I'll never forget the day before the New York City Skate Marathon last year when a forklift operator showed up at the 10th floor door of Raymond's Canal Street warehouse studio in New York City. Raymond and I stood there in utter astonishment as the man jumped into his machine and maneuvered an eight-foot tall palette of energy bars into the middle of the room, nearly scraping the plaster off the ceiling in the process.

Raymond, whose tall, lean frame had already assumed the same extruded look as an energy bar, joyfully took my hand and spun me around in celebration before moving on to his true love, the bars. Like a starving gold prospector, he ripped into a case stamped MOCHA and found boxes and boxes of the coveted treasure. Wasting no time stripping one of its mylar jacket, Raymond devoured it practically whole.

Together we must have wolfed down a dozen right on the spot.

My yearly allotment of energy bars from my sponsor is only a few hundred, so imagine the feeling when over 4,000 show up as if by divine decree. Instead of getting 120 bars with an even mix of all flavors -- my usual order -- I had received 120 cases ! It felt like Christmas.

Since I was leaving New York right after the Marathon, I had no idea what to do with all these bars. I couldn't exactly stuff them into my luggage. But if I didn't take them, the mice would get them. Mice can smell energy bars right through the box and wrapper and, unlike Raymond, they don't care which flavor they get.

We were sitting on a mother lode of complex carbohydrates, and my stomach was churning with pangs of greed. Coming out of my daze, I started thinking of my long-term relationship with my sponsor, and came to the conclusion that the only honorable thing to do was alert the company of its mistake.

So began the first (and only) heated disagreement Raymond and I have ever had. He was adamant that we keep the bars and personally volunteered to keep vigil over them until every last one was gone. I returned that my reputation that was at stake here, not his stomach's sense of wellbeing.

After quite some time, including a couple of phone calls to my sponsor and the delivery company , reason prevailed and Raymond capitulated.

I'm reminded of this incident, because in New York for this year's edition of the NYC Skate Marathon, someone asked me where my energy bars were. Normally, I pull up to the line of a long race with neatly cubed bars stuck to my helmet. That way I can feed myself when my body needs replenishment - no fuss, no muss. This time, however, the bars were conspicuously absent.

Bars are still a staple of my training regimen, I explained. I had had one that morning to cut the coffee in my stomach. But for racing, I have graduated to a gel. To prove it, I took one from my jersey pocket, tore off the top and gave it a good squeeze, following it up with a mouthful of water. Bing bang boom. I was ready to go.

During a 100K race,the skating is so fast and furious it's nearly impossible to fiddle with a wrapper, much chew and digest a bar in the heat of action. For the lead pack of the NYC Skate, the 3 mile loop around Prospect Park in Brooklyn resembled a raging battlefield more than the idyllic setting it is. Pavement, hills, egos, rain, oily residue, and flying tempers mixed together into a volatile brew.

I wouldn't have been able to keep my blood sugar on even keel without the gel and water at every lap. As I whizzed by, my support person handed me a rocket pack - a bottle of water with a gel attached under the cap. With only the tear tab part of the gel pack attached to the bottle, I could pull on the package to open it and squeeze the stuff down my throat in a single motion. From hand-off to eating to hands-free again, I could give any tire-changing', gas tank-fillin' Indy-Car pit crew a run for their money.

I won that race in something more than three hours. Thanks to water and a dozen gels, I managed to trash the legs of my breakaway companions with frequent breaks and searingly painful ascents of the hill. With 3 and a half laps to go in the 19 lap race, as my fellow competitors clutched their cramping legs with the wide-eyed stares of babies doing their business, I left them for good. My margin of victory was a gaping 3 and one half minutes.

After such dramatic results with gel, it's hard not to Jones after more of the stuff at races and during workouts. I sure wouldn't mind it if some forklift operator shows up this year with a monster pallet of gel, I'm not so sure I could resist the temptation.