UPDATE: Can a vegan diet make you faster as a cyclist?

Bombay Wrap w/ home made plum chutney 25 Aug 13

I said I'd report back on my vegan experiment which began on January 1st, 2013.

I maintained a strict vegan diet for one month, before ending the experiment.

You might think that I then splurged on bacon butties and sausage meat, but I didn't.

I waited to see what would happen and my position six months later is very similar to Brett's (www.zentriathlon.com - a popular podcast series from this likable guy in Texas).

He recently had an interesting conversation with Rich Roll, another ultra guy who's made veganism the basis of a significant business. But Brett just said this: that he can go for days and weeks as a vegan without even consciously trying to, but it's not a strict commitment for him, so much as a life style choice that can bend in the breeze on the occasions when kale smoothies and chick peas are thin on the ground.

In my original blog, I noted that pro-cyclist Dave Zabriskie had reported his fastest season when he threw out most of the meat in his diet, going pesca-vegan - no dairy but a couple of weekly portions of salmon to get those omega fats.

I recently received a press release about a massive, long-term health and mortality piece of research conducted over twenty years over 20,000 subjects, and the winning group for sheer longevity were the pesca-vegans.

If I am faced with various non-vegan alternatives when (say) on a hearty press trip with motoring journalists who wouldn't know the difference between lettuce and spinach, I'll get the fish or the white meat or occasionally a steak - a piece of high quality red meat is better than plumping for a massive plate of fries washed down with beer, to say that you're still vegan.

So that's my position. Overall and no cheating or lying, I'm about 70% plant-based, the rest comprising dairy (I really like a drop of milk in my coffee, for example), fish, and maybe 2 or 3x a month a small amount of meat. I'm heavily indebted to my wife Stephanie, originally from the West Kooteneys, British Columbia, Canada, without whom I think I'd still be in the land of the sausage roll. She just made the Bombay Wrap displayed above. Whole wheat pita; curried hummous; carrots; purple cabbage; coriander; red peppers and home made plum chutney. Fantastic.

The biggest standoput result of my vegan experiment was that I lost weight and felt lean quite quickly. I was already at a racing weight, the experiment beginning in the middle of the Cross season, but by the end I was down to 68kgs and flying (warning: unless you are that mythical beast, a GC contender, do not make the mistake of losing too much weight - having said that half the guys in my club have stomach weight they should NOT be carrying, even if they are still faster than I am on the road). During the experiment I was eating a great deal, so it never felt like a diet. I never even set out to lose weight and in fact didn't need to. It just happened. A by-product of cycling a lot and cutting out meat and dairy.