Nutrition & Fueling

Store-bought carb drinks add up fast once you’re training more than a few hours a week. A single serving of Precision Fuel PF60 or Maurten Drink Mix 160 runs $3 to $5, and if you’re doing back-to-back long rides or brick sessions, that adds up over a season. I started mixing my own a while

Nomio has shown up on a lot of start lines this year. Mads Pedersen credits it with his best 90-minute ride ever. Cole Hocker took a shot before a 5K world title. A concentrated broccoli sprout extract selling for around $28 for four doses is now a fixture in pro team fridges, and it is

Most century ride advice comes down to “eat something every 20 minutes” and a list of someone else’s favourite gels. That works until mile 60, when vague guidance turns into a bonk nobody saw coming. A century is long enough that small fuelling mistakes compound over the day: too little carbohydrate and the legs run

Pick up five gels and you will find at least three different carb ratios on the back. Maurten prints 1:0.8. Precision Fuel prints 2:1. SiS reformulated Beta Fuel a few years ago and now sells both numbers across its range. Each brand talks about its number like it settled an argument, which is odd, because

Nothing ends a good run faster than a sudden negotiation with your gut about whether you are going to make it home. It happens to beginners on their first long run and to experienced marathoners on race morning, which is the annoying part. Fitness does not protect you. Most runners assume it is random, decide

If your feed has been full of grainy race photos and an unfamiliar gel wrapper this summer, you’re not imagining it. Riders at the Tour de France, and the team behind Yomif Kejelcha’s world-record marathon debut, are both talking about the same ingredient. For decades, coaches blamed lactate for the burn in your legs and

You trained through the winter, locked in your pacing targets, built your nutrition plan, and have a finishing time in your head. Then race day arrives and it’s 30 degrees before 9am. None of the numbers you planned around work anymore. The effort feels wrong, your stomach is less cooperative than usual, and you’re burning

Gatorade has 250mg of sodium per bottle and 35g of sugar. Liquid IV has 530mg of sodium and 11g of sugar. Same category, completely different formula. If you’ve been training with a sports drink and wondering why you’re still cramping or fading late in a run, that gap is probably worth paying attention to. That’s

Walk into any running store and you’ll hear that cramping is a sodium problem. Scroll Reddit for five minutes and you’ll find someone telling you salt pills are a scam. Both sides sound certain, and both sides have numbers. If you’ve ever stood at the start line wondering whether you actually need that second electrolyte

You’ve watched enough race footage to know every pro is running with something tucked in their kit. The brands are everywhere: Maurten at Boston, GU at every aid station, Precision Fuel on the Tour. So you Google it, land on a wall of options, and realise nobody’s actually told you what makes one gel different