up in efforts lasting roughly 90 minutes or longer at meaningful intensity. Below that, you aren’t going deep enough into your stores for the extra capacity to matter, and you’ve just carried some extra water weight to the start line for nothing.

The 30-mile race: Yes, for nearly everyone. Front-of-race riders finishing near 1:45 are right at the threshold and still benefit. Everyone behind that — the 2:15 riders, the 2:45 riders, the 3:30-and-beyond riders — benefits more, not less. The longer you’re out there, the more this matters.

The Slush Cup: Depends on you. Nine miles with real climbing, ridden in November, puts plenty of riders in the 60-to-90-minute range and some beyond it. If you expect to be out there over an hour, a modest version is worth doing — not a full aggressive load, but a carbohydrate-forward day before and a solid breakfast. If you’re a stronger rider finishing well under an hour, just eat normally and focus on a good breakfast. Don’t carry pointless water weight up those climbs.

The Sno-Cone: No. Please do not carb load a six-year-old. Feed them breakfast and bring snacks.

The Protocol: Simpler Than You’ve Heard

Forget the old-school version with the depletion phase — the brutal week where you ride yourself empty, eat almost no carbohydrate for three days, feel terrible, then gorge. That approach came out of research from the 1960s. It works, but it’s unnecessary, it leaves you flat and irritable during a week when you want to feel good, and it carries real risk of showing up stale.

The modern version:

One to two days of high carbohydrate intake, combined with minimal training.

That’s it. For Iceman, that means Thursday and Friday, with Friday being the more important of the two.

Your number

Target 8 to 12 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day during the load. Most riders do well in the 8 to 10 range — the top end is genuinely hard to eat and tends to cause more GI trouble than it’s worth.

Run the math in advance so you’re not doing it Thursday night:

  • 140 lb rider (64 kg): roughly 510–640 g per day
  • 160 lb rider (73 kg): roughly 580–730 g per day
  • 180 lb rider (82 kg): roughly 650–820 g per day
  • 200 lb rider (91 kg): roughly 730–910 g per day

Those numbers are much larger than normal eating. That’s the point. Most riders who think they carb loaded ate a big pasta dinner and landed around 350 grams for the day, which is barely above maintenance.

The taper is half the equation

This is the part people skip, and it’s not optional. The reason the modern protocol works without a depletion phase is that you’re not burning through what you’re storing. If you’re still doing hard efforts Thursday and Friday, you’re filling a tank with a hole in it.

Race week training should be short and easy. A couple of short spins with a few brief openers is plenty. The fitness is already banked — nothing you do in the last five days makes you faster, and plenty of things you could do make you slower.

How to Actually Eat 700 Grams of Carbohydrate

The practical obstacle is volume. Whole grains, beans, and big vegetable servings are excellent food and terrible options for this. You’ll be full long before you hit your number, and you’ll be carrying a lot of fiber into race morning.

Shift toward lower-fiber, more concentrated sources during the load:

  • White rice instead of brown
  • White pasta and white bread instead of whole grain
  • Potatoes without skins
  • Fruit juice and sports drink alongside whole fruit
  • Bananas, grapes, melon
  • Pancakes, waffles, bagels, pretzels, crackers
  • Sports drink mix, which is a genuinely useful tool here — a few hundred grams of carbohydrate can go down as fluid far more easily than as food
  • Honey, jam, syrup, sugar in your coffee

Dial down during these two days:

  • High-fiber grains and large volumes of raw vegetables
  • Beans and legumes
  • Large salads
  • High-fat foods, which fill you up and crowd out the carbohydrate you’re trying to eat

And eat on a schedule. Four to six smaller carbohydrate-focused meals works far better than three enormous ones. Trying to hit a big number in three sittings is how people end up bloated and miserable.

Protein and fat don’t go to zero. Keep protein moderate — around 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg is plenty for these two days — and let fat drop somewhat. You’re shifting the ratio, not eliminating anything.

The Scale Will Go Up. That’s Correct.

Glycogen is stored with water — roughly three grams of water for every gram of glycogen. A successful load typically shows up as two to four pounds of weight gain, sometimes more.

That water is not a penalty. It’s stored fuel plus the hydration that comes with it, and it’s part of why loaded riders handle a cold, long day better. Do not weigh yourself Friday night, panic, and skip breakfast Saturday morning. I have watched riders undo a perfect week over a number on a bathroom scale.

If you know this will bother you, the simplest fix is to not step on the scale during race week.

The Mistakes That Actually Cost People

Loading with fat instead of carbohydrate. The classic pre-race pizza, the fettuccine alfredo, the cheese-heavy everything. These are fat-dominant meals wearing a carbohydrate costume. They fill you up, slow gastric emptying, and leave you short of your target.

Starting too early. A full week of loading doesn’t store more glycogen than two days does. It just means five extra days of feeling heavy and sluggish.

Trying new foods. Race week is the worst possible time to introduce an unfamiliar sports drink, a new bread, or a restaurant you’ve never been to. Everything you eat Thursday and Friday should be something your gut already knows.

Forgetting about fiber. A big jump in total food volume with your normal high-fiber choices is a recipe for an uncomfortable Saturday morning. Reduce fiber deliberately starting Thursday.

Alcohol. Friday night with friends is tempting, and a beer won’t ruin you. But alcohol impairs glycogen storage directly, disrupts sleep, and increases fluid loss — all three of which are exactly what you spent two days building. Save it for the finish line, where it’ll taste considerably better anyway – but after the protein!

Neglecting sodium and fluid. Storing glycogen requires water, and you need sodium to hold onto it. Salt your food normally or a little more than normal during the load and keep drinking. Loading on carbohydrate while under-hydrating leaves you with less than you think.

