There is some interesting talk about not eating before big rides, but you always have to ask, “why?” and, “what do you mean exactly?”

In this case, Hammer Nutrition put together some research about glycogen depletion rates. They found that if you eat within a couple hours of your ride, your body starts burning glycogen at an increased rate. This means you could potentially run out of glycogen sooner than if you abstained from any pre-ride food.

So the conclusion gets boiled down and paraphrased as, “do not eat before your ride.” But that leaves out a couple key points from the research:

1) If the ride is 90 minutes or less, you don’t run the risk of depleting glycogen stores, so it doesn’t matter if you eat before the ride.

2) If you eat 4 hours before the ride, apparently that’s enough time to get back to the fasted state which preserves glycogen. So eating 4 hours before the ride is fine, despite the seemingly strict advice of “do not eat before a ride.”

3) This “no food before riding” strategy requires you to consume quite a few calories once you begin the ride.

As you can see, it’s nowhere near as simple and concrete as “do not eat before a ride.” There’s a lot more to the story.

There’s also your gut instinct. That’s what’s telling you “I will surely bonk” and usually your gut is right.

You have to consider other aspects too. For example, even though this research says you can eat right before a 60 minute ride and do just fine, I know I’d throw up if I ate a big breakfast right before an intense interval training session.

The moral of the story: Question everything, and trust your gut.

It’s worth testing multiple nutrition strategies, though. You never know when something that sounds crazy could work very well!

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