I have bonked in a race exactly once and I promised myself it would never happen again. It was a hundred-mile sportive, I had eaten normally the day before — which is to say, not enough — and by mile seventy I was seeing stars and my power was down thirty percent from where it should have been. That was not a fitness problem. It was a fuel problem. And the fix was embarrassingly simple once I understood the science.
Your body stores glycogen in your muscles and liver. When those stores are full, you have enough fuel for about ninety minutes to two hours of hard riding before you need to rely entirely on what you eat during the event. The difference between starting a race with full glycogen stores and starting with seventy percent is the difference between having a reserve at kilometre one hundred and twenty and having nothing.
The old approach to carb loading was a week-long protocol where you depleted your glycogen with hard training and low carbs for three days, then overcompensated with high carbs for the next three. It worked, but it was miserable. You felt terrible during the depletion phase, your training suffered, and the rebound loading often caused bloating and gut problems.
The modern protocol is simpler. Forty-eight hours of elevated carbohydrate intake. Eight to twelve grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight per day. For a seventy-five-kilo rider, that is somewhere between six hundred and nine hundred grams of carbs per day. That sounds enormous, and it is. You will feel stuffed. But you are not eating for pleasure. You are eating for storage.
The food choices matter. This is not the time for brown rice, lentils, and high-fibre vegetables. Those are great for daily nutrition but they sit in your gut, slow down digestion, and increase the chance of stomach problems on race morning. In the final forty-eight hours, switch to white rice, white pasta, white bread, potatoes without skin, honey, jam, and sports drink. Low fibre, high glycemic index, easy to digest. Boring is the goal.
The pre-race breakfast is its own discipline. Three to four hours before the start. One to four grams of carbohydrate per kilo of bodyweight. Porridge with honey. White toast with jam. A banana. Nothing adventurous. Nothing you have not eaten before. Fat and protein should be low because they slow gastric emptying and you need that food processed and available before you clip in.
The mistake I see most often is riders who eat well during the race but start with half-empty tanks. You cannot make up for poor pre-race nutrition with gels on the road. The gels are there to top up. The forty-eight-hour window is where the real work happens.
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