Bonking 101: A Lesson in Endurance
This Sunday, for the first time, I road a gravel bike, which is a design between a road bike and a mountain bike.
Where road bikes are light and built for roads, and mountain bikes are heavy and meant for bumping over rocks and roots, gravel bike are in between: fairly light, but with thicker tires to handle the grit of fire roads.
I was with two friends and we were doing a long, mostly fire road route through the forest in Marin. The trip started off great, but after two hours, when climbing a long hill, I began to feel unwell, as in so tired I had a hard time holding up my head. I knew I needed to eat, but didn’t want to slow down the other riders, who were ahead. I figured I’d eat at the top.
But when I got to the top, the weather had turned cold and rainy and I again didn’t want to hold up my friends, so I tried to push on, which meant going along a very muddy, slick ridge trail.
I pedaled slower and slower until…I…stopped. I forced myself to eat, which took a lot of effort, then pedaled on a little more to meet my bike mates. I finished eating my sandwich, but it was clear I’d “bonked.” My friends took pity and we cut the trip short by returning via roads.
According to Bonking: The Birds and the Bees, a bonk means you have an abnormally low blood glucose level.
You feel: weak, exhausted, shaky, dizzy, hungry, irritable, confused, emotional, prone to heart palpitations. In an extreme case, a bonk can induce a coma.
The question is why did I — a fairly experienced endurance event person — bonk? I rarely eat anything unless riding longer than 2.5 hours and we’d only been cycling for a little more than two hours. That and I’d had enough to drink.
The answer: the normal equations I use for eating/drinking are based on either a road bike trip or a mountain bike trip. I needed a new equation for a trip with this type of bike, which takes more energy than a road bike excursion and goes farther than a mountain bike trip.
So that’s the lesson I learned. If you change a significant factor of a workout — length, difficulty, type of equipment, environment (hotter, colder, wetter) — change the equation regarding how much to each and drink and when to do so.
Have you ever bonked? What did you learn?
If you want a little more information, here’s an article titled 4 Reasons Why You Have Low Energy Levels at the Gym.
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