FUELLING THE DAY: ON THE HILL, IN THE SADDLE AND OVERNIGHT RECOVERY

The Technique

1. Get breakfast right when the start is early and you do not want it. Big riding days start early, often before daylight, and appetite at that hour is usually poor. This is the meal that most often gets skipped, and it is the one that costs you most. Aim to eat something substantial one and a half to two hours before you start moving if you can, so it has time to settle before you are bouncing around. If the start is too early for that, eat something smaller and easier closer to the time, and accept that you will need to top up sooner in the morning. Build it around carbohydrate you find easy at that hour, such as oats, toast, rice, pancakes or a smoothie, with some protein alongside, and go lighter on fat and fibre than you would at home if your stomach is sensitive. If you genuinely cannot eat solid food early, drink your breakfast, because a smoothie or a bowl of milky porridge is much easier to get down at five in the morning than a plate of eggs and it is far better than a coffee alone.
2. Understand that big days usually fail on fuel, not fitness. Watch a group late in a long day and you will see it. The riding gets sloppy, lines get lazy, people stop reading the terrain, someone gets a sled badly stuck in a place they would have avoided at nine in the morning, and everyone starts making short tempered decisions. That is a fuel problem far more often than a fitness problem, because the brain runs on carbohydrate and it is the first thing to suffer when stores get low. The important point is that this is a safety issue, not a comfort issue. Judgement, terrain reading and reaction time all degrade before you consciously feel wrecked, and in avalanche country or on a technical descent that is exactly when it matters. Treat food as part of your risk management. The rule to work to is that you eat before you need to, on a schedule, not when you feel like it.
3. Solve the actual problem of eating on the move. The theory of eating every hour is easy. Doing it with cold hands, gloves on, a helmet, goggles, a chest rig and a group that is already moving is the hard part, and this is where most plans die. So build for the conditions. Choose food you can open with one hand or with your teeth, and open packets partly before you set off so you are not fighting foil in the cold. Keep the food you intend to eat next in a chest pocket or an inside jacket pocket where body heat keeps it soft, not in the bottom of your pack where you will never get to it. Cut bars into pieces at the lodge and put them in a resealable bag rather than dealing with wrappers on the hill. Attach a drink hose where you can reach it without stopping. Then anchor the eating to something that already happens, such as every time the group regroups, every lift ride, or every time you stop to look at a line. Food that requires taking your gloves off in the wind is food you will not eat.
4. Choose food that survives a pack, in cold or in heat. A pack is a hostile place. In deep cold, gels turn to toffee, bars turn into bricks that could break a tooth, fruit freezes solid and drink hoses freeze at the bite valve. In heat, chocolate coatings melt, anything soft becomes paste, and food that needed a fridge becomes a genuine health risk. Pick accordingly. For cold days, favour softer, denser food that stays chewable, keep it close to your body, and consider a warm sweet drink in an insulated flask, which does double duty as fuel and morale on a cold ridge. Blow back down the drink hose after each drink so the tube empties, and keep the bite valve inside your jacket. For hot days, favour food that does not mind being warm, such as dried fruit, salted crackers, rice based snacks and firm bars, and leave anything dairy based or meat based out unless it is going into an insulated bag. In both cases, pack food that survives being crushed by everything else in the pack, because it will be.
5. Drink deliberately, because cold weather lies to you about thirst. In the cold your body suppresses the sensation of thirst, so the signal you would normally rely on simply is not there, while you are still losing water through hard breathing of dry air, through sweat under heavy layers, and through more frequent urination. Riders regularly finish a cold day well down on fluid without ever having felt thirsty. The fix is a schedule and a system: drink at every regroup whether or not you want to, carry fluid where it will not freeze, and check your urine colour at the lodge, aiming for pale rather than dark. Altitude adds to the loss through faster, drier breathing. Heat swings the other way and makes the losses obvious, but it also makes it possible to lose a lot of fluid and salt in a few hours, so on hot days you need both more fluid and some salt with it. The other failure mode is worth naming: drinking huge volumes of plain water while sweating heavily for hours can dilute your blood sodium, which is dangerous. Sensible volumes, with food and some salt, is the target.
6. Keep electrolytes in plain terms. Sweat is not just water. It carries salt, and the more you sweat and the longer you go, the more that matters. For a short outing in mild conditions, water and normal meals cover it. For long hot days, for heavy sweaters, and for anyone in gear that traps heat, adding some salt to what you drink or eat helps you hold on to fluid and feel better late in the day. You do not need to get scientific about it or buy anything specific. Salted crackers, salted nuts, an electrolyte tablet or powder if you like the convenience, or salt on your lunch all do the same job. What you should ignore is any product that promises performance benefits beyond replacing what you lose. If you are cramping, feeling unusually flat in the heat, or getting headaches on hot days, salt is one of the things worth looking at, alongside how much you are actually drinking and how much you are actually eating. If you have high blood pressure, kidney problems, or take medication that affects fluid balance, get personal advice before adding salt deliberately.
7. Fuel a short intense day differently from a long endurance day. These are different problems and they need different food. A short intense day is the one with a few big efforts and a lot of standing around: three hard climbs, a couple of hero laps, a technical section that empties your arms. Here the fuel is mostly already in you from breakfast and the day before, and what you eat during is mainly about keeping your head clear and your hands working. Modest amounts, easy to eat, taken at the natural breaks. A long endurance day is the ten hour push, the big traverse, the full day in the saddle covering ground. Here you cannot carry enough in your body to cover it, so you have to keep taking carbohydrate in steadily from early in the day, and starting late never gets fixed. The mistake nearly everyone makes is waiting until they feel empty, because at that point you are trying to fill a hole while still working, and your gut is much worse at absorbing food than it was two hours earlier.
8. Be honest about alcohol on a multi day trip. Après is part of the culture and nobody is telling you to be a monk. But understand what you are paying for it. Alcohol degrades sleep quality even when it helps you fall asleep, and it does that on exactly the nights you most need deep sleep. It adds to fluid loss when you are already down. It blunts appetite in the evening, so the recovery meal gets smaller at the worst time. It affects judgement and coordination into the next morning more than most people admit, and in avalanche terrain or on a technical trail that carries a real cost. It also interferes with the muscle repair you are relying on overnight. The practical position is simple: keep it small and keep it early on riding nights, drink water alongside it, never let it replace dinner, and save the big night for the last night when there is nothing left to ride. If you are on medication or heading to altitude, be more conservative again, because both change how alcohol affects you.
9. Own the evening, and treat sleep as part of the fuel plan. The hours between finishing and going to bed are where tomorrow is decided. Get something in within the first hour of finishing, especially if dinner is a long way off, because that is when your appetite and your body's readiness to restock are both at their best. It does not need to be a shake. A bowl of soup with bread, yoghurt and fruit, a sandwich, or leftovers from lunch all work. Then eat a full dinner with a solid protein source, a generous carbohydrate portion to restock what you burned, vegetables, and enough of it that you are not hungry at nine. Sleep and appetite are linked in a way that bites you on long trips: poor sleep tends to increase cravings for quick sugary food and reduce the appetite signals that tell you to eat properly, so a few bad nights quietly leads to worse eating, which leads to worse riding, which leads to worse sleep. Break that loop deliberately. Protect a proper sleep window, get your gear sorted before dinner rather than after, and keep the last night's habits off the middle of the trip. To string five or seven hard days together, the pattern is the same every day: real breakfast, steady food during, something within the hour after, a full dinner, water all day, alcohol small or none, and sleep protected. Day one is easy. Day five is where the plan proves itself.

