Sportive Nutrition Plan: What to Eat Before, During and After
Most riders who blow up at 70 miles didn't blow up at 70 miles. They blew up somewhere around mile 25, when they were feeling strong, the group was rolling, and eating felt like an interruption. The damage takes two hours to show itself, which is exactly what makes sportive fuelling so easy to get wrong. By the time your legs tell you something is off, you are already several hundred grams of carbohydrate in the hole and there is no realistic way to claw it back mid-ride.
A proper sportive nutrition plan isn't complicated, but it does have to be decided in advance and written down. Not "I'll eat when I'm hungry" — an actual schedule, with numbers, rehearsed on training rides so that your gut and your hands both know what to do. Below is the framework I use and give to riders I coach: the week before, the morning of, every hour in the saddle, and the two hours after you roll back across the line.
The Week Before: Top Up, Don't Stuff
Forget the old three-day depletion-then-loading protocol. It made people miserable and the research moved on decades ago. What works for a one-day sportive is far simpler: cut training volume in the final three or four days, keep the intensity short and sharp, and let carbohydrate intake rise to roughly 7–10g per kilogram of bodyweight per day for the last 48 hours.
For a 75kg rider that means 525–750g of carbohydrate a day. That is a lot more than most people eat without thinking about it. It is porridge and honey at breakfast, a proper sandwich lunch, rice or pasta at dinner, plus fruit, juice and a couple of snacks. You should finish the last two days feeling slightly heavier and a bit sluggish — that is glycogen and the water bound to it, roughly 3g of water per gram of glycogen. It feels wrong. It is exactly right.
Two practical points. Drop the fibre for the final 24 hours: no big salads, no lentils, no bran. Fibre that is still working its way through you on Sunday morning is the single most common cause of an unscheduled hedge stop. And drink to a pale straw colour rather than clear — over-drinking the night before just dilutes your sodium and sends you to the toilet all night.
Race Morning: Three Hours, Then Nothing New
Eat breakfast three hours before your start if you can face it, or two hours minimum. Target 1.5–2g of carbohydrate per kilogram — around 110–150g for that same 75kg rider. Porridge with banana, honey and a splash of milk gets you most of the way there. White toast with jam and a coffee is a perfectly respectable alternative if oats sit heavily on you.
Keep protein modest and fat low. A full fry-up delays gastric emptying and you will still be carrying it on the first climb. Coffee is fine and genuinely useful — 3mg of caffeine per kilogram, taken about 60 minutes before the start, reliably improves endurance performance and reduces perceived effort.
Then the rule that matters more than any of the above: nothing new on the day. Not a new bar, not the free sample in the event goody bag, not the energy drink the organisers are handing out at registration. Every item in your sportive nutrition plan should have been used at least twice on a long training ride first.
During the Ride: 60–90g of Carbs an Hour, Starting at Minute 20
This is where the plan is won or lost. Your muscles and liver hold roughly 500g of stored glycogen — about two hours of hard riding. Everything beyond that has to come in through your mouth, and there is a hard ceiling on how fast you can absorb it.
Glucose alone saturates its intestinal transporter (SGLT1) at around 60g per hour. Add fructose, which uses an entirely separate transporter (GLUT5), and total absorption rises to 90g an hour or more. That is why the glucose-to-fructose ratio matters — a product built on a 1:1 or 2:1 blend delivers considerably more usable energy per hour than pure glucose, with less of it sitting fermenting in your gut.
Practical targets by event length:
- Under 2 hours: 30g per hour is plenty. Water and one item will do.
- 2–3 hours: 60g per hour.
- 3 hours and beyond: 80–90g per hour, assuming you have trained your gut for it.
Start eating within the first 20–30 minutes, while you are fresh and the pace is civilised. Set a repeating alarm on your head unit for every 20 minutes and take a third of your hourly target each time. Small and frequent beats large and occasional — a 250ml bolus of concentrated drink sloshing about in your stomach on a climb is how nausea starts.
Sodium matters too. Sweat sodium concentration varies enormously between individuals, from about 200mg to over 2,000mg per litre. If you finish rides with white salt tide-marks on your kit and dark shorts, you are a salty sweater and should be taking 500–800mg of sodium per hour in warm conditions.
The Feed Station Trap
Feed stations are for water, not for your fuelling strategy. Riders routinely lose ten minutes queuing, then eat a fruit cake and half a banana that between them supply about 40g of carbohydrate — less than they should have taken in that hour anyway — and arrive at the next climb with a stomach full of unfamiliar food.
Carry your own fuel. Use the stops to refill bottles, take a minute in the shade, and get moving. If you know the route has a genuinely brutal second half, put your most palatable, easiest-chewing option in your rear pocket for that section — appetite falls off a cliff after four hours and whatever you have left needs to be something you can still face.
After the Finish: The First Two Hours
Glycogen resynthesis runs fastest in the first couple of hours post-ride. Aim for 1.0–1.2g of carbohydrate per kilogram per hour for the first two hours, alongside 20–25g of protein to support muscle repair. Chocolate milk is genuinely excellent here and needs no preparation.
This is also where tart cherry earns its place. Montmorency cherries are dense in anthocyanins — the polyphenols responsible for their deep red colour — which have been shown across multiple trials to reduce markers of oxidative stress and muscle damage, and to lower perceived soreness in the days following prolonged exercise. If you have another ride, a sportive, or simply work on Monday, that difference is worth having.
What We Use at FTP Endurance Fuel
Our pastilles were built around the problems above: a glucose-fructose blend for absorption, a chewable format that doesn't need water to get down, and a size you can take one at a time rather than committing to a whole sachet. That last point matters more than it sounds — it makes the every-20-minutes rhythm easy to stick to.
For most riders the sensible setup is Mixed Fruit Pastilles for on-bike fuelling, because flavour fatigue is real and variety keeps you eating late in the ride, and Tart Cherry Pastilles for the anthocyanin content in the days either side of a big event. They come in 1kg bulk packs, so you decant what you need into a pocket-sized bag rather than paying twice over for individual wrappers you'll only bin.
Write your plan down this week, then ride it. Take it out on your next three-hour training ride exactly as you intend to run it on the day — same breakfast, same hourly target, same alarm on the head unit — and adjust from there. If you want to test the pastilles before committing to a full bag, the Taster Pack is the low-risk way in. Get the plan rehearsed, and the last 30 miles of your next sportive will feel like a different event entirely.
