Rob,

Do you ever try taking in less calories and seeing if that makes any difference? Personally, I perform very close to the same with 225-475 cals per hour. It just does not make much difference. Did Texas with 240 an hour on the bike and PR'd the run, for example. Had good days in racing and training with WAY different intakes.

Hey Will - mainly for taste, and also the ginger helps settle the stomach a bit. It also gives me an extra 150 calories or so. It doesn't help me to absorb more. I got to that high intake purely by accident. Back in 2012 I was using EFS liquid shot in races. That's 400 calories in a bottle, but one bottle per hour would cause some bloating for me, so I would aim for 4 bottles over 5 hours. I wanted to use it in training too, but it was very expensive to do that with the actual EFS, so I bought some maltodextrin powder and fructose powder to make my own "simulated EFS liquid shot". I just mixed it in a 2:1 ratio and then went out on a training ride. It worked quite well, but when I got back I realized I'd make a calculation error, and taken in 600 calories on my 90 minute ride. And I felt just fine! I was building up to IM Los Cabos 2013, so I started experimenting with 500-600 per hour during my race sims (120 mile bike followed by 8-10 mile run), and everything went fine. So at IM Los Cabos 2013 I dialed it back a little because it was hot. I think about 450 per hour if I recall, and I had a great race. The success seems to be the inclusion of both malto and fructose (they have different transport systems) and then the addition of gummy worms seems to help too (for me anyway). If I try maltodextrin alone, or fructose alone, I cannot take in that much. Recently I have also been concentrating my Glukos energy powder (commercial drink mix) and that seems to work well too (probably because it's so simple without complicated ingredients)