Am I consuming too many calories while riding?

Nutrition
21

Energy is energy, it doesn’t matter where it comes from.

For endurance athletes eating enough carbs, especially during physical activity, is healthy.

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22

Tim will still base his nutrition and fueling strategy for athletes on weight, power output, and duration. Have you worked with him?

23

And furthermore, how many calories do you need to maintain your bmr over that same time period? For me, I need somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 calories or more a day just resting and I would probably get most of that in the time period that this race is happening.

So, if you are riding your bike for 13 hours it is basically impossible to eat too much. Very easy to eat too little

3 Likes
25

I think it was a TrainingPeaks Podcast I listened to which talked about nutrition and the functionality they had added to the Application.

The advice was to aim to consume half the carbs you are burning on any ride. TP now has activity fields which show estimated Carb burn - so you can go from these.

I have found this to work pretty well for me.

26

The short answer is NO, but as always it depends.

I am by no means a very active racer but have race 1-3 races a year for 15 years, with some exceptions. I recently participated in a 109 km mtb-race, 50/50 (distancewise) singletrack/gravel. Due to some long ongoing health issues my FTP was quite low ,apx 230 W @ 82 kg. I was out for around 8,5 hours. I planned for 80-90g hour, and I think i nailed it for at least the first two hours but after that it was a lot less. In hindsight i found that the average for the whole race was just below 60 so probably around 40 an hour after that. During the race I was quite sure that I was on top of feeding all the time. After 5,5 hours, after a long gravel section and returning to a long singletrack climb (not steep, but a long climb non the less) I kind of mentally crashed with lack of energy, strength and general motivation. In hindsight I attribute at least half of this crash for lack of energy/carbs. My assumption that I was on top of feeding was thus probably wrong and the next race/ride I am doing I am going to have som better protocols to ensure that I get in as much as I have planned for.

I did only fuel on carbs. No protein and fats. I find that those slow my digestion and in the end just bloats the belly and stops further carb-feeding. I am not tuned to fat-burning by any means :slight_smile: