What Ultra Riders Can Teach Us About Fueling Long Rides

By Ric Stern

I don’t know how long you’ve been cycling, but for me, this is my 43rd season, having started when I was 14. Realistically, this is totally unimportant, so why am I mentioning this? The answer is nutrition, and it’s our third column in our ultra series.

Back in 1984, there were no gels, no energy drinks (that I can recall), and frankly — nutrition-wise — things were a bit of a mess. I started cycling with a local club, and there were some weird things we were told about nutrition. Minimize the amount of liquid you take in, and eat as little as possible. Doing the opposite of this meant you were soft. This change in nutrition is one of the bigger changes I’ve seen over the years (and I’ve seen lots of changes).

Apparently, you could teach yourself to consume less fluid and food and your body would adapt to that. A few years later, maltodextrin energy drinks started to become readily available and people would consume 30 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Now, ultra-endurance athletes such as riders at the Tour de France, Ironman triathletes, and people doing long-distance ultra events are consuming around 90 to 180 grams of carbs per hour (that said, I find that upper number quite mind-boggling, but hey ho, I spent my first few years only drinking water occasionally on the bike and eating nothing, while also being admonished by the group leaders if I failed to ride 100 miles in a single day, or couldn’t do any push-ups. Ahh! The old days. I digress).

So, if you’re planning to do a long ride, or an ultra event, do you just start consuming at least 90 grams an hour? If you’ve never done this previously on a bike ride, then no, it’s likely to lead to gastrointestinal distress: bloating, cramping, or worse — diarrhea, which I’m fairly certain no one wants on the bike ;-).

But like your actual bike training, this too is trainable. You’d start at a level that is comfortable for you. This may be 50 or 60 grams per hour, and over a course of several training sessions, you’d aim to add about 10 grams per hour, say to 60 to 70 grams. Then, in the following session, another 10 grams or so. And so on until you reach an upper comfortable limit.

Of course, if you’re trying to take on, say, 90 grams an hour, it can be quite hard to carry that amount of food or drink if you’re riding for 4, 5, 6, or more hours, or over multiple days. I mean, obviously, I have the luxury of a following car dragging around spare clothes and food for me (I wish!), but what can you do? How do you carry sufficient gels, energy bars, and drinks?

The answer is you don’t. I’ve got a six-hour ride planned for tomorrow and there’s no way my skinsuit has sufficient room for 540 grams of carbohydrate (even taking into account that I’ll have about 160 grams in the two bottles on my bike). I’d need about 19 gels in my pockets and, apart from the fact I actually don’t have 19 gels in the house, frankly I’d rather not consume 19 gels in one sitting (although I know plenty of people who do). I actually can’t fit that much in my pockets.

So, what do you do? Barring the fact that it’s unlikely that most of us have a following car (which of course wouldn’t be allowed in most ultra-endurance events), the answer is that you have to make anything work for you. You can stop at a gas station and buy candy, a sandwich, anything really. Sometimes you actually need to try and assess what’s available and pick something vaguely correct; other times it’s whatever you can get your hands on. James Hayden told me that he recalls stopping at a gas station and getting some ice cream to eat and a bar of chocolate — it’s not perfect, but if it’s the only option between starving and having some fuel, then it’ll definitely work.

On the other hand, Jeff Jones explained that when he did the 12-hour TT, he didn’t have bad patches because he planned his nutrition carefully and had the correct fuel with him. Of course, this leads nicely to say that sometimes any fuel is good fuel and you often don’t have to eat when hungry — you need to be more proactive than that.

Take yesterday: I was out on a ride of about six hours. In the first half of the ride, I had a couple of gels, some drinks with carbohydrate and electrolytes in them, and a cereal bar or two. Felt full. Then for lunch, I had a sandwich, some chips, and a drink. Felt plenty stuffed. Set off to get home, and literally 10 minutes later I’m fading badly and my power starts dropping badly. Twenty minutes later, my legs have folded, the wife has ridden off and left me, and I’m now groveling on my knees wishing I was at home with my feet up. Thirty minutes later, I meet up with Claire. She’s waiting outside a shop (“couldn’t wait for you, I needed to keep my average speed up”) and I have a bag of candy, a Coke, and a popsicle. Sit and relax for 30 minutes while I gorge on everything and then back on the bike, on the front, and smash it home.

Of course, if you’re consuming large amounts of carbohydrates, whether they’re from candy or sports energy drink, then you’ll need to make certain that what you’re consuming comes from different types of carbohydrates. To take in more than 60 grams an hour, it really needs to come from multiple carb sources so that you’re consuming both glucose and fructose, due to limits on how much carbohydrate each type can transport. Your gut can transport only so much carbohydrate through each pathway. Glucose and fructose use different transporters.

Simply not eating enough isn’t really the way forward: it’ll lead to declining power and make it hard to put the hard efforts in as the ride progresses. Although researchers thought there were limitations on how much you could consume, this is no longer true — eat to fuel your rides and don’t make my mistake from yesterday!

Want to see how your fueling stacks up? My nutrition calculator works it out in a couple of minutes. And if you’d rather have your nutrition built into a proper coaching plan, that’s something we do too. Just get in touch.

Ric Stern is founder of CycleCoach and has coached athletes to World Championship gold, Commonwealth medals, and Paralympic podiums across 29 years.