Bananas -- ARE YOU READY for the Bananas?

(Click on photo to enlarge)
Every athlete, and even if you aren’t into endurance sports, you know how good bananas work for supplying the body with some energy to get the job done. Whether you are out on a challenging hike, out jogging a long-run, a few miles of swimming, or a bike ride, the banana is one of the most convenient and good for you foods that you can possibly ingest. Over the years I have participated in many multi-day organized bicycling tours and a few road running races. And at every event the BANANAS are king!! On the week long cycling tours I’ve been on at every rest stop that the volunteers organize the bananas are there – in it's own wrapper, instant snack, ready energy to get you through the miles. They are so convenient to stuff in your bike bag or the back jersey pocket and take with you. So long as you don't forget you put it in your bike bag and you find it a week later :-( You can eat them on the run, and not feel guilty tossing the peel along the road, the environmentalists won’t mind, cuz you know the turkey vultures will come along and eat them peelings right up! But let me tell you, after two to three SAG (support and gear) stops a day, say on a week long bike tour, for six days straight you get a wee tired of seeing these things. You begin to feel like you could hop in the Monkey Island at the zoo, the apes would love your banana breath! So I’ve been asking myself: Am I ready for FIFTY DAYS of bananas? I remember the last cross-country trip – by about Day 40 (well maybe as early as Day 3) we are all swearing we will never ever eat another banana after this trip. But yeah, I’m ready for the mountains of bananas. I’ll just keep on eating them, because they are one of those complex carbs that burn slowly and give you the energy to keep on truckn’and turning those pedals or running the miles in the running shoes. I swallow them and at the same time remind myself that I’ve just given my body (with a medium sized):
109 Calories, 1mg Sodium, 467mg Potassium, 28g Carbohydrates, 3g Dietary Fiber, 1g Protein, ZERO Fat, no Cholesterol, and along with supplying me with a percent of these needed nutrients - 2% Vitamin A, 1% Calcium, 4% Thiamin,3% Niacin, 34% Vitamin B-6, 2% Phosphorus, 2% Selenium, 9% Magnesium,1% Zinc, 18% Vitamin C, 2% Iron, 1% Vitamin E, 7% Riboflavin, 6% Food Folate, 9% Manganese and 6% Copper.
Pretty impressive, eh?
This photo was one I took last summer 2005, during the week-long bicycle ride across the Colorado Rockies. There were 2,000 cyclists on this 410 mile ride. About every 25-30 miles there would be a food stop along side the road, and every other rest stop would have boxes of these bananas just like this photo. Hey, I wasn’t the last one to come in to the rest stop, as you can see there are lots of them left for the people behind me. At one stop there were bananas the next stop would have a stack of boxes like this but they would be oranges. So every other stop we feasted on bananas. Now let me tell you, these were thee most PERFECT bananas I have ever been served on one of these biking events. They were never over ripe, never too green. Just perfect. And every time, and every day they would be like that. So you know they didn’t just truck in a thousand boxes of these and serve them all week, as they would have been pretty brown by end of week. No, every stop where the bananas were served, every day they were just delicious. Note the guy on the left side of the photo, looks like he was stuffing his back jersey pockets with some for the road. Maybe his belly too? His expression says he has been eating bananas all week, and he wonders if he can stomach another one!
LONG LIVE – ah that is – LONG GROW, THE BANANA. Bring ‘em out, I’m ready to eat maybe 3-4 a day on this 50 day bike ride. They’ll get me cross country, I’m sure.