Fueling Your Ride
To keep your muscles working at an optimal level when you ride for over an hour, it’s essential to maintain your hydration and your glycogen stores. Otherwise, you can’t access the power or endurance your muscles actually have – no matter how hard you’ve trained in the past. You’ll tire more quickly and seriously increase your risk of bonking.
Hydration can be maintained easily enough. Drink a sports bottle an hour on the ride – maybe more, if the weather’s extreme in either direction – and you’ll be fine. Fueling requires a little more attention.
If you fuel up in a casual, “I’ll just grab whatever’s around” kinda way, your muscles will respond in exactly the same way – making use of whatever glycogen’s around, but not giving you the strong, consistent performance you want. On a long ride, “garbage in, garbage out” will leave you short every time.
You want quality results? You’ve got to do it right.
The first principle is to eat before you ride. But it’s not as simple as that. Eat a burger and chips as you’re going out the door and you’ll be sorry before your legs get warmed up.
Ideally, your last meal should be eaten 4 hours before you ride. And it should be 60-75% carbs for you to burn, with only a moderate amount of protein and fat. If you’re going on a long ride or an early morning ride, be sure to eat a high carb meal the night before to fill up your glycogen stores.
Two hours before your ride eat or drink a high carb snack that’s easy to digest. Gels, energy drinks and power bars are great for this. But some people bake cookies with the right combination of ingredients for fuel, then eat them before and during a ride. Other people prefer fruit, juice, cola, chocolate, etc. If you don’t have trouble digesting these on the ride, go right ahead!
Fresh carbs in your system will launch you more easily. So be sure to choose whatever can be turned to fuel quickly. Solid food in the last two hours can hamper your performance. And cheap calories, like those in soda and candy, ultimately undermine your health, which is something to consider.
Just before you head out, drink enough liquid to fill your stomach – about 200 to 400 ml, depending on the stomach.
Don’t overdose on fluid as you ride. Your body can’t absorb more than 600 ml per hour. But you should take in regular infusions of fluid with carb. Considering you’re burning 5 gm of carb or more per minute, it only makes sense.
Rule of thumb? Drink 400 ml an hour and replace 1 gm of carb for every 1 kg of body weight per hour.
That said, not all days are created equal. Some rides, for no reason you’re aware of, you need more fuel or more hydration – before, during and/or after a ride. One day, little nanites in your bloodstream may be able to tell you exactly why, but for now, just listen to your body. It’s got the score.