For me the trick is to have all your mix in 1 bottle that you sip every 15-20 minutes, then immediately chase with plain water. So fuel in 1 bottle and hydration in all others. You can also rinse your mouth with plain water after so it’s never too sweet.
I do 110-120+ carbs an hour this way. I put all carbs in a 1 liter bottle and have it marked by hours where I need to drink to. If it’s over 6 hours I’ll need 2 fuel bottles, as much more than 600+ grams of carbs and salt doesn’t mix well in just 1 liter.
I just did this yesterday and drank 600g of carbs and ate 1 fig bar.
I don’t know which Skratch product you are referring to, but I believe that Skratch high carb mix is 90% glucose and 10% fructose. And their regular hydration mix is only 20g total carbohydrate per serving. So maybe that explains why Skratch didn’t taste as sweet?
I got some 320 Maurten on sale from The Feed and tried it out on a 4hr ride (never used it before). I had 3 / 320 in my hydration pack and I have to say it was the best drink mix I every used. No stomach weirdness and no sickly sweet taste.
Will probably use Gatorade Endurance for anything < 3 hours as I find that is generally the tipping point for me with stomach issues. I really don’t like pure sugar options.
Maple creemee with maple dust, another critical way to mainline the good stuff. I read somewhere* that it uses alternative pathways to get more sugar into the system faster, but there’s a high risk of brain freeze if you’re not careful.
Yes I use a similar mixing ration of DIY to Skratch suggestion. Yes I do eat food as well but I don’t like gels so I supplement with Carb mix. Thanks for pointing that out the skratch mix. made an assumption that they were at least 2:1. Yes, that would explain it, but I have bought in to the 2:1 minimum. I do add citric acid.
I did a 750 ml bottle this weekend that measured out like this…
70g of malto
55g of fructose
7g of sodium citrate
4g of organic black tea powder.
It did not taste too sweet. If I had used mango or even dark cherry powder to flavor it would have been unpalatable. something about the mix just knocks down the sweet really well.
I’m currently on about six tablespoons of table sugar and the juice of half a lemon. Sometimes I add some salt or sodium citrate, but only if it’s hot because it messes with the taste.
But in direct answe to the thread title, my preferred option is a can of coke!
If you dislike tart flavors, 0.5% should be enough. I like more so 1-2%. Closer to 2% the flavor reminds me of gatorade endurance from the early 2000s.
I’m doing that in a bottle, but I’ve recently (this morning) joined a CC and the social ride cost me 2000kcal over 4hrs. I’m not sure two of those bottles will cover the last two hours.
BCAA is purely for the flavor. I use a raspberry one from iherb.com. Feel free to double it.
You can add citric acid to make spritz more. What I can’t recommend is adding baking soda/citric acid (which would lead to a carbonated drink). Not because of the taste, it’s a bit of a faff with mixing before you leave the house.
Coffein is on the low end. Some say you need to go up to 175mg/h to get an effect. But since I use it for gel use as well, I had to find a way to balance it.
For gel:
Don’t use citric acid if you plan to use it as gel (which works as well). I tried to add Xanthan and Guar. No great results so far (some need to heat it up and just too much work).
In my 250ml soft flask i can get about 180g of drink mix. Works like a charm. You can recycle it as drink mix if you like on the road.
