Mtracer

I'm struggling with how best to eat/fuel rides. I'm not competitive, but still interested in feeling strong throughout rides and I'm still trying to bring my weight down. I'm 62 years old, 6' 2" and 200-205 lbs.

More and more lately I've been seeing information online about eating a lot during rides. For quite a while my rule-of-thumb has been to NOT eat for rides 2.5 hours or shorter in duration. Then eat about 500 calories per hour if a ride is going to be longer than that. Now, that doesn't mean I wait until 2.5 hours pass before eating, just I don't eat if the ride is 2.5 hours or less. If the ride is say 3.5 hours long, I'll usually eat 500 calories, the first 250 cal about an hour into the ride and another 250 cal 30min to an hour later.

Basically for long rides this means I'll have a 1,200-1,400 calorie deficit during the ride. This more or less means I can eat whatever the heck I want later in the day. Especially since I often ride early without eating before a ride.

About half the time, on a longer ride 3+ hours, I'll start to fade a bit towards the end. This is more common if I've not eaten heavily the day before.

I usually ride early in the day and often without eating anything before a ride. Yesterday, was unusual in that I rode late in the day around 3pm for 2.5 hours. I had a very large lunch (ate a 10" thin crust pizza). So, I was well fueled before the ride (well quantity if not quality). I felt strong throughout the ride. Aside from a big lunch, it was also perfect riding weather at about 65 F, and sunny.

So, I'm now thinking that maybe I should eat more during all rides as well as eat earlier in a given ride. For example, if I'm doing a 3.5 hour ride, start eating right away at a rate of about 500 calories per hour, and maybe stop eating the last hour or hour an a half.

In the end, I'll eat more during rides, and of course not have the calorie deficit to justify eating as much after a ride.

I'm just wondering what other think about this, especially if you are still trying to lose a bit of weight.

terrymorse 

If you're not competitive, I don't think it's super important to eat a lot while riding.

Unless you're riding hard on these long rides (who does that?), you're not blowing through your glycogen stores at a great clip. The bulk of your energy is coming from fat stores.

I eat a little on longer rides of 3+ hours, but nowhere near as much as the pros do. A Clif Shot once per hour is plenty for me.

MoAlpha

Non-carbohydrate calories are of no use on a ride. Everyone has adequate, readily available, fat stores and protein has a short-term energy cost to metabolize. Put some carby stuff in your pocket and eat it when you anticipate the fade. Titrate to experience.

If you want to get quantitative, you can predict your requirement in grams of carb per hour.

Iride01 

If I was to try and eat back the Calories I'm burning up while riding then I'd feel bloated and queasy. I usually shoot for about 150 to 180 Calories per hour. And I might up that to a little more than 200 for a really hard ride. But probably just a portion of that ride and not the entire ride.

I put all my Calories in my bottles. That way I don't have to fuss with unwrapping them or having to deal with the wrapper and potentially having it fall out of my pocket and becoming litter.

But I have done rides with just water only. So if your rides are low enough effort where you don't get into your reserves deeply to climb hills, then there isn't much to worry about. Just don't use the excuse of the Calories you burned on the ride to let you eat double what you need after the ride.

And sometimes hunger gets confused with thirst. Particulary if you aren't hydrating properly during the ride as well as for your entire previous life. So that hunger you feel after a ride might really be thirst. After my rides I frequently tend to eat less than normal.

Bearhawker

I do all my riding fasted but I expect I am the extreme minority.

pdlamb

I think I'm kind of like a steam locomotive. I can ride a couple hours, say 30 miles, and then I have to stop and get more water (like a steam locomotive, I run out of water earlier than I run out of fuel!). While I'm stopped, I'll grab a snack -- 200-250 Calories, a candy bar, energy bar, etc., and then I'm good for another two hours.

FWIW, I can't start a ride on an empty stomach, or I'll get nauseated within a half hour or so.

Insert the mandatory "experiment of one" adage here. Your "fade towards the end" sounds to me like you've used up the glycogen in your muscles, so if you want to ride longer or stronger toward the end of your normal rides, grab some carbs. (Have you noticed a Snickers bar closely parallels the protein/fat/carbohydrate makeup of a lot of protein bars -- and the Snickers tastes better, too? If only the chocolate didn't melt in hot weather...)

