How many carbs per hour, really

Ask five endurance athletes how much they eat during a race and you will get five numbers between 30 and 120 grams of carbohydrate an hour. All five can be right, because the number depends on how long you are out there, how hard you are going, and — the part most people skip — how much your gut has practised.

The ranges most people land in

As a starting point, not a prescription:

• Under 90 minutes. You probably do not need much beyond what you already have on board. Water and habit are enough for most people.
• 90 minutes to about 2.5 hours. Somewhere around 30 to 60 grams an hour is a reasonable target. This is the range where most people first notice that fuelling changes how the last third feels.
• Longer than that. Higher intakes become useful, and the athletes who tolerate 90 grams and above are almost always using a mix of glucose and fructose rather than one sugar alone — the two use different transporters, so the ceiling is higher.

The part that actually decides it

Your gut is trainable, and it is the limiting factor far more often than your legs. Someone who has never eaten while running is not going to absorb 90 grams an hour on race day because a website said so — they are going to spend the last 10 km looking for a portaloo.

Which means the useful version of the question is not “how much should I take?” but “how much can I currently take, and how do I move that number up before the race?”

Rehearse it, then write it down

Pick your two or three longest sessions in the build and treat them as fuelling rehearsals rather than as training that happens to include a gel. Same products, same timing, same concentration as you intend to use on the day. Then record what happened — not just the number, but whether it sat well, and at what point it stopped sitting well.

This is exactly why fuel plans in Soigneur are attached to an event and visible to your coach rather than living in a note on your phone. A plan nobody reviews is a plan you find out is wrong at kilometre 30.

The short version

Start conservative, rehearse in training, raise the number gradually across a build, and write down what happened each time. The athletes who fuel well in races are almost never the ones with the best information — they are the ones who practised.