How do you refuel when riding? do you slow down dramatically? I find that I am too busy trying to breathe and maintain cadence to try to eat or drink. if I try to drink, I end up choking.

If you don't drink you can end up dead. IIWY, I would opt for the choking.

if you're that bad off, friggin stop, calm down and eat/drink, just my .02

1. Practice.
2. Hold bottle down while looking up. Do not take eyes off the road.
3. Do it on a slight downhill so you can soft pedal or coast for a few seconds.
4. If you can't do this, it's ok to stop. Refuel at stop signs etc.

What kind of cadence are you doing?

Drinking
1. Coast
2. Grab bottle
3. Pedal lightly while drinking
4. Coast
5. Put the bottle away

I can do it while pedalling but that does take a little bit of practice.
I also pick a moment like when I top a hill and/or am on a bit of a descent.

Eating
Usually I stop and eat but on a really long timed ride, I can't always do that so I've got food in my handlebar bag, and I can reach in and break off a piece of cookie or grab a lollie or a couple salted almonds. It's all about bite-sized pieces. And it can take a little bit of practice.

Eating and exerting is not a good idea. Stop to eat. Drinking on the fly is fine.

Drinking:

-Rapha-flick bottle
-Insert nipple in mouth
-Drink

Eating:

-Get home
-Eat

Eat more fat based foods. Almond butter etc. Then you will not need to refuel as often.
I don't think of water as fuel, but you will need that.

<checks sub-forum> Oh, not racing related? Stop and eat, like a person. Will getting to your destination 90 seconds later make or break the ride? When I feel hungry on a ride, I look for a nice shady tree to stop under for a minute or two. If there's somewhere to sit, even better! If I've forgotten to bring food (again) I use the emergency $5 tucked in the pocket of the saddle bag to buy junk food from wherever is convenient.

Eating on the fly seems to keep Grands Tours riders alive and healthy ,... and on long rides I do it myself. Your body can absorb nutrients quite well while active—in fact, your body is always active to one degree or another.

There might be difficulties if one tries to eat three cheeseburgers ... the stomach will take extra blood the muscles and lungs might want. However, small quantities a bite at a time works.

I forget how much the body can absorb, something like a couple hundred calories per hour max anyway ... so eating energy bars and such every 15 or 30 minutes is just to keep metabolism constant—so there is no time when the body isn’t processing food into fuel, while the body is burning fuel at several hundred Calories per hour.

If a rider cannot manage breathing, eating, and drinking .... hmmmmm.

I would hope it would be clear that if one was riding so hard one could barely breathe, one would not be able to stop breathing and eat or drink very well. Sometimes when I need to drink and breathe, I take a mouthful of water, breathe hard through my nose (post-drink cleanup required) and swallow small sips until my mouth is empty.

Taking individual small sips is also good but requires one to keep the bottle in hand.

What I do before fast rides, is to open my Powerbars in advance—I suggest putting them in a plastic bag as they get messy in warm weather—because ripping open the wrapper can be tough. Once the wrapper is ripped it isn’t too hard to peel the bar with teeth.

Practice makes it much easier. Set a timer on the computer or a watch to remind you to sip every 15 minutes. Once you are dehydrated riding it is impossible to catch back up and cramps climbing are NOT fun.

Are you trying to eat/drink while hammering or something? At an endurance pace, eating/drinking shouldn't be a challenge. Slow down for a bit.

Eating or drinking, if you're riding in a pack or paceline, it's almost always safer to do it at the back end of the line. That way, if you inadvertently veer, you're less likely to take somebody else out.

As for eating, if you can, pre-open whatever kind of package your food is in before you start out. (Tearing open a wrapper can be pretty challenging when trying to maintain pace.) Then, take smaller than usual bites, space them out a bit, and rinse each bite or two down before going for the next one.

My rule is that if I can't breath from my nose, I will try not to drink/eat (but sometimes you must). I usually wait for flatter section to eat, and will drink just anywhere.

I stop about 25 miles into my daily ride and eat an energy bar and wash it down with water, but then I'm not trying to keep up a massive cadence. I do keep up a decent pace on my rides though, then just deduct the time it took to eat the bar (and feed a squirrel buddy) from my overall time in those rare instances I'm keeping track.

If I were really aiming for personal speed records though I'd simply skip eating at all during the rides (up to maybe 40 miles), instead I'd eat something like a PB&J shortly before heading out and then just hammer out the miles.

Yeah, I enjoy this too. Not sure what this has to do with bikes, but who cares?

At anything short of red-line you should be able to grab a drink from a bottle. Eating generally requires backing off some.

If you look at pro riders, the feed zone is usually relatively early on a flat portion of the stage. That way the riders can ease off to refuel before going full gas.

It's really easy if you put Perpetuem or equivalent in one bottle, plain water in the other. I use 750 cal./bottle which lasts me over 3 hours on a very hard ride. I take a sip of "food" ~every 15 minutes.

Ease up. There's no requirement that you have to be on the rivet every moment of your ride.

[MENTION=78894]Carbonfiberboy[/MENTION], I have been using your maltodextrin/ON Gold bike food recipe with great success on my last several brevets. I try to go through one bottle of bike food and one bottle of gatorade between each control. Is there any reason I should use water in one bottle instead of using the gatorade powder?

Not really. It's my preference to separate electrolytes from water consumption, but I think the majority of long distance riders mix the two. Glad to hear of your success.

It's not always possible to slow down or ease off. If one is riding long distance for time or on a group ride, one is at the mercy of the clock or other riders. Not everyone chooses to ride like that, but some of us do.