What I’m curious about is what “fine” is actually measuring. Finishing the workout is one outcome. How the rest of your day goes, and what the habit does for your race day, are two others, and those tend to get overlooked.
Overnight your body keeps working, and it draws on the carbohydrate stored in your liver to keep blood sugar steady while you sleep. By morning those stores are lower than most people assume. Start a workout from there without adding anything, and the session runs on a partially drawn-down tank, followed by a day that still needs plenty of energy.
For most of the athletes I work with, that day is full: school, a full-time job, family, other responsibilities. A workout that felt fine on the bike can leave less in reserve for all of it, and the effect rarely gets connected back to a choice made at 5:30am. It’s the same pattern as fueling debt. A small gap doesn’t announce itself, and it gets blamed on sleep, stress, or a busy afternoon.
Here’s a question I like to ask: are you going to do your race or your event fasted?
Most people plan to eat something before the start, which means the pre-race routine is something worth practicing. Early morning sessions are the most realistic place to do it. The gut adapts to what it’s practiced with, just like your legs. Taking in a little fuel before you clip in or lace up gives your body repetition with having food in the system while you work, so race morning isn’t a complete shock to the system. That repetition is something I’ve found to be essential for a lot of the athletes who find success in their events.
This one comes up a lot. In most endurance efforts your body is using fat and carbohydrate at the same time, and the mix shifts with intensity. It isn’t one or the other. At an easy aerobic effort, taking in some carbohydrate lets your body keep using its fat stores while making sure the carbohydrate stores don’t get fully drawn down.
None of this requires a full pre-race meal. The place it usually stalls is the athlete who isn’t hungry in the morning. I hear it constantly: “I’m usually just not hungry in the morning. I just don’t want to eat right away.” That’s a normal experience, and it’s where small and simple works better than forcing down a meal.
A banana, a slice of toast with honey or jam, or a few chews or a gel all count. When solid food doesn’t sound good, something liquid you can sip works too, like a carb drink mix or a recovery shake made and ready to go before you leave the house.
Something 15 to 30 minutes before heading out works well for most people. Some athletes notice a dip when they eat right around an hour out, so it’s worth paying attention to how your own body responds. If a session is under an hour, you may not need anything during it, which puts even more weight on what happens before and after.
One athlete I work with was spending more time in the gym and finding they had really low energy, even though the sessions were “only an hour.” When we looked at their schedule, there was a window where they had no chance to fuel at all. We added a little fuel during the session, and I got a text that said, “To nobody’s surprise, feeling a lot better after having a little something in my bottle or in my backpack to snack on during the gym.”
It isn’t a fasted morning ride, but it shows how little it can take.
The most convincing evidence is usually your own. Over a week or two, pick two similar sessions. Do one the way you normally would, and do the other with a little something first. Notice how the session feels, how your energy holds up in the hour afterward, and how the afternoon goes. I like to call it me-search: you’re using your own training as the test, and what you notice guides the next adjustment.
Fasted morning sessions can feel free because the cost is delayed. You finish, you feel okay, and the bill arrives later in the day or on race morning. A small amount of fuel beforehand is one of the simplest ways to keep that from building, and it doubles as practice for the day it counts.
If you’d like the full picture of before, during, and after fueling built out step by step, that’s what we cover inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course.
]]>An athlete told me that about their nutrition. One set of numbers, the same every day, through strength blocks, speed blocks and everything in between. Their training changed every few weeks. Their fuel didn’t.
I see the opposite too. Another athlete told me, “If it’s a lighter week, I’ll try to lay off the carbs.” And another said that on easy days, they now just eat the main meals and tend to snack less.
Both approaches come from a good place. But neither one quite matches how your body actually uses fuel.
Yes, your nutrition should change with your training, just not the way most people think.
It doesn’t need to be the exact same amount of food every day. It should be the amount of food that supports the work you’re doing. And the work you’re doing includes the hard session tomorrow, not just the easy spin today.
Not everything on your plate should move up and down with your training. Here’s how I think about it:
So when we talk about fueling for your training, we’re mostly talking about carbs. Protein and fat hold steady in the background.
This is the part that feels counterintuitive. You’re thinking, but I’m not exercising as much, so why should I eat as much?
Here’s the thing. Your rest day isn’t really about today. It’s the opportunity to set yourself up for success tomorrow. It’s the day your glycogen stores get filled back up and your muscles get primed for what’s coming next.
Say Wednesday is your rest day and Thursday is a big session. There’s a tendency to lower your intake on Wednesday. But Wednesday is when you finally have time to eat enough to support that bigger effort on Thursday. If you have a rest day on Thursday and then hard days on Friday and Saturday, you want to eat enough on Thursday to support what Friday and Saturday are going to bring.
