Nutrition for 70 miles

pblakeney

Milemuncher1 wrote:

Jelly babies and beer.

Doesn't the beer froth up in the bidons?
Jelly babies and water. First pub after the finish line...

rob39

Thanks guys great advice. Did a very hilly 55 with 3500ft elevation (70 has 4000ft elevation) on porridge & x2 coffee in the morning 1500ltr of energy drink with electrolyte in. X2 bananas x2 gels. Probably add some flapjacks into that on the day

keef66

rob39 wrote:

... 1500ltr of energy drink with electrolyte in....

:shock: I'm hoping you mean 1.5 litres...

lostboysaint

He was following a High 5 tanker.

vrsmatt

I did the tour of the Black Country 100m on Sunday and had porridge and buttered toast for breakie, 4 gel bars, a flapjack and a banana with 1.5 litres of energy drink/electrolytes and 0.5l of water.

dannbodge

I did a 75 mile (5000ft) ride a couple of weeks ago in Zone 3 HR
Pasta the night before
Bowl of muesli/granola mix for breakfast
@ 40miles a flapjack
@ 55 miles (or when the other guy needed a pee) half another flapjack

750ml bottle with electrolyte tablet
750ml bottle with High 5 energy plus (Didn't drink all of this though)

And this weekend did 86 miles (3000ft) in Zone 2 HR (very slow)
Bowl of muesli/granola mix for breakfast
@ 40 miles had a sandwich and chips

750ml bottle with electrolyte tablet
750ml bottle with High 5 energy plus (Didn't drink all of this though)

Ste_S

This thread is Bike Radar at its best (worst).
Generally you’ll need to experiment and see what works best for you. Probably the most important thing is to eat and drink before you feel you need to, as if you start to feel the effects of dehydration or a hunger knock, then you’ve left it to late. If anything, slightly over eat/drink rather than under eat/drink – you want your time on the bike to be enjoyable, if you need to diet, do it off the bike.

Did a 133 mile ride at 70% FTP a few weeks ago, generally eating something every 45mins, had :-

Night before – Pizza, A beer, Bottle of Prosecco
Breakfast – Porridge, Coffee, Orange Juice
During Ride – 3x Banana, 3x Oat Bars, 1x Flapjack, 1.2L Sis Go Electrolyte, 0.5L Lucozade Sport, 0.5L Water, 0.6L Diet Coke, Awful Kenco instant coffee, Lunch stop (Mozzerella Pannini, Double Espresso, Carrot Cake – heaven).
10 miles from end of ride would have had a beer, but Rapha only do alcohol with food (and they’d stopped serving food…)

pippi_langsamer-2

I tend to stick my nose in places like Holland & Barret occasionally and see what stuff they have on offer. My local H&B currently has some lovely, compact 9 Bars in the penny sale, so I effectively get two for £1. I find one of those and perhaps a gel or slice of Soreen fits nicely in one of my pockets and does the job for ~60m. Overnight oats with seed/ nut sprinkles on top with a sliced banana n honey beforehand (with strong coffee), sets me up.

stueys

The science on ketogenic diets is mainly looking quite encouraging, but no-one has really got much in the way of long term data yet. Certainly people like Friel are now advocating Paolo type diets with additional carb supplementation when you exercise. Which I broadly try to follow and have had some success with.

Ultimately I think it's relatively simple. Our bodies are highly adaptable machines, they will burn the most available food source for energy most readily. In the western diets that tends to be highly processed carbs that are digested very quickly and cause spikes in insulin. That trend accelerated with the demonisation of fat. I think it's a key driver of the weight gains lots of people are seeing. If you feed your body more fat, it will use fat more readily as a fuel source (a good thing for endurance sports given the limited amount of glycogen we can carry). Switching to a more paolo diet that shuns processed carbs and has a more distributed intake of the macro nutrients (carbs, fat, protein) seems to make a lot of sense.

The pro's eat carbs when they race, its nonsense to suggest otherwise. They are fat adapted but ultimately when the pace lifts up everyone's body burns carbs because fat doesn't burn quickly enough. The key difference is that the pros have higher ftp' than the rest of us so they can go a lot faster and still be in Z2/Z3.

keef66

I hope you mean Paleo. Named for the assumed diet of paleolithic man. We can be reasonably confident he didn't eat donuts and drink full fat Coke.

Paolo sounds more like an Italian waiter. His diet will likely involve pasta and bread.

