That's funny, that's my favorite part! I love eating solid food on the trail. Unlike some, though, I'll just stop, sit down, and eat a sandwich in the middle of a hundred-mile race or something... no riding/eating simultaneously for me.
Well I certainly enjoy snack breaks as well, but there is also a sense of personal satisfaction to be had from the feeling of having "covered all that ground without stopping." If it's anything more than a quick snack, a break can quickly turn into quite a lot of time at 0mph (and not even sleeping!). I guess this mentality comes to me from 24 hour racing, where a five minute break every lap to eat might not seem like much, but that adds up to one to two hours of not moving (one or two fewer laps completed) by the end of the race! I notice the same thing when I'm just out for a leisurely bike ride: it's quite easy to spend nearly as much time standing around as riding without even realizing until you look at the "moving time"/"stopped time" numbers on your GPS. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but in endurance racing (whether for the win, or just a personal record) minimizing downtime seems to be the most important go-faster strategy. How did that old story about the tortoise and the hare go again?