Pay attention to fueling and feeling especially if you're riding long hours on consecutive days. Lingering fatigue and grouchiness may indicate you need to fuel your engine a bit more.

downtube42

Carry a gel or two; if you feel the fade start with more than 30 minutes to go, have the gel with some water. You'll have a short lull, but gels go to work pretty quickly. If the fade starts with less than 30 minutes to go, turn the wick down and consider the next 30 minutes an extended cooldown. This assumes there's not a monster climb or something in the last couple miles, in which case you might want to be fueled up.

Eric F 

The general rule of thumb for me is 1 gel and 1 bottle of water per hour. On rides longer than 2 hours, water will get supplemented with a carb/calorie drink mix (I'm currently liking Skratch Labs Super High Carb). On the road, I stick with bottles. On the MTB or gravel bike, I may also carry a hydration pack of plain water.

Mtracer

I already carry gels mostly for just the reason. Something to have that kicks in relatively quickly in the last hour or so of a ride. I don't do it every ride, just if I think it will help. Again, this will almost always be for rides of 3+ hours.

I've been wondering about a high carb drink mix. Things like the Skratch Labs products look interesting, but seem absurdly expensive. I'm wondering about simply adding some maltodextrin to my usual Gatorade powered. I normally use a half-strength Gatorade mix. As much to hide the taste of the plastic water bottles as anything else. Full strength is simply too sweet. It's my understanding that maltodextrin isn't very sweet, something to do with longer sugar molecules. Looks like it might cost about $0.40 per water bottle and add about 120 cal. Certainly not a lot of carbs, but another way to get some in.

Eric F 

When I was racing 20+ years ago, half-strength Gatorade was usually my choice, exactly for that same reason - too sweet. The Skratch Super High Carb mix doesn't have the same issue for me, but I do vary how many scoops of the powder I use, depending on the situation. Yes, it's not cheap, but I'm happy with the results. I'm not really a home-brew kind of guy when it comes to endurance drink mixes.

Mtracer

Well, I ride reasonably hard, but certainly not elite athlete hard. I do understand there is a transition that occurs where at lower intensity you will burn more fat. As the intensity goes up the fat burning drops, and the glucose/glycogen burning dominates.

What I'm not sure of is how this scales. I'm just making these numbers up as an example. Let's say a pro-level effort is 800 cal/hour and this relies on 90% glucose and 10% fat. If this same athlete does a relatively ease pace at half this power or 400 cal/hour, then I could see where they might drop down to a level primarily fueled by fat. But does this mean a recreational rider, doing the same 400 cal/hour would also mostly use mostly fat. Or since this may be a relatively high level for them, would they tend to burn more carbs then fat?

Again, I'm just trying to understand this a bit better. I'm not competitive and don't need to optimize anything, but would like to feel as good as possible on my rides. In the summer when I ride early in the day, I'm doing all but the 2.5+ hour rides fasted with no calorie intake other than a weak mix of Gatorade. I may eat a banana before I leave if I ate light the night before. I always have some gels on hand in case I feel I need a little something.

I don't think I've ever truly bonked. At least not the way I've heard it described as something very unpleasant and almost incapacitating. Had a friend bonk once, and it was all he could do to simply walk his bike. I occasionally have longer rides where near the end, a 60% effort feels more like an 80% effort. This is what I mean by fading. Most of the time, near the end of a long ride, for me, 3-4 hours, my legs will feel fatigued, and the pedals don't turn as easily. But I have no trouble putting out power, it just feels a bit harder and takes some concentration to maintain my target power.

All of this is a tough nut to crack because it clearly is more complex than simply how much you eat on a ride. I know that other things factor into how you can feel on a bike related to longer trends, recovery, sleep and so on.

pdlamb

A gel doesn't last more than 15-20 minutes for me. I can feel the sugar rush, and I can feel it leaving me that quickly. Ergo, I have to have something more substantial to last an hour. YMMV.

terrymorse 

For what it's worth, here's the supposed "standard textbook" graph of fat and carbohydrate oxidation, as a function of % VO2max:

BTinNYC 

.5 PB&J/hr

Mtracer

That sounds about right. Typical gel is 100 cal or about 10-12 minutes of total fuel for me. I have no way to know how much they help as a quick energy boost, not having a way to compare what it would have been like without eating one. But, I figure it can't hurt in an effort to help late in a ride as a last minute(s) pick-me-up.