Alex99

Milemuncher1 wrote:

Jelly babies and beer.

Reminds me of an experiment by early Alpine mountaineers testing the highest calorie density digestible materials available: lard and neat ethanol. I bet it was an 'interesting' climb.

Alex99

Internet opinion pieces are useless for this diet / health argument. If you must, go to clinical trials especially meta reviews e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3530364/

Avoiding misunderstanding might be achieved if we avoid undefined terms such as "riding full power". People will have different performance goals and will make their own interpretation of what this means. I might read that as 1 minute max power being the same after 70 miles, as after 5 miles. Someone else might take this as a subjective "I still feel basically OK" after 70 miles. Clearly very different. Claims of the impact of any particular diet on performance need to be substantiated when offering out advice based on an n of 1 with no other information.

The other thing that always strikes me when diet and weight come up, is that how different people are. I'm an ecto, I think this means that my hunger signals and propensity to store energy and build muscle are set on the low side. I feel like I eat a lot, but perhaps not?!?

Perhaps all we can say (as others wisely have) is that people need to find out what works for themselves, whilst not ignoring the basics of chemistry and biology.

keef66

The thing I find endlessly fascinating is that we are still discovering new things about the chemsitry and biology of nutrition / diet and the interactions with our microbes.

There is however a disturbing amount of pseudo-scientific nonsense and extreme diet advice on the web, and for some reason significant numbers of people are taken in by it. I don't think it's necessarily because they are gullible or naieve, but I still don't understand why anyone would base their food choices on the advice of random, frequently unqualified strangers, or even celebrities. Alkaline diets, green smoothie diets, eating clean - whatever that means. And people being convinced they have food intolerances and so avoiding gluten or dairy for no sound medical reason.

It doesn't help that official dietary advice is often lagging behind the science, and that the results of new studies invariably reach most people via news headlines which oversimplify or occasionally draw the wrong conclusion entirely. We seem to want to identify a single component of diet and blame it for all our problems. Fat was demonised for years and peoples' diets suffered as a result. Then caffeine, aspartame, salt, sugar, simple carbohydrates in general.

So at home we practice dietary spread betting. We try to eat as many different things as we can, mainly freshly cooked / prepared. We don't worry about their nutritional content, but instead go for variety and taste. A lot of it is vegetarian or fish. Red meat of some kind maybe once a week. Occasional blowouts with a curry night, fish & chips, massive fry-up. But I also do intermittent fasting to keep my weight in check and because I'm convinced it has some other benefits.

I think the most sensible and succinct dietary advice came from journalist Michael Pollan:

Eat food, not too much, mainly plants

Alex99

keef66 wrote:

The thing I find endlessly fascinating is that we are still discovering new things about the chemsitry and biology of nutrition / diet and the interactions with our microbes.

There is however a disturbing amount of pseudo-scientific nonsense and extreme diet advice on the web, and for some reason significant numbers of people are taken in by it. I don't think it's necessarily because they are gullible or naieve, but I still don't understand why anyone would base their food choices on the advice of random, frequently unqualified strangers, or even celebrities. Alkaline diets, green smoothie diets, eating clean - whatever that means. And people being convinced they have food intolerances and so avoiding gluten or dairy for no sound medical reason.

It doesn't help that official dietary advice is often lagging behind the science, and that the results of new studies invariably reach most people via news headlines which oversimplify or occasionally draw the wrong conclusion entirely. We seem to want to identify a single component of diet and blame it for all our problems. Fat was demonised for years and peoples' diets suffered as a result. Then caffeine, aspartame, salt, sugar, simple carbohydrates in general.

So at home we practice dietary spread betting. We try to eat as many different things as we can, mainly freshly cooked / prepared. We don't worry about their nutritional content, but instead go for variety and taste. A lot of it is vegetarian or fish. Red meat of some kind maybe once a week. Occasional blowouts with a curry night, fish & chips, massive fry-up. But I also do intermittent fasting to keep my weight in check and because I'm convinced it has some other benefits.

