Drink
If I'm going to do 6-10 hours of biking a day, I need to have a hydration system. One part of that is the hydration pack, but I'll address that another day. The second part is the contents of the pack, i.e. the liquid to drink. As many know, drinking just plain water while exercising for lengthy periods of time is going to result in bad things -- hence the invention "sports drinks" which replenish the nutrients lost with sweating so the exercise can go on.
Alas, purchasing a gallon of sports drinks per day for three months running would probably double my daily expenses. Therefore, an alternative must be formulated. There's many instructions on the Internet for "make your own sports drink", but most of them seem to rely on access to a home fridge, since they list a whole bunch of perishable or otherwise difficult to carry goods. What I need, on the road, is compact dry goods. Salt and sugar are easy dry goods to carry along fairly compactly and mix in with water, so that would make a good base, but there are other micronutrients also that need replenishing, such as potassium. So I need to figure out an easy, cheap and *consistently available practically everywhere* source of various micronutrients to get a good balance.
Alas, purchasing a gallon of sports drinks per day for three months running would probably double my daily expenses. Therefore, an alternative must be formulated. There's many instructions on the Internet for "make your own sports drink", but most of them seem to rely on access to a home fridge, since they list a whole bunch of perishable or otherwise difficult to carry goods. What I need, on the road, is compact dry goods. Salt and sugar are easy dry goods to carry along fairly compactly and mix in with water, so that would make a good base, but there are other micronutrients also that need replenishing, such as potassium. So I need to figure out an easy, cheap and *consistently available practically everywhere* source of various micronutrients to get a good balance.