Low Cost High Carb

How to fuel without breaking the bank in a 'high carb' world

A quick outline to absolve myself of the click-bait title - Whether you are ingesting 40g, 90g, or 140g of carbohydrates per hour while running, buying gels for training and events is EXPENSIVE. Leading brands in the nutrition space (Precision, Maurten, NeverSecond, SiS, etc…) range in price per gel from $2-5 depending on supplier. Then consider you may need to consume 2-4 of these gels per hour to fuel appropriately, multiply that by the hundreds of hours of training, and the dozens of racing hours… Trying to use these products to fuel your racing, let alone training, is prohibitively expensive. Under-fueling can hamper performance and experience, or worse, lead to injury and other poor health outcomes. We need better options to fuel appropriately without breaking the bank. Towards the end of this piece I’ll list some options for cheaper fueling, scroll to the bottom for that. Before that, I want to provide some clarity on the ‘high carb’ craze, and what we might reasonably take away from it as everyday athletes.

This is where I want to put a huge disclaimer - nutrition is HIGHLY individual. What works for some people will not work for others. For that reason, and others, in this article I will not be recommending high carb fueling or any other general prescription. I’m also not a nutritionist, dietitian, or nutritional scientist, so please read this with that caveat in mind. Any time someone talks about their nutrition strategy, I hope athletes listening can take it with a huge grain of salt - it is valuable information to inform personal experimentation, and nothing more.

Additionally, I want to acknowledge that conversations around diet, food, and calorie/carbohydrate tracking might be triggering for people, especially those with eating disorders or histories of disordered eating. I am engaging in this conversation around nutrition to provide context for runners, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is that you fuel the work you are doing, in daily life, and in running.

So, high carb fueling is all the rage in ultra trail running right now - what does it mean? Do a quick google search and you’ll find that carbohydrate recommendations for runners are all over the place, but most center around 60-90g/h during prolonged activity. This is what we might call a “moderate carb” fueling approach. Particularly over the last year or two the conversation in ultra running nutrition has shifted to a discussion of “high carb” (generally this is 90-120g/h, though some athletes are pushing into the 140-150g/h range that we see in pro-cycling.) To dispel a common misconception - high carb in this case does not refer to eating lots of carbs in daily life (though you can do that too and thats totally legitimate if it works for you!). High carb specifically refers to a fueling strategy for during exercise. This is in contrast to the Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) diet trend that pervaded endurance sports for much of the last few decades (and still does, despite problematic impacts for many athletes). You’ll often see these two pit against each other, and while they do have some important conflicts, they aren’t strictly opposites. Understanding their differences and the science behind them is beyond the scope of what I want to cover here.

A growing body of research supports the efficacy of a high carb approach, and more importantly, the almost ubiquitous adoption of this fueling strategy by the pro-cycling peloton and elite ultra-runners points to some important learnings about ingesting more carbs. It’s not going away any time soon, and we can probably learn something from it.

A 2020 study in the journal Nutrients found a reduction in exercise-induced muscle damage associated with the intake of 120g/h as compared to 90g/h or 60g/h during a mountain marathon event. This finding was bolstered by another 2020 study that concluded “120 g/h CHO [carbohydrate] intake during a mountain marathon might limit neuromuscular fatigue and improve recovery of high intensity run capacity 24 h after a physiologically challenging event when compared to 90 g/h and 60 g/h.” A 2021 systematic review, which included 8 studies relating to high carb fueling, found that high carb intake, in this case 120g/h, “is important to delay fatigue and avoid GI complications, and to ensure high intake, it is necessary to implement intestinal training protocols.”

These findings are compelling, and the latter points out a key factor - fueling strategies are only useful if they don’t result in GI complications (a nice way to say vomiting mid-run or scurrying to the nearest bush to let it out the other end.) The need for training your intestine to handle your chosen fueling strategy is almost certainly the most important takeaway here. Training your gut is critically important regardless of what or how much you eat on runs. This means fueling consistently during training which gets expensive.

This is where I wish the conversation would shift to higher carb fueling, rather than ‘high carb’. We might all benefit from trying to take on slightly more carbohydrates during exercise than we already are. If we fuel more during training, we might recover slightly better, and thus adapt to training more effectively. If we fuel more during races or events, we might suffer less muscle damage, and be able to return to training more efficiently. Let alone the fact that we might run faster, feel better, and maybe have more fun as a result! I don’t think we all need to start trying 90-120g/h necessarily, but if you are currently taking in 40g/h (this was me until a couple years ago, when I started tracking my intake for the first time) maybe consider trying 60g/h, see how it feels, and go from there. The research seems content to focus on 120g/h as some gold standard of high carb, but I am convinced that incremental changes in nutrition will have effects, especially in the aggregate. In order to do this, we have to be able to afford the fuel!

