I prefer to drink water to sport drink when I ride, so I’ve always raced with gels (2 on bike, 1 during run). But I was thinking about body adaptation today…
Gels are hard to come by for everyday training, so I sometimes do sport drink before and after or sometimes a little during. Then I use gels for the race. Isn’t it optimal to train how I race? Since gels are expensive and you never know just when to take them in, I would think that training and racing with gatorade would be best…
One’s body can adapt to taking in the sports drink so come race time, there is no unknown coming into the body. This will also help from having to down a full 8oz of water on the run to wash down a gel.
Just as you don’t have to treat every training session as a race, you don’t have to hydrate and feed every training session the same as a race. You should make sure you are able to complete something similar in terms of length and exertion level to your race events with the same hydration and feed a few times, but for most other workouts feel free to experiment with different combinations and see what works for you.
realistically they are pretty much the same ingredients so as long as you have no problem absorbing the gels on the move I don’t think it’s a problem to only race with them. They do get expensive on a daily basis.
But what if I miss the “mark” with when I take gels during a race…say I forget or something…
This is another reason why sports drink might be better, since it is ingested constantly throughout the 40k vs 100 cals all at once whenever I down a gel.
Since most sports drinks are just simple sugar then I tend to take real food with me on long rides and water in a Camelback. Even powerbars have a lot of simple ingrediants in them, so I just take Pop-Tarts with me sometimes–they taste better and my body uses them as fuel at half, or less, the cost. A few weeks before my half-IMs I’ll start using perpetuem and that tends to get me through my long rides, though after five hours, perpetuem is not very tasty.
You can’t really simulate the stress of racing very well, so the best way to experiment with a fueling plan is in your B-races.
The distance also effects how much you need to take. For races under three hours I don’t take more than about 100-200 calories of gel dissolved in a water bottle. Under 1:30 and I don’t eat or drink anything. At Half-IM I have figured out how much perpetuem I can take during the ride and then I am done. My stomach can’t handle anything on the run without cramping.