EF Diaries · Roadman Cycling Collective +

EF Diaries

Few more points from EF camp over the last few days. I’ve a good few other interesting things but I’ll try space them out so I have content ideas over the next while.

Also feel free to message me to arrange a call if you haven’t already! Just plugging it here quickly.

Not sure if you have heard of the game called “Traitors”. It’s been a big game show in Ireland and the UK over the last couple of years. Most nights all of the riders come together and sit in a circle. Everyone closes their eyes and the moderator chooses 2-3 people to become traitors in secret. Each round people try and figure out who are the traitors and who are the faithfuls. So everybody has an opportunity to speak and interact with each other. Every round one person is voted off until either all the traitors are caught or else all the faithfuls are eliminated and the traitors win. The traitors also discuss who they wish to kill off after each round so they pick one extra person to be eliminated. (The traitors have to lie and pretend that they are innocent and try to spin the narrative to take the heat off of them and try and play the crowd. Hope this has been explained somewhat well enough to understand the concept at least).

Anyways all of them have been playing a few rounds of this game every evening and I think it’s a good one. I think it’s good to help the quieter people speak up and communicate without the loud people controlling entire conversations and so on. Especially with people coming from different backgrounds and a lot of people not speaking English as well as others. So yeah this has been a pretty good team bonding thing that the men’s and women’s teams have been doing every night. Better then everybody scrolling through Instagram or something anyway!

Recovery pyramid:

The riders were shown this recovery pyramid thing this morning which unfortunately caoimhe doesn’t have a photo of. But I know the headlines.

At the base of the pyramid was sleep. So that’s the most important thing in order to improve recovery. The second most important one was drinking water. Next was food. So these were the three standout things where over 99% of the recovery gains are. (Obviously theres caveats to this like if you are really stressed out then this could absolutely be the most important factor affecting recovery for you - but this pyramid is referring to recovery tools as opposed to things that can affect recovery. Hope that makes sense!).

At the very top of the pyramid were things like massage guns, massages, red light therapy, foam rolling and so on. You could imagine what other niche things you could include in here that you could spend a serious amount of money on. Even these fancy vitamins or wonder supplements would be up here.

All of the best recovery tools are just the absolute basic components of life really and there are no major secrets. It’s definitely worth putting time and effort into figuring out how you could improve your sleep habits and what healthy food changes you could make. It’s not sexy and is really boring but that’s the trick. If you have the basics dialled then you are 99% of the way there. Which is far more valuable than putting time and effort into boujee recovery products to find a 1%.

Interesting foods :

At mealtimes there are a few things that all the riders are taking religiously.

Kombucha and actimels at either lunch or dinner.

Ginger and tumeric shots in the morning.

Lots of sourkraut and other fermented foods. But a fair amount of these compared to a normal looking portion of these foods.

All of these things are mainly for gut health from what I can gather. Lots of fibre here too. But these seems to be staples that most of us wouldn’t include in our day to day meals. They have 3 team chefs on site so they are investing in this stuff properly for the riders.

The chefs also create a meal plan in hexis so the riders don’t have to go calculating things. So let’s say it’s chicken curry for dinner - they’ll get a screenshot of the macros for that meal in their group chat for hexis and the riders will work out how many carbs they need based on the chefs recipe. They figure this out before going down for dinner and they can quickly weigh out what they need to weigh instead of each person taking 5 mins to work out the breakdowns for their individual needs. Really simple but great idea.

The other noticeable thing during mealtimes is that they all eat tonnes of vegetables. Like way more than normal. One thing they have said to caoimhe is that they strongly recommend using the off season/non racing periods to really consume lots and lots of fruits and vegetables. The theory is to build up a really healthy, nutrient rich body. And then when you enter the heavy race periods where it’s impractical to consume as much nutritious fruits and veg you’ll have a bank of reserves that you can safely deplete without suffering any ramifications for it. And as soon they finish races they are expected to really focus on getting those healthy nutrients on board so they are stocked up again. Really healthy and long term, sustainable advice I think which is good to see.

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