Badlands is not a race that forgives improvisation. Eight hundred kilometres across southern Spain, roughly 16,000 metres of climbing, no support crew, no marked route beyond a GPS track. The riders who finish — and a significant proportion do not — are the ones with a plan that survives contact with 60-plus hours of heat, dust, and compounding fatigue.
The fuelling problem at Badlands is not just caloric. It is logistical, physiological, and psychological simultaneously. You are trying to sustain power output, preserve gut function, manage sleep debt, and make decisions with a brain that is increasingly unreliable. Getting the nutrition right does not guarantee a finish, but getting it wrong almost always ends one.
This breakdown draws on How a Pro's Insane Fuel Plan Almost Won Badlands on the Roadman Cycling Podcast, which featured a Badlands finisher walking through their exact strategy. The numbers are real. The adjustments are real. The mistakes are real too.
The calorie math for 800km
Start with expenditure. A 70kg rider averaging 180 watts across the rolling terrain of Badlands burns approximately 648 kcal per hour. At a finishing time of 65 hours of total elapsed time and roughly 55 hours of actual riding, that is just under 36,000 kcal of gross expenditure. Factor in the body's mechanical efficiency (approximately 23–25%) and you arrive at a net metabolic cost in the range of 17,000–20,000 kcal depending on body mass and pace.
No rider can consume that volume of food in motion. The practical ceiling for caloric intake during sustained cycling is around 300–360 kcal per hour from carbohydrates alone — roughly 75–90g/hr — with additional contributions from fat oxidation, which becomes increasingly relevant as intensity drops overnight. This is not a gap you close through eating more. It is a deficit you manage through pre-race nutrition loading and strategic fat metabolism.
The targeting approach used by the podcast guest was simple arithmetic. Estimate riding hours. Multiply by 70g of carbohydrate per hour as a conservative baseline. Convert to calories (70g × 4 kcal = 280 kcal/hr from carbs), then layer in fat-based calories from nuts, cheese, and savoury foods at checkpoints to bring total intake closer to 350–380 kcal/hr during eating windows. Over 55 riding hours, that targets roughly 19,000–21,000 kcal consumed. The deficit is real but survivable because the body is not running on fuel alone — it is running on pre-loaded glycogen, trained fat oxidation, and a pacing strategy designed to keep intensity honest.
If you want to model your own numbers before committing to a race plan, the fuelling calculator on this site handles multi-day events and accounts for body weight, expected power output, and race duration.
Hourly fuelling targets
The plan was not a flat 70g/hr across the entire race. Intensity varies considerably across Badlands — steep technical climbs followed by fast descents, hot afternoon sections through the Tabernas desert, and cool overnight sectors where the temptation is to back off the calories because the effort feels easier.
The podcast guest divided the race into three phases with distinct fuelling targets.
Phase one covered hours 0–24. Intensity is highest, heat stress is significant from hour six onward, and gut function is still reliable. Target: 80–90g of carbohydrate per hour, using a 2:1 glucose-to-fructose mix in drink format plus gels when liquid intake was already sufficient. Asker Jeukendrup's research on multiple transportable carbohydrates is the scientific foundation here — when glucose and fructose use separate intestinal transporters, oxidation rates can reach 90g/hr without the GI distress that would occur with glucose alone at those quantities.
Phase two covered hours 24–48. Fatigue accumulates, appetite becomes unpredictable, and gut sensitivity increases. Target: 60–75g/hr during movement, supplemented by solid food at every checkpoint stop. Savoury options were prioritised to counter flavour fatigue — a phenomenon that is debilitating in multi-day events. Sweet gel after sweet gel stops working, not because of any physiological change, but because the sensory system simply refuses to cooperate.
Phase three covered hours 48 to finish. Pace slows, power drops, and fat oxidation covers a larger percentage of energy demand. Target: 50–60g/hr. Trying to maintain 80–90g/hr in this phase typically causes gut problems without a commensurate performance benefit, because the effort level no longer demands it.
When solid food vs liquid
The default advice for ultra-distance events is "eat real food." The practical reality is more nuanced. Liquid carbohydrates are faster to consume, require no chewing, and impose less gastric load during high-intensity efforts. Solid food provides satiety, flavour variety, and in the case of savoury options, sodium that would otherwise require deliberate supplementation.
The rule used through the first 24 hours of Badlands: if riding intensity is above approximately 65% of FTP, liquid carbohydrates and gels only. Below that threshold — descents, flat sections, rolling terrain where breathing allows chewing — solid food is acceptable.
After the 30-hour mark, the rule relaxed. Gut motility slows during prolonged exercise, which paradoxically makes solid food easier to tolerate at lower intensities than it was early in the race. Rice cakes, boiled potatoes with salt, bread and cheese at village stops — these became the primary food source through the second night. Checkpoint stops were used for hot food where available, typically 15–25 minutes off the bike.
One specific observation from the podcast guest: savoury food at 03:00 is categorically more appealing than another gel. Planning checkpoint stops around hot savoury options is not a comfort measure — it is a compliance strategy. If the food is tolerable, the rider eats. If it is not, they skip calories they cannot afford to skip.
