Day 5, Rax to the Max: Layover in Champoeg Park

When I was little my mom would get home from work and sit on the couch and say, "I need to relax." I clearly didn't quite get what she was saying and would sit myself on the couch with my arms out stretched and say, "I need to rax. I need to rax."

And rax is what I did on Day 5. I did a bit of laundry in a bucket, I did a bit of knitting. I might have done a bit of reading. I ate - a lot. And basically just spoke kind words to my knee with the hope that by Day 6 it would be feeling peppy.

Since there isn't much to recount from Day 5 I think now is the time to discuss food. In general I like food and eat a lot. Couple that pre-existing predilection with hours of intense biking and you have Brooke eating a ton. Supposedly you burn something between 400 and 600 calories for every hour on the bike. Multiple that by 6 or so (we generally biked between 5 and 7 hours each day) and you get a sizeable number of calories burning away. Supposedly the guidelines are that people should be consuming 6,000+ calories each day on the ride and I actually believe that is about what is needed.

As a result we often found ourselves eating about three times what a normal person might eat. Breakfast wasn’t just eggs and hash browns or cereal and yogurt or oatmeal and fruit but all of that put together. My standard breakfast was ~3 eggs, hash browns or potatoes with cheese or whatever other option they had, oatmeal with raisins, cereal, milk, yogurt, a spot of fruit perhaps and some orange juice. This would be around 6:30 or 7:00 and by 10:30 or 11:00, despite a Luna Bar along the way, I would be starving for lunch. The other meals tended to be rather similar – an unseemly amount of food being packed away by one and all. It was great!