Making it a percentage of VO2 max would certainly scale or normalize it between me and an elite athlete. Is there a common way to relate %VO2max to power or relative to FTP?

I found some equations online that approximate Vo2max = 16.6 + 8.75 * 5-min relative power. I'm thinking this 5-min relative power is W/kg body weight. All I have for VO2max is what my Garmin estimates, currently 42. It seems reasonable enough. I certainly understand to be truly accurate it must be measured in a lab with sophisticated equipment. But if I work this backwards from VO2max = 42, weight equals ~92 kg, I would have a 5-min power for this purposes of 263 W. That's in the range of what my power curve is in Strava. Which of course, is probably the same data Garmin used to estimate the VO2max in the first place.

Assuming I use 260 W as the 100% VO2max power, then my typical 170 W endurance pace would be 65%. That would put me at about 30% fat 70% carbs. Though total ride average power is lower due to warmup and cool down. Continuing with the approximations, 170 W is about 600 cal/hour. So, if 70% must come from carbs, that would be 420 cal of carbs per hour or about 105 grams per hour at endurance pace.

Is this SI units?

Carbonfiberboy 

How to eat depends on how many hours you'll be in the saddle and how much power you put out. It's a lot easier to figure this out if you have a power meter, but Strava will give a decent estimate if the numbers you put in are accurate. What you want to know is how many kilojoules of energy you expend on the ride. Because of the body's inefficiency, we burn about a calorie for every kilojoule of work we do on the bike.

As you have discovered, at your normal riding effort, you can ride for about 2 hours without eating before you start to get weak. That's also my experience. However my practice on rides of much over 2 hours is to start eating 15' after I start and to keep eating every 15' for the whole ride, no matter the length of the ride, though the my longest ride was only18 hours. I like to keep my blood sugar nice and even.

But how much to eat? I try to eat about half my burn. Your burn will depend on how much you weigh and how hard you ride. On long rides, I pretty much ride as hard as I can and still be able to finish strong. It works out that on long rides I burn about 3 calories per pound of bodyweight per hour, so I eat about half that. Your burn rate may be different.

And what to eat? Everyone has their favorite thing. I discovered that I do really well on a diet of nothing but maltodextrin and flavored whey protein mixed 7:1 by weight. I put enough powder in a bottle to last me 3 hours (4 Cal. per gram), add water and shake lots. I carry extra powder in my saddle bag. For really long rides, I can't carry enough powder, so I make up the difference with convenience store food, whatever is quick. I've done other, more conventional things. Clif bars worked well. Open pack, break into quarters, eat 1/4 every 15'. Hammer gel in their 6 oz squeeze bottles worked well, no tearing open, no packaging waste, lower cost. Hammer Perpetuem works well, treated just like my malto mix, but no added protein necessary. There are many ways to do it.

Why eat from the start? Because if one doesn't, one draws down one's glycogen unnecessarily and it'll probably be needed later. The idea is never to run out of it. I've helped many a weakened rider. I just hand them my bottle and tell them to take 6 swallows. They'll be good for maybe another hour.

Mtracer

I have a power meter and have solid data on my energy expenditure. I really don't have a problem I'm trying to solve, just more asking what others are doing. Though again, maybe there's something I can do better to feel stronger throughout a ride. I know I have rides where I feel fantastic and others where I'm draggy. I think we all of those good and bad days. But if there's a fueling strategy that will help this, then it seems like a good idea.

I've just ordered some maltodextrin powered I'm going to play around with. Just looking to up the carbs in my hydration to rely a bit less on eating something solid.

As you do, eating about 50% (half) your burn rate sounds like a good rate. Playing around with the graph Terry provided it looks like I might be in the range of burning 70% carbs 30% fat. If I were to eat 50% my burn in carbs that would leave 20% to come from glycogen stores (100-120 cal per hour). That should be fine for the rides I do, always under 5 hours.

50% my burn rate would be equal to about a Clif bar per hour plus some carbs in whatever I'm drinking.

I read something today that suggested that glycogen isn't just a gas tank. That as it gets lower, things change. I think basically your body starts to do things to protect itself form running out of it completely. So, your idea of keeping it up from the start, sounds like a good idea.

I've also seen some videos etc. that basically say eating during the ride will result in better performance, better recovery and less likelihood of overeating after a ride.

