http://theclimb.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/eating-up-the-tourmalet/

31 Days to L’Étape. Today’s training: a recovery ride after pretty intense interval session last night, practicing high-cadence pedaling and generating more power.

As many readers have mentioned in comments, and my coach, Ann Marie, has stressed, one of the skills I’ll need to master in the four weeks before I get to the Pyrenees is the art of eating on the bike. Last weekend, during the long ride I took with an experienced rider who is helping me, I had a near-bonk experience, slowing dramatically on one of the steeper hills outside the city. This rider’s diagnosis was that I’d failed to eat enough of the gels and Power Bars I’d brought along earlier in the ride. This underlined what Ann Marie has been telling me — that what you eat, or don’t eat in the first hour of a long ride is key to how you do later on.

You might recall from an earlier post that another Times writer who has survived a ride up Tourmalet during L’Étape, Ian Austen, wrote to tell me that

The one thing that stunned me were the feed stations. Although they are very large, they quickly resemble a desert where the sand has been replaced by empty plastic mineral water bottles.

Doug G., another reader who has ridden L’Étape — and lived to blog about it — passed on this piece of advice on eating:

Consider how much drink mix and snack food you want to bring. The Etape organizers will provide only a minimal handful of rest stops and in 2005, they were stocking those stops with ham and cheese baguettes and some European energy drink I’d never tried. Needless to say, I was very glad I carefully planned out and brought my own powered drink mix packets and my own energy bars. I had a ton of stuff in my jersey pockets at the beginning, but it was worth it.

Stuart Stevens, a real endurance athlete who was pictured last year in Play Magazine riding L’Étape, agrees that the feed stations at L’Étape are a problem. Stuart’s advice:

I’d suggest avoiding them. Probably you will be better off stopping at a cafe or bar or local well to fill your water bottles. The food they offer is harder to eat than the ride is to pedal, so I’d take all your own feed. (Or pre-position along the way, which is actually a neat trick.)

Following everyone’s advice, I’m currently planning to bring along a bunch of Power Bars and gels, and am going to try this Hammer Perpetuem drink to wash it all down. But I know that some people swear by eating “real food” as well during rides of this length. Christophe Vandaele, who owns SBR, the triathlon shop near Central Park, wrote on SBR’s Web site that, for him, one key to getting through the amateur cyclosportive along the whole, cobblestoned course of the Tour of Flanders route last year was a Flemish pastry:

From my research about the course and knowing the Flemish weather, I knew that gels, energy bars and food I normally would use for a triathlon was not going to get me through this race. The beating on the body, but more importantly the mental state of the rider would require “real food.” Particularly, food that was high in sodium and medium in fat. Some sugar, bananas, and of course “rijs taartjes,” a Flemish pastry made of rice and vanilla pudding. For hydration I used rosebud tea, my dad dug up his old tea recipe from his racing days back in the 60’s when riders didn’t have the performance drinks we have nowadays.

The whole of Christophe’s account of his ride of that 160 miles, including 18 climbs up cobblestoned hills, is worth reading. Christophe’s already trying to get me to consider riding this event next year — The Climb II, This Time It’s Cobblestones.

But back to the issue at hand, what experiences have other people had? Sports drinks and gels, or real food?