Sometimes I’ll have athletes do a hard day of eating on their so-called easy day. And if you usually snack between meals, keep the snacks on your rest days too. They’re doing more work than you think.
If you’ve seen the athlete’s plate model, you know it has three versions: an easy training plate, a moderate one and a hard one. The harder the day, the bigger the carbohydrate portion.
For most endurance athletes, I tell them to ignore the easy training plate and focus on the moderate and hard ones. Even when you have a rest day, that’s your opportunity to fuel for your hard days. Most of the endurance athletes I work with stay in that moderate-to-hard range even on an easy day or a day off, because their training week as a whole demands it.
One athlete asked me whether I’m more of a fan of changing targets by training block, or adjusting them day to day based on training load. The answer is that it depends, and it’s probably a little bit of both.
What about a strength block? If you’re shifting into more gym work and less volume, my starting point is usually to keep things the same, see how your energy and recovery feel, and then shift if needed. Changing everything at once makes it hard to tell what’s working.
And a lighter week isn’t a reason to strip the carbs out. A recovery week is when your body actually has the chance to absorb the training you just did, and it needs fuel to do that.
Sometimes your body tells you before your plan does. One athlete who was building mileage for a marathon told me, “This past week I was just so exhausted the first two days.” Their training had ramped up, and their eating hadn’t.
If your training has gone up and you’re suddenly wiped out, the fix is usually one of two things:
I’m not a huge numbers fan when it comes to giving athletes a direct calorie count. You can do all of this without weighing every meal.
Your fuel should follow your training, but not in a straight line. Protein and fat stay fairly steady. Carbohydrate is what moves, and it moves with the work you’re doing across the whole week, not just today.
Rest days are refuel days. Lighter weeks still need fuel. And if your training goes up and you’re suddenly exhausted, that’s usually a sign your plate hasn’t caught up yet.
If you want help matching your fueling to your actual training plan, block by block, that’s exactly what we work on inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions.
]]>That’s from a gravel racer I work with, and I hear some version of it all the time. Another rider looked back on a long day and said, “I rode for 4 hours. There’s no way that this was enough.” Another told me they typically aren’t eating after the ride until 8 or 9 at night.
The ride goes fine. The hours after it are where the day falls apart.
It’s rarely because people don’t know they should eat. It’s because life happens:
All of those are real. But the gap still costs you.
Even if you’re hitting your 80 grams of carbs per hour on the bike, you’re still going to finish in a deficit. You burned through more than you took in, and your muscles’ glycogen stores need to be refilled.
The 30 to 45 minutes after you finish is when your muscles are most ready for it. The simple carbohydrates you take in then can easily be shuttled into your muscles to start refilling what you used.
Wait four or five hours, and you feel it. You crash, you get hangry, and you’re starving by the time dinner finally shows up. One athlete had an upset stomach at dinner after a long ride, and it most likely came from that long window without taking in anything.
A lot of athletes finish a long ride and reach straight for protein. Protein matters, but protein can’t do its job well without its buddy, carbohydrates.
Here’s why. During a long ride or run, you’re depleting your carbohydrate stores. Carbs are what refill them. Protein is there to start repairing and rebuilding your muscles, and it does that job better when carbs are around. When there’s carbohydrate available, your body isn’t tempted to use that protein as a source of energy, so the protein can go where it’s meant to go.
The general rule of thumb for endurance athletes is a 4:1 ratio: about 4 grams of carbohydrate for every 1 gram of protein. Anywhere from 3:1 to 4:1 works well. It’s actually more carb than protein, which surprises a lot of people.
In real numbers, that looks like:
That’s also why you see chocolate milk recommended so often for recovery. It naturally lands close to that ratio.
If you’re lifting weights, sure, protein can lead. But after rides and runs over an hour, make sure carbohydrate is in there too.
Your post-ride recovery isn’t meant to replace a meal. It’s meant to bridge you until your next one.
Think of it as covering the bases between getting off the bike and sitting down to real food. For me, that was the difference that meant I wasn’t a monster by the time I got home. You’ll still want a real meal later. The goal is to make sure you actually get there in one piece.
This is my favorite fix, because it takes almost no effort and it works whether you’re busy, driving or not hungry.
I’ve become fairly religious about this. It makes recovery non-negotiable, because it’s already sitting there waiting for you. It’s also a really great way to get in around 300 calories without having to think about it.
If a recovery mix isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other ways to hit that 4:1 range:
Aim to get something in within 30 to 45 minutes of finishing. And if you want to have it the moment you stop, go for it. There’s no such thing as too soon here.