Doing this for the first time on race week. See below.

Practice It First

This is the piece I’d most like you to take from this post.

Pick a day well before race week and do a trial run. Eat a loading day, then ride the next morning. You’ll learn three things: whether you can actually hit your number, which foods sit well in volume, and how your gut handles it.

Almost everyone discovers something. Usually it’s that the number is harder to reach than expected, or that a food they assumed would work doesn’t at that volume. Finding that out on a quiet Tuesday costs you nothing. Finding it out on race day costs you the race.

Race Week, Day by Day

Monday through Wednesday. Normal eating, normal carbohydrate intake, training getting short and easy. Nothing special. Start lowering fiber slightly on Wednesday.

Thursday — load day one. Ramp carbohydrate up toward your target. Low fiber. Short easy spin at most. Buy everything you’ll need for Friday and Saturday now, so race week doesn’t hand you a grocery problem.

Friday — load day two, the important one. Hit your full target. Keep fiber low. Spread it across five or six feedings. You’ll likely be at the Ice Cycle Expo at the Grand Traverse Resort — plan your food around that rather than relying on whatever’s available there. Pack what you need and eat on your schedule, not the expo’s.

Dinner Friday should be moderate in size and familiar. The enormous night-before pasta dinner is a tradition, not a strategy — if you’ve loaded properly across both days, you don’t need a massive final meal, and a lighter dinner means you sleep better and start Saturday without a brick in your stomach.

Lay out your kit, fill your bottles, and prep breakfast Friday night. Race morning should require no decisions.

Saturday. Breakfast three hours before your wave, familiar and carbohydrate-focused, low fiber and low fat. Then execute the on-course plan you’ve already practiced.

Your Action List

  1. Calculate your number — body weight in kg times 8 to 10.
  2. Schedule a practice loading day and actually do it, well before race week.
  3. Write the grocery list and buy the shelf-stable items early.
  4. Decide your Friday eating schedule in advance, including around the expo.
  5. Plan race-week training to be genuinely easy. Put it on the calendar so you don’t improvise your way into a hard Thursday.
  6. Decide now that you’re not weighing yourself during race week.

Carb loading is one of the few nutrition interventions in endurance sport with genuinely strong evidence behind it. It’s also one of the easiest to botch through enthusiasm. Two days, a real taper, familiar low-fiber food, and a number you’ve actually calculated. That’s the whole thing.

Coming up next: race week and race morning. The taper-week eating that doesn’t undo your work, the night-before plan, breakfast timing by wave, and exactly what goes in your pockets before you roll out of Kalkaska.

Gina Render is a certified Performance Nutrition Coach that works with a variety of athletes and active individuals both locally and remotely to help them meet their goals. As a wife, mom of two teens avid mountain biker, and strength athlete, she understands the demands that come with balancing life and sport. From sport-specific fueling to general nutrition, she’s your partner and advocate to empower you to Adventure More. Contact her at gina@adventure-more.com.

The Season I Didn’t Plan For

This has not been my typical race season.

By this point in the year, I would normally have ten or eleven races behind me. This year, I have raced only five. That difference represents more than a number. It represents changed plans, missed opportunities, and a version of myself I have been trying to understand.

I entered this season expecting it to be epic. My calendar was filled with challenging races, long days on the bike, and goals that excited and scared me in all the best ways. I pictured frequent visits to the trails and the deep satisfaction that comes from pushing myself through difficult miles.

Instead, a back injury changed the direction of my season.

Healing has been slower and more frustrating than I wanted it to be. I have had to step away from some of the longer races I love and accept that my body is not ready to do everything my mind still wants to do. I have spent far less time on the trail and far more time learning where my limits are.

Finding my way and my place in this season has been challenging.

I also know I am not the only person who has experienced a season like this. Many athletes have watched carefully made plans change because of an injury, illness, family responsibilities, work demands, or circumstances beyond their control. It can feel isolating when everyone around you seems to be racing, improving, and reaching goals while you are simply trying to heal. If you are in that kind of season too, I hope you know that stepping back does not erase who you are or everything you have already accomplished.

There have been moments when the rest felt good and necessary. My body needed it, even if I did not always want to admit that. But there have also been moments when I deeply missed the familiar rhythm of training, racing, and spending long hours in the woods. Mountain biking has become such an important part of who I am that stepping back from it has sometimes left me wondering where I fit.

Injury has a way of challenging more than the body. It tests your patience, your confidence, and your ability to adjust when life does not follow the plan you carefully created.

I am learning that healing requires its own kind of endurance.

There is no race clock, no cheering crowd, and no finish line marking the moment you have made it through. Progress can be slow and difficult to measure. Some days bring hope, while others make you feel as though you have gone backward. The challenge is continuing to listen, adjust, and trust the process even when you cannot see exactly where it is taking you.

With Iceman on the horizon, I know the race will look and feel different to me this year. I may not arrive with the season of preparation I imagined. My goals may need to change, and success may have a different meaning than it has in the past.

Maybe success will be respecting my body instead of fighting it. Maybe it will be appreciating every mile I am able to ride. Maybe it will simply be showing up with gratitude for the opportunity to be part of an event and community that mean so much to me.

I am still figuring that out.

What I do know is that I do not want to spend this season mourning the one I thought I would have. I want to embrace the journey I am actually on. This season may include fewer races and shorter rides, but it is still teaching me about resilience, patience, and the courage required to begin again.

The season I planned would have tested me through distance and difficult courses. The season I received is testing me in an entirely different way.

It may not be the challenge I chose, but it is still a challenge worth meeting.

Thank you Heather Newman @goodtimesally_mtblife for being our Iceman Cometh Challenge Trailbazer!

