The subject of nutrition splits into two: what to eat to support your training; and what to eat to provide fuel for energy used during an event. The two aren’t entirely unrelated but they are different, so they require a different thought process and a different approach.
Broadly speaking, optimal training nutrition means eating and drinking the right things at the right time in order to support your training, and to recover from and assimilate the effects of it, while building or maintaining lean body mass. Event nutrition means eating and drinking to fuel the effort you are making there and then. So because it’s more straightforward we’ll deal with event nutrition first.
Event nutrition
This starts the day before an event, when you should eat what you would normally eat, but cut down on the amount of protein and increase the portions of carbohydrates you consume. Ideally these should be complex carbohydrates such as brown rice or wholegrain pasta (for a better definition of complex carbohydrates read the section on glycaemic index [GI] rating under Carbohydrates). Try to eat cooked vegetables rather than salads, especially during your evening meal. Limit the amount of fruit you eat too, because fruits and raw salads can upset your stomach, especially if you are nervous about the event. And don’t eat a big meal late in the evening.
The big thing about pre-event-day food is it should be easy to digest, and it should top your energy supplies up to maximum ready for the next day. Cyclosportives tend to start early, which is why you shouldn’t eat late, because digesting a late meal can prevent you sleeping.
However, if it happens that you can’t eat until late then you must still eat. Cut protein down to a minimum, because it takes longer for your body to process; don’t eat salad and instead concentrate on eating complex carbs. A full tank of fuel is more important than sleep.
Breakfast on event day is a very important meal, especially if the event is a long one. You might be nervous and find it difficult to focus on eating. Your nerves might also make you not want to eat, and in extreme cases some people find the thought of food nauseating. You have to fight these feelings and eat. Cereals with milk, yoghurt or fromage frais, and bread or toast with various spreads are ideal. Eggs are good, but bacon, sausage and other things in a traditional English breakfast won’t help at all because they are too difficult to digest.
Pro tip_
‘One of the most popular pre-race meals that pro racers eat in the Tour de France is pasta, with olive oil, egg and a little bit of cheese grated on top of it.’ Nigel Mitchell, nutritionist for the British cycling team and Team Sky.
Ideally, eat two hours before the event begins so digestion is well underway before you start and you won’t have an uncomfortably full stomach when you get going. If you have to eat later than two hours before the start still do it, but cut the portion size.
You also need to go into your event well hydrated, so drink plenty of water during the day before, but not too much at one go. Also avoid things that work against good hydration. Coffee and tea have a diuretic effect, so limit yourself to two or three cups. Alcohol too dehydrates you, so while a glass or two of wine or beer will help you relax the evening before a sportive, any more than that will work against you. Avoid alcohol the night before if you aren’t used to it. Drink a glass of water as soon as you wake on the morning of the event, and keep sipping plain water until the start.
Energy bars versus real food
A lot of science has gone into modern sports energy bars. Brands such as High Five, CNP, ZipVit and SiS employ specialist sports nutritionists who totally understand the demands of long-distance cycling. Many of the companies work or have worked closely with Tour de France racers to develop, refine and even invent new products. In short they work, and they will improve your performance.
On the other hand cakes taste nice, and they will broadly meet your energy demands during a cyclosportive. If you can’t find an energy bar that you like or is palatable when exercising, cakes will do the job, only not as well. They provide a big burst of sugar, which can result in spikes and troughs of energy, whereas energy bars will drip-feed their energy into your system.
Your event food and drink should be prepared the night before and put in a fridge. Take it to the start in a small bag then transfer the contents to the pockets in your top and bike just before the start. If you keep it all in one bag there’s no danger of forgetting anything.
+ Two full-size bottles to carry on your bike, one with an energy drink diluted according to the manufacturer’s instructions, and the other containing plain water
+ Energy bars
+ Real food, such as cakes if you prefer them
+ Energy gels
+ Two sachets of your chosen energy drink powder
Distribute the bars, cakes and gels evenly around the pockets of your top. Don’t forget to put a mobile phone and some money in your pockets too, for emergencies.
Energy drinks, bars and gels often contain electrolyte minerals. These are crucial to your performance as they are responsible for the signals that keep your muscles going, and they help you stay alert and thinking clearly. Also, your muscles will cramp if you run short of electrolytes. The thing is though, the most important of these minerals when you are exercising – sodium and potassium – are lost through sweating. They need to be replaced, especially on hot days, and energy drinks and gels that contain them do so in amounts that are more speedily absorbed by your body.