The real goal is to protect the time around your training with something carb-forward, so a busy afternoon doesn’t turn into a four-hour gap.
The ride isn’t over when you get off the bike. If you’re too busy or not hungry enough for a meal, you don’t need one yet. You need a bridge.
If you want a plan for the whole day around your training, before, during and after, that’s what we build inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions.
]]>That’s one of the most common questions I get from athletes, usually right before a big race. And right behind it is the other half of the problem: “I think I’m usually just not hungry in the morning. I just don’t want to eat right away.”
When to eat before a hard effort matters almost as much as what you eat. So let’s walk through the timing, including one window that catches some athletes off guard.
Here’s what happens when you eat about an hour before you start.
When you eat, carbohydrate enters your blood, and your body releases insulin. Insulin is a hormone that shuttles that carbohydrate out of your blood and into your cells. An hour is just enough time for that insulin response to be in full swing.
Then you start riding or running. Your working muscles also start pulling carbohydrate out of your blood, and they can do that independently of insulin. So now you have two things pulling blood sugar down at the same time. That can cause a double decrease in your blood sugar right as the effort starts.
For some athletes, that shows up as feeling flat, shaky or light-headed early on. One athlete described it perfectly as “almost a premature bonk.”
Not everyone feels this. Plenty of athletes eat an hour out and feel totally fine. But if you’ve ever felt off in the first 20 or 30 minutes of a hard effort for no obvious reason, your snack timing is worth a look.
Here’s how I like athletes to think about the hours before a hard ride, run or race.
This is your real meal, and 2 to 3 hours is realistic for most early morning rides and runs. It’s enough time to digest without setting an alarm for 3 a.m.
Make it carb-forward and familiar. A general guideline is roughly 2 to 3 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight at this point. For a 150 lb athlete, that’s about 135 to 200 grams. That might look like a bagel with peanut butter and a banana plus some juice, or a bowl of oatmeal with fruit and honey.
Keep fat and fiber on the lighter side. I think we can all agree that a full four-course meal right before you hop on the bike isn’t going to sit well.
If you find you feel flat or shaky early in your efforts, look at whether you’re eating right around that hour-out mark. Often the fix is simple: push your last meal a little further out, and push a snack closer.
If an hour out is the only window you’ve got, keep it small and simple, and pay attention to how you feel in the first half hour.
This is where a quick, simple-carb snack does its best work. Your muscles are about to start using it right away, so there’s no time for that insulin dip to set in.
Aim for about 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrate from something easy to digest:
Personally, I’m someone who will start snacking on fruit snacks as I’m heading out the door. For race day, this window runs right into the start line. How to Fuel the First Hour of a Gravel Race Without Falling Behind covers what to have at the gun.
The best pre-workout food is the one you already know sits well. I can’t tell you how many times this conversation has happened:
“Do you typically have oatmeal before your runs?”
“Oh, no, no. I don’t really like oatmeal.”
Oatmeal is a great option on paper. But if you don’t eat it regularly, race morning is not the day to start. Something carb-forward that you’re familiar with, that you’ve eaten before hard training days, is going to serve you far better than the “right” food you’ve never tested.
This is really common, especially with early start times. If a real breakfast sounds awful, drink it instead.
A smoothie, a recovery shake, or a bottle of high-carb drink mix can cover the bases when you’re not ready to look at a plate of food. Sip on it while you get ready, and you’ll still be getting carbs in without forcing anything down.
At the end of the day, I want you to fuel, and I want you to pay attention to how you feel while you do it.
Not everyone trains at dawn. One athlete told me they used to eat dinner before their runs, because it stayed light later. Once it started getting dark earlier, they started heading out right after they got home from work.
That can leave a long gap. If you’re training after work, the snack between lunch and your session is doing the job your pre-workout meal would normally do. Plan for it. A granola bar, toast with peanut butter, or a piece of fruit mid-afternoon, then a small top-off in that 15 to 30 minute window before you head out, can make a big difference in how that session feels.
Pre-workout timing matters, but it isn’t everything. Nothing you do the morning of is going to make or break your race. By that point, you’re not building the foundation, you’re just adding to it.
The real foundation is what you eat in the days leading up to a big effort. For races, that’s your carb load, which I cover in How to Carb Load for an Endurance Race. The pre-race meal and the top-off are the finishing touches, not the whole plan.
Then test it. Try your timing before hard training days, not just race day, and pay attention to how you feel in the first 30 minutes.
If you want a pre-race routine built around your event, your start time and the foods you actually like, that’s what we put together inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions.
]]>That’s from an athlete I worked with, and it’s one of the most frustrating places to be. Another rider described the same pattern: “I’ll do good for about 50 miles out of the 80 to 100, and then I will cramp hard.”
