10 Things I Wish I Learned Sooner About Fueling Long Bike Races
I just finished my fourth UNBOUND Gravel 200! Honestly, it still blows my mind that I’m capable of riding that far in a single day. It was only four years ago that I did my first UNBOUND Gravel 200, and at the time, I didn’t even know if riding 200 miles was physically possible for me. Ultimately, it’s all about having sufficient fitness, sufficient mental toughness, and sufficient fueling. These are the three key components to success in endurance cycling. I’ve focused a lot of time and effort on training my body and mind, so today, let’s focus on the gut.
Fueling in endurance sport has evolved a lot in the last few years, and my own fueling strategy has evolved with it. Back in 2022, I fueled my first UNBOUND with Sour Patch Kids, Rice Krispies, Oreos, and Doritos. I was essentially living by the mantra of “eat trash, ride fast.” It got me to the finish, but let me tell you, I was not feeling my best during that race, or after it.
I’ve learned a lot since then, and one of the reasons I’ve been able to take on more and more endurance races as I’ve gotten older is that my fueling has improved so much. But I’ve also made a lot of mistakes along the way, too. Here are 10 things I wish I had learned sooner about fueling long bike races.
A Brief Preface: The Carbohydrate Revolution
2-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard eating a gel. Photo: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP
A few years back, we entered what people are calling the “carbohydrate revolution.” If you’ve been keeping up to date with pro cycling or the latest training and nutrition science, you probably already know all about this. The basic gist is: Eating more carbs on the bike = more performance.
Races are getting faster, largely because riders are fueling their rides at a much higher level than they did 5-10 years ago. Our knowledge about fueling for performance has improved a lot, and the fueling products available to us have gotten a lot better too. That’s awesome, because every athlete can benefit from these advances.
But now, there is so much nutrition and fueling information out there that regular riders like me often get lost in the weeds, and we might end up latching onto ideas that don’t always work for our bodies. Which is what leads me to lesson number one…
Lesson 1. Your Gut is Unique
Whether it’s on the bike or off the bike, diet and nutrition are just one of those things that people get insanely dogmatic about, which is unfortunate because every person has a different body, different preferences, different needs, and different budgets. The more I see and learn, the more obvious it is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to fueling.
For an obsessive amateur like me, it’s really easy to see someone do something, or to hear a recommendation from a coach, a podcaster, or a YouTuber, and to interpret that information as a hard-and-fast rule. (i.e., “This is what works. It’s what you have to do!”) I’ve fallen into that trap tons of times now. If there’s one lesson really worth learning, it's that every “rule” or “fact” should be approached as a suggestion. I am a special and unique person, and so are you.
One of the things I’ve discovered about myself over time is that my gut is fragile and needs a lot of pampering. A lot of things that people say work for them don’t work for me. A great example is pushing your carbs per hour. The recommendation that a lot of experts give is to consume 90-120 grams of carbs per hour. This is supposedly around the maximum amount that you can absorb. But even with months of gut training, I always feel better whenever I stay closer to 60-80 grams per hour.
Whenever I pushed it higher, I always felt sick. I actually tried to push it a bit above 80 grams per hour at UNBOUND this year, and I ended up puking late in the race. As someone who’s super obsessive and impressionable, being outside the “ideal range” can make it feel like I’m doing something wrong. But I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m not as powerful as riders smashing 120 grams per hour or more. My energy needs are different. And I definitely don’t have an iron gut. That’s just who I am.
So take all the ideas you’re presented with, absorb them, but most importantly, test them. The key to constant improvement is staying curious and being open to experimenting. Maybe, with more gut training, I can finally start consuming more grams per hour. But it’ll probably take me a really long time to train my gut enough.
Lesson 2. Start Practicing Fueling Early
Fueling is a major factor in performance, and like any performance factor, it’s something that can be improved through training. Gut training is key. You can’t just show up on race day and expect to smash 100 grams per hour. Your gut is going to revolt. For me, it took three months of training to start hitting 80 grams per hour consistently during long rides.