+ The case for cake
You might argue that cakes would be better towards the end of an event, when you need energy fast, but energy gels are just as fast and they contain other vital nutrients, even performance enhancing ones like caffeine, and in a form where they are all easily and quickly absorbed. Gels are also very easy to use, you simply tear a portion of the top off and suck the contents down. No complicated unwrapping. And while I’m on about wrappers, you’ll be tired, hot and bothered sometimes in an event or during a tough training session, but don’t forget to put all wrappers back in your pocket and dispose of them in the proper way after the event or your training session is over.
To conclude the energy bars versus real-food debate, energy bars and gels do work best and you should choose them unless you really can’t stomach them. However, there is one exception, which is best summed up in the following pro tip.
Pro tip_
‘Keep something in your pocket that you really enjoy eating, and save it for when you go through a bad patch and need to restore your morale.’ Robert Millar – 1984 Tour de France ‘King of the Mountains’.
You need to fine-tune your own event nutrition strategy on your long rides, but here are some guidelines to start with:
+ Drink little and often, at least every 15–30 minutes depending on temperature.
+ Eat something solid after the first 30 minutes and repeat every 30 minutes after that.
+ Eat only half an energy bar at one go, unless the bars are small.
+ Start eating solid food, then progress to energy gels.
+ Drink a mouthful of plain water each time you eat.
+ Drink a mouthful of plain water after each energy gel.
+ Eat energy bars at the beginning of the event and gels towards the end.
+ If you feel your strength suddenly failing suck down a gel quickly, then eat something solid as soon as possible.
+ Some events offer energy drinks at aid stations, find out what it will be and try it out in training.
+ The sachets of energy drink you take with you should be mixed with water from an aid station as and when you need to replenish your energy-drink bottle.
+ Keep topping up your water-only bottle at aid stations.
+ Save something you really enjoy eating for when you need a bit of encouragement.
Hydration
Your body loses fluid through sweating and breathing. If you don’t replace that fluid you cannot carry on working at the same rate. A 2 per cent drop in body weight through fluid loss impairs temperature regulation. A 3 per cent loss means reduced muscular endurance, and at 4 per cent muscular strength starts dropping. Then as internal temperature continues to rise the body begins to shut down as a safety mechanism. It is imperative to keep drinking.
Pro tip_
‘I use energy drinks, bars and gels, because I trust them to provide what I need to race. But I eat bananas in a race too. They provide a good punch of energy, plus they are one of the best sources of potassium you can find.’ Dan Fleeman, pro racer and British national hill climb champion.
Your energy drink will meet some of these needs. In fact, it will meet more than just drinking plain water does because, due to the presence of other constituents such as carbs and electrolytes in it, it’s absorbed by the body quicker than water.
The plain water you carry with you is for drinking when you eat or when you take a gel. In those situations the food or gel speeds up the absorption of both. Some energy bars contain electrolytes, which as well as being important for the reason we’ve discussed above, help speed up absorption of fluid in your stomach.
But plain water is also useful in hot conditions in another way. Yes, you must match the amount you drink to sweat loss, but plain water can help reduce sweat loss. The body loses heat by using it to evaporate sweat from your skin’s surface. Pouring water over yourself conserves sweat by giving the body another liquid to evaporate and lose heat by doing it.
Pouring water over yourself in hot conditions also helps you maintain optimal power output. Your body loses heat by radiation as well as by evaporating sweat. Your blood carries heat to the skin’s surface where it radiates away. But the blood diverted to do that isn’t taking oxygen and nutrients to your working muscles, so your power output drops. Pouring water over yourself cools your body, so more blood goes to your muscles instead of your skin, taking nutrients and oxygen with it, so you can keep powering those pedals.
Afterwards
You might not feel like eating, but you probably will be thirsty. So after you finish the event drink a bottle of quite diluted energy drink, and make sure it’s one that has electrolyte minerals in it. Don’t gulp it down, take a few minutes to drink it.
As you get your breath back you need to think about getting some calories inside you to replace the energy you’ve just expended and to help your body recover. You need carbohydrates for energy, but the sooner you can get some protein for your body to use in repairing and rebuilding itself the better. But here’s some good news: if you can eat carbs and proteins together in the first 30 minutes or so after you exercise they speed up the absorption of each other. This used to involve trying to eat a protein and carb sandwich when you still might be feeling a bit queasy from the effort you’ve just made, but now there are recovery drinks that provide carbs and protein in a palatable, easily digested mix.
Carry on sipping water for the rest of the day until you start urinating and your urine is clear. That’s the sign that you are rehydrated. Don’t be tempted to drink too much beer and wine after your effort to celebrate, as that sets your rehydration back. If you do get carried away and drink too much, your body is in no state to cope with a hangover. You will regret it, I promise.