If you’ve been there, you’ve probably heard the same advice over and over. Take more salt.
I think we always immediately associate cramping with salt. And sodium definitely is a piece of the puzzle. But it’s not always the only reason we cramp.
Part of the confusion is about what sodium actually does. A lot of people think its main job is to prevent muscle cramping, but its primary role is really fluid retention. Sodium helps you hold on to the water you drink, and that fluid does a lot of jobs, including getting your fuel where it needs to go.
So when someone cramps, sodium is a great place to start looking. It’s just not the only place.
When an athlete comes to me with cramping, I’m usually looking at three possibilities. Sometimes it’s one, and often it’s a mix.
This is still the first line of defense, so it’s where I start, by looking at total sodium intake. If you’re losing a lot of salt and water and not adequately replacing them, eventually your body is going to be like, you know what, you’re done.
If you haven’t looked at this yet, start here:
If you’ve dialed both in and you’re still cramping, it’s time to look at the other two.
A muscle that’s running low on fuel can cramp too. And this can happen even when you’re eating.
Even though you’re taking in carbs, they may not be getting to the right place in time. That can be because you’re dehydrated, so there isn’t enough fluid to move them along, or because of the type of carb you’re using. The fuel is in your pocket or your stomach, but it isn’t making it to the muscle that needs it.
That’s also why cramping sometimes shows up alongside a sour stomach. If you can’t digest what you’re taking in, your muscles aren’t getting it either.
Sometimes a muscle cramps simply because it’s tired.
Think about professional football players. They’ve done this for years and years, with every resource available to them, and they still get muscle cramps in the second half of games. That isn’t because nobody handed them salt. It’s because they’re tired.
One athlete told me about the first time they had really vicious cramps: “It was only a three-hour race, but it was full gas the whole time.” Three hours isn’t an especially long race. But all that power output, held the entire time, pushed their muscles harder than they were used to. That kind of fatigue can cause cramping on its own, even with sodium and carbs right where they should be.
One athlete cramped badly in a race that started out foggy and cool. As they described it, it was so socked in in the morning, and then it just got hot.
That’s a setup for cramping from almost every direction. When it’s foggy, you’re not really thinking you need to drink a lot. So you drink less, which means less fluid and less sodium, right when the day is about to heat up. Then the heat hits, sweat rate climbs, fuel stops moving as well, and you’re pushing hard the whole time.
No single thing caused that cramp. It was the conditions, the fueling and the effort all stacking up.
One athlete asked me what the probability was that just getting carbs and sodium right would solve their cramping, and what we’d do if it didn’t. It’s a fair question, and it’s exactly why a little detective work helps.
1. Write down what actually happened. Next time you cramp, get specific. Something like: I started cramping at 75 minutes. I drank this many bottles. I had this much food 90 minutes before the ride. It was this hot. Understanding your routine is what shows you what led to that cramp.
2. Start with the amounts. More times than not, dialing in total salt and carbohydrate intake is a great starting point. Are you getting enough sodium for how you sweat? Are you getting enough carbs per hour for how long you’re out there?
3. Then look at the sources. If the amounts look right and you’re still cramping, look at what you’re taking in. Is it sitting well? Is it actually getting digested and absorbed, or is it sitting in your stomach?
4. Then look at the effort. Did you go out way harder than you’ve trained for? Was this the longest or hardest effort you’ve done in a while? You’re training for a 4-hour effort. You’re not going to just do 1-hour sessions to get ready for it. Longer training days also build up the fueling and hydration your body can handle, which helps with all three suspects at once.
Cramping is often a salt problem, but not always. A muscle can cramp because it’s low on sodium and fluid, because it’s underfueled, or because it’s simply tired, and on a hard race day it’s often a mix of all three.
Start with your sodium and carbs, because that’s where most athletes find the biggest win. If that doesn’t fix it, look at what you’re taking in and whether your training matches the effort you’re asking your body to do.
If you keep cramping even after your fueling and hydration are dialed in, it’s worth checking in with your doctor to rule out anything else going on.
If you’d like help doing that detective work, looking at your sodium, your carbs and your race-day plan together, that’s what we dig into inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions.
]]>That’s what one athlete told me after a long effort. Nine pounds is a lot on its own. But then they added that they drank at least two liters along the way.
Two liters of water weighs about 4.4 pounds. So if they finished nine pounds down after drinking all of that, they actually lost closer to 13 pounds of sweat.
Most athletes have no idea their number is anywhere near that. And that’s exactly why knowing your sweat rate is so useful.
