1.Roman, let's talk about alcohol and Christmas

Roman, let's talk about alcohol and Christmas. Cute out intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness, and our long changes? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Row Man Podcast. Roman welcome back to another Roman cycling podcast. Thank you for joining me again. We've only four more sleeps till Christmas with Dublin saying, why do I used to say to me anyway, and he's a true blues we call it true Dublin man about his mom and dad been born in Dublin. It was four more sleeps and we'd be bungjord. I'm not really sure what that means. I'm not Not sure what the word bungjaw means is, word bungjaw means, I'm not sure how you spell the word bungjaw, I'm not sure if it's a word, but there you go, four more days and we're gonna be bungjawed. Folks today I want to talk to you about alcohol and Christmas because there are two things that just go together, like Hansel and Gretel, like Tweedledome and Tweedledow, like Wout Van Earth and Vanderpaul in the cyclocross, these things they just go together. I want to talk to you about if it's a good idea, you probably know already it's not a good idea, but I want to talk to you about a few strategies around how to manage it and why this might be a particularly bad idea. Folks before I do, I know you're all super eager keen to buy me a point of beer for over the holidays. It's twofold. One, you get to support the podcast, which you've been listening to all year and I know you secretly love it. You're smiling now aren't you? You, you, slow little fucker. And you get to make me fat over the Christmas, which means if you see me out on the road, I'm going to be going a lot slower because I'm going to be drinking your donation. It's slowing me down. Win, win. patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh. Buy me a point. Link is in the bio. It really, really helps the podcast. So go make that happen. So alcohol and Christmas, they go together very, very well. The bad news is alcohol and training don't actually go together that well at all, unsurprisingly. Now I did have a team ace a few years ago and he was a beast of a man in the time trial and I remember one particular morning we were going to a time trial and he said to me the night before look I'm on a heavy one so you might wake me next morning, cars packed, I'm definitely going to the race but you're going to probably have to bang on the door and drag me out of bed. So next morning I'm banging on the door, I'm trying to drag him out of bed, eventually get him out of bed down the stairs. He's inking a whiskey from the night before we get to the race. I'm warming up, he's still in the car like sleeping. Now this dude is a prodigy of a talent. I was a 10 mile time trial, I'd skin sewed up and I'd go to him, he'd warm up, do a 10 mile time trial and I was getting pretty decent around that time and I'd assumed I'd won the TT or gone very close looking at my numbers and time and results are getting called out and it's like third place is Joe Glogg, second place is Anthony Walsh and I was like who the fuck is after beat me now and then its first place is my buddy my buddy who'd been drinking all night he just pulled it out of the bag like you wouldn't believe won the 10 mile TT and he said a new course record. So right there we could end this ad for Diagio and say that alcohol and cycling go together brilliant, the drink and merriment and threshold training, it all goes together great and go off and have yourself a festive merry little Christmas. But unfortunately I'm not too worried about the lawyers coming back at me and saying a lot of your listeners have told it, but I'm more worried about my moral sense of obligation to you the listener and giving you some good facts going into the Christmas. We're heading into a period where you likely have more training hours. A lot of people listening to this will be confined to training in the evening, squeezing in a session before work, after work, and now you're finding yourself with a heap of training time. Raffa Fest of 500 training time, which is actually a good idea and I'm scribbling that down as I speak for a future podcast should you do the Raffa Fest of 500.

