Month: February 2012

Yep, I’ve got another sponsor to help me in 2012! I’ve been talking with these guys for a little while and was waiting for the logos before blogging about our new association.
BBI Healthcare have a base in South Wales nearby, in Pencoed. They make a couple of products right now that are pretty interesting to the endurance athlete: GlucoTabs and GlucoJuice. These are simple, glucose based products in a tablet form and a liquid form.
The GlucoTabs have 4g of glucose per tablet, which adds up to about 16 calories. There are 10 in a handy tube, and I find 3 tubes are a nice fit in a jersey pocket on the bike on long rides. For shorter rides I’ll usually just carry 1 tube. So that’s 160 calories per tube, or 40g glucose. They come in orange and berry flavours, and I’ve been favouring the orange. They’re pretty sweet, kind of too sweet at the start of a ride but I find I crave the sweetness after a couple of hours. On long rides I eat around a tube of GlucoTabs each hour after the first hour, which adds up about right for a rider of my weight. They’ve been enough for me for 4 and 5 hours on the bike, staving off the bonk no problem with nothing other than a bottle of water. GlucoTabs are great at this time of year as its cold so I don’t drink much. If I have a carbohydrate drink in the winter I have to drink too often (and stop to pee too often). The GlucoTabs are good to chew too, an important thing on the bike for me (I find I chew my bottles if I just have carbohydrate drinks) and they have that nice dissolving sensation like other dextrose tablets. If you’ve eaten other tablets you’ll know what I mean.

They act really quickly too. I was almost home and getting a bit tired on the climb up through Morriston after hours of riding and lots of hills. I snaffled a bunch of tablets when it flattened out a bit and felt better within minutes (and had another hill to drag myself up too).
I find I can open the GlucoTabs tubes fine with big gloves on (and with huge lobster mitts on too), but it helps to have broken the seal before you leave to cut out any faff while riding along. Another top tip is to keep the full tubes upright in your pocket and turn the empty ones upside down when you’ve finished them. It’s difficult to tell when a tube is full or empty – if they’re part full they rattle. So putting the empty ones upside down means I only pull out a tube with tablets in it.
The GlucoJuice I like for running. When cycling I like to chew, but when running I don’t want to chew. I like breathing. GlucoJuice is a sweet, watery bottle with 15g of glucose (i.e. of carbohydrate, or around 60 calories). Check out the website for recommended use , but I’ll usually carry 1 or 2 GlucoJuice bottles with me on longer runs. Unlike gels you don’t need to drink water with them, and they don’t get stuck in your teeth, so they’re really good to carry and simple too. I can stick 1 or 2 of them down the back of my shorts (as long as the waist is tied!) and there’s no discomfort and nothing extra to carry. They’re a bit warm when I get round to drinking them though…
Again, GlucoJuice is really fast acting. Some of this effect may be because of the link between carbohydrate in the mouth and the brain, but mainly this is a simple glucose drink that is rapidly digested.
The Gluco guys are looking at other products for us endurance athletes, and I’m really looking forward to finding out what they come up with and testing it out. I might be able to give you lot an inside look at what they do and how they do it.

So, specific examples. The last couple of weeks of my final block of base training had some long rides (for a triathlete!) One ride was a 100km flat ride at zone 2 effort all the way round, that turned into an ill prepared ride of strong winds, cold rain and misery. The weather forecast hadn’t predicted the rain so I wasn’t wearing the right kit. My heart rate and effort were ok (my power meter failed in the rain again) but average speed was well down thanks to the weather and the solo nature of the ride. Nonetheless, squash in my bottle and GlucoTabs in my back pocket got me round just fine.
The other weekend was a nice big, hilly ride taking in some of the classic sights of South Wales. I rode out up the Neath valley to the Rhigos, and climbed that and the Bwlch to get in around 1500m of climbing. A cracking ride on a cold day, only drinking a single bottle, but munching on GlucoTabs most of the way round to finish strongly and follow the ride with a short bricked run (after swigging a bottle of GlucoJuice in “transition”). Great stuff!
So that’s an introduction to GlucoTabs and GlucoJuice. Try it!