Bring your friends

Team sports have never been my thing.

I wasn’t tough enough for the football team. I wasn’t cool enough for the soccer team. I didn’t have the height for the basketball team. I also didn’t have the skillset or talent for any of these sports…but that’s besides the point. Running and especially cycling came naturally to me because I could run my own show. I wasn’t relying on someone else to pass me the ball, or to block someone on the other team. Just me at my own pace. No one else to blame when things went a little sideways.

This can and did work just fine. But as an adult racing for fun, there’s something missing that may need to be forced back into the equation.

Accountability.

No doubt if you’re reading this you inherently enjoy riding your bike. But there will always be those rides where the weather is questionable, the miles are long, and the alarm clock is set too dang early. It’s easier to just stay in bed, right?? I can say from experience that it’s waay tougher to bail if you know there’s a couple of buddies waiting for you at the trailhead (even though they probably feel the same way). Those “questionable” rides often end up being the most rewarding, too! Your dad would call it character building. Sometimes you just need that extra push from your friends. It’s good for you.

Motivation.

Competition sure ain’t everything but having someone to chase will help keep you sharp. Some people compare Strava times. Some people compare mileage for the year. Maybe you just need to follow someone else’s line through a difficult section of singletrack. There are a lot of really talented people out there, and if you’re paying attention you can learn something from just about anybody. Surround yourself with people who think and behave how you want to think and behave. Whether they’re aware of it or not, they can help you achieve your own fitness goals, diet or weight loss goals, or improve your technical skills on the bike. Heck: you probably are that person for somebody else.

Camaraderie.

Ok, ok; let’s not get too serious here…bikes are more fun with friends! Share your stories about the aforementioned “questionable” rides. Find the people that are just as excited about your new bike/wheels/helmet/etc as you are! Show off that sweet new sticker you got. Grab a coffee or a beer after the ride. Send them stupid stuff you see on Instagram or Facebook marketplace. Riding bikes is cool. You’re probably pretty cool, too. 

You’re racing in November, right? It might be too late for your friends or family to sign up this year, but invite ‘em along! Especially those who might not know what a mountain bike race is like. Make a weekend out of it. Celebrate your successes and share your challenges from raceday and from the season leading up to it. Iceman is a unique and exciting event, and is a great way for us to introduce others to the sport. In addition to the food trucks and the beer; the afterparty is filled with interesting and accomplished people who are there celebrating the same things you are. Share that with your friends!

They’re going to want to be a part of your team.

Thank you to Aaron Schutter @aaron_two_tired for being our 2026 Iceman Trailblazer.

Men, Muscle, and the Long Ride: Fueling Strategies for Male Riders

Last month’s post was about the gaps in women’s fueling advice. This one is about a different problem. Men generally get plenty of nutrition advice — it’s just that a lot of it is wrong in the same predictable ways, and the mistakes change shape depending on how old you are.

A fifteen-year-old racing the Junior Iceman and a fifty-five-year-old racing his eighteenth Iceman are both under-fueling, but for completely different reasons and with completely different consequences. The teenager is under-fueling because he’s growing, riding hard, and physically cannot eat fast enough to keep up. The fifty-five-year-old is under-fueling on purpose, because he read somewhere that he should show up lighter.

It’s September. Iceman is Saturday, November 7 — about seven weeks out. Your training load is near its peak right now and your fueling discipline usually isn’t. Let’s go through it by decade.

The Mistake Almost Every Male Rider Makes

Before the age-specific stuff, here’s the pattern that shows up across every category.

The default approach to endurance fueling for most athletes is some version of “ride hard, eat whatever, it’ll sort itself out.” For a long stretch of your life, that works well enough. Young men have enormous metabolic margin — you can skip breakfast, ride three hours on one bottle and half a bar, eat badly, sleep poorly, and still perform.

The problem is that the margin is doing the work, not the strategy. And the margin shrinks. Slowly at first, then noticeably. When it finally runs out, most people don’t recognize what happened — they just conclude they need to train harder, which accelerates the exact problem they’re trying to solve.

The fix is the same at every age: stop treating food as an afterthought and start treating it as a training input. What changes with age is the margin for error, not the principles.

Carbohydrate: The Number That Actually Matters

Iceman is roughly 30 miles of punchy, cold-weather racing. Front-of-pack riders finish near 1:45. Competitive amateurs run 2:15 to 2:45. Mid-pack is 2:45 to 3:30. Plenty of riders are out there four hours or more.

At those intensities and durations, carbohydrate is the limiting fuel. Not fat, not protein, not willpower. And most male riders are running on considerably less than they need.

Daily intake during heavy training

  • Moderate training weeks: roughly 5–7 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day
  • Hard training weeks with multiple quality sessions: 7–10 g/kg/day

For a 180-pound rider, the hard-week range works out to roughly at least 570 grams of carbohydrate daily. That is substantially more than most guys eat, and it’s the single most common gap I find when I review a male athlete’s actual intake.

On the bike

  • Efforts under 90 minutes: 30–60 g of carbohydrate per hour
  • Efforts over two hours at real intensity — which is Iceman for nearly everyone: 60–90 g per hour

That upper range requires a mix of glucose and fructose sources, and it requires practice. Your gut adapts to carbohydrate intake the same way your legs adapt to intervals. Do not try 90 grams an hour for the first time on November 7. Start now, on your long rides, and build tolerance over the next twelve weeks.

The September trap

Here’s the pattern I see every fall. Training volume peaks in August and September. A rider looks at the calendar, decides he’d like to show up in Kalkaska a few pounds lighter, and cuts carbohydrates — at exactly the moment his body needs the most fuel it will need all year.

