Nutrition is a necessary part of participating in all sports, but not all sports demand eating while participating.
If you’ve checked out other parts of my website, you will already know that I love to ride bikes. With that, I also like to race. I started racing in 2022 on the road in Cat 5, did a full season in Cat 4 in 2023, and started off 2024 in Cat 3. I’ve also really enjoyed doing several gravel races since 2022. I was dealing with a chronic illness during this time where part of my treatment was eating a very strict diet where most foods were off the table. In cycling, you have to eat a lot. You burn more calories than the average athlete due to the duration of the training necessary to compete and the duration of the events themselves. This made cycling at the level I wanted to be at tougher than perhaps it would have been otherwise. What really was difficult was eating during races. What is truly unique about cycling is that you have to eat while you are racing. Races are usually 3-4 hours long, and if you don’t consume carbs while you are racing, you probably won’t finish, and you certainly won’t perform at your best.
All I could eat that I was able to bring on bike rides with me when I started racing were rice cakes and maple syrup. The only prepackaged snack on my approved list of foods were rice cakes. I’m talking about the Quaker hockey puck type. I’d bring packs of plain Lundberg Thin Stackers on long bike rides, sometimes 3-4, and get them down when possible. Meanwhile, everyone else was drinking carb mixes in their bottles, energy bars, and gels, among other things. People who didn’t know about my situation thought my rice cakes were weird. I then figured out I could bring maple syrup packets on my ride. Those were a big help. Scarfing down dry rice cakes while riding and breathing decently hard was difficult.
I began racing with rice cakes and maple syrup, and it was basically impossible to perform well at races where nutrition was a factor, aka road races and gravel races (I could do well at criteriums which lasted at most 60 minutes). I remember pulling out a packet of rice cakes in the Berkeley Hills Road Race, putting a couple in my mouth, and then turning the corner to the start of a climb that was a key point in the race, and I like almost choked while trying to get them down and keep up with the splintering pack. I also needed water with electrolytes, so I’d start each race with two bottles with some plain electrolytes in each. I’d simply hope that I wouldn’t need more water than I brought or that the race organizers would hand out neutral water in the feed zone. One time, at the Patterson Pass Road Race in 2023, I brought 4 bottles to the start of what would be a 100+ degree day, two on my bike and two in my pockets, and I got dropped on the first climb less than 30 minutes into the race.
Luckily, in 2024, I was able to tolerate plain maltodextrin in my bottles. This opened the doors for me to be able to perform well in road races. I’d start off each race with two full bottles with 60g of carbs in each. However, that would never be enough hydration or carbs in the race I was doing, so I had to find people to hand off bottles to me.
For most races, I could not convince nor did I want to burden my parents or girlfriend to drive 3 hours with me at 5 am to the middle of nowhere to stand out on the course in whatever the weather had in store and hand me a bottle once an hour when I rode by. Instead, either one person on my team would volunteer to do the feed for the entire race or get their dad or someone else they knew to do it. More often than not, it was a teammate’s dad. And when I say the entire race, I mean for all of us part of the same racing club team in different categories. At a normal race in Norcal, our club would have racers in the Men’s P12 race, Cat 3, Cat 4, and one Master’s race in addition to the women’s P12, 3/4/5, and Master’s race. So potentially, one guys’ dad would hand out bottles for multiple racers in 7 different fields. In my experience, it was usually one dad handing out bottles for racers in 4-5 different fields.
Someone on the team would fill a bunch of bottles for the team the night before the race and put some sort of cheap carb mix, usually gatorade powder with maltodextrin. I couldn’t drink that.
Other people would also bring their own bottles with specific mixes they wanted. I’ve done the feed zone for my team before, and knowing whose bottle is whose, navigating the different fields, and navigating each peloton to pick out your riders is very difficult. Even if I manage to get the right bottle ready for a rider, bottles are often dropped during the hand-off.
These issues with in-race nutrition inspired my creation for the Bottle Grab. With a portable stand that I could set up in the feed zone with my bottles, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of the issues described above for getting the bottles I need during a race. I don’t have to ask someone to come to a race with me to do my feed. I don’t have to ask a teammate doing the feed zone to make sure to get me my specific bottles. I don’t have to sheepishly ask one of my teammate’s dad to do my feed. I don’t have to worry about all of the things that could go wrong – is my feeder there, does my feeder have the bottles I need, does my feeder know which field I’m in. It enables me to do any race I want to do where in race feeding is necessary.