Three months sound like a lot of time, but in reality, it didn’t feel like very much. With work and family, I can only do one long ride per week, and those long rides are when it’s most important for me to practice fueling. That meant in the months leading up to UNBOUND, I only had around 12 opportunities to practice my fueling strategy and get my gut ready for the demands of the race. 12 really isn’t that much!
The big thing I want to change about my training next year is that I want to start practicing fueling and training my gut even earlier. I think ideally, this year, I would have started in January instead of March, giving me two extra months. Now, since I’m hoping to do UNBOUND again next year, I’m going to consider today my new starting point.
With a full year ahead of me, maybe I can actually work up to successfully eating 120 grams per hour. But the chances of that happening are much lower if I put it off until next spring. The main advice here is to just start practicing your fueling as early as you can, especially if your schedule limits the number of long rides you can do in training. Fueling is so important for endurance cycling, and the earlier you can start practicing, testing, and experimenting, the better you’ll perform when it’s finally time to race.
Lesson 3. Maltodextrin Makes Me 💩
To hammer home the importance of practicing fueling early, this is something I discovered that had a huge impact on my performance. I’m going to keep this short, but after testing a lot of nutrition products, I realized that I was having negative reactions to a very common ingredient: Maltodextrin.
So maltodextrin is in tons of sports nutrition products, and that’s because it’s absorbed like sugar, but it’s not as sweet as sugar, so nutrition products can pack a lot more in to increase the amount of carbs. I've known for a long time that maltodextrin makes me gassy because I’d eat a GU or some other maltodextrin-based gel and turn into a fart machine. But that didn’t seem so bad. I just dealt with it and carried on.
But then, when I started trying to increase my carb intake into the 80 or more grams per hour range, that’s when I started running into more serious problems. I thought that given enough gut training, my body might adapt and be able to process more maltodextrin without making me feel gassy. But the opposite seemed to happen. I actually started reacting more violently to it. Hopefully, this isn’t too much information, but I had several training rides and races derailed by nausea so intense that it often ended in an unplanned pit stop in a porta-potty.
This sucks because maltodextrin is everywhere, and a lot of the most affordable nutrition products use it as a main ingredient. Ultimately, this is part of “your gut is unique.” Plenty of people have no issue with maltodextrin, but I’ve had to find alternatives.
This year, I tested a ton of gels that don’t use maltodextrin. I switched to a drink mix that provides fewer carbs than a true carb mix, but it doesn’t contain maltodextrin. I even started experimenting with just using plain table sugar in my bottles and eating maple syrup. Over the next year, I’m going to keep trying things, and maybe I’ll discover a magic gel, food, or product that changes my life.
Lesson 4. You Need to Adjust for Heat
So the conditions at UNBOUND were atrocious this year, and there were a lot of DNFs in the 200-mile race. Combining the pros and amateurs, it had a DNF rate of about 20.4%. That’s a lot! But it’s still less than the number of DNFs you see in a hot year. The last super hot UNBOUND year was 2021, and the DNF rate was 34.5%! The point here is that heat is likely a bigger race-ender than mud.
Heat is brutal, and it makes a lot of athletes, including me, fall apart during races. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are major reasons for DNFs, but something I’ve experienced and I know a lot of other riders have experienced too is that heat also affects your gut and can make it really hard to keep eating.
When it is hot, your body diverts blood from your digestive tract to your skin to try to cool you off. The side effect of this is that it suppresses your appetite and causes nausea. What happens to a lot of riders when it gets super hot is that they just stop eating. This leads to a death spiral, where they feel sick and tired, but they don’t eat, so they feel even sicker and more tired.
So what do you do? I find that being heat-adapted helps prevent this to some degree, but also just being aware that it will happen can make a big difference, because you can change your plan or behavior. What I do is adjust my fluid to carb ratio. Essentially, I just shift more of my carbs away from gels, chews, or solids to liquid forms that are easier for your stomach to handle.
