Fuelling Long Bike Rides: A Complete Guide to On-Bike Nutrition
Ask any experienced cyclist what separates a great long ride from a miserable one and the honest answer usually isn't fitness. It's fuelling. You can hold 250 watts all winter on the turbo, but if you roll out for five hours with a banana and a vague plan, physiology will win. Your body stores roughly 400–500g of glycogen — about 1,600–2,000 calories — and at a solid endurance pace you can burn through most of that in under three hours. After that, you're running on fumes, and no amount of grit gets you up the last climb.
The good news is that fuelling long bike rides properly is not complicated. It's a numbers game with a bit of practice attached. This guide covers how much to eat, when to eat it, what actually works out on the road, and how to avoid the two classic failures: the bonk and the rebelling stomach.
The Numbers: How Many Carbs Per Hour?
The research here is remarkably consistent. For rides over 90 minutes, aim for 60g of carbohydrate per hour as your baseline. Riders doing big days — five hours plus, or racing hard — can push towards 90g per hour, but only if they've trained their gut to handle it and are using a mix of glucose and fructose. Your intestines absorb glucose and fructose through separate transporters, so combining the two (ideally around a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio) lets you take on more total carbohydrate than glucose alone, which caps out at roughly 60g per hour.
To put 60g in context: that's about two bananas, one and a half typical energy bars, or 8–10 energy pastilles depending on the brand. It sounds like a lot because it is. Most amateur cyclists chronically under-fuel, eating perhaps 20–30g per hour and wondering why the last 90 minutes of every long ride feels like survival. If you take one thing from this guide, make it this: set a target in grams per hour, and hit it from the first hour, not when you start feeling empty.
Timing: Start Early, Eat Little and Often
The most common mistake in fuelling long bike rides is waiting until you're hungry. Hunger lags behind glycogen depletion by 30–45 minutes, and by the time your legs feel heavy the deficit is already dug. The fix is mechanical, not intuitive:
- Start eating at 20–30 minutes in, even though you don't feel you need it. You're fuelling hour three, not hour one.
- Eat every 20 minutes rather than in big lumps. Three 20g feeds per hour is far kinder to your stomach than one 60g dump.
- Set a timer on your head unit or watch. On a long ride, discipline beats memory every time.
- Front-load solids, finish on fast carbs. Bars and real food sit better early when intensity is low; in the final hours, chews, pastilles and drink mix are easier to get down and absorb faster.
A practical example for a four-hour ride at 60g per hour: that's 240g of carbohydrate total. You might carry a bottle of carb mix (40–60g), a couple of bars (50g), and a pack of energy pastilles covering the rest. Write the plan on a bit of tape on your top tube if you have to — plenty of pros still do.
Hydration and Electrolytes: The Other Half of the Equation
Carbohydrate gets the attention, but dehydration will end your ride just as effectively. Aim for 500–750ml of fluid per hour, more in heat, and include sodium — roughly 300–600mg per litre — on rides over two hours or any time you're sweating hard. A 2% drop in body weight through fluid loss measurably reduces power output, and it happens faster than most riders think.
One useful trick: separate your fuelling from your hydration decisions. If all your carbohydrate is in your bottles, a cool day where you drink less means you also under-eat. Carrying some of your carbs as solids or chews means you can adjust fluid intake to conditions without wrecking your fuelling plan.
Train Your Gut Like You Train Your Legs
Gut trouble is the number one reason riders abandon their fuelling plan mid-ride. The encouraging news is that the gut is trainable. Studies on gut training show that consistently practising your race-day fuelling in training measurably increases carbohydrate absorption and reduces GI distress within about two weeks.
Start at 40–50g per hour on your weekend long ride if you're new to structured fuelling, and add 10g per hour every couple of weeks. Practise eating at intensity too — taking on food at 200 watts on a climb is a different skill from eating while soft-pedalling. And never, ever debut a new product on an event day. Everything you eat during your target sportive or century should have been tested on at least two or three long training rides first.
What We Use at FTP Endurance Fuel
We built our range around exactly the problems described above. Our pastilles deliver a measured dose of carbohydrate in a format that's easy to chew and swallow at endurance pace, easy to portion into a jersey pocket or top-tube bag, and gentle on the stomach in the late hours when gels start to turn it. Each pastille is a known quantity of carbs, so hitting 60g per hour becomes simple counting rather than guesswork.
For long rides we lean on the Tart Cherry Energy Pastilles — the tart cherry brings anthocyanins, the compounds studied for their role in reducing oxidative stress and easing post-exercise muscle soreness, which is a welcome bonus when you're backing up big weekend rides. The Mixed Fruit Pastilles do the same fuelling job with a bit of flavour variety, which matters more than you'd think in hour five. Both come in 1kg bulk packs, which works out considerably cheaper per ride than buying individually wrapped products — decant what you need into a small bag and go.
Pulling It All Together
Fuelling long bike rides comes down to a few habits executed consistently: know your grams-per-hour target, start eating in the first half hour, feed little and often on a timer, drink to conditions with sodium in the mix, and practise all of it in training until it's automatic. Get those right and the last hour of a century stops being something to survive and starts being where you do your best riding.
If you want to sort your on-bike nutrition for the season in one go, our bundles are the most cost-effective way to stock up. Test your plan on the next long ride — your future self, 140km in, will thank you.
