Now please don’t be put off by these long words, basically it’s just a fancy way of saying food and drink, but it makes me sound really clever. If you have any designs on doing any long distance cycling events, then nutrition and hydration will be important aspects of your training and event preparation. The bottom line is that if you don’t eat and drink properly during training or during the event, your performance will suffer. Even on shorter rides of around 30 or 40 miles you risk ‘the bonk’ if you are not adequately prepared.
Now, here’s some technical stuff, so sit up at the back and pay attention. Cyclists typically burn around 400 to 700 calories per hour, depending on the ride intensity. So if you do a 100 mile ride in, say, 6 hours at 16.5mph, you will probably burn between 3500 and 4500 calories. This is around 2 days worth of food for normal people. The body has enough fuel, in the form of carbohydrate, to go for between 1½ to 2½ hours of cycling. This means that your body will need to be refuelled with 2500 to 3000 calories to get you to the end of the ride. Typically energy drinks provide around 200 calories per 500ml, bananas (150 calories), jam sandwiches (300 calories for 2 rounds), cake (200 calories per slice), dried fruit (200 calories per 100g) or jelly babies (300 calories per 100g). So you can see that this is a lot of eating a drinking that you will need to do on the ride.
So here’s the answer. This has been one of my personal secret weapons that I don’t usually divulge, but if you have read Cycling Weekly recently then the gaff has been blown. Long distance cycling relies on the body’s ability to use fat as a fuel. This is because muscle glycogen, which is the body’s store of carbohydrate, is generally used up in the first 1½ to 2½ hours of exercise. From that point on, to continue using carbohydrate as a fuel, it must be taken in the form of food or drink. The body’s store of fat, on the other hand, could theoretically fuel exercise for a number of days, and I’m not just talking about myself! Unfortunately fat can only be mobilised at lower effort intensities. But the body can be trained to burn fat in a more efficient way, so saving the carbs for when you really need them. Long slow rides will mobilise fat as a fuel more effectively. Professional riders carefully control their diet using periods of low carb, higher fat intake so that they train with low muscle glycogen to force increased fat usage, but this might be a bit extreme for club cyclists. However, training without carbs could help and it’s a method that I have used. Generally for rides up to 1 hour I only ever take water. For rides up to 2 hours I will use only water but take a few energy gels, just in case. For rides over 2 hours I will take a banana and water. Over 3 hours and I will take an energy drink. Long slow rides in the morning after a light breakfast are good fat burning rides. Remember to use your heart rate monitor to stay within the zone.
So fat can be fit after all.
Happy cycling
The Coach
Questions to the Coach
Q. Dear Coach , I’m useless at cycling up hills, can you help (from Jean Ne Mont Pas)
A. Well Jean (that’s a strange name, I don’t think you’re from Tenby are you). It sounds to me like you have terminal hill climb syndrome (THCS). My advice is to either give up cycling, ‘cos it sounds like you’re a bit of a wuss, or move to Kilgetty and cycle between Kilgetty and Broadmoor, which is flat.