Six weeks later his intervals feel terrible, his recovery is shot, and he’s frustrated. Then he pushes harder, which makes it worse.

If you want to change your body composition, the window for that was April through June. In August, the job is fueling the work. A slightly heavier rider who’s properly fueled beats a lighter rider who’s dug a hole, every single time, over 30 miles.

Protein: How Much, and How to Spread It

Endurance athletes need 1.6 to 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. For a 180-pound rider, that’s roughly 130 to 165 grams.

Total matters, but distribution matters nearly as much. Aim for 30 to 40 grams at each main meal rather than eating a light breakfast and an enormous dinner. Four moderate servings across the day drive more muscle repair than the same total dumped into one sitting.

The gap is almost always breakfast. Coffee and a bagel is not a protein serving.

Young Male Riders

If you’re a teenage rider, or you’re the parent of one, this section is the important one.

A young male athlete in a growth phase has the highest per-pound energy demand he will ever have. He is building bone, building muscle, running a nervous system through a major renovation, and training on top of all of it. His fuel needs are not “adult needs, scaled down.” Per pound of body weight, they are higher than an adult’s.

What this means practically

  • Eat frequently. Three meals is rarely enough during a growth spurt with a training load on top. Plan for meals plus two or three substantial snacks. The after-school window before evening riding is the one most often missed.
  • Protein across the day, not just at dinner. Growth and training both draw on it. Breakfast protein is the usual weak point in teenage eating.
  • Carbohydrate is not the enemy. Teenage boys pick up a startling amount of nutrition misinformation from social media, most of it aimed at physique rather than performance. A young endurance athlete needs carbohydrate, and plenty of it.
  • Iron matters here too. Rapid growth raises iron needs substantially, and heavy training raises them further. If a teenage rider is chronically fatigued and training isn’t producing results, an iron panel is worth asking about.
  • Calcium and vitamin D. Roughly 1,300 mg of calcium a day through the teenage years, managed by bloodwork and a doctors guidance – don’t just start supplementing. Focus on nutrition. Peak bone mass is built during adolescence and it’s largely built by about age twenty. 

On weight and young athletes

Cycling has a weight (diet) culture, and it reaches teenagers early. I want to be direct about this: under-fueling in an adolescent male athlete suppresses growth, suppresses testosterone, compromises the bone density he’ll carry for the rest of his life, and reliably makes him slower.

Low energy availability is not just a female issue. It affects male athletes too, and it’s diagnosed later in men because nobody’s looking for it — there’s no missed period to serve as an obvious alarm. Warning signs in a young male rider: growth that stalls, frequent illness, stress injuries, persistent fatigue, mood changes, training that stops producing progress.

If a teenage rider is talking about cutting weight for racing, that’s a conversation to have with a sports dietitian, not a plan to execute alone.

Parents: next month’s post covers the family and kids’ race logistics in full. What to pack, and what young riders will actually eat on a cold race morning.

Men in Their Twenties and Thirties

This is the stretch where everything works and nothing is optimized. The margin is wide, so mistakes stay invisible.

The thing worth doing now: build the habits while it’s easy, because they compound. Specifically —

  • Practice race fueling in training instead of assuming you’ll figure it out on race day. Gut training is real and it takes weeks.
  • Get protein to your target consistently. Muscle you build and maintain in your thirties is muscle you’re not fighting to keep in your fifties.
  • Start resistance training if you haven’t. Two short sessions a week. It’s protective for bone, it’s protective for durability on technical descents, and it gets harder to start the longer you wait.
  • Take sleep as seriously as you take intervals. It’s the highest-return recovery input available to you and it’s free.

You can get away with skipping all of this. You’ll just be a worse rider at forty than you needed to be.

Masters Men: Forty and Up

Something genuinely changes, and it’s worth naming so you can respond to it instead of just being annoyed by it.

Muscle becomes less responsive to protein. The same 20 grams that triggered a solid repair response at twenty-five does less at fifty-five. The fix is a larger per-meal dose — 35 to 40 grams at each main meal — plus resistance training, which restores a good deal of that sensitivity.

Recovery takes longer. Glycogen replacement slows, muscle repair slows, and the adaptation window stretches. Practically: prioritize the post-ride meal more deliberately than you did at thirty. Carbohydrate plus protein within an hour or so, especially after hard sessions and especially when you’re riding again the next day.

You likely need more carbohydrate than your perceived effort suggests, not less. This is counterintuitive and it trips up a lot of masters riders. Your ride may feel easier than it used to at the same heart rate, but the substrate demand hasn’t disappeared. Under-fueling masters riders is extremely common.

Body composition moves even when nothing else changed. The instinct is to cut calories. The better lever is more protein, more resistance training, and holding your carbohydrate intake steady during hard training. Cutting calories during your peak block costs you fitness and doesn’t fix the underlying issue.

Sleep quality degrades. Which means recovery nutrition has to carry more of the load, and it also means evening alcohol costs you more than it used to.

Alcohol: The Honest Version

You’re going to get a beer at Timber Ridge after you cross the line, and you should. That’s not what this is about.

What matters is the training block. Alcohol impairs glycogen replacement, blunts muscle protein synthesis for hours afterward, disrupts sleep architecture even when total sleep time looks fine, and costs you more recovery as you get older. Three or four drinks the night before a key session is a meaningfully compromised session.

Practical version: keep it away from your hardest training days and away from the night before anything that matters. Race weekend, that means Friday night at the Expo is not the night for it. Saturday afternoon at the finish festival absolutely is.

Creatine

The evidence here has gotten strong enough that it’s worth mentioning directly.

