I’d avoid any gels with no fluid. So have some fluid left to swig with that gel.
I’d also personally leave a little fluid to sip just to keep my mouth from drying out. I’d finish the last drop for sure by 15min before end of race.
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What an awesome thread!!! Thank you @Dr_Alex_Harrison for invaluable insights and videos!!
- after all this reading I think I’ll just start with Table Sugar + Table Salt…
I consume 1000ml/hour
so 60gm of table sugar/32oz bottle + 4g table salt and a splash of lemon juice
For me in Australia this works out to roughly $0.20AUD/bottle (60g)
@AussieRider are you based in AU? where do you source maltodextrin from that is not silly expensive?
As @redlude97 points out, my only concern here is my bodies ability to effectively use all 60grams of sucrose as opposed to 60g maltodextrin that I’m used to via Drink Mix and Gels.
Also anyone have good advice about adding potassium/magnesium?
I’m in the U.S. I get a 5kg bag for about $40. I’ve found a cheaper source of Fructose from a local grocery store. Sodium Citrate is what I use for sodium. I find it much better than table salt.
seems to be much more/cheaper options for maltodextrin and sodium citrate in US… almost 3-4x the cost here in AU
Well that’s $US40+Tax so I guess that’s about $AUS65. This is the brand I get. We have free delivery here which I doubt is a thing yet in OZ.
thanks @AussieRider works out to about $100AUD from Amazon AU free shipping … $20/KG … it’s still about the 1/4 the price of a premium drink mix 
but when table sugar is only $2.5/KG… lol I think I’ll play with both and experiment…
I might be testing the limits of the topic here, but have any of you tried any of these (primarily/exclusively table sugar) solutions in ultra-endurance racing? What’s it like after a few days? Obviously there’s a nutritional need to still stop for solid meals, but I just mean in terms of keeping calories topped up as much as possible.
I’ve just been accepted into a self-supported ultra where we’ve also got to carry all our rubbish with us to the checkpoints rather than discarding it en-route. Should be about 3 days between checkpoints and a week and a half overall. It means I’m thinking not just about calorie density of what I carry (and can find at corner shops) but also about the bulk and biodegradability of packaging.
Coincidentally, I also just switched from SiS to table sugar + himalayan pink salt + lemon juice for my indoor training rides as a cost saving measure. May or may not add some malto as I settle in, but it sounds like it’s really not necessary unless pushing absolute absorbtion limits. Given that I’m already going to be training my gut on this stuff, it seems like it might be a pretty good option for supplementing solid food on the big ride - can be had anywhere and the only ingredient with any bulk comes in a paper bag.
Define ultra-endurance. I can answer better with a little more specifics.
Multi-day (riding every single day)? How many sleep hours? Mandated sleep? How many hours riding during each 24-hr period?
The longest I’ve had someone use exclusively fueling like this: 24 hours straight of pedaling. Worked great. Since I haven’t tested beyond that, I can’t say for certain that it will work for 25 hours… but I’m pretty confident nothing’s going to change out to about 30-36 hours. It should work great for the longest single-session events I’m aware of.
It’s also worked great for folks who have done 10-12 hours of riding per day for up to 7 days. As far as multi-day stuff, I haven’t tested it beyond that, but I suspect that it could be used for something like Rait Ratasepps’s 60 IM in 60 days, all of which were under 12 hours.
Beyond 36 hours… I’m not so sure. Things might get a little weird from even a pure performance standpoint.
But if you’re riding more than 36 hours straight… you’re probably at the fringes of “acceptable behavior for humans who function reasonably well in a society.”
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How’s everyone feel about adding honey to water bottles? What I’m reading says 100 grams of honey has about 300 calories and about 85 grams of that is 50/50 glucose/fructose.
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I did it for about a year. It worked. Not absolutely optimal and I didn’t like the sweetness at higher concentration, but it was acceptable.
Thanks, this is really helpful to know and probably confirms that my use-case should be workable. I’m talking about longer riding days than this, but with rest stops and solid food in the mix as well. Probably 14-16 hours riding & 3-6 hours sleep in every 24h. There’s a longer rest/reset roughly every 3 days too.
It’s 4x mass start stages, each of which should take about 3 days to complete, so as long as you get to the end of a stage well before the next one begins then you get an extended rest until the clock starts again. Looks like past riders have got anywhere between 10 and 20 hours between stages, so likely enough time to get a full sleep, wash some kit, etc. but not enough to begin to really clear the fatigue of the previous effort. I’d guess its enough for a mostly complete digestive reset though, which should make the sugar solution more workable.
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Totally workable.
Sugar during. And easy to digest other foods between events. Can ‘easily’ meet daily macro needs. Limit fiber. Probably should consume some sugar off the bike too.
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Just back from GBDURO (the bikepacking stage race described above) and happy to report this worked really well.
- I think training with just table sugar (& salt & citric acid) for the last 8 months really helped prepare me. I’ve gone as high as 130g per hour for one-day events without issue, so I’ve cleartly adapted pretty well.
