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Most riders arrive at a training camp having thought carefully about their gearing, their bike case and their route files, and not at all about food. Then they ride five hours a day for six days, eat like they are on holiday, and cannot understand why day four was so grim.
Across a single long ride, fuelling decides how you feel at the end. Across six consecutive long rides, it decides whether the week produces fitness at all.
Why a camp is a different problem
On a normal long ride you finish with your glycogen stores partly empty, eat normally for a day or two, and they refill. On a camp there is no day or two — there is tomorrow, and tomorrow is another five hours.
Each day you finish short and start slightly emptier than the day before. By day four that accumulated shortfall shows up as heavy legs, an unusually high heart rate for easy power, poor mood and — reliably — the conviction that you have simply overtrained. Frequently you have simply under-eaten.
Schematic. The two riders do identical training. Only the refuelling differs, and by day five they are having completely different weeks.
The daily rhythm
Breakfast — Substantial and carbohydrate-heavy, 2–3 hours before rolling out where possible.
Porridge, bread, honey, fruit, eggs alongside rather than instead. This is the meal riders most often under-do because they are not yet hungry at 7am — eat anyway.
On the bike — 60–90 g of carbohydrate per hour, starting in the first hour.
Across five hours that is a serious amount of food. Work out the number the night before and carry it, rather than hoping for a café at the right moment.
Within an hour of finishing — Carbohydrate and protein, immediately.
On a one-off ride this matters little. On day three of six, with another five hours tomorrow, it is the difference between riding well and surviving.
Dinner — A proper meal, and more of it than feels normal.
You are running a deficit whether you feel like it or not. Riders who eat a sensible restaurant portion for six nights arrive home depleted.
Before bed — Something small if the day was big.
Overnight is eight hours of no intake before another long day. A snack costs nothing and helps.
The hour after each ride is the one riders skip when the hotel is a drive away, and across six days it compounds — the glycogen refuelling window covers what is actually happening in it.
The on-the-bike number is the one that does most of the work, and it is the one most riders miss by the largest margin. Fuelling long rides: carbs per hour has the detail, and if 90 g an hour has previously upset your stomach, gut training is a thing to work on in the weeks before you travel, not on day two.
Four traps
A cappuccino and a pastry is not 90 g of carbohydrate an hour. Café culture is one of the best things about a camp and a poor fuelling strategy on its own.
Losing 2 kg across a camp week is almost never fat. It is glycogen, water and — if the deficit is large — some of what you went there to build.
Camps happen somewhere warm, which is the point, and sweat rates go up accordingly. Know your own rather than guessing.
Unfamiliar gels, unfamiliar bars, unfamiliar breakfast. Day five of a camp is a bad time to discover your stomach's opinion of something.
Practical logistics
- Take your own bars and gels. Enough for the whole week. You cannot rely on finding your usual products abroad, and a camp is the worst time to switch — see eating abroad and stomach trouble.
- Buy real food locally on day one. Bread, ham, bananas, rice cakes. Cheaper, easier on the stomach across six days, and better than living on gels.
- Sort out the post-ride hour. If the hotel stops serving at 3pm and you get back at 4pm, that is a problem you must solve on day one, not day four.
- Know your sweat rate before you go. Camps are hot, and guessing at fluid is how a good week turns into three days of headaches — how much do you actually sweat takes an hour to answer.
The signal to watch
If day four feels dramatically worse than day three at the same effort, do not automatically conclude you are overtrained. Ask what you ate on days one to three first. Fatigue from training needs rest; fatigue from a fuel deficit needs food, and responds to it within a day.
Getting this right is what makes the camp work at all — the volume is only training if you can repeat it tomorrow. Training camps: how to do one properly covers the shape of the week itself, and Moveee's fitness and fatigue view will show you afterwards whether the week landed as a spike you absorbed or a hole you dug.
Sources 7
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Burke LM, Hawley JA, Wong SHS, Jeukendrup AE Carbohydrates for training and competition · Journal of Sports Sciences · 2011
- 2 Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports Medicine: Nutrition and Athletic Performance · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2016
- 3 Burke LM, van Loon LJC, Hawley JA Postexercise muscle glycogen resynthesis in humans · Journal of Applied Physiology · 2017
- 4 Kerksick CM, Arent S, Schoenfeld BJ, et al. International society of sports nutrition position stand: nutrient timing · Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition · 2017
- 5 Mountjoy M, Sundgot-Borgen J, Burke L, et al. IOC consensus statement on relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S): 2018 update · British Journal of Sports Medicine · 2018
- 6 Jeukendrup A A Step Towards Personalized Sports Nutrition: Carbohydrate Intake During Exercise · Sports Medicine · 2014
- 7 Baker LB Sweating Rate and Sweat Sodium Concentration in Athletes: A Review of Methodology and Intra/Interindividual Variability · Sports Medicine · 2017
A plan that knows how long tomorrow is
Moveee builds your week from your own rides and keeps it honest about duration and intensity — which is the number every fuelling decision on this page depends on. Free coaching, and it adapts when life gets in the way.
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