DIY sports drinks/nutrition

Rapidly available carbohydrates are a keystone of endurance training and performance. Nearly all specialty nutrition suppliers are using one or another form of sugar polymers which have the advantage over simple sugars of allowing absorption of more calories per hour than simpler sugars, while still not requiring the additional digestion time associated with starches (the most common form is malto-dextrose from brown rice syrup).

Small or single serving sports nutrition products offer athletes of all types highly convenient energy, however it comes at a price both economic and environmental. 100 calories of energy in Gel form costs about $1.00-1.50, single-serving drink mix packets run about the same and every serving includes non-recyclable packaging.

Bought in bulk, the same products come down significantly in price, Cytomax (which happens to be what I use) runs $0.42 per serving. However, if this still sounds expensive it is; brown rice syrup costs $0.25 per 100 calorie serving at Whole Foods, honey is a similar cost and plain sugar (organic) is $0.14 per 100 calories.

I train about 500 hours per year and averaging an intake of about 100 calories per hour during training, I certainly would rather be getting that fuel for less than the $500 it would cost if I used primarily single-serving sources.

Supplements, of course include more than just calories, nearly all include electrolytes, most include some vitamins and anti-oxidants. I already have sources I like for vitamins and antioxidants, however when I mix my own nutrition, I do need to add electrolytes. Of course plain salt is trivially cheap, but I prefer to get the potassium, magnesium, calcium etc that are included in something like Nuun or Hammer's Enduralytes.

So I mostly train using my own mix. I use drink mix as a base because frankly un-flavored Malto-dextrose or malt sugars are pretty seriously unpleasant. Typically I mix up 1/3 drink mix, 1/3 brown rice syrup and 1/3 sugar along with the additional electrolytes I've found I need to avoid muscle cramping. Using Hammer's Enduralytes powder is cheap enough, althogh I've also gone with table salt in a pinch. I put as many calories as I need of this mix into one bottle. A second and sometimes also a third bottle carried in a jersey pocket are filled with plain water which is more refreshing and also allows me to only need to do bottle exchanges for plain water on a race course.

I've been able to nearly eliminate the use of gels this way. When I go into the mountains I will go with just drink mix because I can carry it dry in a Nalgene or doubled ziploc bags and mix it as-needed. I don't like bulk gel containers in the mountains because if they leak they're incredibly hard to clean up. For long training rides, centuries or races, I mix up a concentrate as described above, but with 600-1200 calories in a single bottle, however this will ferment if you try to prepare it more than a day in advance, don't try!