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A hundred kilometres is the distance where packing starts to matter. Below that, you are close enough to home that almost any problem is solvable by a phone call. Beyond it, the gap between "irritating" and "day ruined" is usually one item you decided not to carry.
The temptation is to solve this by taking everything, which is its own mistake: a heavy saddlebag on every ride is a tax you pay 50 times to avoid one bad afternoon. The useful skill is triage.
Non-negotiable
Tube, tyre levers, pump or CO2
One tube for a 100 km ride, two if you are far from anywhere or the roads are rough. A pump does not run out; CO2 is faster and finite. Many riders carry both, which is not silly.
Multi-tool with a chain tool
A loose bolt is a minor irritation until it is a cleat you cannot clip into. The chain tool is the part people leave out and the part that turns a walk into a ride home.
Phone, with battery to spare
The single most important safety item. A navigation app will drain it — take a small power bank on anything over four hours.
Money and a card
A café, a shop, a bus, a taxi. Cash still works where a card reader has no signal.
ID and an emergency contact
A card in your jersey pocket, or a note on your phone's lock screen. Free, weightless, and occasionally the most important thing you are carrying.
Depends on the day
Food: 60–90 g of carbohydrate per hour
For 100 km at a decent pace, that is real food and gels adding up to something substantial. Plan it, do not improvise it — the article on fuelling long rides has the maths.
A rain jacket
Depends entirely on the forecast and the terrain. In the mountains, take it regardless: a 20-minute descent when wet is a different proposition from a wet flat road.
Extra layer for descents
Arm warmers or a gilet weigh nothing and change a cold high-altitude descent completely.
Quick link for the chain
Tiny, weightless, and the difference between a five-minute roadside fix and a phone call.
Tyre boot, or a folded note
For a cut in the casing that a tube alone will not survive. A banknote genuinely works.
Leave it at home
A full spare tyre
Unless you are somewhere genuinely remote with known bad surfaces, the weight and bulk are not justified for 100 km.
A lock
For a café stop, a lightweight cable is enough of a deterrent. A real lock on a 100 km ride is carrying a kilogram to avoid a five-minute risk.
Three bottles' worth of everything
Two bottles plus a plan for where to refill beats carrying four hours of fluid up every climb.
The two things riders actually get wrong
Not enough food. A hundred kilometres at a decent pace is three to four hours, and two gels will not cover it. Work out the number before you leave — fuelling long rides: carbs per hour has the arithmetic, and bonking covers what happens when you get it wrong. A café stop is a plan; hoping to find a café is not.
Not knowing how to use the tools. Carrying a chain tool you have never used is carrying a small metal object. Change a tube in your kitchen once, calmly, before you need to do it in the rain on a verge with cold hands. The same goes for a quick link — ten minutes at home is worth an hour at the roadside.
Where to put it
- Pockets: food, phone, money, layers. Things you want without stopping.
- Saddlebag or bottle-cage tool can: tube, levers, multi-tool, quick link, boot. Things you hope to ignore all day.
- On the frame: pump, bottles. Everything else on a bike works better when it is not swinging.
The test of a good setup is that you never think about it. If you are aware of your saddlebag on a climb, it is too heavy; if you cannot reach your food without stopping, it is in the wrong place.
Plan the route, not just the bag
Half of packing is knowing where the shops, taps and towns are — and a route that passes a village at 60 km needs far less carried than one that crosses an empty plateau. That planning is the subject of how to plan a 200 km ride, and everything in it scales down neatly to 100.
Moveee's Route Engine builds routes that favour quiet roads and decent surfaces, and knowing where your route actually goes — rather than where a line on a map goes — is what tells you whether today is a two-bottle day or a stop-at-the-shop day. If it is your first ride at this distance, zero to your first 100 km covers the rest of it.
One last item
Tell somebody where you are going and roughly when you expect to be back. It costs one message, it weighs nothing, and it is the only item on this list that helps in the situations where none of the others can.
Sources 4
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Jeukendrup A A step towards personalized sports nutrition: carbohydrate intake during exercise · Sports Medicine · 2014
- 2 Burke LM, Hawley JA, Wong SHS, Jeukendrup AE Carbohydrates for training and competition · Journal of Sports Sciences · 2011
- 3 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 · Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics · 2016
- 4 Sawka MN, Burke LM, Eichner ER, Maughan RJ, Montain SJ, Stachenfeld NS American College of Sports Medicine position stand: exercise and fluid replacement · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2007
See this in your own numbers
Moveee builds your power curve, fitness and fatigue from every ride you upload, and writes a training plan around them. It is free, it takes one Strava connection, and it will tell you more about your riding in a week than any article can.
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