The riders who finish a four-, six-, or eight-hour event with their best legs of the day did the same thing. They fuelled on a clock. The riders who collapsed in hour four did not. Most amateur fuelling failures are not about what the rider ate — most riders know which foods work for them. The failures are about when. The timing is what falls apart, and the timing is what produces the bonking that most amateurs blame on fitness.
This is the 24-hour race-day fuelling timeline we run with Not Done Yet coaching members for events between four and eight hours long. Calibrate the absolute amounts to your body weight; the structure is the same.
T-minus 24 hours: the day before
The day before is part of race-week loading, not a separate problem. Carbohydrate is at 8-10g/kg/day for the final 48 hours, weighted toward low-fibre, easily-digested sources. White rice, white pasta, cereal, fruit. The aim is full glycogen at the start line, and 600-750g of carbohydrate (for a 75kg rider) demands low-fibre delivery if the gut is to handle it without distress.
Two practical points.
Drink water steadily through the day. Glycogen storage binds 3-4g of water per gram of carbohydrate stored, and the body needs the fluid available to do the loading. Most riders under-drink the day before because they're worried about overnight bathroom trips. Front-load the day's fluid into the first 12 waking hours; ease off after dinner.
Dinner the night before. A 100-150g carbohydrate meal three to four hours before bed, from foods you've eaten the night before a hard ride at least twice in training. White rice with chicken and vegetables, pasta with a simple tomato sauce, a baked potato with a small piece of fish. Boring beats novel.
What not to do. Do not introduce a new food the night before the event. Do not order from a restaurant whose cooking you don't know. Do not "carb up" to the point of GI discomfort — the loading happened across the previous 48 hours. The dinner is a maintenance feed, not a hero meal.
T-minus 12 hours: bedtime
Sleep is part of fuelling, not separate from it. Cortisol responses to under-sleep blunt the carbohydrate-storage and protein-recovery the body needs across the night. Aim for 8 hours in bed. The pre-race night will feel light and broken for most riders — that is normal. The two nights before are more important than the night before, and a good sleep three nights out partially compensates for race-night anxiety.
Avoid alcohol the night before. The mechanism is well-documented: REM-sleep suppression, overnight HRV reduction, and slight dehydration the morning of. The two-drink "I'll relax better" rationalisation is the single most reliable way to shave 3-5% off race-day power output.
A small slow-digesting protein feed before bed — Greek yoghurt, cottage cheese — supports overnight muscle recovery without disrupting sleep. The casein-rich profile keeps amino acid availability up through the night.
T-minus 4 hours: race morning starts
Wake up. Coffee or tea. Bathroom routine.
The first 30 minutes after waking are not the time to eat — the body is not ready for a major carbohydrate load straight out of bed. A small carbohydrate (a banana, a piece of toast) plus the morning caffeine is enough to start the metabolic engine running. The main meal arrives shortly.
T-minus 3 to 3.5 hours: the pre-race meal
The structural rule: 1.5-2g of carbohydrate per kg of body weight, three to three-and-a-half hours before the start gun. For a 75kg rider, that's 110-150g of carbohydrate. The window is timed so the food is fully digested and out of the gut by start time.
Worked examples that get this right:
- Porridge with banana and honey. 70g of oats (45g carbs) cooked in skim milk (15g carbs), topped with one banana (25g carbs) and a tablespoon of honey (15g carbs). 100g total carbs, 9g protein, easy to eat at 6am.
- Two slices of white toast with jam, plus a bowl of cereal. 60g of cornflakes with skim milk (50g carbs) plus two slices of white toast with strawberry jam (60g carbs). 110g total carbs.
- The "rice pudding plus banana" model. 200g of cooked rice pudding (50g carbs) plus banana (25g carbs) plus a fruit smoothie (40g carbs).
A small protein component — a hard-boiled egg, a scoop of whey in a smoothie, a spoonful of nut butter on the toast — slows the glucose response slightly and reduces the risk of a reactive blood-sugar drop in the warm-up. Not heroic; just present.
What works for one rider may not for another. The pre-race meal is the part of the timeline you absolutely must rehearse in training before the event — at least three times, on the morning of a long ride that resembles the event in duration and intensity.
T-minus 60 to 90 minutes: caffeine + top-up
Caffeine is the most evidence-backed legal performance aid available to a cyclist. The well-replicated dose is 3-6mg per kg of body weight, taken 45-60 minutes before the start. For a 75kg rider, that's 225-450mg — roughly two to four shots of espresso, or two cans of energy drink, or one strong gel-caffeine combination.
Two practical notes.
Calibrate the dose in training first. Some riders tolerate 6mg/kg fine; some have anxiety or GI symptoms above 4mg/kg. The race is not the day to find out where you sit on that distribution.