Creatine monohydrate, 3 to 5 grams a day, is one of the most studied and best-supported supplements available. The benefit is clearest for repeated high-intensity efforts — which describes Iceman well, given how punchy the course is. The evidence for masters athletes in particular, for muscle maintenance and possibly for cognition, has strengthened considerably.

It’s inexpensive, it doesn’t require loading, and it’s well tolerated. Expect a small weight increase from intramuscular water, which is not fat and is not a performance penalty. Worth a conversation with your physician, particularly if you have kidney concerns.

For teenage athletes: this is a conversation for a physician and a sports dietitian, not a decision to make off a blog post.

Race-Day Carbohydrate Math

Take your realistic finish time and work backward.

  • 1:45–2:15 (front of race): 80–90 g of carbohydrate per hour, almost entirely liquid and gel. You won’t have hands free or heart rate low enough to chew much.
  • 2:15–2:45: 70–90 g per hour. Mix of gels, chews, and drink mix.
  • 2:45–3:30: 60–75 g per hour, plus real food if your stomach handles it in the cold.
  • 3:30+: 50–70 g per hour, and eat on a timer rather than by feel. At this duration in cold weather, appetite is not a reliable signal.

And the cold-weather warning that applies to everyone here: you will not feel hungry, you will not feel thirsty, and you will under-fuel if you go by sensation. Set a timer on your computer. Eat when it goes off, whether you want to or not.

Your September Action List

  1. Add up one honest day of carbohydrate intake and compare it to 5–7 g/kg. Most riders find a gap.
  2. Fix breakfast protein. Aim for 30–40 grams before you get on the bike.
  3. Practice 60–90 g of carbohydrate per hour on your next three long rides. Build the tolerance now.
  4. Put two strength sessions on the calendar weekly through October.
  5. Pick your hardest training days and keep alcohol away from the night before them.
  6. If you have a teenage rider in the house, look honestly at whether he’s eating enough during his growth phase.

The theme across every age here is the same: the guys who fall apart at Iceman are almost never under-trained. They’re under-fueled, and they got there by treating nutrition as the part that doesn’t require a plan.

Coming up in October: the whole family. Fueling young riders from the Sno-Cone and and beyond, plus the race-morning parent checklist that keeps everyone fed and functional in the cold.

Gina Render is a certified Performance Nutrition Coach that works with a variety of athletes and active individuals both locally and remotely to help them meet their goals. As a wife, mom of two teens avid mountain biker, and strength athlete, she understands the demands that come with balancing life and sport. From sport-specific fueling to general nutrition, she’s your partner and advocate to empower you to Adventure More. Contact her at gina@adventure-more.com.

There Is Room for All of Us at the Finish Line

The start of a new school year always brings a major shift in my life. The relaxed rhythm of summer quickly gives way to early mornings, busy days, lesson planning, classroom routines, and a calendar that seems to fill faster than I can keep up with it.

This year, I am also finishing my teaching degree and completing my student-teaching internship. It is an exciting season, one that I have worked toward for a long time, but it is also demanding. When life becomes this busy, the things we do for ourselves are often the first things pushed aside.

Training can begin to feel like one more responsibility. Rides must be squeezed into already full days, and sometimes finding the energy to begin is harder than completing the workout itself. But I am learning that protecting time for the things I love is not selfish. Riding my bike and getting to the gym gives me space to breathe, think, challenge myself, and reconnect with a part of who I am outside of work, school, and everything I do for others.

Recent events in my life have brought challenges and reminded me that we are often stronger than we realize. Sometimes moving forward means accomplishing something big. Other times, it simply means continuing to show up when life feels difficult. The bike has always helped me work through hard things, and that made this year’s Ore to Shore especially meaningful.

For five years, I had been chasing a podium finish at that race. I had come close before, but I had never quite made it. This year, I finally did.

Crossing the finish line and earning a place on the podium represented more than one good race. It represented years of showing up, training through busy seasons, learning from disappointments, and continuing to believe the goal was possible.

I am proud that I competed hard. I wanted that podium, and I worked for it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to race well, push our limits, or discover what we are capable of accomplishing. Competition can motivate us to train harder, take chances, and become stronger riders.

However, there is a line between racing competitively and allowing the desire for a certain result to override good judgment.

Mountain biking requires all of us to share the trail. We may have different experience levels, goals, and speeds, but every rider deserves to feel safe and respected. Passing responsibly, communicating clearly, giving other riders enough space, and recognizing when a move is unnecessarily risky are all part of being a good competitor.

A few seconds or one finishing position is never worth putting another rider, or ourselves, in danger.

It is easy to become caught up in the adrenaline of racing, especially near the start, on a crowded section of trail, or as the finish line approaches. Those are also the moments when trail etiquette and respect matter most. Racing hard does not mean racing recklessly. Strength is not only measured by how fast we ride; it is also shown through patience, awareness, and the decisions we make when emotions are high.

This is especially important as we encourage more women and new riders to enter the sport. Cycling communities grow when people feel welcomed, supported, and safe. We build that kind of community when we invite someone to her first group ride, calm another rider’s nerves at the starting line, share advice, call out a safe pass, offer help on the trail, and celebrate one another at the finish.

We can race one another fiercely and still respect one another. We can want the podium without believing that another person’s success takes something away from our own. We can be strong competitors and supportive members of the cycling community at the same time.

That is the example I want to set as a cyclist and an Iceman Trailblazer. The next generation of riders is watching how we compete, respond to challenges, celebrate victories, and treat one another on the trail. I want them to see that determination and kindness can exist together, and that being a strong competitor never requires leaving respect or compassion behind.

As another busy season begins, I am reminding myself to continue making room for the things that help me feel strong and whole. Some weeks, training may look different. Some rides may be shorter, slower, or squeezed between responsibilities. But that time still matters.