If you follow these guidelines, within a couple of hours you will be well on your way to recovering from even the hardest event. To continue your recovery you should eat a proper meal, with protein, carbs and fats in it, plus some mixed salad, veg and/or fruits to continue getting the building blocks of recovery as well as those essential vitamins and minerals inside you.
Cycling fact_
Cycling potential in its simplest form is expressed as an individual’s power-to-weight ratio.
Training nutrition
Unlike for event nutrition, for training nutrition your strategy needs to be fixed as much in the future as it is in the present. What you eat and drink should support your training and provide the building blocks to help you not only recover from each training session but also build on the stimulus your training provides.
You therefore need to fuel your training and your recovery with enough essential nutrients so that your fitness improves progressively, while at the same time not adding extra weight to your frame in the form of stored fat.
Lose the fat
Your body produces power to push the pedals of your bike around. The more power you produce the faster you go. But there are other sides to the speed equation, and one of the most important is weight. If you can reduce your weight and produce the same power you will also go faster. Weight in cycling refers to you and your bike, but where your bike might weigh 10kg, you weigh a great deal more, so the potential for losing weight from your body is much greater.
Training correctly with good nutritional support will increase the power you can produce, and training specifically for cyclosportives increases the power you can generate over a long period of time. Now, if you can lose some fat as well you will be able to ride faster, particularly uphill.
While a certain percentage of body fat is required to maintain health, the rest of your body fat is a long-term food store, which does nothing to power your bike. That’s the job of your muscles, organs and blood, as well as the bones your muscles are attached to. They all work together to power you along, but fat drags you back. You don’t need it as a food store, that’s a prehistoric adaptation dating from when we were hunter-gatherers and never knew when the next meal was coming from.
But losing body fat while maintaining muscle mass isn’t easy, and it isn’t something you can do quickly. Increasing the power side of your power-to-weight ratio brings bigger gains in speed anyway, so losing body fat isn’t something you should get too hung up on. However, it’s something to keep in the back of your mind, and it can be one of the side-effects of following the good day-to-day nutrition principles that support your training. It just requires a little manipulation, which will be explained later.
Food groups
This is just a quick look at the food groups that make up your diet, with a word or two about how they support your training. There are many books and internet sites that treat sports nutrition in a more in-depth way. What we’ve tried to do though is describe food groups and what constitutes a good diet for someone who want to take part in cyclosportive events. It’s only a grounding, from which you’ll be able to fine-tune your own diet as you gain more experience and more knowledge of what suits you.
Tip_ Some useful advice
Keep these points in the back of your mind:
+ Become food and body-weight conscious, without becoming obsessed.
+ Make a note in your training diary of the food you have eaten and your weight, and look for correlations with how your training is going, how you feel and how well you are riding.
But:
+ Don’t become food and weight obsessed.
+ Do become food, weight and performance conscious.
These are grains, root vegetables, fruit and milk sugars plus other sugars. Carbohydrates are broken down into glycogen, which breaks down further into glucose when your body requires fuel. Glycogen is a half-way house in the carbs-to-glucose cycle, and it’s stored in your muscles and liver. It’s converted to glucose when your body needs it, such as when you exercise. Your body’s glycogen stores are quite limited, which is why carbs are consumed on longer rides.
However, consumed carbohydrate that cannot be stored as glycogen is converted to fat, which is why you need to match your carbohydrate intake to the amount of exercise you do. Some carbohydrates are processed quickly, so their energy is available quickly. Some carbs are absorbed more slowly. The problem with the ones that are absorbed quickly is that if you don’t need the energy they provide almost immediately, and your glycogen stores are full, they will be stored as fat. Because the slower-absorbed carbs release their energy more slowly there’s more chance of your body needing it, so it won’t be stored as fat.
This contrast is magnified by the fact that quickly absorbed carbs will leave you feeling hungry sooner than slower-absorbed ones, so you end up eating more. There’s a handy measure called the glycaemic index (GI) for all foods. You can classify carbohydrates into low, medium or high GI by their GI value.
Broadly speaking you should restrict your carb intake to foods in the low-GI and to a lesser extent medium-G1 groups. The exception is when you are riding or immediately after exercise, when some high-G1 carbs will help fuel the work you are doing and will increase your rate of recovery from exercise because their quick absorption is beneficial then.
+ Examples of low, moderate and high glycaemia index foods
You should also try to match your carb intake to how much you exercise each day. Eat fewer carbs on light training days or rest days, and more before, during and after hard or long training sessions.
In the long term low GI carbs will help you lose fat while maintaining muscle. A recent research study of more than 900 adults and 800 children from eight European countries found that after six months, those on a low GI diet were on average 2kg lighter than those on rival diets with a high glycaemic index.
