Fueling a six-hour ride
May 22, 2026
The intuitive plan for a long ride is to eat when you’re hungry. This is wrong, in the same way that drinking when you’re thirsty is wrong. Both signals lag the underlying deficit by an hour or more, and once you’re behind on either you don’t recover inside the session.
Endurance fueling is mostly a carbohydrate-oxidation problem. The trained gut absorbs around 60 g/h of glucose alone, capped by the SGLT1 transporter. Add fructose (GLUT5 transporter, separate pathway) at a 1
.8 glucose-to-fructose ratio and absorption rises to 90-120 g/h. Without the fructose co-ingestion, anything above 60 g/h sits in the stomach and turns into the GI distress that ends long sessions early.This is the fueling protocol I run for a six-hour Z2 ride:
| Time | Intake | Carbs (g) | Sodium (mg) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre, -90m | Oats, banana, honey, coffee | 90 | 200 |
| 0 | 750 ml bottle, 80 g Maurten 320 mix, pinch of salt | 80 | 500 |
| 0 | 1 gel (Maurten 100, 25g carb) | 25 | 100 |
| 1 | Refill bottle, 80 g mix | 80 | 500 |
| 2 | 1 gel + half a rice cake (homemade, white rice + jam) | 70 | 300 |
| 3 | Refill bottle, 80 g mix | 80 | 500 |
| 3 | 1 gel | 25 | 100 |
| 4 | Refill bottle, 80 g mix, caffeine gel (Maurten 100 CAF) | 105 | 600 |
| 5 | 1 gel | 25 | 100 |
| 6 | Recovery shake (whey + maltodextrin, 4-to-1 carb-to-protein) | 60 | 300 |
That’s roughly 95 g/h of carbohydrate in-session, all 1
.8 ratio, with 2,900 mg of sodium across the ride. Hydration target is 600-750 ml/h depending on temperature, scaled up another 200 ml/h above 25°C.Two things this isn’t. It isn’t keto-adapted fasted training, which has a place in low-intensity base weeks but breaks down above Z2 and is the wrong tool for a race-pace session. It isn’t the “real food only” approach you read in cycling forums, which sounds noble and fails at 90 g/h because solid food empties from the stomach too slowly. Mix and gels for the carbohydrate budget, real food (rice cake, half a banana) for jaw fatigue and morale.
The single biggest mistake I made for the first year was salt. I undershot by half. The cramping I attributed to “fitness” was sodium loss. A sweat test (white residue on a dried jersey, weight loss per hour adjusted for fluid intake) put me at the high end of the salty-sweater range, around 1,200 mg/L. At 700 ml/h that’s 840 mg/h of sodium lost. My old fueling was replacing maybe 300. The gap closes itself in two to three hours of riding, which is exactly when the cramps used to start.