I will continue chasing goals. I will continue competing. I will continue pushing through difficult seasons. And I will continue respecting and cheering for the people riding beside me, because there is room for all of us at the start line, on the trail, and at the finish.

Thank you to Heather Newman @goodtimessally_mtblife for being our 2026 Iceman Cometh Trailblazer.

Fueling for Women: The Hormonal Nutrition Playbook for Iceman

Most of the fueling advice floating around cycling was built on studies of male athletes, then handed to everyone else as if it were universal. That’s not a conspiracy – it’s just how the research funding worked for decades. But it does mean that if you’re a woman lining up in Kalkaska in November, some of the standard advice is going to fit you fine, some of it needs adjusting, and a few pieces of your nutrition picture never get mentioned at all.

This post is about that last group. Not because women’s nutrition is exotic or complicated, but because the things that most often hold female riders back – iron status, chronic underfueling, bone health, the shifts that come with perimenopause – are rarely part of the conversation until something breaks.

It’s August. Iceman is Saturday, November 7. That’s about three months, which is exactly the right amount of runway to fix the things on this list. Most of them can’t be fixed in race week.

Start Here: Put Your Cycle on the Calendar

If you’re still cycling, the single most useful thing you can do this month is figure out roughly where race day is going to land.

Count forward from your last period in cycle lengths. If you average 28 days, November 7 is about four and a half cycles from mid-July. You won’t nail it to the day – cycles drift, and training load and stress push them around – but you’ll know whether you’re likely to be in the first half or the second half of your cycle on race morning. That’s enough to plan around.

If you’re not tracking already, start now. A note in your phone is fine. What you want by October is a few months of your own data, not an app’s average of someone else’s.

Why it matters: not because one phase is “bad” for racing – women win national championships in every phase – but because knowing where you are lets you make small, specific adjustments instead of guessing at why you feel off.

What Actually Changes Across Your Cycle

Let me be honest about the state of the science here, because I think you deserve that more than you deserve a tidy answer.

The broad hormonal picture is well established. In the first half of your cycle – the follicular phase, from the start of your period through ovulation – estrogen rises and progesterone stays low. In the second half, the luteal phase, both estrogen and progesterone are elevated. Those hormones do measurably affect substrate use, core temperature, fluid balance, and protein turnover.

What is much less settled is how much any of that changes race-day performance. When researchers pooled the available studies, the average effect on performance turned out to be small and, importantly, highly individual. Some women feel a real difference. Some feel nothing. Both are normal.

So the useful framing isn’t “your hormones will sabotage you.” It’s “there are a handful of predictable physiological shifts, and if you happen to be someone who feels them, here’s what to do.”

The shifts worth knowing about

  • Body temperature. Core temperature runs slightly higher in the luteal phase – roughly half a degree Fahrenheit. In a summer criterium, that’s a real thermoregulatory tax. At Iceman, in 30-degree woods, it’s a non-issue and arguably an advantage.
  • Fuel use. Estrogen promotes fat oxidation and tends to spare muscle glycogen. Progesterone works somewhat against that. The practical translation is not “eat fewer carbs in one phase” – at Iceman intensities you are burning carbohydrate regardless. It’s that some women find they need slightly more total carbohydrate to feel normal in the luteal phase, especially on hard days.
  • Protein turnover. Progesterone increases protein breakdown. If you’re going to be in your luteal phase during your heaviest training block or on race day, nudging protein up is a low-cost hedge.
  • Fluid balance. Fluid shifts are common in the late luteal phase. That can show up as a scale change that has nothing to do with body composition, and as a slightly higher sodium need. Don’t panic-diet in response to a number on the scale that week.
  • Perceived effort. The days right before your period are when most women report higher perceived exertion at the same power. Effort feels harder than the numbers say it should. If race day lands there, plan to race by feel less and by plan more – stick to your fueling schedule and your pacing targets rather than negotiating with how you feel at mile eight.

If race day lands in your luteal phase

Nothing dramatic changes. Add a bit more carbohydrate in the two or three days before the race than you otherwise would, keep sodium intake steady rather than restricting it, hit your protein, and trust the plan you practiced. The cold weather at Iceman genuinely works in your favor here.

Iron: The One Most Likely to Be Quietly Costing You

If you take one thing from this post, take this one.

Iron is central to oxygen transport, and endurance athletes lose it through more channels than the general population – sweat, gut losses, foot strike and impact, and for menstruating athletes, monthly blood loss on top of all of it. Low iron stores can drag down your aerobic capacity and leave you flat and heavy-legged long before you’d ever show up as clinically anemic on a standard blood panel.

This is the classic silent performance leak. You don’t feel a sudden drop. You just feel like your fitness stopped responding to training, and you assume you need to work harder – which makes it worse.

What to do

  1. Ask your doctor for a full iron panel, not just hemoglobin. You want ferritin, which reflects stored iron, along with hemoglobin and transferrin saturation. Ferritin is the number that flags a problem early. Many sports medicine practitioners start paying attention in endurance athletes well before the lab’s “low” cutoff, so ask for the actual number rather than just “normal or not.”
  2. Do it now, not in October. If your iron is low, correcting stores takes months, not weeks. August testing gives you time. Race-week testing gives you nothing but anxiety.
  3. Don’t supplement blind. Iron overload is a real problem, and supplementing without knowing your status can mask other issues. Test first.
  4. If you do supplement, get the details right. Absorption is better in the morning and worse in the hours right after a hard session, when your body’s iron-regulating response is elevated. Vitamin C helps absorption; coffee, tea, and calcium-rich foods taken at the same time work against it. Every-other-day dosing is often absorbed better and tolerated better than daily.
  5. Build the food side regardless. Red meat, shellfish, liver if you’ll eat it, plus beans, lentils, tofu, and fortified grains paired with a vitamin C source. Plant iron is absorbed less efficiently, so pairing matters more if you’re eating mostly plant-based.

