Thought #1.
I used to classify my rides as one banana rides, or two banana rides or three. If I rode 60 miles, I had to take three bananas with me and had to eat one every hour. Otherwise, I would be running out of power and dragging my tail home, or ordering a taxi.
That’s because my body would run out of carbohydrate fuel, and even though I had tens of thousands of calories of body fat, I couldn’t use it efficiently for exercise. That’s where the concept of needing carbohydrates for exercise came from.
That is a major exaggeration. Exercising at a moderate pace (say, at 140-150 bpm), you can go for a minimum of 3 hours without any food before you run out of power, lo-carb or hi-carb.
Thought #2.
My gas tank got a lot bigger when I gave up carbs. Because we can only store maybe 1500 calories as carbs. If I burn 600 – 700 calories per hour, and I depend only on glycogen, that’s about two hours of fuel. But if I have 30,000 to 40,000 calories of fuel in my fat, I can ride for days.
Nobody depends "only on glycogen" when cycling (not unless we're talking about short bursts of activity at 180 bpm.) Everyone burns fat as well. For sure, his ability to burn fat got improved vs. the average joe when he went on a high-fat diet, but even the average joe can get 200 calories/hour from fat. The flip side is that his glycogen stores are always depleted and I would expect that he has a low performance ceiling.
Thought #3.
No study that went longer than two weeks has demonstrated the benefits of a high carb diet.
Not true. For example, see
http://jp.physoc.org/content/492/Pt_1/293.full.pdf+html :
Ten untrained young men ingested a carbohydrate-rich diet (65 energy percent (E%) carbohydrate, T-CHO) and ten similar subjects a fat-rich diet (62 E% fat, T-FAT) while
endurance training was performed 3-4 times a week for 7 weeks. Time to exhaustion at 81 % of pre-training maximal oxygen uptake increased significantly
from a mean of 35 min to 102 and 65 min in T-CHO and T-FAT, respectively, after 7 weeks... It is concluded that ingesting a fat-rich diet during an endurance training programme is detrimental to improvement in endurance. This is not due to a simple lack of carbohydrate fuel, but rather to suboptimal adaptations that are not remedied by short-term increased carbohydrate availability.
Finally, even if you can adopt to a low-carb diet, why would you want to? It's unnatural and unhealthy. Primates and early humans subsisted for millions of years on plant-based, high-carbohydrate diets. In the modern world, healthiest societies with longest life expectancies are the ones consuming plant-based high-carbohydrate diets (sometimes supplemented by small quantities of fish.)