The sleep-nutrition interaction
Sleep deprivation does not just impair cognition and decision-making — it directly degrades the body's ability to process carbohydrates. Insulin sensitivity decreases measurably after one night of poor sleep. The practical implication for a 65-hour race is that the carbohydrate you consume in hours 30–50 is less efficiently converted to usable energy than the same carbohydrate consumed in hours 1–20.
This is why the sleep strategy at Badlands is also a nutrition strategy. The podcast guest took 90 minutes of sleep in a single block during the second night, timed deliberately between 03:00 and 04:30 — the period that aligns with the body's circadian trough. That 90 minutes provided one full sleep cycle, including slow-wave sleep, which is the stage most associated with metabolic recovery and hormonal restoration.
Immediately before sleeping, the guest consumed approximately 40g of carbohydrate — not enough to cause GI discomfort, but enough to prevent hypoglycaemia during the rest period and to support the mild anabolic processes that slow-wave sleep facilitates. On waking, a further 60g of carbohydrate was consumed before any significant physical effort resumed. This creates a deliberate re-fuelling window that restores blood glucose before the rider's next hard push.
Skipping sleep to save time is almost always counterproductive beyond the 48-hour mark. The cognitive impairment from sustained wakefulness leads to navigational errors, pacing mistakes, and reduced willingness to eat — each of which costs more time than the sleep would have taken.
Real-time adjustments when the plan breaks
Every ultra-distance plan breaks. The question is not whether adjustments are needed but whether the rider has a framework for making them under duress.
Three things broke in the podcast guest's account: gut function around hour 36, a mechanical stop that disrupted the planned checkpoint timing, and a full loss of appetite during hour 48 that lasted approximately three hours.
The gut issue at hour 36 was managed by dropping carbohydrate intake to 40g/hr for 90 minutes, switching exclusively to liquid calories with no gel or solid food, and increasing water intake to dilute gut concentration. Concentration of carbohydrate solution in the gut is a primary driver of GI distress at high intake rates. Diluting while temporarily reducing total intake brought function back without forcing a complete stop.
The mechanical stop created a 40-minute unplanned rest. The guest used it deliberately — ate a full solid meal, elevated legs, and treated it as an enforced checkpoint rather than a crisis. The calories consumed during that stop covered the hour that followed and reduced the pressure to eat at the next planned window.
The appetite loss at hour 48 is the most instructive episode. Forcing food when the gut refuses is rarely effective and often makes things worse. The approach: drop to 30–40g/hr from liquid sources only, accept a temporary caloric deficit, and wait for appetite to return. It did, at around hour 51. The deficit from three hours at reduced intake is real but recoverable. Causing a gut shutdown by forcing feeding is not.
The broader framework: when things break, the priority order is gut function first, caloric adequacy second, planned targets third. A rider with functioning GI tract and reduced calories will outperform a rider with GI shutdown every time.
For anyone building a structured approach to ultra-distance racing, the Badlands training plan on this site includes a periodised gut-training protocol across the 20 weeks before the race.
Lessons for shorter events
Most people reading this are not planning to ride Badlands. But the principles scale cleanly to events of four to twelve hours, which is where the majority of serious amateur cyclists spend their race calendar.
The most transferable lesson is carbohydrate periodisation within a single event. The instinct at hour one of a sportive is to eat conservatively because you feel good. The instinct at hour six is to eat more because you feel terrible. Both instincts are wrong. Front-loading carbohydrate intake in the first 90 minutes, when gut function is optimal and glycogen stores are being drawn down fastest, produces measurably better outcomes than eating reactively. The principle is simple: energy managed well in the early hours of hard events preserves the capacity to perform in the final third, where races are decided.
The gut training principle is non-negotiable at any distance. Consuming 90g/hr is a trainable adaptation. Attempting it on race day without progressive gut loading in training will cause problems that training alone could have prevented. Start at 60g/hr in long training rides, increase by 10g/hr every two to three weeks, and use the actual race nutrition products — not substitutes — during the adaptation period.
Finally, the savoury food insight applies directly to events over five hours. Flavour fatigue is real from around hour four onward. Packing one or two savoury options alongside standard race nutrition is not a luxury. It is a compliance mechanism that keeps total intake where it needs to be in the back half of long efforts.
If you want to build a personalised fuelling plan for your A-race — ultra or otherwise — NDY coaching at Roadman works through each of the five pillars including race-day nutrition as a structured component, not an afterthought. The application is where the conversation starts. The principles from Badlands apply whether the event is 65 hours or six.
Got a specific question — your own per-hour target during a heat-affected ultra, how to eat when sleep-deprived, what to pack for a multi-day audax? Ask Roadman for an answer drawn from the actual conversations with Asker Jeukendrup, Dr. David Dunne, and the rest of the nutrition guests on the podcast. Cross-link the in-ride nutrition guide and the carbs-per-hour breakdown for the underlying frameworks.