Okkkaaaay! That was a lot of context, now lets move on to the part where I actually give out some actionable advice. Fuel is important, fuel is expensive, here are the best options I’ve come up with to get the carbs on board without spending half my earnings every month -

Candy
I doubt this is news to anyone in the ultra running world, but candy is fuel. You don’t need to get too technical here, find your favorite candy at the grocery store, check your serving size if you want to track your carb intake, and have at it. My favorites are Sour Patch Watermelons (except on really long efforts where the citric acid gets to be too much), and Starburst Minis (these can be hard to chew, but I still love em). Prices will very, but I can almost guarantee they will be less than gels, and the ingredients (usually maltodextrin or similar) are identical!

Maple Syrup
There are a couple of nutrition brands specifically selling maple syrup based products - UnTapped here in the US, Endurance Tap up in Canada (who obviously have the leg up on maple syrup consumption.) But, you can also just buy maple syrup by the half gallon, add some sea salt and ginger powder if you’re feeling spicy, water it down if you want it to be less viscous and you’re golden! I’ve used this as a GI intervention with extra ginger, or as a straight fuel source. A small caveat here, maple syrup is mostly made up of sucrose, which for reasons I’ll expand on below, could be problematic for some people’s GI systems - as always, practice with your fuel before you use it on a big effort.

Make Your Own Drink Mix / Gels
This is where I’ve landed and its by far the most cost effective while still providing nutrition that I feel is as good or better than the market alternative. I want to say I’m definitely not the only person doing this, and I got the details of this idea from my friend Zach Perrin, but its a great solution and I feel it deserves more attention. I’ll give a detailed recipe at the bottom of this, but some context first.
You can buy maltodextrin and fructose (these are just the products I have come to like) and mix them. To do this well you’ll need a kitchen scale of some kind. This approach is incredibly simple and it offers a kind of freedom that you can’t get from brands. The important bit is to understand a little of the science of gut transporters, and to mix accordingly.

Here goes: the reason you probably shouldn’t use table sugar (sucrose) for this is that it is a 1:1 ratio of glucose to fructose. We have transporters in our intestinal track that take sugars across the gut membrane into our blood and eventually muscles for metabolization, and we have specific ones for glucose and fructose (as well as others, but this is the super simplified story). When taking in lots of fuel that 1:1 ratio of glucose:fructose will often overload the fructose gut transporters, which we usually have less of, meaning slower gastric emptying, and thus a greater potential for GI distress. Most gels on the market land around a ratio of 1:0.8 (Maurten, SiS) or 1:0.5 (NeverSecond) glucose to fructose. They do this to try to mimic the balance of available gut transporters. My advice if you already know a brand of gel that works for you is to go to their website and see if they list their ratio. Many companies do as a way of differentiating themselves.

Once you know what ratio you want to mix your maltodextrin (the glucose source) and fructose, the rest is simple. I tend to mix a large batch of the powders first, so I can easily measure out what I need in total carbs from there - 1g of the mix equals 1g of carbs. After that, measure your carbs into bottles or flasks, and add flavorings and water. Add lemon juice, or any other juice you like for flavors that I promise will outperform any drink mixes on the market. Using fresh fruit juice is a huge step up here, artificial flavors are fine but they use them to ensure a shelf life, when you mix your own you can get a lot more creative - my recent favorites have been peach juice and lemon juice! My advice is to start with some hot water, shake well, and add the rest of the cold water after.

If you want to make your own gels, it gets just slightly more complex. Gels have different thickening agents, many of them use xanthan gum or similar, while Maurten opts for a combo of pectin and sodium alginate to achieve their unique texture. My advice if you’re making gels is to mix your thickening agent into your portion of premade drink mix first, then add water. Leaving the gels sit overnight can also help to avoid clumping of the thickener. Many companies make specific ‘nutrition’ flasks, and there are lots of other container options that work just as well. Here are two example recipes, one for a SiS or NeverSecond style liquid gel, and another for a Maurten style “hydrogel”:

Liquid Gel:
55g Maltodextrin
45g Fructose
2g xanthan gum
5.6oz water

‘Hydrogel’:
55g Maltodextrin
45g Fructose
2g pectin
1.5g sodium alginate
5.6oz water

Both of these use a 1:0.8 ratio for the base mix, which is my personal preference, but the glucose:fructose ratio doesn’t matter here, the thickener amounts here are based on 100g of carbs regardless. Varying the water content, and adding flavor, may change the consistency but honestly I tend to mix my water without much measuring - try it out and see what consistency you like! These drink mixes / gels, depending on ingredients, can be as much as 12x less expensive then their market alternatives. They lack some of the convenience, but they make up for it in flexibility and cost.

I hope this is helpful in reducing the ridiculous cost associated with fueling (especially at high rates) and also, as an added bonus, it might mean less single use plastics in the landfill if we all switch to making our gels at home! If you have any questions about this, or other ideas for cheap fueling, shoot me a message or a comment!