Newbie nutrition

If I am hungry I eat food, if I am thirsty I drink water or other fluid beverages. I don't think you can go far wrong.

Not very insightful, I had to get up early to watch the tennis.

A lot of the current sports nutrition stuff is mainly marketing. They're selling you quite basic stuff often at incredibly inflated margins.

E.g. for water bottle electrolyte sachets, you're basically paying a fortune for sodium bicarbonate, salts and citric acid. Salt you almost certainly already have (the "LoSalt" stuff is good - it has both sodium and potassium salt), baking soda you may well have, and citric acid is cheaply available at any Asian/Chinese supermarket. A teaspoon of bicarb, a half tea-spoon of citric acid, and a quarter tsp of salt per bottle. Add some honey, ribena or other juice to flavour. Alternatively, buy diarrhoea electrolyte sachets - still cheaper I think. Some, but not all, also contain magnesium - you can get supplements in tablet form from a health store, if you wish.

The gels are often just very expensive forms of sugar. You'd be well just buying a bag of whatever small, easily chewed & swallowed jelly sweets you want, from your supermarket. However, too much sweet stuff (gels or otherwise) will make you feel ill.

Many gels contain caffeine. Caffeine may have a diuretic effect (studies seem to vary on how much is needed), which may mean you'll need more water, or that you may be more prone to dehydrating. Caffeine can give you a nice boost, if you're struggling toward the end of the ride. Whether you can still get that boost if you've already been taking it the whole ride, I don't know. Personally, I don't like taking caffeine.

That's not to say all the sports nutrition stuff is automatically crap, but do look at the ingredients and compare to what's available in super-markets to get an idea for how much is marketing. Also, some of the ingredients will be products of things I've mentioned, e.g. sodium citrate is just a product of sodium bicarbonate and citric acid reacted together, other stuff will be colourings, flavourings, stabilisers and other junk.

In terms of nutrition, possibly the best thing is to get a big load of carbohydrate in the *day before*, if not 2 days. Pasta is great. Sticky, glutinous rice is good too. Bananas and flapjacks for one the ride, to mix something more solid in, in between the sweets and so avoid feeling sick, is another. Bananas are available everywhere, flapjacks are also easy to get, even easier to make yourself! On the morning, a good breakfast of some slow-release starchy/carby food is good, like some form of oats (porridge, muesli, etc)!

Generally the advice seems to be to eat and drink regularly, and before you feel the need to. Plan how much you will need for the whole trip, then divide by the time to figure out the rate you need to eat at. With more rides, you'll figure out exactly what works for you.

For 2 to 3 hour rides, you won't be needing that much in the way of food though.