Day 18: Bunkie, LA to Oberlin, LA

Daily Miles: 64.9 Total Miles: 951.4

Starting the ride near Chicot State Park

Today was a rough one for several reasons. First, I had a pretty significant headwind for a good part of the day which at one point had me rolling along, on completely flat land, at under 8MPH for several miles. The second big issue today had to do with my nutrition. I woke up today and ate a small breakfast (some fruit and a Clif bar) and after starting I immediately felt out of it. I continued to ride and made it to the 20-mile mark and decided to stop and eat more. I had another Clif bar, more fruit, some nuts, and a lot of water. I kept riding on to Mamou, ~38 miles into the day, battling the headwind, and felt awful. We stopped and ate lunch, and after I ate, I felt really cold, nauseous, and light-headed. I went to sit in the car and decided to do some research. It turns out that I had "bonked", apparently a fairly common occurrence among long distance cyclists, which basically means that I pushed my body to the point that I had an abnormally low level of blood glucose.

Crawfish farm (the things in the water are nets)

For more info, click here to read a very well-written and informative blog on the subject. I had most of the symptoms (including irritability, which Mary might argue is just part of my personality), and proceeded to treat myself by drinking a lot of Gatorade and letting the carbs I ate at lunch kick in. I was finally up and feeling better around 3pm and hit the road again. The route finally changed direction, and I no longer had a headwind to contend with, although I still wasn't going very fast. The wind was more of a 85% crosswind 15% tailwind.

Rice farm (we think)

It still vastly improved my speed and I finished out the last ~26 miles of the day by about 5:30pm. All in all, I rode almost the same distance today as yesterday, but today I spent over an hour more on my bike. The route was really interesting today and after I started feeling better I really started to appreciate it. We rode through mainly crawfish and rice farmland and the types of farms were both very interesting to see. Once again, almost all of the land is flooded, but now I think it's by design. At least I hope so, because the weather forecast is calling for a huge storm that's going to dump 15" of rain on this region. Mom and I are heading out now to eat Chinese (so that I can carbo-load for tomorrow's ride), and we're hoping to beat the storm tomorrow. Wish us luck!