Your sweat rate tells us how much fluid you’re losing over a given amount of time. Once you know it, you’re not just guessing and drinking randomly.
One athlete asked me, “You need a liter of water every hour?” Not necessarily. That depends on what your sweat rate is. Most people land somewhere between 750 milliliters and 1.2 liters an hour, but that range is wide. Your number might be at either end, or outside it completely.
Even a 2% drop in body weight from water loss can hurt performance. For a 150 lb athlete, that’s only three pounds.
Three pounds goes quickly. On a hot day, a heavy sweater can lose that in the first couple of hours without realizing it. Your sweat rate tells you how fast you’re heading toward that line and how much you need to drink to stay ahead of it.
You don’t need a lab for this. The low-tech way works really well, and all you need is a scale.
Add the weight you lost to the fluid you drank. That total is roughly how much you sweated.
A quick conversion helps: 1 pound of weight lost is about 16 ounces (roughly 450 ml) of fluid.
Here’s an example:
One athlete asked whether they needed to account for the food they ate too. For the first round, don’t worry about it. The goal is simply to measure total water weight loss. You can get more precise later, but a rough number you actually test beats a perfect number you never get around to.
The goal is to get the difference between your before and after weight as close to zero as possible. Here’s what your result is telling you:
And remember, the goal isn’t necessarily to replace every ounce during the effort. Ultimately, the goal is to drink to thirst, and your sweat rate tells you whether your thirst, and what’s in your bottle, is keeping up.
Your sweat rate isn’t one number. It’s a number for a specific set of conditions.
If you did a run in December in Arizona, that’s going to be very different from July in Arizona. The same rider will probably need more water in Florida than in Denver. Heat, humidity, altitude, effort and even what you’re wearing all change how much you sweat.
So one test gives you one data point. The real value comes from testing across the conditions you actually train and race in.
I call this me-search instead of research. A lot of my athletes build their own little database of sweat rates, so eventually they can say, “When it’s this temperature and these conditions, I know my sweat rate is around a liter an hour.”
A simple note on your phone is plenty. For each test, log:
It would be really helpful to do this for all of your races too, so you get a sense of your sweat rate in race conditions and not just in training. After a season, you’ll have a pretty clear picture of what a hot race day actually asks of you.
Once you know your number, you can use the same scale to check whether your plan works.
Say you know you lose about a liter an hour in certain conditions. Head out for an hour-long run or ride, drink a liter of water with about 800 milligrams of sodium in it, and weigh yourself after. You should come out close to zero.
If you’re still coming out lighter, keep weighing yourself before and after, and add a little more sodium each time until that number gets close to zero. If you’re starting to gain weight, pull it back. That’s the whole process: test, adjust, test again.
You don’t need a lab or special equipment to figure out how much you sweat. A scale, an hour-long ride and a little math will get you most of the way there. Test in the conditions you actually train and race in, keep a log, and use it to decide how much you drink and what goes in your bottle.
If you want help turning your sweat rate into a full hydration and fueling plan for your next race, that’s exactly what we work on inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions.
]]>An athlete told me this about a long race where nothing else would stay down. Hating pickles and still reaching for pickle juice isn’t random. More often than not, that’s your body asking for the sodium your bottles weren’t giving it.
Another athlete mentioned the white marks drying on their hydration vest after long runs. Same story. That white crust is salt you lost in your sweat.
So how much sodium do you actually need? The answer starts with a question I ask almost every athlete I work with: do you think you’re a salty sweater or a heavy sweater?
Those sound like the same thing, but they aren’t.
You can be a super salty sweater but not a heavy sweater, or the other way around. But if you’re a heavy sweater, you’re probably losing more sodium no matter what, just because there’s so much more sweat. How much sodium you lose comes down to both at once.
Sweat sodium varies a lot from person to person. The lowest I’ve seen is around 400 milligrams of sodium for every liter of sweat lost, and the highest is up to 2,000. That’s a five-fold difference between two athletes who might be riding side by side.
Most folks tend to sit around 800 milligrams per liter, and that’s a useful starting point if you’ve never been tested. Even so, I think it can be wildly underestimated just how much sodium that is over a long day.
Here’s an example that makes the salty vs. heavy difference click.
I once compared my numbers with an athlete I was working with, over the same kind of effort. Her sweat sodium concentration was about 600 milligrams per liter, and she lost about two liters of sweat. Mine is 1,200 milligrams per liter, and I lost about one liter.
We lose the same amount of sodium, for completely different reasons. She’s a heavy sweater and I’m a salty one. That’s why copying someone else’s bottle recipe doesn’t always work, even when you ride together.
How salty your sweat is stays fairly consistent for you. It can shift a little, for example as your body adapts to training in the heat, but it isn’t swinging wildly from one ride to the next.
