Eat right for those long rides
How to plan your food intake so that you’re always fully fuelled
When we’re looking at a ride like the Tour of Flanders sportive, which can be up to 229km long if you opt to ride the full race route, ensuring you plan your food consumption correctly is very important. You want to find out where the feed stations are along the route, but more importantly, you need to know what kind of food those stations are going to provide. “Some events will give that sort of information beforehand,” says Head of Nutrition at EF Education First Pro Cycling, Nigel Mitchell. “If the food provided is something that you don’t normally eat, ‘practise’ with that food during training, so your gut becomes accustomed to it.”
He also suggests that rice-based foods are really useful for long events. “It’s easy to digest, a good source of carbohydrate, and because rice is cooked with water, it’s a really good fluid provider as well.” So be prepared, and get some simple meals together to fuel yourself mid-ride.
01 PREP FOR A SCHLEP
If you have to provide the food yourself for an event, planning and preparation is key. “Use a simple food saver vac pack, sealing it at home to keep it hygienic,” says Mitchell. “A lot of multiday events allow you to transport your luggage to the day’s end destination, so prepping food beforehand with this method is especially convenient.”
02 LEVEL UP
“With long events, you should be trying to keep your blood glucose levels topped up,” says Mitchell.
“Bear in mind that the amount of carbs your body uses will depend on how hard you’re working. When you’re doing something like a six-hour event, 40g of carbs per hour is a good target to aim for, to feed both the muscles and the brain.” Mitchell suggests a large banana, energy bars, homemade rice cakes or energy drinks and gels.
03 BUILD ON BREAKFAST
Start with a good pre-race meal. “With our pro riders we tend to use oatmeal or porridge oats, often with eggs. It’s really popular and
the combination of the fats and protein helps to regulate the digestion and absorption of the carbohydrate.” If you’re on a plant-based diet, use coconut oil and soya milk with your oats to ensure that you get the protein and fat there too. 04 SOUPY TWIST
“I was discussing the 3000mile long Race Across America, and when a rider is into the third or fourth day of this kind of event, they can get a flavour overload. Switching to more savoury foods can be helpful – even things like a soup while riding. A soup that’s really high-carb that has been pureed to make it easy to drink can be really good mental and physical stimulation.” 05 RECOVERY RECIPES
“Depending how depleted riders are, a general rule of thumb is 1g of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight during recovery. If a rider is completely bonked out – they haven’t had enough to eat, they’ve lost some of their food and haven’t eaten for a good three hours perhaps – then that figure needs pushing up to about 2g per kg bodyweight,” says Mitchell. This means a typical 70kg rider should eat either a large sweet potato, or large plate of pasta or large plate of rice. “For overnight fuelling I recommend a prebed snack of natural yoghurt with honey, or if you’re plant based, that could be soya milk with a squirt of agave nectar.”