Are You Actually Eating Enough?

This is the uncomfortable section, and it’s the one I’d most like you to sit with.

Low energy availability means you’re not taking in enough fuel to cover both your training and the basic business of keeping your body running. It doesn’t require an eating disorder. It happens constantly to conscientious, motivated athletes who simply increased training volume and never increased food to match – or who picked up a nutrition message somewhere that leaner equals faster and quietly ran a deficit for months.

The downstream effects hit bone density, hormonal function, immune function, mood, gut health, and – eventually and inevitably – performance. The performance drop usually arrives last, which is exactly what makes it so easy to miss.

Warning signs

  • Your period has become irregular, lighter, or stopped altogether and you’re not pregnant or on a contraceptive that explains it
  • You’re getting sick more than you used to, or minor illnesses linger
  • You have a history of stress fractures or bone stress injuries
  • You’re always cold, even by Northern Michigan standards
  • Recovery between hard sessions is taking noticeably longer than it used to
  • Training is going up and performance is flat or going backwards
  • Sleep is poor, mood is low, or you feel unusually irritable and can’t point to a cause
  • You think about food, restriction, or your weight more than feels comfortable

Losing your period is not a sign that training is going well. It is a physiological alarm, and it’s the one most often dismissed as normal in endurance sport. It isn’t.

If several of these sound familiar, please talk to a sports nutrition coach or a physician who works with athletes. This is fixable, and it’s much more fixable now than after a stress fracture in September takes your season.

Bones: More Relevant to Cyclists Than We Admit

Cycling is largely non-weight-bearing, which is wonderful for your joints and unhelpful for your skeleton. Mountain biking gives you more impact and loading than road riding does, but not enough to count as bone-building on its own. Add in the fact that bone loss accelerates around menopause, and this becomes a category worth actively managing rather than assuming.

  • Calcium. Aim for roughly 1,000–1,300 mg per day, mostly from food. Dairy, fortified plant milks, canned fish with bones, tofu set with calcium, and leafy greens all count.
  • Vitamin D. At this latitude, we make essentially none from sunlight between roughly October and March. Get your level tested and supplement based on the result rather than a guess.
  • Load your skeleton. Two short strength sessions a week does more for your bone density than any supplement, and it will make you a more durable bike handler on rough sections of the course. This is the single best training investment most female cyclists aren’t making.

Perimenopause and Menopause

If you’re in your forties or fifties, some of what you’re experiencing on the bike may have nothing to do with your training plan.

As estrogen declines, several things shift at once: muscle becomes less responsive to the protein you eat, body composition tends to move even when your habits haven’t, recovery slows down, sleep quality often degrades, and thermoregulation gets less predictable. It’s a genuinely disorienting stretch, and a lot of women respond by cutting calories – which is precisely the wrong lever.

What actually helps

  • More protein, better distributed. This is the phase to stop being casual about it. Aim for 30–40 g of protein at each main meal rather than back-loading it all at dinner. The higher per-meal dose is what overcomes the reduced sensitivity.
  • Resistance training. Not optional anymore. It’s the primary defense of both muscle mass and bone density through this transition, and it directly protects your power on the bike.
  • Creatine. The evidence for 3–5 g per day in menopausal women- for muscle, and possibly for cognition and bone – has gotten meaningfully stronger. It’s inexpensive and well tolerated. Worth a conversation with your physician.
  • Don’t cut calories to chase the scale. Under-fueling accelerates every problem in this list. If you’re training for a 30-mile race, eat like it.

Protein: The Number to Actually Hit

Endurance athletes need considerably more protein than the general population guidelines suggest – in the range of 1.6 to 2.0 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. For a 140-pound rider, that’s roughly 100 to 130 grams daily. Emerging work suggests women may sit at the upper end of that range rather than the lower, particularly in the luteal phase and after menopause.

Distribution matters as much as the total. Three or four servings of 25 to 40 grams spread across the day beats a small breakfast and an enormous dinner, even if the totals match.

The practical test: add up what you actually ate yesterday. Most riders I work with are surprised, and the gap is almost always at breakfast.

Callouts

Masters women, 40 and up

The perimenopause section is your section, but so is the strength training line in the bone section. Two sessions a week, consistently, from now through October will change how you feel on the rough sections between Williamsburg and the finish. It is the highest-return thing on this entire page for you.

Junior girls racing the Slush Cup or Junior Iceman

You are training and still growing, which means your fuel needs per pound are higher than an adult’s, not lower. Eating enough is not a side note to your training – it is your training. Underfueling during your teenage years affects bone density you will carry for the rest of your life, and it ends more promising athletic careers than any crash ever will. Eat the second breakfast.

Men reading this

Don’t skip it. If you train with women, coach them, or are raising one, the iron and low-energy-availability sections are worth knowing well enough to recognize in someone else. Your post is next month.

Your August Action List

  1. Start tracking your cycle so you know roughly where November 7 lands.
  2. Book a blood draw and ask for a full iron panel including ferritin, plus vitamin D.
  3. Add up one honest day of protein and see where you land against 1.6–2.0 g/kg.
  4. Put two strength sessions a week on the calendar and treat them like rides.
  5. Read the low energy availability warning signs again, honestly. If more than two apply, make the call to a professional this month.

None of this is exotic. It’s the unglamorous infrastructure underneath a good race – the stuff that determines whether the fueling plan we build in October has anything solid to sit on top of.