What changes day to day is how much you sweat. A cool, cloudy morning and a 95-degree afternoon can look completely different, even at the same effort. So a hot day doesn’t make your sweat saltier. It means more sweat, which means more total sodium lost.
The idea is to make the fluid you’re taking in roughly the same concentration as what you’re losing when you sweat. Sweat isn’t just water. It’s water and sodium, so replacing only the water leaves you short.
If you don’t know your number, start with the average of about 800 milligrams of sodium per liter. In practice:
Then drink to thirst. Because you’re matching concentration rather than chasing a set number of milligrams per hour, the sodium follows the fluid. On a hot day you’ll drink more and get more sodium automatically. On a cool day you’ll drink less, and that’s fine too.
Thirst is useful information. If you’re drinking a full-strength bottle and you’re still really, really thirsty, that can tell us you might need a little more sodium in it.
Some other signs you’re coming up short on sodium:
That last one is common. If it’s a hot day and your bottle has 80 grams of carbs but only a little sodium, you can drink through all your carbs and still feel pretty crappy.
In my experience, it’s better to be slightly over-salted than under-salted. Your body has ways to get rid of excess sodium, but it doesn’t have ways to make more. The athletes who end up in the med tent needing an IV are often the under-salted ones, not the over-salted ones.
Very rarely do I see athletes dealing with the effects of too much sodium. What I see far more often is people unintentionally under-salting themselves. Even athletes who come in convinced they’re the saltiest sweater I’ve ever seen often aren’t hitting the average yet.
If you’re a salty sweater, a heavy sweater, or both, there are a few easy ways to raise your intake without drinking something that tastes like the ocean:
If you’re wondering why sodium matters this much for hydration in the first place, I get into how it helps your body hold on to fluid in How to Fuel the First Hour of a Gravel Race Without Falling Behind.
Whatever you add, test it in training first. Find an amount that sits well with your gut and makes you feel better on the bike. A number you can tolerate every single time beats a perfect number you can only hit on paper.
The 800 mg per liter average is a great starting point, but it’s still a guess. A sweat sodium test is the most accurate way to know how salty you actually are. It’s quick, you don’t need a bike or a treadmill, and it only takes a small patch of sweat on your forearm.
What I love about it is that athletes leave with an action step. They know how much sodium they’re losing, instead of guessing and adding random scoops.
So, salty sweater or heavy sweater? For a lot of people, the answer is that they don’t know yet. Start with about 800 mg of sodium per liter, drink to thirst, pay attention to the signs, and adjust from there. When in doubt, lean toward a little more.
Building a hydration and sodium plan around how you actually sweat is part of what we work on inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions. If you’re tired of guessing, either one is a great place to start.
]]>That’s from a gravel racer I work with, and some version of it comes up with almost every rider I talk to about race day. Another athlete said they didn’t have their first gel until an hour and a half in, “because I was breathing quite hard climbing.”
The first hour is where a lot of race fueling plans quietly fall apart. Nothing dramatic happens. You just don’t eat, and by the time you notice, you’re already behind.
Gravel starts are chaos. You’ve got a packed field, a fast rollout, and often a climb or a rough section early on where you’re breathing too hard to eat and don’t want to take a hand off the bars. Eating is the last thing on your mind.
Here’s the math that makes that a problem. A typical gel has around 30 grams of carbohydrate, and 30 grams is only going to get you to about minute 30. If the first climb takes 90 minutes, that one gel isn’t going to carry you up it.
So the goal isn’t to force yourself to eat during the hardest, most hectic part of the day. It’s to show up to the start line already covered.
There’s a gap between your last real meal and the gun, and that’s where a lot of riders go quiet. Finish your pre-race meal, then stop eating, but have something on the start line.
Timing matters here. Anything you take in within 15 to 20 minutes of the start, even right at the gun, is going to be the most useful, because your muscles can put it to work almost right away. That’s carbohydrate you don’t have to find a free hand for once the race is on.
My favorite tool for this is what I call the start bottle. It’s a concentrated bottle of carbohydrate, sodium and water that you finish right before the race. It really primes the system and gets it going.
Here’s the recipe I use with athletes:
That’s a lot more carbohydrate than a single gel. Instead of a 30-gram gel that runs out at minute 30, you’ve got a bottle that carries you well into the race while things settle down.
The sodium is doing important work too. A bolus of sodium at that concentration helps increase your plasma blood volume, which is exactly what you need heading into a hard, high-intensity start. Sodium is what helps you hold on to that fluid instead of just passing it through.
