Agreed, both with your points and your summary of what I’m trying to express.
I just ran into this situation again over the weekend. A routine solo 300k ride (goal ~9h of Z2, with a 30min threshold effort in the middle during a climb) turned disastrous when a significant deviation in the weather from the forecast left me stranded in a hotel in a small town with no food available beyond what I had left on me and eating the sugar and milk packets from a coffee machine… Having not brought night-riding supplies, I was left with a very small window of appropriate weather to get home the next day, which required departing before 5am, and riding for 3 hours on an empty stomach before any stores opened up to get food.
Again, in no way a “normal” situation, but a good example of the sort of nonsense you can run into on long rides despite careful planning, and how some sort of preparation for biking in a carb depleted state can (hopefully) help you.
In the greatest irony of ironies (in my very small sport-nutritionist mind) many of the supplements that are principally maltodextrin are marketed as “complex” or “not sugar.” Maltodextrin is viewed virtually identically as sugar by the pancreas, and other organs responsive to sugar because by the time it hits the blood stream (just as fast as pure sucrose, dextrose, or fructose) it is already fully broken down. The same thing is true for things like highly branched cyclic dextrin or just branched cyclic dextrin (HBCD & BCD). Body responds to it just like sugar. The primary reason any of them are used is actually to enhance the speed and ease of absorption in the gut (there are better ways and no it’s not worth your money), but the irony there is that is precisely the purpose of plain sugar too!
The fact that Hammer vilifies sugar but promotes maltodextrin is sheer hilarity to me.
I would just pack more sucrose especially if the ride was mostly flatter. I almost always over-pack our (wife and my) water bottles with sucrose and sodium citrate, because invariably something goes awry and elongates our rides, sometimes substantially. I may also be misunderstanding a portion of your particular scenario.
Yeah, I’d packed light based on the assumption that I was not going to be out that long, and there were multiple stores on the route. Didn’t pan out, and was in a hotel from mid-afternoon till early the next morning with no meals, then rode for 3 hours the next morning on an empty stomach, until things started opening at 8am. 0/10, do not recommend at all.
Dr. Harrison, I can see the logic in the above statement. I have a question, though: before learning from the podcast of the 1:.8 ratio for Malto:fructose (or 2:1 glucose:fructose), I bought a BUNCH of HEED from Hammer. HEED contains only malto, according to my review of its ingredients. And now I am curious whether it would make sense to buy some fructose and combine it with the HEED I already have, in that ratio. I am trying to a 90g carb mix put together using the HEED I have purchased in bulk, and this thought occurred to me when reading your post.
Great question. I’d personally just do it using sucrose because I’m cheap.
That’s sort of the structure around which I initially started writing the app I’ve got in beta testing now. It prescribes fuel, and then takes care of the sugar + whatever math. Heed is one of the listed products. I’d just put a scoop of Heed in a bottle and do the rest of what’s recommended by the app as sugar. If not using any calculations or app, just throw in “mostly sugar, with a scoop of heed” and your ratios will be great, and it’ll taste nicely mild too.
But, yes, could use fructose alongside the HEED too. Eventually the app will have an option for selecting fructose, and the app optimizing whatever fuel products are used to a 1:0.8 ratio, but for now, it’s just sugar and I just let it do the servings math and overall prescription for me.
I do have a food scale so I will probably start with 40g HEED: 32g Fructose (72g / 500ml bottle), and then work from there. Going to try that during my workout tomorrow.