Gels, drink mix or real food?

There is a mild moral dimension to this argument that does not deserve to be there. Gels are treated as industrial and slightly suspect; rice cakes and bananas as wholesome and authentic. Neither framing is useful, because the real distinction is mechanical: how fast you need the carbohydrate, and how hard you are riding when it arrives.

What your body is doing with it

All three deliver the same thing — carbohydrate for working muscles and for blood glucose. Where they differ is how quickly it gets there and how much digestive work it takes on the way.

At high intensity, blood flow is diverted away from the gut toward the muscles, so digestion slows dramatically. That is why a sandwich that sits perfectly well at endurance pace becomes a problem at threshold, and why the last hour of a hard event is gel territory whatever your preferences are.

The practical answer is all three

Most experienced riders converge on the same pattern without being told to: real food early, when intensity is lower and there are hours to go; drink mix throughout as the baseline; gels saved for the hard part at the end.

That ordering solves several problems at once. It keeps the cost down, it avoids the palate fatigue that makes riders stop eating at hour four, and it puts the fast-absorbing option where it is actually needed. If you have ever finished a long event unable to face another sweet thing, you have met the reason this ordering exists.

What actually matters more than the choice

• The total. 60–90 g of carbohydrate an hour, from whichever source. A rider hitting that on rice cakes is better fuelled than one falling short on premium gels — fuelling long rides: carbs per hour has the arithmetic.
• Starting early. The mistake described in bonking: nothing eaten in the first hour, because you did not feel like you needed it.
• Training your gut. High intake rates need practice — gut training. Whichever source you plan to use in an event is the one to train with.
• Never trying something new on the day. Every rider learns this once, usually memorably.

Making your own

Real food for the bike does not need to be elaborate. Cooked rice pressed into bars with a little sugar and salt, bananas, small jam sandwiches, salted boiled potatoes for the strong-stomached. The two qualities that matter are that it is easy to chew while breathing hard and that you still want to eat it four hours in.

Home-made drink mix is even simpler — sugar, a pinch of salt, and something for flavour gets you most of the way to a commercial product at a fraction of the cost. Getting the sodium roughly right matters more than the brand, and how much do you actually sweat is how you work out what "roughly right" means for you.

Indoors, it is simpler

On a trainer you have a table next to you, no wind, no traffic and no wrappers to deal with. Real food is easy indoors, and the reason riders under-fuel there is not practicality — it is the assumption that a 90-minute indoor session does not need fuelling at all. It does, and at a higher rate per hour than most outdoor rides of the same length, because the intensity is usually higher.

A bottle with carbohydrate in it is enough for most sessions. Moveee Indoor saves the full power stream, which is a reliable way to find out whether the last interval sagged because the session was too hard or because there was nothing left to burn.