This is the first thing almost everyone asks. One athlete put it perfectly: “I peed so many times before the start, and I could pee again in the middle of this race.” Nobody wants to spend the first hour of a race looking for a bush.
Most riders deal with this by drinking early, so there’s time to pee it out before the start. The timing that actually works is the opposite. I’ll have athletes finish their start bottle about 10 minutes before the race, so there’s no time for it to be processed and peed out. Drinking it too far ahead lets it move through your system, and your body decides it needs to get rid of it. Drinking it 5 to 10 minutes out means your body is still putting it to use when the gun goes off.
The amount of sodium matters too. When a bottle is really high in sodium, your body holds on to that water, at least for a while. When it’s a lot of fluid with only a little sodium, your body says, “Too much fluid, need to pee it out.” That’s why the start bottle is concentrated on purpose. The goal is to take it in without needing to pee.
Not every start line needs the same thing. It really comes down to finding the right mix of fluid, carbs and salt for the conditions.
A start bottle or a start-line gel takes care of your fueling for the first 20 or 30 minutes, so you can settle in and get through the chaos without thinking about food. That’s the whole point. Once the pack spreads out and your breathing comes down, your regular fueling takes over.
A few things help that handoff go smoothly:
The first hour doesn’t have to be a fueling black hole. Stop eating at your pre-race meal, but don’t stop fueling. Finish a start bottle about 10 minutes before the gun, let it carry you through the hectic part, and start your regular feeds once things settle down.
If you want a plan built around a specific race, including the start line, the first climb and every aid station after that, that’s exactly what a Race Ready Session is for. If you’d rather work through it on your own, the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course is a great place to start.
]]>If you’ve been there, you know exactly what that feels like. Your legs are begging for fuel, your stomach is refusing it, and every sip feels like a negotiation. Another athlete put it more simply after a long race: “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so bloated in my life.”
The usual conclusion is “I just have a bad stomach.” More often than not, that isn’t what’s going on.
In How Many Carbs Per Hour Do You Actually Need? we talked about carbs having to get through a door from your gut into your bloodstream, and how a line forms when you send more than the door can handle. This post picks up right there. What’s actually happening on the gut side of that door when the line backs up, and what you can do about it?
I like to think of carbohydrates as Lego pieces. Your body wants to use single Lego pieces for energy, and your gut is constantly paying attention to how many pieces are floating around in a given amount of fluid. That’s called osmolality: how many pieces are in a certain volume.
Your body likes things at a fairly steady concentration on both sides of that door. So if all of a sudden one side is way too concentrated, your body will try to pull water in to dilute it and bring it back to where it wants to be. Go from two pieces to 40 pieces really quickly, and that’s exactly what happens.
That’s where the GI distress comes from. All of a sudden there’s a ton of water in your gut with a ton of stuff in it. That’s the bloating, the sloshing, the cramping in your stomach and, for some people, the emergency porta-potty stop.
Here’s the part people tend to forget. Carbs don’t get from your stomach to your muscles on their own. They need enough fluid, and enough blood volume, to get where they’re going.
Sodium plays a big role here too. I think of sodium almost like the glue that keeps water in your system. People forget that one of the jobs of sodium in helping you hold on to water is so that water can help digest everything a little bit easier.
So if there’s a lot of carbohydrate and not a lot of sodium or fluid, things just kind of sit there. They aren’t really moving, and a stomach full of carbs that aren’t moving is not a happy stomach.
It works in the other direction too. If you’re taking in a ton of fluid and sodium but not a lot of carbohydrate, you can end up with that same bloated, sloshy feeling.
That’s why “too many carbs” isn’t quite the right way to think about it. The problem is usually the ratio. Carbs, fluid and sodium work as a team, and when one of them gets way ahead of the others, your gut is the first to let you know.
Most athletes don’t have stomach trouble in the first couple of hours. It creeps in later. When things get past that five or six hour mark is when the stomach is most at risk of going, and heat makes it worse.
There are a couple of reasons for that. At high intensity, or in the heat, your body stops prioritizing breaking down food. Blood gets sent to your working muscles and to your skin to cool you off, so your gut is running on a skeleton crew. On top of that, you’ve been sweating for hours, so the fluid and sodium that help move carbs along are running low right when you need them most.
That’s why the heat version often doesn’t look like throwing up. It’s more of a queasiness that won’t go away until you stop wanting to eat altogether. In the heat, that’s usually a fluid and sodium story before it’s a stomach story.
One athlete I worked with was mixing bottles at around 180 grams of carbohydrate each, on top of gels and food. They were already suspicious of it: “I’m assuming that I probably am loading my bottle so much that my body probably isn’t getting the hydration or the salt that it can because there’s too much fuel in the bottle.”
