When you're on the bike all day for 8 out of every 9 days, some things change.

Furthermore, this was by no means a luxury outing. We ate as cheaply as possible for the most part, because money saved was money donated to the cause. We were living out of a single duffle bag and didn't have room for extra clothes, a full array of hygeine items, and our first aid kit consisted of some bandaids, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, an ace bandage, and a bottle of knock-off brand advil--all of which I bought and left to the common good...because I'm a good person? Kinda. Also because I didn't have room in my bag for that kinda stuff at first!

I'm a pretty healthy guy on average even when I'm not riding across the country,but my particulars before the trip were:

• average weight: 185
• sleep 7-8 hours a night
• workout for 1-3 hours a day, usually not contiguously (bike commuting, yoga class, etc)
• poop once a day
• tend towards eating quite a bit
• shower at least once daily - I sweat easily and profusely
• never wear a pair of socks, bike shorts, or underwear more than once between washes
• my lower back hurts after riding about 40 miles with no break; a quick stretch fixes it. I never had any other problems (saddle sores, leg cramps, sore wrists, etc) even though I ride daily even in my civilian life, and I ride fast.

That's where I started. I ended up in about the same place, a month after the end of the trip. During the trip, things rolled a little differently.

• eating. I think I spent as much personal money as anyone eating out when we were in towns, but I have rich tastes (sushi, beer, double helpings, beer, etc) and I tend to eat well all the time. But much of the time, there was nowhere to go to eat, or going somewhere would have been a long bike ride after dark, and I am at heart a lazy guy much of the time. So here's the "typical" day:
  
  • breakfast: 3 servings of carbs and 1 of protein. some fruit and as much liquid as I can consume (milk or OJ preferably but water or other juice suffices)
  • average rest stop: handful of pretzels/crackers. 24oz of liquid, water or electrolytes depending on sweat levels. 1.5 peanut butter and banana and honey sandwiches, or perhaps spaghetti, butter, and parmesan sandwiches. something misc sweet--typically cookies. once every 20 miles.
  • sometimes, an extra sandwich around lunchtime.
  • once we arrive, I eat another sandwich since dinner is rarely available on our schedule, and I find myself cranky at the worst possible time--when we're trying to make plans and unpack and all getting on eachothers nerves.
  • dinner is 2-3 servings of whatever's available. typically, that's beans and rice or pasta with red sauce. if there's a quickie mart within range, we usually get an ice cream or slushie later on just for grins.
  
  Of course, we usually burn 3-5000 calories over a day of biking, depending on distance. You'd think I'd swell up on all that food, but I actually stayed pretty constant weight-wise. I might have added a little muscle and lost a little fat during the trip (which all came back with reinforcements once I got back and had to stay off the bike for two weeks due to a stupid injury), but other than increased stamina, I don't think my speed or strength increased overmuch throughout the trip.

• body functions. I've always been one to enjoy potty humor, there were plenty of opportunities on the trip. One thing that I had to deal with immediately was increased input equalling increased output. I've always had great control over my bowels and bladder--mostly I just don't have urgent needs to excrete unless and until there are facilities available. This served me very well on the road as I got stuck having to relieve myself in the middle of nowhere fairly rarely. However, it did take some planning to maintain that equilibrium--I was religious about "dropping the deuce" as we called it, in the morning before we left, and then typically followed it up later in the day with a second episode if there was plenty of food. I definitely noticed the "slim" days when we ran out of bread or had small helpings for dinner because I wouldn't need to go twice. By the end of the trip, I'd noticed that my body was trying to compensate even more and I'd go 3 times some days, and finally, on the last day, I achieved the holy grail: the quad-deuce day. A few other folks got theirs earlier in the trip, but mine was worth waiting for. er. It wasn't a competition or anything. Not really.

  Of course, as a guy, the world is my urinal, so I was fortunate in that respect--the side of the road is never too far from the side of the road =)

• cleansing body and clothes. Normally, I hate being dirty and smelly. I mean, I enjoy *getting* dirty and smelly--heck, adventure races are some of my favorite events and they always involve something wet or muddy and I revel in it. However, I typically run directly to the shower after any adventure, be it just riding to work or crawling through mud. On this trip, opportunities for cleansing became few and far between as we got norther, so I had to cope.

  I got my hair cut short for the trip and that was invaluable for not feeling yucky. If I can smell my hair (as I can if it's long enough to get near my nose), I'm squicked out and have to clean it immediately OR ELSE I'm intensely uncomfortable. That problem averted, there was the rest of the body to cope with. As I mentioned above, I am a champion sweater. I sweat almost constantly in Texas. I'm gonna have to blame the humidity for that though, since as we got norther and further away from the land-of-daily-showers, it got less humid, and I got less sweaty. Of course, sunscreen makes a layer of ick even without sweat, but I learned to cope with being dirty, and tried to get my face washed and use baby wipes to get the majority of the sunscreen and bugs/grit stuck to my skin off. It helped that we were typically all the same amount of dirty, so at least we didn't usually smell eachother =)

  Laundry was an even rarer privilege--I don't think we averaged better than about once every 3 days, and sometimes, we (okay, some of us) were driven to wash clothes in the sink. We used Dr. Bronner's soap for everything including clothes and while it wasn't great at getting stains out, it was fine at getting dirt out. Thank goodness! Wearing spandex and cool-max (the material our jerseys were made of) helped too since sweat tended to evaporate rather than pooling and leaving stinkiest spots. My socks, which were sometimes cotton, smelled awful after a couple of days, but the shorts never got too bad.

• soreness. I'm used to biking every day; I'm not used to biking so far every day. My muscles hurt sometimes, but that was the good kind of pain, the "you earned it" sort of pain. Saddle sores, numb fingers, back and foot pain from ill-adjusted bike fit were a different story. I'd never really experienced any of that before. I never actually got saddle sores, but the spots directly between my sit bones and the seat got highly irritated during some of the longer harder stretches (4 days / 440 miles, for instance). I think about half of that was attributable hygeine--cleaning shorts and skin every day would have helped. Some of it was just toughening up though, and by the end I didn't really suffer from ass-pain so much. My right pinky, which was numb for about the last 60 days, has since re-awoken and is fine. My foot and back pain depended largely on how hard/how fast I rode, so turning it down was always fine. Soldiering through it never caused permanent damange. Oh, and I had arthroscopic knee surgery 2 months before we left--and my knee was just fine the whole time.

• tiredness. I never really got exhausted on the bike except from the typical lack of sleep situation. Until we hit the camp-every-day zone in canada, we were not getting near enough sleep--usually 5-6 hours a night on good nights, so there was some yawniness and on a couple of days I almost dozed off, while pedalling! I got worn out when I worked hard, but it was always that feel-good-you've-worked-hard sort of tired. Not muscles-are-damaged-you-must-stop-or-fall-over kinda thing. I don't think many people got to that point--even folks who weren't in the same shape I was at the beginning.