- I went with a ‘feed bottle + water bottle’ strategy. So I’d put an entire 500g bag of sugar into one 710mL bottle and leave my other as just water. Then I topped up both with pure water at every stop until the feed bottle ran out, and at that point I’d start with a new bag of sugar. 500g in 710mL doesn’t quite completely dissolve and it becomes a bit syrupy, but nowhere near as thick as even the thinnest gels. I could have measured it out in smaller increments, etc. but for simplicity’s sake it was really helpful to just dump the full thing and keep moving. Certainly aided by the fact that it’s never that hot in the UK so I didn’t need as much fluid intake as I might elsewhere.
- I carried himalayan pink salt in a repurposed multivitamin pill bottle. Maybe 50mL size? After months of making my drinks using just less than a teaspoon for about 400mg I was comfortable measuring by sight, putting in a bit more in the hot part of the day and a bit less at night. I wasn’t trying to be too scientific and figured off-bike food would help even out sodium intake anyway. I thought I might need to find more salt mid-race but the thing is still half-full even now.
- I hadn’t quite got to the point in training of eliminating the citric acid, so I brought some with me in a ziplock bag. I had no trouble going without it though so disposed of the acid bag fairly quickly and just used sugar and salt.
- I didn’t force my rate of intake at all - just took in the sugar water as fast as I felt happy doing so. It worked out to roughly 1500g sugar per day and 3kg per 72 hour stage, plus or minus 500g. That’s broadly 500g each for a morning, afternoon, and evening shift. I was a lot slower with it during overnight efforts and found a big preference for solid food then. I’d guess this is partly because it’s the longest shift I did without any kind of cafe stop.
- The other racers thought I was absolutely mad (except one or two, who also happen to be endurance athlete coaches). They called me ‘sugar daddy’
- One night I thought I saw a clump of extra salt go into my bottle but I was getting swarmed by midges so just decided it would be fine and moved on. Flash forward several hours and I was in major gut distress and couldn’t take in any fuel, was slowly melting into the dawn. I finally realised it must be the extra salt, chucked out the contents of my feed bottle and made a new one with no salt at all, and the moment I had the first sip it was like rocket fuel. There was clearly some kind of central nervous system governor in place that got lifted at that point, because the effects were far too immediate for any of the carbohydrate to have made it through my system. I then proceeded to take in the entire 500g in 2hrs and was still able to continue taking in the subsequent bottle at pretty much my normal rate. I lowered my salt intake across the board after that too and found it easier to take in the mix faster for the rest of the race.
- Looking back it seems like my daytime intake rates were around 120g per hour, dipping as low as the 90s and surging up to 250 depending on what else was going on.
If I were going to do it again I don’t think I’d change much about my feed bottle strategy. I might try to be a bit more deliberate about my solid food choices - I mostly just ate to taste/desire and I think that makes lots of sense, but I might do some more research into macros for joint health and see if some subtle tweaks might help mitigate the inevitable overuse injuries that come from these kinds of races. My engine and pedaling muscles were never my limiter, but knees, the tendon in one hamstring, and both achilles tendons were. As I say, I think that’s just inevitable with this kind of thing to some extent, but I bet taking it into consideration when making solid food selections might help. Might even be as simple as bringing along a vitamin supplement focused on joints and connective tissue.
Thanks for all your help @Dr_Alex_Harrison and others, and if anyone else wants to know any other details I’m happy to share more. Just ask!
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Epic report.
I can relate to so much of this. ^^^
Epic report.
I can relate to so much of this. ^^^
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I described it to the other racers as feeling like the scene at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance where Marty is melting and ceasing to exist, then his parents kiss and he flies straight back to his feet & decides to try out Johnny Be Goode: https://youtu.be/T_WSXXPQYeY?si=tVRae3HUPEyVA7Yz
The rider who named me sugar daddy just said, “you should definitely never try drugs.” 
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Sounds like a great strategy that worked for you… but were you really carrying three of four bags of sugar around per day, or six bags for each 72 hour stage ?
I’m fully on the sugar water bandwagon, but I’m having trouble imagining starting a stage of a race with 3kg of sugar somewhere on my bike…
I mostly just had what was in my bottle plus a bag in my pack for the next bottle. Sometimes they only had 1kg bags so I’d end up carrying double spare, and if I was going into an overnight shift or whatever I might carry 2x 500g deliberately, but in general I just tried to have the supplies for the next bottle and then started looking for a place to buy more as soon as I mixed that.
Final stage of the race had the longest stretch without resupply available and I carried 2kg plus what was in my bottle which was enough that I did notice it impact bike handling a bit (probably more about the fact I just jammed it on top of everything else instead of packing with weight balance in mind.) I finished the race with 1x500g still unopened but better that than running out.
Sugar is 400kcal per 100g, so I guess the real question is, if not a 500g bag of sugar, is there a lighter or less bulky way of carrying 2000 calories?
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