They were right. Those bottles were a little too concentrated, especially on top of all the other grams of carbs they were taking in. It wasn’t that their stomach couldn’t handle fuel. It was that one bottle was trying to do three jobs at once, and doing all of them at a concentration their gut had to fight.
If you’ve had a race fall apart because of your stomach, it’s easy to decide your gut just can’t handle fuel. Most of the time, it’s the mix, not the gut.
Figuring out the right ratio of carbs, fluid and sodium for the way you train and race is exactly what we work on inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions. If you’re tired of the vicious cycle, that’s a great place to start.
]]>That’s what one athlete told me in a session this year. Some version of it comes up with almost every athlete I work with. How many carbs per hour is the question I get asked more than any other, from first-time marathoners to riders lining up for 200 miles of gravel.
Part of the confusion is a good problem to have. We are in this era of slam as many grams of carbs as you can, which is great because it’s very different than 10 years ago, when it was like here, have a sip of water and hope for the best. But somewhere between “hope for the best” and “slam as many as you can,” the useful answer got a little lost.
So let’s walk through what the ranges actually are, where they come from, and how to figure out where you fit in them.
The general sports nutrition ranges look like this:
That last part, mixed carbohydrate sources, is doing a lot of the work. It’s also the reason the range stops at 90.
Every gram of carbohydrate you take in has to get from your gut into your bloodstream before your muscles can use it. I like to think of that as walking through a door.
Glucose has its own door. On average, we can process about one gram of glucose per minute through it. That’s roughly 60 grams an hour, and that’s the ceiling if glucose is all you’re giving it.
Fructose uses a different door. I think of it as a yellow door, and it only opens about once every two minutes. That’s roughly half a gram a minute, or about 30 grams an hour.
When both doors are open, you get 60 plus 30, which is 90. That’s where the top of the 60 to 90 range comes from. If everything in your pockets is one kind of sugar, you’ve got a line forming at one door while the other one sits empty.
When that line backs up, the carbs that can’t get through stay in the gut. Your body pulls water in to dilute them, and that’s where a lot of the bloating, sloshing and race-day stomach stories start.
If you want to check what you’re working with, flip your gel or drink mix over and look at the ingredients. Glucose, dextrose and maltodextrin go through the glucose door. Fructose goes through the yellow one. Cane sugar (sucrose) is one of each stuck together, so it uses both.
The range goes up to 90, but that isn’t where most of the athletes I work with live. I find that most folks are really happy between 60 and 75 grams per hour, if they’ve trained for it. For a lot of people, 75 ends up being a sweet spot.
I very rarely have athletes go up to the high end of 90 to 100. That isn’t because 90 is wrong. It’s because 90 is a ceiling, not a target.
This is the part that gets lost in the noise. Sure, you can totally hit 90 grams of carbs per hour. But can you do that for six hours? Probably not.
Picture a long gravel day. At hour two, 90 grams an hour feels great. By hour six, you’re forcing down sips of a bottle you can’t stand anymore, your stomach is sloshing, and eating anything at all starts to feel like a chore. Compare that to someone who sat at 70 grams an hour from the first pedal stroke to the finish line and never missed a feeding.
If we can find a number you can be consistent at, that’s going to be so much more impactful than hitting 90 some of the time. It’s also easier to build up than it is to pull back. Starting a little lower and adding more goes a lot better than starting too high and trying to recover once your gut has already said no.
You’ve probably seen it. A pro posts their race-day numbers, and suddenly 120 grams an hour is the number everyone’s asking about.
Here’s the thing about those athletes: they’re also putting out the power to support that. The work they’re doing creates the need for that many carbs, and they’ve spent a long time training their gut to handle it. Their number is a reflection of their output and their training, not a standard the rest of us are falling short of.
I don’t think more always equals better here. The goal is finding the amount that works for you, that you can stay consistent at, and that keeps you feeling good the whole way.
Your gut is trainable, and that’s the good news in all of this. The way you get there is gradual.
Grams per hour can feel abstract until you see it in your pockets. Everything counts toward the total: your drink mix, your gels, your chews, and whatever real food you bring.
One thing to keep in mind as you add more gels: bring more water with them. Those carbs need fluid and sodium to get where they’re going, and a concentrated gut is an unhappy gut.
The ranges get you in the right neighborhood. Where you land inside them depends on how long you’re out there, how hard you’re working, and what your gut has been trained to handle.
There’s a more individual way to set your number based on the work your rides actually demand. That’s what we dig into inside the Gravel Performance Nutrition Course and in 1:1 sessions. If you’re tired of guessing between 60, 90 and whatever number showed up on your feed this week, that’s where to start.
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