One very important fact to remember is that eating protein or fats with any carbohydrate lowers its GI number.
It’s also a good idea to spread your carb portions over the whole day. Eat less at one go but eat a snack between meals. This drip-feeds you with energy all day. Include a small amount of protein with each snack, as it’s also better to drip-feed proteins into your system throughout the day. This is because, like carbohydrates, your body needs only a given amount of protein at any one time.
+ Proteins
Proteins are broken down by digestion into amino acids, which your body uses to build new proteins in the form of body tissue such as muscles. Muscle fibres get damaged during training, but training sends messages that form little blueprints telling the body where to rebuild muscle fibres. This building won’t take place unless you eat adequate amounts of protein.
Opinions differ on what is an adequate amount, but for someone training for tough events such as cyclosportives, 1g protein per 1kg body weight is considered a minimum to aim at, with 1.5g per 1kg necessary on really hard training days.
Again, it is important to match your protein intake to the training you do, because protein that isn’t used in repairing or building body tissue will be stored as fat. This fact is another reason why your protein intake should be spread throughout the day.
Eating proteins with each meal is also useful because of their satiating effect. Proteins, particularly those found in eggs and dairy products, make you feel full and can help stave off hunger pangs. This is very helpful if you are trying to lose weight.
Good protein sources for athletes are lean meat, low-fat dairy produce, fish, eggs, pulses, beans and nuts.
+ Fats
First of all don’t be afraid of fats. Your body uses fat for fuel, and it needs certain fats to function. Some fats even make you healthier. The thing to be aware of is the distinction between good fats and bad fats. Bad fats are generally solid at room temperature. So they are the fats you see on meat, or in cheese and other dairy products. Good fats are liquid at room temperature, like olive oil.
Eating too much bad fat can cause health problems, like raising the levels of the sort of cholesterol (we’ll call it ‘bad cholesterol’) in your blood that coats your blood vessels and can cause high blood pressure. Good fats though raise the levels of ‘good cholesterol’ in your blood, which mitigates against the effects of bad cholesterol. Exercise helps do that as well, which makes exercising and avoiding bad fats a double healthy-lifestyle hit.
But while it’s a good idea to cut the amount of bad fats you eat, most people can increase the amount of good fats they eat with health benefits. Anyone taking part in strenuous exercise will also benefit from doing this, as good fats reduce inflammation in the body, helping to speed recovery. There’s even some evidence that says certain fats, those in fish oils, help preserve muscle mass.
One thing that should be avoided by everyone is hydrogenated fat or oil, as it increases bad cholesterol. Hydrogenation is a process used in food production, so you won’t find any hydrogenated substances in fresh food. However, this is not a warning against processed foods, because many processed food don’t contain hydrogenated fats. Just read the labels.
Sources of good fats_
+ Fatty fish such as tuna and salmon
+ Nut and seed oils
+ Nuts and seeds
+ Olive oil
+ Vitamins, minerals and micro-nutrients
Whole books have been written on this subject. Suffice it to say that vitamins, minerals and some micro-nutrients play vital roles in your physiology. Some, such as iron and B vitamins, are really important to anyone training for an endurance sport or challenge. However, supplements, with one or two exceptions described in chapter 7 (Going Further), should be taken only on medical advice where a deficiency has been diagnosed.
The best way to ensure you get adequate supplies of these essential nutrients is to eat a wide variety of fresh food. Different nutrients are found in all the main food groups but in different foods, everything from meat to leafy vegetables and fruit. That’s why a varied diet is essential. Processing, and to a certain extent cooking, destroys some of these substances, which is why fresh foods are better.
The cyclosportive diet
This doesn’t need to vary much from a general healthy diet:
+ Try to eat from each food group, that’s carbs, protein and fat, at each meal.
+ Include lean meat, white fish and dairy at least once each every week.
+ Include oily fish, such as tuna, salmon and mackerel, at least once a week.
+ Try to eat five portions of fruit and/or veg a day, and more if you can. A portion is not one slice of orange by the way, it’s the whole orange!
+ Include good fat food sources at least daily.
+ Match your carbohydrate and protein intake to the amount of training or work you do.
One way of ensuring you get a good mix of nutrients is to try to have a lot of different coloured foods on each plate you eat. Different coloured fruit and veg in particular contain different vitamins and minerals.
Don’t under-fuel on days when you don’t exercise. The pace of modern life is tough, and stress consumes calories and nutrients. Look after yourself. Cut portion sizes on non-exercise days but never miss a meal.