Common Mistakes

Skipping breakfast because of an early start and no appetite. Fix: drink it instead, with a smoothie or milky porridge, and top up earlier in the morning.

• Waiting until you feel empty before eating on a long day. Fix: put food on a schedule tied to regroups or lift rides and eat before you need it.
• Packing food you cannot open with gloves on. Fix: pre cut bars into a resealable bag, pre open packets, and keep the next item in a chest pocket where body heat keeps it soft.
• Relying on thirst in the cold. Fix: drink at every regroup regardless, blow the hose clear after each drink, and check urine colour at the lodge.
• Drinking large volumes of plain water through a long hot day with almost no food. Fix: take salt and carbohydrate with the fluid rather than water alone.
• Treating late day sloppiness as fatigue you should push through. Fix: read it as a fuel signal, stop, eat properly, and reassess the terrain before continuing.
• Having a big night mid trip and writing off the next morning. Fix: keep drinks small and early on riding nights and save the session for the last night.

The Drill

Run a full dress rehearsal day at home before the trip. Pick your longest hard training day, and fuel it exactly as you intend to on the hill: same breakfast at the same interval before starting, same food in the same pockets, same drink, same schedule, wearing gloves if the conditions allow. Write down what you actually ate and drank as you go, not from memory afterwards. The standard is that you finish the day still able to make good decisions, you ate on schedule at least every hour on the long efforts, nothing gave you stomach trouble, and you can name at least one item you will replace because you could not open it, could not chew it, or could not stand the taste by the fourth one.

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