Fuelling On The Bike: Why I Said No To Gels
This week's post is about fuel, specifically, what's going in the jersey pockets instead of the usual couple of gels.
I did the sums a while ago and it stopped me in my tracks. If I fuel the way most people fuel a big endurance year, I'd get through something like 1,200 gels, and wrappers between now and next June. Twelve hundred little foil packets, torn open with my teeth on the bike, dropped in a bin if I'm lucky and if not stuffed back in a pocket to get messy. That's before the Tour of Tours itself even starts. It's an insane amount of waste for a challenge that's meant to mean something, and my stomach was never a fan of the goo in the first place. So I made the decision: real food, no gels.
Easier said than done… The first attempt was Turkish delight, the proper stuff, not the chocolate-covered kind, which travels well, tastes like an actual treat at hour three, and doesn't turn my gut inside out. It worked, right up until I started worrying about what a number of daily sugar-dusted cubes was doing to my teeth over an eleven-month build. Great fuel, questionable dentistry!
So I've moved on to making my own bars: oats and dates, with chia seeds added for a bit of texture and a slow-release carb bonus alongside the natural sugars from the dates. I blend it all down, press it into a sushi mould which turns out to make a very tidy mini-flapjack sized bar, and cut it into bite-sized pieces. No wrappers, no faff, and it actually tastes like something I'd choose to eat rather than something I'm forcing down at mile 100.
My oat, date and chia bars, if anyone wants to try them:
15 pitted Medjool dates
100g rolled oats
2 tbsp natural peanut butter (crunchy is better I think)
1–2 tbsp chia seeds
1 tbsp water (if needed)
Pinch of sea salt
Blend the dates in a food processor until they form a sticky paste, add the peanut butter and salt and pulse again, then pour in the oats and chia seeds and pulse until it all binds together. Press firmly into a mould or lined tray, chill for half an hour, then cut into bars. Ten minutes of effort, and they'll sit happily in a jersey pocket for hours.
None of this would work half as well without a proper way of carrying it. Huge thanks to Mike Preston at Doma Cycle in Canada, who kindly supplied me with a set of their pocket musettes — small, washable pouches that slip neatly into a jersey pocket. I can load a bar or a handful of Turkish delight in before I leave and pull out exactly what I need on the move, instead of fighting a sticky mess out of a plastic bag one-handed at 25kph. It's a small piece of kit that's solved a genuinely annoying problem.
The upshot: a four-hour ride is now easy to fuel, entirely wrapper-free, and my teeth are considerably less worried about me than they were a few months ago.