Carbonfiberboy 

When I was just starting out trying to become an endurance rider, I happened upon the Hammer website and read all the info on it. I put their ideas into practice and whaddya know, it worked. I don't use any of their products except Endurolytes, but their recommendations work, remembering that they have products to sell and they definitely oversell them.
https://hammernutrition.com/blogs/getting-started

GhostRider62

Most of us probably should not try to compare to professionals, they not only have a high relative fat burning capacity, they also have a massive VO2 max and functional reserve capacity.

At 800 kcals/hr, this might be 50% of their FTP. This would be 210-220 watts per hour energy equivalence, approx. They would be more like 1000 kcals/hr on a zone 2 ride and if they ride 25-30 hours per week, they have to eat for health moreso than fueling today's ride. Most of us have lots of fat and our outputs are so much lower that the considerations are different.

Their challenge for pros is not losing too much of the vital fats.

I just have a couple bars stashed in my bag and rarely eat on a ride under 3-4 hours unless for fun, like my favorite french bakery about 1.5 hours away

Jughed

I've been riding/training while in ketosis for the past 4 years. As a T2 person, my body doesn't process carbs well and can't handle any excess carbs.

My V02 max is 310-320W. Estimated over a few months of 3-5 min max effort intervals. (edit, I do crap out after V02 max interval sessions if I don't add some carbs to the mix)

I've done multiple 210-220W (65++% of V02) 1.5-2+ hour rides with zero added carbs - just my typical fat based diet. I just did a 1+ hour FTP interval session, 3x10 min @ 240-260w with no added carbs.

I'm not elite by any means, just a bike rider... but the body can be trained to run off of fat at a fairly high level.

I took a long time to get to this point - and was in no way easy...

That being said, simply adding 30-40+/- grams of carbs per hour does make my RPE seem better, it feels like I can deliver the power with less effort.

It's very nice to be able to do long rides without having to carry a ton of extra fuel or worry about eating all the time - it's really nice to get that added boost when I do eat...

MinnMan

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what kinds of foods you eat. It's real easy to make up that 1200-1400 calorie (plus) deficit if you are eating the wrong things, especially processed foods which commonly have unbelievable calorie counts.

Even though I ride a lot (7-10 thousand miles/year), I watch my caloric intake. I have a pretty good BMI and if I "ate whatever the heck I wanted", that would go out the window fast.

As they say, YMMV.

pdlamb

I've found that after long rides (which I define as 50 miles or more), if I try to restrict calories the rest of that day I'll have a voracious appetite for a day or two after that. If I skip tracking food I'm eating that night and splurge a bit, I can usually restrain myself on the following days. So paradoxically, eating more on a "long" day seems to result in better one-week weight loss that trying to be parsimonious with what I eat later the day of the ride.

As always, YMMV.

Mtracer

I think this is generally true and why trying to create really large calorie deficits, either from exercise or eating a lot less, or both, tend to be counterproductive in terms of weight control. Slow and steady ultimately wins that race.

This of course is one of the things that is an issue concerning fueling. Keeping up with calorie burn isn't realistic, just too much to eat while also trying to perform. Of course, just in this thread we've seen many people with different approaches that work for them. One size doesn't fit all. It's just a bit of a puzzle to solve given we can do efforts with calorie expenditures equal to a day's worth of calories, or much more for really long events.

Mtracer

Thanks for the lead on Hammer products and their website. I've started looking at the Hammer website, based on your suggestion. They express some clear, and very strong positions on things. And as you said, a healthy dose of marketing. But, that's fine, you have to promote it if you want to sell it.

I already found some things that are quite interesting. The main two are eating a meal no sooner than 3 hours before a ride (so it completely digests) and only eating 120-180 cal per hour. The 3-hour rule is interesting because that was just about what happened with me last week, eating lunch and then riding 3 hours later and feeling pretty darn good. In contrast, I did a long ride two days ago, and ate about a hour before. I can't say it made me feel bad, but it does sort of seem like your asking your body to do two things at once, exercise hard and digest a meal.

The 120-180 cal per hour, does sound pretty low to me, I'll need to see what else they have to say and track down references to justify that. But on its surface, for a business selling food products for athletes, it's hard to see the motivation for talking you into eating less rather than more. So, it gives them some credibility.

BTinNYC