Coming up in September: we flip to the men’s side. Testosterone, protein timing, masters-specific carbohydrate needs, and why the “just ride hard and eat whatever” approach works right up until the year it doesn’t. Fueling for Women: The Hormonal Nutrition Playbook for Iceman doesn’t.

Gina Render is a certified Performance Nutrition Coach that works with a variety of athletes and active individuals both locally and remotely to help them meet their goals. As a wife, mom of two teens avid mountain biker, and strength athlete, she understands the demands that come with balancing life and sport. From sport-specific fueling to general nutrition, she’s your partner and advocate to empower you to Adventure More. Contact her at gina@adventure-more.com.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance.

Ok ok, cheesy and possibly overused title referencing a book that is only tangentially about maintenance of any kind. 

For the sake of this post, let’s ignore “Zen” for now (which I know basically nothing about) and talk about bicycle maintenance (which I know a whole bunch about). I certainly can’t cover everything in one blog post. There are countless books on the subject (do people still read service manuals?) and things are constantly being updated as technology marches steadily on. I can, however, share my ritual that I perform approximately one to two weeks before any major ride, event, or race. Glamorous? No. Satisfying? You betcha.

Let’s start with a clean bike. Give it a quick rinse, lather it up with some water and Dawn dish soap (is anyone from Procter & Gamble reading this? #sponsorme) to help cut grease buildup on the drivetrain, and rinse everything off with a hose when you’re done. Towel dry what you can; compressed air may be helpful for the hard to reach places.

Wheels off!

Remove both wheels and give both tires a quick visual, looking for tread wear, cracks from age, and any small cuts or punctures that you may not have noticed. Pull the valve cores and check sealant levels using a small zip tie or allen wrench as a dipstick. Make sure the valve stems are free of any dried sealant, and consider installing new cores if it’s been tough to get air in or out of your tires.

Feel the hubs. You don’t need to be a bearing whisperer to tell when they’re worn. Bearings should turn smoothly and quietly, with no lateral (side to side) or axial (up and down) play. Crunchy? Noisy? Might be time to stop by your local bike shop unless you’re comfortable digging deeper.

Check for any broken, damaged, or loose spokes. Measure spoke tension if you have the means. If you don’t have the tools, plucking the spokes like a guitar string will at least identify any that are severely loose or tight. Spokes should all have approximately the same pitch.

Now is also a good time for a quick brake inspection. Disc brake pads often feel and function fine right up until they are completely worn out! As a reference: when pads are brand new, the friction material is just a little thicker than the backing plate. Are yours gettin’ skinny?

Chain off!

Quick measure your chain with a chain wear indicator (available at any local bike shop for $10-$20), and pop it off with a masterlink pliers (also $10-$20 at your LBS). If it’s worn out, or nearly worn out; replace it. If it’s BAD worn out proceed with caution: you may need a new cassette too ($$$…this is why we measure our chains frequently often). If you have the tools and/or motivation to do so, remove the cassette and derailleur pulleys, too: although they can be cleaned on the bike it’s easier to be thorough when everything is disassembled.

Soak the chain in some mineral spirits or simple green. Scrub, rinse, repeat as needed. The cleaner the better (especially if you wax!). Old school tip: soak your chain in a plastic pop bottle partially filled with solvent. Thread the cap on and shake periodically to release any grit. Contaminated solvent can be dumped out and refilled as needed. Cut the top off the bottle to get the chain out. Let it air dry, or blow dry with compressed air.

Scrub the cassette, derailleur pulleys, and chainring. It’s hard not to make a mess if they’re still on the bike, but again: the cleaner the better.

While the chain is off, give the crank arms a spin. It’s way easier to identify noisy bottom bracket bearings when they’re isolated from the rest of the drivetrain.

Reinstall your nice clean parts.

And don’t forget to lube your nice clean chain! Cleaning and lubricating your bike is the equivalent of unplugging it and plugging it back in. Making noise? Try this first.

Give the wheels a quick spin and make sure they’re straight (heads up: a tire that is not fully seated can disguise itself as a tweaked wheel and is not at all uncommon) and that the brake pads are not contacting the rotors.

With the bike on the ground, grab the front brake and rock the bike forward and backward a little. Any play in the front end is usually a loose headset. Pick up the front of the bike and turn the handlebars back and forth. There should be no sad crunchy bearing sounds or drag. Overly tight headset bearings are very common, especially after swapping stems. That top cap doesn’t need to be that tight, people! Draw the top cap bolt down just enough to take up any play in the headset bearings, then tighten up the bolts on the stem. Done!

Feel the pedals for any play in the bearings; this is another very common issue, especially with you high mileage riders!

Double check the torque on the stem bolts, crank bolts, chainring bolts, axles/skewers, suspension hardware, and brake caliper bolts (and any other important bolts that I’ve forgotten to mention).

Anything electronic on your bike? AXS batteries (don’t forget about the coin cell batteries in electronic shifters or power meters)? Computer? Lights? Charge ‘em up.

Test Ride.

And not just up and down your driveway. Go out for a regular ride and just ride like you normally would. Any brake noise? Is the chain skipping under heavy load? Maybe you made things worse? No worries! This is why we do these things a week or two before the main event (see paragraph one). You still have time to try again, grab any replacement parts if needed, or seek professional help.

But hopefully everything is smooth and quiet and we have guaranteed that nothing could possibly go wrong, right?!

Well, no.

Crashes, flat tires, and even mechanical failures can and do happen at inopportune times. But we can now approach our race with confidence, knowing that we have addressed the variables that are in our control. We’ll just have to roll with whatever else happens along the way.

Maybe that’s our Zen.

Thank you to Aaron Schutter @aaron_two_tired for being our 2026 Iceman Trailblazer.