Training Question: Sugar before ride affecting my heart rate?

[MattTuck]

I have a slight confession. They were selling girl scout cookies at work this past week and I picked up a couple boxes. The past two nights, before I hopped on the trainer I cheated a few cookies and noticed that my heart rate was quite a bit higher than usual, at the same time the the exertion was quite a bit easier than normal (felt like I was stronger).

I just put 2 and 2 together that it may have been related to the cookies, and I don't typically eat before rides. But I do train based on heart rate, so it would be good to know if eating (especially sugar) before rides can mess with my HR.

Thanks

[Ralph]

Any of those cookies have chocolate (caffein) in them? Drinking coffee before? Here is what Dr Mirkin says about exercse and sugar. He's a long time well regarded sports Doc and nutrionist....runner and cyclist (currently in his 80's, living in Florida racing tandems). You might want to also have a few cookies while you ride.

http://www.drmirkin.com/fitness/sugar-for-intense-exercise.html

[cash05458]

what sort of jump are you talking about?

[Mikej]

Prolly just outta shape....

[MattTuck]

what sort of jump are you talking about?

Early season, so I'm shooting for base miles, pretty easy, Zone 2 kind of stuff. Last two rides, I found myself getting up into mid Zone 3 and even into upper zone 4 by accident.

[1centaur]

Replace heart strap battery. Make sure strap is tight enough and making moist contact. If all that is in order, then there's something to think about. I don't think it's sugar.

[rustychisel]

Did you smoke any crack?

[OtayBW]

Did you smoke any crack?
Yeah, but it was a year ago and he was in a drunken stupor.
Oh wait - that was another guy....

[oldpotatoe]

I have a slight confession. They were selling girl scout cookies at work this past week and I picked up a couple boxes. The past two nights, before I hopped on the trainer I cheated a few cookies and noticed that my heart rate was quite a bit higher than usual, at the same time the the exertion was quite a bit easier than normal (felt like I was stronger).

I just put 2 and 2 together that it may have been related to the cookies, and I don't typically eat before rides. But I do train based on heart rate, so it would be good to know if eating (especially sugar) before rides can mess with my HR.

Thanks

Maybe some of this stuff in the cookies?

http://www.medicaldaily.com/winter-olympics-2014-undetectable-doping-agent-full-size-mgf-being-sold-athletes-sochi-268656

[biker72]

What heart rate would you normally expect and how much higher was it ??

[AgilisMerlin]

Did you smoke any crack?

some bring you up
some bring you down
never mix and match

cacao / Aztecs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/6194447/Aztecs-and-cacao-the-bittersweet-past-of-chocolate.html

It wasn’t usually sweet; it didn’t melt in the mouth; and it sometimes came mixed with human blood. Aztec chocolate had little in common with the treat to which we are so addicted.
The chocolate industry loves to use cacao’s Mesoamerican origins as shorthand for “sexy” and “exotic”.
In the Seventies, Cadbury sold The Aztec Chocolate Bar, with someone climbing an Aztec pyramid, and last year, Magnum launched the Mayan Mystica bar, wrapped in gold like an ingot and flavoured with “authentic” ancient flavourings such as cinnamon, honey and nutmeg, plus a soupçon of Eva Longoria (who fronted the advertising campaign).

None of these delicacies is anything like the chocolate of the Aztecs, which was mostly a drink rather than a food, and as much a drug as a treat. Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish missionary and chronicler, compared Aztec chocolate to hallucinogenic mushrooms and wrote: “This cacao when much is drunk, when much is consumed, especially that which is green, which is tender, makes one drunk, takes effect on one, makes one dizzy, confuses one, makes one sick, deranges one.” Just like a KitKat, then. Historians have puzzled over these claims of intoxication. Cacao does contain caffeine and theobromine – both stimulants – but nothing technically inebriating. Some scholars speculate that Aztec chocolate drinks were mixed with alcohol; others note a fermented beverage was sometimes made from green cacao pulp. In any case, chocolate for the Aztecs was a heady, bitter, fiery, spicy drink that was much more than mere dessert.
Our chocolate is available to anyone with 50p and access to a corner shop. In the highly stratified society of Moctezuma’s Mexico, chocolate was only meant to be drunk by nobles, merchants and warriors. If a “common person” had some, it was considered a bad omen. Cacao drinks were served, usually at the end of the meal along with some tobacco, at banquets. The conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo described the emperor being served copious quantities of foaming cacao in “some cups of fine gold”. The Aztecs said the drink was for “success with women”.

Related Articles
The season: autumn 2009 07 Sep 2009
Alone with the Aztecs 20 Jun 2009
Get sprinkling: try British sea salt Hyundai
Chocolate was precious to the Aztecs partly because it was hard to come by at court. It did not grow in the highlands around Tenochtitlán but in the southern Mayan lowlands (even today cacao is harvested in the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Tabasco). To the Aztecs, cacao was so precious that its seeds were used as money. According to Sophie and Michael Coe in The True History of Chocolate (1996), a single cacao bean would buy one large tomato; three beans, a newly picked avocado; 30 beans, a rabbit; and 200 beans, a turkey cock. As with any valuable coinage, cacao forgery went on. Fraudsters made fake beans from bits of avocado stone and wax.

As well as being a form of money, cacao had religious connotations. It was associated with blood, which was an important offering to the gods. In Aztec ritual, cacao was a metaphor for the heart torn out in sacrifice – the seeds inside the pod were thought to be like blood spilling out of the human body. Chocolate drinks were sometimes dyed blood-red with annatto to underline the point. In one annual ritual, a beautiful male slave was forced to wear the jewels of the gods over a 40-day period, dance, and drink a gourd of chocolate mixed with blood from sacrificial knives, before himself being sacrificed.

It is a world away from a nice square of Green & Blacks of an afternoon. And yet in one crucial respect, the Aztec attitude to chocolate was the same as ours: the extreme things they did with it stemmed from their finding the fruit of the cacao tree unusually delicious. Chocolate drinks were made with great care in earthen jars with special strainers, and served in ornate, painted gourds. Aztecs liked their chocolate cold, whereas the Mayans drank it warm. The fermented bean was ground, toasted and foamed up with ground maize and water. Flavourings were luxurious. The classic addition was Cymbopetalum penduliflorum, spicy petals from a tree of the custard-apple family. Also added were chillies and allspice; vanilla and aniseedy “string flower” leaves. The emperor enjoyed countless variations, according to a Spanish witness: “green cacao-pods, honeyed chocolate, flowered chocolate, [chocolate] flavoured with green vanilla, bright red chocolate…”