A while back, during my first half iron race, I found that (as many athletes have reported) after several hours of effort my sense of taste became exaggerated and I totally lost my stomach for food and sweet drink. At the same time, in an endurance event of that length, they say you have to take in 300-350 calories an hour or you'll bonk (on this one, I choose to believe them rather than test it out for myself). It can be really hard to consume that much and a lot of athletes run out of energy because they can't.
So -- in contradistinction to virtually everyone else in the entire world -- I began looking for drinks that had tons of calories but little flavor. What could I drink that would supply me with a constant stream of carbs, maybe a little protein, but wouldn't taste sickly sweet after a few hours of biking, swimming and running? Late last year I realized there's an obvious candidate that fulfills these requirements perfectly, and in fact it has been used as a performance beverage for many years. Beer.
However, it would be less than ideal to become intoxicated during a 21 MPH, 56-mile bike ride, and everything I read indicated that alcohol is quite the opposite of a performance-enhancer, and besides alcohol is banned by triathlon rules, so it would have to be the alcohol-free kind.
A quick look at some labels indicated that 12 oz of original Gatorade has 75 calories, 14 grams of carbs, and 0 grams of protein. O'Douls NA beer has 70 calories, 15 grams of carbs -- and 1 gram of protein to boot! I found a brand of beer, Clausthaler, that had even more calories (90), and tasted better too. Not a bad comparison, and if you actually drink more because it's not sickly sweet, you could actually take in more per hour in a long event!
I did a quick Google search to see if I could find anything on line about anyone trying this, and came up completely empty, which I figured meant it was either a really stupid idea or a stroke of genius. The only flaws I could see in the idea were 1) the carbonation, or 2) the alcohol. It turns out that even alcohol-free beer contains a little alcohol, around 0.4%. That would mean you would have to drink 8-10 12-ounce servings to get the alcohol from one can of your average beer. But, I figured that might be just enough to take a little pain away without actually inhibiting performance. On the carbonation, I figured that the solution to this was to either a) try it out on long training rides and see if it was a problem for me, or b) drink flat, alcohol-free beer (i know, it's sounding less attractive by the minute). Just like they serve flat coke sometimes in aid stations. I figured the other potential flaw might be just that when I actually tried this it would be heinous and nasty and horrid.
Well so I tried it, and on several rides found that the beer, even in somewhat flat, warm, non-alcoholic condition, tasted really good! The carbonation (there was still some when I drank it) was not a problem (on the other hand I have a quite strong stomach) and I didn't get even the slightest buzz.
My experimentation with beer as a performance beverage caused quite a lot of merriment among my friends; for example when I led a 100-mile bike ride they dubbed it the "BYOB Century."
Eventually the charms of beer began to wear off; in practice rides I generally just never got to the point where watered-down Gatorade tasted that bad, plus I discovered a powdered drink, Carbo-Pro, which is a white powder of complex sugars that has 112 calories a scoop -- and is totally tasteless.
But, I found beer to be a viable option, and it is still in my bag of tricks. I'm definitely planning to put some in my special needs bag if I ever do a full Ironman race.
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