When I race in hot climates, I almost always use a hydration pack. My pack has a two-liter bladder that I’ll put 200 grams of carb mix in. Even when I’m so nauseous that I can’t stand the thought of smooshing a gel down my throat, I can usually still sip the carb mix in my hydration pack. I can’t only do carb mix, though. When it’s super hot, I always have to supplement my hydration by drinking a lot more plain water, and this is very closely related to the next lesson…
Lesson 5. Drink More Plain Water
I wrote an article around two years ago about fueling, and I had an image of a bottle of water with a caption that read: “Plain water? We need CARBS!” I had bought into the hype around the carbohydrate revolution so much that I thought, “Why would you ever drink plain water. That’s just a missed opportunity to consume more carbs.”
Well, it turns out that regular old water is one of the best things on the planet. It’s almost as if we need it to survive or something… Over the years, I have had a lot of races go sideways, especially in the heat, because of nausea that keeps me from eating. A solution I’ve found to reverse this is as simple as it gets: Drink more plain water.
When I experience this state of nausea during hot races, plain water is often the only thing I can handle drinking. Once I have enough, my gut often feels reset, and I’ll be able to start eating or drinking a carb mix again. These days, in addition to the carb or electrolyte mix in my hydration pack, I always try to have at least one bottle on my bike filled with plain water. When it’s super hot, I’ll alternate between sips of plain water and carb mix, plain water and electrolyte mix, or plain water and gel.
Obviously, the extra hydration helps prevent nausea, but since water is largely tasteless, it also helps reset your palate. I find that mixing it in actually makes it easier to ingest more carbs, and it is a big part of how I figured out how to take in more grams per hour without feeling sick, especially during the summer.
Lesson 6. Avoid Flavor Fatigue with Something Savory
When it comes to resetting your palate, sometimes you need something a bit stronger. The carbs that most riders consume on the bike taste sweet, and when you’re constantly eating sweet stuff during a long ride or race, it can lead to flavor fatigue. Plain water helps, but I’ve found that when you are hours into a race, you hit a point where it just isn’t enough. That’s when I start to crave something savory.
I always make sure I have at least one savory item to break things up. My savory food of choice right now is Doritos. I keep some in a small bag, and I don’t need much more than a handful, but it gives my palate what it’s craving, and it acts almost like a reset button. When I eat a handful of Doritos, all of my gels, chews, or drink mix suddenly feel palatable again. I’d almost describe it as a hack, and this simple trick has helped me take in more grams per hour than anything else.
You can use almost any savory snack. It doesn’t have to be Doritos. You could use regular potato chips. I have a friend I ride with who swears by Cheez-Its. I have another who loves dried meats like pepperoni or jerky. Cam Jones, the guy who won UNBOUND last year, supposedly likes peanut butter-filled pretzels. During the last 12-hour mountain bike race I did, I had cream cheese and a baguette in my pit, and it felt like one of the best things I’d ever eaten.
Lesson 7. Learn To Eat Under Duress
I started racing gravel around ten years ago, and in one of my earliest gravel races, I ended up riding with a super fast group of riders. I had food in my pockets and knew I needed to eat something, but I didn’t. Instead, I just kept riding until I finally bonked and got dropped.
Back then, I was too scared to open a gel or a pack of chews and eat it while riding in a fast group. In training, or if you’re riding by yourself or with friends, it’s a lot easier to eat when you want. You can pick the safest moment, you can sit up, or you can even stop. But when you’re racing, you have a lot less control, and if you’re not used to it, it can be a bit of a shock.
One thing I try to do in training is actually practice eating during stressful riding situations. That means grabbing, opening, and eating my food one-handed, while pedaling hard. If I’m riding by myself, I’ll even visualize that I’m in a fast group or paceline and focus on holding my line and keeping my speed as steady as possible.
I even had to put some thought into my method for eating gels quickly while pedaling: I pull the gel tab off with my teeth, hold the tab in my teeth so I don’t litter, squeeze the whole gel into my mouth as fast as possible, crumple the wrapper and put it back in my pocket, then swallow the gel in my mouth in between breaths.