Never train on an empty stomach. To get the most from any training session you have to fuel it, otherwise you won’t be able to train with enough intensity to stimulate your body into adapting and getting better. Even if you exercise early in the morning, eat something before the session. Your normal breakfast will fuel midmorning training. And one of the mid-morning or afternoon snacks listed will help fuel a late afternoon or evening training session.
Consume a bottle of water during easy training sessions of one hour or less. Take an energy drink on harder sessions of less than an hour, and use energy drinks, bars, gels or anything else you like for longer rides. Always take one gel on every ride that is just there for emergencies if you run out of fuel, which in cycling slang is called ‘bonking’. No sniggering – the term comes from the fact that the sensations felt when you run out of fuel on a bike ride happen so suddenly that it’s like being hit over the head with a hammer, hence bonk!
Finally, eat five smaller meals instead of three big ones. A typical day’s menu for someone taking part in cyclosportives should look like this:
+ Breakfast
Low-fat milk with natural muesli or porridge, wholegrain bread with low-fat cheese, an orange.
+ Mid-morning snack
Oatcakes spread with peanut butter.
+ Lunch
Wholegrain bread with lean meat or chicken, tuna steak in tomato sauce with vegetables.
+ Mid-afternoon snack
Protein flapjack.
+ Dinner
Stir-fried turkey with vegetables and wholegrain pasta; avocado salad with feta cheese and sugar peas.
Tools of the trade
That’s your diet sorted out. You’ve got the tools to progress in sportive events now. You can carry on enjoying them, trying new events in new areas, or even in different countries. Cyclosportive is a great way of seeing the world and meeting like-minded people.
The only thing left to help you on your way is to talk a bit about how to look after your bike and do some simple jobs on it, which we’ve left until the last chapter so it’s always easy to find. Before that though there’s a chapter for more experienced sportivers and for those who want to get competitive.
What Tour de France racers eat and drink: Nigel Mitchell
Every day for three weeks, racers in Tour de France face what you will face in a major cyclosportive, so knowing their nutrition strategy gives you something to base yours on. In this case study, British Cycling’s nutritionist, and nutrition advisor to Team Sky, Nigel Mitchell takes you through the menu for a Team Sky rider during one day in the Tour de France.
‘A good hydration plan is the foundation of getting through a race like the Tour, where it’s likely that the riders will race in temperatures of 20-30 degrees every day. In that situation, if hydration is good, then everything else fits into place.
Our riders start the day with a visit to the team doctor to discuss how they are feeling, and to catch up with any injury or other problems he might be treating them for. He might give them a check over and while they are with him they pick up a dilute fruit drink and start sipping it.
The fruit doesn’t play a specific nutrition role, it’s just to make the drink taste nice, which means the riders are more likely to drink the water. If they drink early it gets them in the habit of sipping away all day.
Next is breakfast, and this is where hydration steps up a bit with a fruit juice mix that’s full of electrolytes, particularly potassium which plays an important role in the body and is lost easily through sweating.
They eat cereals, some bread and pasta with some protein like eggs or cheese. Not meat because it’s more difficult to digest. Protein is very important for Tour riders, and for anyone in heavy training, as it provides the building blocks for your body to adapt to training. Protein can be taken in the form of whey powders, but this is only a supplement. With every aspect of nutrition the first line should always be good food sources. Maximise those, and just use supplements as they are intended – for supplementation. A safety net if you like.
Between breakfast and the stage start we give the riders 1.5 litres of juice flavoured water and encourage them to keep sipping so they drink at least half of it. One of the key problems with the big stage races is that they are often run at the height of summer. Heat is a problem, and therefore electrolyte loss is significant. We add a product called Gatorlyte to this drink, which is a powder that contains electrolytes.
Once the stage starts, the riders drink one bottle of water and one of sports drink, a bottle being the standard race size, per hour if it’s hot. They also take gels, which contain electrolytes as well as plenty of calories. For food they eat sports bars plus cooked rice cake. Cooked rice is great race food because it contains lots of easily digested and available carbohydrate, and lots of water.
After the stage they get a protein shake, which helps meet fluid needs and starts getting protein into them to help them recover. If we suspect they might be dehydrated we’ve got another electrolyte drink. We’ve used that in races where the temperature is 40 degrees every day, and everyone was OK.
They might eat an energy bar or two while they are waiting, but the evening meal is the main refuelling opportunity. They eat easily digested pasta, good quality protein sources like fat-free meat, or fish with salad or vegetables. I like to liquidise salad and veg so as not to overload their gut with fibre. They eat plenty, at least three courses including a desert, plus there’s fruit and protein bars available all the time.’
