After a couple small attempts at this, I think I figured it out for the third time!

If you remember, the whole point of this is to find something to give me more calories in a mountain bike race without adding solid food. We’re talking about a 2.5-3 hour race, maybe a 6 hour. I think there will be a lot more testing though, if I try to figure out the proper nutrition method for a 24 hour solo attempt…

So really, I just needed to add a couple hundred calories to my 2 bottles of Gatorade. And that is what I did on day 3 testing. I took 2 bottles of Gatorade/maltodextrin mix out for a 2 hour ride. And it went great! (Well, from a nutrition standpoint it did, I was a bit sluggish because I was fighting off a cold…)

In the end, the main finding is that I can combine Gatorade and maltodextrin powder and use it successfully while riding.

Ride number two with maltodextrin… a bit different than the first time. I did about 2 and a half hours on the road, still very hilly of course. This time I loaded the maltodextrin into my bottles, hoping to add an extra 200 or so calories.

The ride seemed to go well. I got worn out, but considering I haven’t been riding much, I don’t think the maltodextrin was giving me problems! On this ride I had a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of water, both of which contained some maltodextrin powder. I’ll tell ya this - that was the last time I mix maltodextrin powder with plain water!

As far as the Gatorade and maltodextrin powder mix, it was fine.

If you’ve been reading a while, you know that I’ve been planning out a nutrition strategy for training and racing. Last week was the first day I tested the addition of maltodextrin powder to my normal fluid intake.

I did a little less than two hours on my mountain bike over hilly terrain, but no serious efforts. I used a bottle of Gatorade/maltodextrin powder and a bottle of water. Everything went fine. Granted I didn’t use that much maltodextrin, but I was doing the unthinkable - mixing simple and complex carbs! Uh oh!

My next ride I will be using quite a bit more maltodextrin, so keep reading to see what happens!

After many hours of searching, I found one place that shed some light on mixing simple and complex carbohydrates!

It turns out that the glycemic index of maltodextrin is not that far from glucose, a very simple sugar. That would mean that mixing some maltodextrin powder into my Gatorade would not cause a problem!

So I did some more research…

And I found that numerous people mix complex carbs with simple carbs and don’t have problems! Although, I also found out that some people do experience some gastric problems when mixing the two. That gave me some relief, as I bet that I will be OK if I mix maltodextrin with Gatorade. I’ll just do some tests. I may even just mix my maltodextrin with some Kool-Aid mix.

I’ll post a bit later with some online discussions I’ve found on this topic.