I think the most sensible and succinct dietary advice came from journalist Michael Pollan:

Eat food, not too much, mainly plants

I think diet is particularly susceptible to the issues above because:

1) Dietary advice doesn't change very quickly, and in that sense, it's fairly dull. People expect new information all of the time, so they jump on whatever is new. New studies get sensationalized and over blown.
2) There is a massive market in creating new diets. Marketers are clever and exploit that fact that most people can't tell the difference between science and marketing or propaganda. Blaming a single evil is extremely attractive and powerful in this regard.
3) People want to be told that their bad habits are OK or not their fault
4) there is a wide distrust of the food industry and the lobbying power that they have. As a result, governmental advice may be trusted less than an apparently impartial 'truth teller' with a golden formula presented as a new diet.

keith57

Some more proper science for all you LCHF doubters out there sticking to your outmoded and dangerous sugar-burning strategies...

"there are growing concerns that insulin-resistant athletes may be at risk of developing type 2 diabetes if they continue to eat very high-carbohydrate diets for decades since such diets worsen insulin resistance."

"Sugar calories promote fat storage and hunger.
Fat calories induce fullness or ‘satiation’."

http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/49/15/967

The 'FASTER' study is also quite interesting:

http://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(15)00334-0/fulltext

jaxf

Everyone's body is different, I don't bother with thinking about food and drink for that kind of distance - the route setters will have figured it out for you and put the feed stations where you need them.

My trouble is greed - usually come back fatter than I started if food is laid out in front of me.

Alex99

Keith57 wrote:

Some more proper science for all you LCHF doubters out there sticking to your outmoded and dangerous sugar-burning strategies...

"there are growing concerns that insulin-resistant athletes may be at risk of developing type 2 diabetes if they continue to eat very high-carbohydrate diets for decades since such diets worsen insulin resistance."

"Sugar calories promote fat storage and hunger.
Fat calories induce fullness or ‘satiation’."

http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/49/15/967

The 'FASTER' study is also quite interesting:

http://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(15)00334-0/fulltext

You missed some bits Keith.

From the editorial:
"rates of fat oxidation during exercise (up to 1.5 g/min)—sufficient for most exercisers in most forms of exercise—without the need for added carbohydrate"

See that? "sufficient for most exercisers in most forms of exercise". Depends on what you're doing doesn't it.

And from Volek et al 2016:
"Plasma glucose and serum insulin were not significantly different between groups at rest and during exercise but increased during the last hour of recovery in the HC athletes, likely due to the greater amount of carbohydrate in the shake (Fig. 5A and B ). There was no significant difference between groups in insulin resistance as determined by HOMA."

Things are never black and white.

keith57

True, never black and white 8) Depends on what you're doing and whether your interested in the big long term picture too I guess.

Alex99

Keith57 wrote:

True, never black and white 8) Depends on what you're doing and whether your interested in the big long term picture too I guess.

If I was interested in huge endurance events or such, honestly, HFLC makes a lot of sense to me. But for road racing and many other events I think it's a non-starter unless it's part of a strategy to re-introduce carbs near a target race. But then doing some training sessions carb restricted isn't a new concept anyway.

Most, if not all of the studies that I've seen use training regimes and tests that trend towards the high endurance rather than short bursts. Not by chance I think.

I can also see that hammering gels to the detriment of a good overall diet for decades on end isn't going to be good. Extremes rarely are. Are Iron man triathlons good for you? Is going out and pushing to your max heart rate every week good for you? Anyway, we easily can mix up a lot of things in this debate (weight control, health, sports performance).

pbassred

I'm in the same boat as the OP although a few Kgs lighter. I had never thought of stopping! Water and home made cereal/nut bars. Gels are a pain while you're moving, or are you supposed to stop for those too?

apreading

I am doing a 100km Audax tomorrow. I shall be taking a couple of snack bars and a couple of gels. I shall be eating sausage rolls if I see anywhere selling them warm and cake wherever I can buy it from a decent bakery. I will likely have a cup of tea somewhere along the way too. I will probably end up bringing one of the snack bars and one of the gels home unused.

milemuncher1

I did this on Sunday, fuelled by Jelly babies, Lucozade sport, fig rolls, and a Danish pastry

https://www.strava.com/routes/8557031

Then this the following day, pretty much fuelled by Jelly babies, and Shipyard Pale Ale.

https://www.strava.com/routes/8305340

I'm fine.

Mr _Tibbs

Ditto on using the feed stations, they should be more than adequate. Depending on environment, pace, physicality, volume of riders; you may find you need a lot less than you think.

70 miles for me sometimes needs no a flat white and a slice of cake and normally a beer at the end.

I never use gels, drink supplements or any thing more than food and drink.