2.Hmm, stay tuned later in the week

Hmm, stay tuned later in the week. I diverge. As I often do, okay, find yourself with a bunch of extra training hours and with that bunch of extra training hours you have a potential to get a huge fitness bump over the Christmas. But you also have a lot more drinking hours and you have potential to do yourself huge damage over the Christmas and come out the far side of Christmas really chasing yourself and trying to spend the next all of January getting back to where you are right now. So this period of extra time on your hands is a very important period. And I was talking to a friend about something completely off topic. And he summarized it and he said, look what you're talking about here is this is a tool. The festive period, it's a tool. And you have a lot of free time and you can do what you want is this tool. He's like just the way a gone is a tool and you can go and you can shoot your dinner and there's a lot of healthy pursuits and reasons for having a gone for hunting. That's a positive application of it. but you can also get a go on and you can go into the cinema and you can kill everyone. And that's not a so positive application. Now that analogy speaks a lot to this guy's mindset, but it also highlights to us that we can do serious damage to ourselves over the festive period. And a couple of the ways I want to dig into it, and without skaring my mind too much, there is actually some real damage you can get yourself into by drinking too much, and what we'd call sweating it out or walking it out. Because alcohol, it messes up the way we metabolize energy, and it messes up how muscles develop through protein synthesis. So, because the liver is actually busy dealing with all the toxins that it struggles to have just normal metabolic processes in energy production and glycogen replenishment. So, that's really one downside of it. The very obvious downside is the calories, and I have a rule all year long that I don't drink anything that has calories. Typically, unless I have a very occasional glass of wine. But I typically try and not drink calories and as bad as drinks like Coke Zero or Doyacolker because of the aspartan, I still stay away from them. I still drink them as opposed to their sugary counterparts unless it's in a sporting context that I'm having a Coke as a recovery drink or whatever because seven calories per gram is roughly what you're gonna get in alcohol. That's almost as much as pure fat. So a night on the beer is very, very heavy on calories. Also alcohol, it's a powerful diuretic. So you're gaining those calories, which are also gonna be super dehydrated the next day. And then you're gonna go out training. So your dehydration and you're digging yourself into a further hole. There's also been a few studies in the last few years talking about, that, what's it called, that cardiac arrhythmia, abnormal heartbeat. And if you have a propensity for an abnormal heartbeat, there is evidence to suggest that training the morning after a heavy night on the beer can actually accelerate your movement towards that arterial fibrillation, I think it's called. Like we obviously have come in recent years to a point where it's not socially acceptable to drive your card the next morning if you've been on the beer the night before and guard a checkpoint or an outside-up or police checkpoint here and on their setup to breath-lise people and test them to see if they are over the limit in X-Mon and there's been quite a grass-of-marketing campaign, they're only even in cinemas telling you the consequences of driving the next day and you can lose your license and things. But, by extension, if you're cycling the next day, just because there's not a guard at a checkpoint or a police checkpoint to check your blood alcohol levels, doesn't mean it's a good idea. You're risking your safety if anyone who's tried to cycle after a few beers or if you've been like mean, you used to cycle because it was your only means of transport in college and you've tried to cycle home after a few drinks. You realize your risk perception is entirely different, your reaction speed is different and on the sport where we absolutely rely on reactions. I was only last week going around the corner like maybe forty five sixty minutes into my training spin. I was on the bumper of a car who looked to be taking a right turn because they had their indicator on and they just jammed on out of nowhere as I had like one hand on on the bars, it's a split second that took me out of that position.

3.Was a swerve that just got me around millimeters, got around it and…

It was a swerve that just got me around millimeters, got around it and luckily no problem, I continued up my session without drama and I probably wouldn't have even mentioned it because it happened so frequently if it hadn't been for using it as a cautionary tale right now. But if you've had a few beers the night before, that split second judgment means you're bummed into a bucket at and you're having yourself a merry little Christmas eating the hospital food. Look there's a lot of reasons not to drink over the Christmas and for me to rain on your Christmas parade and most of us listening to the podcast aren't professional boy groiders, we're not paid to ride our bike. So it's really just a little bit of advanced plan and saying look I'm going to ride the bike on this day and this day and I'm going drink on these days and make it sure it's the bike sessions aren't lined up the morning after the after a heavy night on the gargle. You want to have a 45 minute session max in recovery zone if you've been drinking the next day and I'd even put that down and say look if you've had three points a beer I would cap it at one hour max the next day and that's you know I haven't researched this I don't know the crossover between you know blood alcohol level and exactly duration, but from experience, that's around the sort of period when if you ride anything more than that, it's not getting some fresh air and helping you're hanging over it. You're actually getting into training effect and then that's when you start to run into all these problems, you know, because we can't metabolize properly, impaired recovery, dehydration, etc. So just be a little bit, most of this podcast, it's meant to be taught provoking. I'm not ever offering the podcast as a definitive, this is the way you should absolutely live your life. It's more just to scratch the itch and say, oh, I actually never thought of that. Now let's exercise a little bit of common sense with my experience. You know your body. You know if you're somebody who's a seasoned drinker and you've been drinking tree for a night to week for your entire life, you know what your tolerance is like. On the flip side of that, if you're someone like me and you know you drink two, three times a year, like proper big sessions, when you go, you go full, that's hard a guy. You know if you're having one of those sessions that it's just not a good idea to ride your bike. I actually had a good buddy of mine, he's living back in Australia now, Robbie John McCarty was running for Canyon DHB last year and he was over just before Christmas and he was living in Ireland, moved back to Australia since and we'd met a few friends in Dublin City Centre and we'd had a particularly heavy noise on the beer and the following day we had our bikes and we'd planned to ride the next day and the bikes never even left the house. I don't even think I left the bedroom that day, it was a particularly heavy noise. But it's just exercise and that bit of judgment, that bit of caution and just saying look better to play it safe because you're trying to appease that guilty mind from drinking the day before really you just need to focus on rehydrating some gentle exercise, getting some air and start trying them back. Easy the following day. Folks we're on the countdown to Christmas. Have a great day and I'll chat to you again tomorrow. Hey everybody it's Anthony again. Really quick I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14 day kickstart challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is This is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's Masters, Beginner, Advanced. There's meal plans, shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you through at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmancycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that roadmancycling.com slash 14 day.