It might seem silly, but it was a big deal for me. Actually practicing how I have to eat in races made it much easier to actually eat in races. That’s important because the last thing I want is to fall behind with my fueling. Racing is always stressful, and the more automatic you can make the act of fueling, the more successful you’ll be at sticking to whatever fueling plan you’ve laid out.
Lesson 8. Keep Fueling Until the End
In general, my fueling plan involves eating something every 30 minutes, and I actually have a timer on my Garmin that goes off every 30 minutes to remind me. I try to stick to that structure pretty rigidly during my long training rides because I’m practicing to do exactly that in long races.
But there’s this weird thing that always happens near the end of my long rides. I’ll hit a 30-minute mark, where I’m supposed to eat another gel, but I’m only 5-10 minutes from home. So do you eat the gel? Or do you say, “Screw it, I’m almost home,” and not eat the gel?
You eat the gel!
I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in a frugal household or if it's just a natural human impulse, but eating that last gel when you’re so close to the end kind of feels like a “waste.” But it isn’t! It took a while for me to realize this, but sufficient fueling isn’t just about fueling the ride happening right then and there. It’s about everything after too.
These days, when I’m close to home, I actually try to finish as much of my leftover nutrition as I can. If I have any carb mix left in my bottle, I polish it off. I think about it as an investment in future performance. I’m kickstarting my recovery, making sure I’m primed to go hard again the next day, and leveling out my appetite so I don’t go hunting for junk food the moment I walk in the door.
Lesson 9. Nutrition Products are Absurdly Expensive
So obviously, I’m using a lot of cycling or endurance-sport-specific nutrition products. If you watched my last gear prep video, I packed five boxes of gels. At retail price, that’s $250 worth of gels! That is a buttload of money.
If that’s a concern for you, just know that you don’t have to buy sport-specific products. A super trendy alternative branded drink mix or carbohydrate mix that I’m a big fan of is just using table sugar in your bottles. There are a ton of riders, much faster than me, who have a lot of success just fueling with table sugar. To replace expensive gels, a lot of people like maple syrup. Or you can make your own simple sugar syrup on the stove. You can put these in a reusable gel flask.
If I’m honest, I haven’t enjoyed making my own gels. I just prefer the convenience of regular gels a lot more. But I only use them on my weekend-long ride and during races. I fuel my one-hour or 90-minute weekday sessions, almost entirely with table sugar in my bottles. Because I split things up like this, $250 worth of gels usually lasts 3-4 months for me, which is a cost I’m okay with at the moment. Ultimately, though, you have to do what works with your budget, and I’m going to continue experimenting with some more money-saving options over the next year.
Lesson 10: It’s Okay to Feel Joy
A lot of what I’ve talked about applies specifically to the performance nutrition that cyclists use to try to ride faster or go farther. But I want to be clear. It’s okay to eat things you like, too. Sometimes, I look back at that version of myself in 2022, racing my first UNBOUND. I had no clue what I was doing. I mean, I barely survived. But I had a lot of fun doing it, and smooshing Sour Patch Kids and Doritos in my face all day was part of that fun.
There’s a reason I still use Doritos as my “savory reset button.” There are definitely a million options that are packaged better, more performance-oriented, or just healthier. But Doritos are the one food that always brings me back to being a kid.
My mom used to take me swimming every week, and afterward she’d let me get anything I wanted from the vending machine. The thing I always picked was Cool Ranch Doritos. And she’d get them for me, even though she thought they were disgusting and terrible for me. As a kid, those chips represented her love. So when I’m hurting and miserable on the bike, it’s nice to eat something that makes me feel human again.
Sometimes I go back to fueling rides with Sour Patch Kids and Oreos just because that’s what I want. It makes me happy. I want to ride to get faster, but sometimes, I just want to ride to be happy, and that’s okay. I think, no matter what you’re eating, if it helps you enjoy riding a bike, you’re doing it right.