making your own 'sports drink'

Hilarity.

And that Test vid - the UK one. Well everyone's seen it by now so i can say this:
i saw the "bear" but that was a crappy ass moonwalk and a crappy ass costume... oh and i got the answer right too... i couldn't have told you it was a bear or that it was moon walking but i noticed the extra person walking through the group passing back and forth. When they asked about the bear for a minute i was like 'wtf' thinking it would have been small or a real bear or something like that. Flawed. Good but flawed. Makes the point, I guess.

Steve brought up a good point about the 'make your own' fluid replacement beverage. It is a pain. Well here's the deal. Grab a container with a good lid (yogurt ones work, glass jars or what not). If you have access to a gram scale, great. And honestly, is there a bike geek out there without one? And honestly - it is best to cook with weight measurements, they are far more accurate and representative of the ingredient elements than a volume measuring device.

Pretty easy to work backwards and make up and mix some pre-mix. So that your "real" drink stuff is easy (fights the lazy side). Yes, it is more or less not possible to do the flavoring in the powder. But, then, do you need flavor? Gatorade says you do, because it stimulates the metabolic desire to drink. That said, ya don't need the drink to tell you to drink. Do you?

Okay - So get your container. and work up from say Gatorade:
#1 8oz serving of liquid has a "scoop" that has:
0.110 grams of sodium
0.040 grams of potassium
14 grams of sugar

Sodium is a 1:1 ratio with Chlorine in Sea Salt (roughly - or should we say close enough for this application). So doing a bit of calculations (man i'm rusty but iirc Sodium has an atomic weight of 22.99 and chlorine is 35.45 - okay i looked it up - periodic table here on my desk). In this case we don't need to convert to mols because we have the gram equivalent of one and we just need to solve for how many grams of chlorine and add those two together to get how many grams of Sea Salt we need to get a 0.110 g of Sodium that is found in gatorade. Right?

Lets call it 0.170 grams. So.

For the salt we need 0.280 grams per 8 oz (240 ml) serving.

How many servings do you want to make up?
10? well Lets translate to bike water bottles. Assuming a 24oz bottle. That is 3 servings.

So. To make up enough for say 10 bottles we just multiple the base formula 30 times.

But. First. Mass (fancy more accurate term for weigh) out one serving and devise a scoop. maybe you need to mass out 2 servings or even better 3. Does one table spoon equal 1 serving? That makes it easy. But that's where the problem solving happens. And the good thing is? Do it once. All done. (FWIW 1 tsp of turbinado sugar is about 4 grams)

Now you know how big of a scoop one serving of the mix makes. Now. Make a big batch up.

30*0.28 grams = 8.4 grams (you'll find the bigger the quantity to mass out the more precise you get. it is hard to get 0.28 grams. very easy to get 8.4 and at 8.4 +/- 0.1 or 0.2 grams isn't going to screw up the formula very much).

Okay then the sugar:
30*14 grams = 420 grams (huh huh - four twenty).

So what about the potassium?
Well. Turbinado does have about 1/3 of the molasses left in it. Dark brown sugar might be better to use but the crystal nature of the Turbinado makes it more suitable for this application. So that bit of molassees left in there will give you traces (traces meaning probably 100% of those elements will be absorbed instead of a % of a supplement in mineral form - ala gatorade) of good stuff like calcium, iron, and potassium.

Sea Salt has traces of lots of good minerals as well.

Sweet sugar/salt water. Can ya tolerate it? maybe. maybe you want to squeeze a lemon wedge or two in each waterbottle to help it go down. Heck, lots of people like the unflavored/plain gels. Maybe you want to put a drop or two of some natural vanilla extract (don't use the corn syrup based stuff - yuck). Or a splash of juice.

Or maybe it is just too much trouble. You don't have time to take care of your body now with all that data analysis your coach is having you do with the powertap files. Here's the deal. Figure out how to justify taking the TIME to prepare your body (engine). You should really spend more time preparing it than analyzing it post exertion. Seriously. Look at the Race cars for example. If a team took care of the motors like most "serious" cyclists hooked up to all types of measuring devices take care of their own bodies, well there would be lots and lots and lots of DNFs from blown motors. Dat the flat out truth.

Take care of what God gave ya there. That sleeve of yours. We ain't in Richard Morgan's Kovacs books. You can't just get a new sleeve. Ya gotta make the one ya got work.

Heddwch
G