Touring - padding

No, not the kind chamois kind that's attached to spandex!

As my tour approaches, I'm finding that I'm putting on a few pounds. Why is this? Well, I figure that if I'm going to be on a bike for 6-8 hours per day for 2 months, what's another helping of fettucine alfredo, or another slice of chocolate cake? By July I'm going to get in much better shape anyway, so why not? Touring cyclists burn so many calories, the extra padding might even come in handy, eh?

Anyone else in the same boat / having the same thought processes as touring season approaches? It's making me even more eager to get out there and start going!

I had that- but then when you're straining to get over mountains, you're hoping you can drop that extra weight as soon as possible! ;)

Eat smart, but it's not like you're going into hibernation and living off your fat either.... beware of the 10 pound gain before your tour!

Koffee

I'm 1 month pre-tour (to the day) and I've put on like 4 pounds overall in the last month and a half. It's got little to do with my mentality but more a function of my crappy lifestyle during university final papers and then final exams. Training and prepping for a long tour while trying to maintain an average in university are pretty demanding. I wake up, eat breakfast, do some paper-writing and studying, eat lunch, do some more studying, eat supper, study, go for a 5-10km run every day or at least every second day (depends on workload), come home, study, snack at like 2am, study/write some more and then finally sleep (at like 4-5am) for like 4 hours. Then I wake up and do it all over again. So far this semester, I've written so many papers that I just finished a 500 pack of printer paper (1 or 2 drafts, then final paper).

When I don't have papers or exams due (rarely), I'm losing weight because I'm able to focus on training. But then school work starts up and I don't really switch up my diet or intake quickly enough to avoid some minor weight-gain. By the time I adjust and tone it down, the papers are already done and handed in. That little bit of unnoticible weight gain starts to add up over time. So I'm kind of on this little up-down-up-down routine, giving and taking about 4 pounds on either end of the scale. Overall, I'm down about 8 pounds, but I'm hovering around here now. I just cannot manage to keep a steady routine when I have nearly 45 pages of law papers coming due in the same week. I could add more energy into the training aspect but at this workload, I'll probably just end up admitted in the hospital again with exhaustion and some funky internal infection due to low antibody count like last year.

I've all but given up losing weight in the next month because I will NOT have enough time to make any real change (up or down) by the time I leave. So I guess I've adapted something like your mentality but I'm sure I'll be cursing it once I see some snowy peaks coming up in the distance though. Thankfully, my cardio and legs are still improving but they'll just have to drag those few extra pounds, which I owe to my inability to cope with school, up the mountainside. After 3 months on the road, hopefully I'll have left those few extra pounds behind by the time I get home.

edit: sorry if this sounds a touch bitter, I'm writing 2 papers as I speak, haha, back to work!

Yup - in that boat too. Leaving in early June for a 6-7 month tour, started riding again a few weekends ago and all of the sudden 3 or 4 extra pounds. And this is not muscle mass - it's that yummy piece of chocolate cake that I so much deserved. Hopefully, the more spring-like weather and the longer rides will remove those pounds before the tour begins.