The weekly long ride is the backbone of cycling fitness. Here's how to fuel it from breakfast to recovery.
The weekly long ride is the backbone of cycling fitness. Here's how to fuel it from breakfast to recovery.
For most amateur cyclists, the long weekend ride is the cornerstone of their week: the session that builds endurance, tests the legs and, quite often, exposes any weaknesses in their fuelling. Get the nutrition right and a long ride is a joy that leaves you tired but satisfied. Get it wrong and it becomes a survival exercise home.
Fuelling a long ride well is a matter of planning across the whole day, not just what you stuff in your jersey pocket. Here is a complete approach, from breakfast to recovery.
A long ride begins with what you eat beforehand. A carbohydrate-rich breakfast a few hours before you set off tops up your glycogen stores and sets you up for the hours ahead. Favour familiar, easy-to-digest foods, and give yourself enough time to digest before you are working hard.
Arriving at the start of a long ride under-fuelled is a poor idea, because you spend the whole ride chasing an energy deficit you created before you turned a pedal. Breakfast is the foundation everything else builds on.
For a long ride, work out roughly how much carbohydrate you will need per hour and make sure you carry enough to hit it. A target in the region of 60 to 90 grams an hour suits most riders on long efforts, adjusted to your tolerance and the ride's intensity.
The bike makes carrying fuel easy, so there is no excuse for running short. Take a mix of an energy drink in your bottles plus gels or chews, so you have both a steady base and convenient top-ups.
The golden rule of the long ride is to fuel from the start and keep it steady, rather than waiting until you feel your energy dip. By the time you feel low, you are already behind, and clawing back a deficit mid-ride is far harder than staying ahead of it.
A simple habit is to take something at regular intervals, checking you are on track with your hourly target. Consistency here is what keeps your legs and your mood intact through the closing hours.
On a genuinely long ride, the higher carbohydrate intakes you need are exactly what dual-source products are designed for. Combining maltodextrin and fructose, absorbed through two different routes, they let you take on more carbohydrate with less gut trouble, which is the science behind BETA Fuel.
This matters because the longer you ride, the more your gut is asked to do, and single-source fuel alone can hit an absorption ceiling. Dual-source fuel raises that ceiling and keeps you supplied.
Long rides, especially in warmer weather, bring real fluid and sodium losses. Drink regularly, matched to the conditions and your sweat rate, and include electrolytes, particularly sodium, using products like HYDRO tablets to make it manageable.
Good hydration is not separate from fuelling; a dehydrated, struggling gut absorbs carbohydrate poorly. Keeping your fluid and sodium on track protects your fuelling as well as your comfort.
The ride is not finished when you stop pedalling. In the first 30 to 60 minutes, take on carbohydrate and protein to refill glycogen and support repair, which a recovery drink such as REGO Recovery makes easy when your appetite has not returned.
Then rehydrate and continue with normal meals through the day. Good recovery from your long ride protects the training you can do next, which is the entire point of building the miles in the first place.