Daily coffee drinkers get less benefit per dose than non-drinkers, by perhaps 20-30%. Either accept the smaller benefit or cut caffeine for 5-7 days before the event to restore sensitivity. Most amateurs find the second option's withdrawal headaches not worth the marginal gain; stick with what your gut knows.
In the same window, take a small carbohydrate top-up: 30-40g of carbs in an easily-digested form. A banana, a single energy bar, half a bottle of sports drink. The aim is to top up blood glucose without putting solid food in the gut at start time.
T-minus 20 minutes: warm-up
The warm-up is not part of fuelling per se, but the fuelling decisions in the warm-up window matter.
Sip 200-300ml of water with electrolytes during the warm-up. No solid food. If you take pre-race gels, take one in the final 10 minutes of the warm-up — this is the cleanest delivery time, and the carbohydrate is in the bloodstream by the gun.
The warm-up itself depends on the event. A flat sportive needs 15-20 minutes of progressive easy riding. A hilly event with an early climb in the first 30 minutes needs a longer 25-35 minute warm-up that includes 2-3 brief threshold-or-above pushes — you do not want the first hard effort of the day to be the first 30-second sprint of the early climb.
T-zero: start
Start moderate. The single most reliable amateur mistake is to ride the first hour 5-8% over sustainable pace because adrenaline is high. Power steady, RPE controlled, eating from the first 20 minutes — not from the first hour, the first 20 minutes.
T+1 to T+5+: in-event fuelling
The in-ride fuelling target: 90-120g of carbohydrate per hour, from the first hour, in a glucose-fructose mix in roughly a 2:1 ratio.
The reason for the mix is mechanical. Glucose absorbs through one intestinal transporter (SGLT1), which saturates at roughly 60g/hour. Fructose absorbs through a different transporter (GLUT5). Combining the two clears the single-transporter ceiling and lets the gut deliver 90-120g/hour without causing the GI distress that 90g of pure glucose would.
Modern sports nutrition products are formulated to this ratio by default. Maurten, Science in Sport's Beta Fuel, Precision Hydration, and most major energy drinks now use the glucose-fructose combination. Read the label; if it's pure glucose or pure maltodextrin, it caps your delivery rate at 60g/hour and you'll struggle to fuel a 5+ hour event.
The cadence. A gel every 25-30 minutes, or a bottle of carbohydrate drink every 30-45 minutes, or a real-food alternative (banana, rice cake, dried fruit) at the same cadence. Choose the source that your gut handles; the timing is what matters.
Hydration. Sweat rate varies wildly. The working starting point is 500-750ml of fluid per hour, with sodium at 500-800mg per litre for most riders, higher for heavy sweaters or hot conditions. Calibrate from at least three long training rides where you weigh yourself before and after.
Hour 4 onwards. This is where amateur fuelling typically falls apart. The rider has been eating gels for three hours and the gut is rebelling. Switch to a savoury or real-food source for the second half of the event — rice cakes with a little salt, boiled potatoes, a small sandwich, salted nuts. The flavour change matters more than the carbohydrate type.
The bonk-proofing rule. If you arrive at hour four with an empty bottle and forty grams of carbs in the last hour, you are already too far behind to recover. The fuelling has to be ahead of the demand from the start.
T+0 to T+60 (post-finish): the recovery feed
Within 60 minutes of finishing: 1.0-1.2g of carbohydrate per kg of body weight plus 20-30g of protein. For a 75kg rider, that's 75-90g of carbohydrate plus 25g of protein. A 4:1 carb-to-protein ratio in liquid form is the most-used delivery — a recovery shake, a protein-plus-carb smoothie, or two tall glasses of chocolate milk if nothing else is to hand.
The first 60 minutes is when glycogen storage rates are highest, and the protein begins the muscle-recovery process before the inflammation peaks. Skip this window and the next 48 hours of recovery is meaningfully worse.
After the recovery feed, return to a normal meal within two hours. Hold daily protein at 1.6-2.0g/kg through the next 48 hours. Sleep is the final piece — the night after a hard event is when the body does the bulk of the connective-tissue and muscle repair, and aiming for an extra hour in bed for the next two nights is the cheapest recovery intervention available.
What to rehearse
Three things you must practise before race day:
The pre-race meal. At least three times, on the morning of a long training ride that resembles the event. The gut needs to know the food.
The in-ride cadence. At a 90-120g/hour rate, on long training rides. The gut tolerance is trainable; six weeks of progressive in-ride fuelling lets the rider tolerate 100g/hour reliably.
The recovery feed. After every long ride, in the first 60 minutes. Make it a default behaviour, not a race-day-only practice.
Race-day fuelling is not complicated. It is timed. The riders who execute the timeline finish strong. The riders who treat it as a guideline find out in hour four why the timing matters.
The work is in the file. The result is in the bottle.