Fuelling Long Sessions

How to stop turning long runs and rides into survival missions

If there’s one place where nutrition really shows up in endurance sport, it’s the long session. The Sunday long run, the big weekend ride, the brick that looks harmless on paper and then quietly wrecks you for two days. These are the days that make you fitter… or flatten you.

A lot of athletes still treat long sessions like a test of grit: “How far can I get on a coffee, stubbornness and maybe a jelly baby?” It feels hardcore in the moment, but it’s not actually good training. You finish wrecked, recovery takes ages, and the next few sessions are flat. The goal of fuelling long is not to prove you can suffer; it’s to give your body enough energy to do quality work and still be standing tomorrow.

This guide is about turning those long efforts from “just get through it” into proper, productive training days.

The point of fuelling long in the first place

When you go long, you’re burning through the carbohydrate stored in your muscles and liver – your glycogen. You’ve only got so much of that on board. If you never top it up while you’re moving, you eventually hit the classic wall: pace drops, legs go heavy, brain goes foggy, and everything feels ten times harder than it did half an hour ago.

That’s not you suddenly becoming unfit. That’s you running low on fuel.

Good fuelling keeps you away from that cliff edge for longer. It doesn’t mean you’ll float along feeling like you’re on a spa day, but it does mean the session feels like hard training instead of a full-body shutdown. It also means you arrive home with enough left in the tank to recover and train again, instead of needing three days and twelve naps.

Start before you start

Your long session doesn’t begin when your watch beeps. It begins a few hours, and even a day, beforehand.

The meal the night before is your first chance to quietly stack the deck. It doesn’t have to be a huge “carb loading” feast, but it should contain a decent portion of carbs and some protein – things like pasta with a sensible amount of sauce and meat or veggie protein, a stir fry with rice or noodles, chilli and rice, or a big jacket potato with a proper filling. You’re not trying to cram in as much food as possible; you’re just making sure your glycogen tank isn’t starting half-empty.

On the morning itself, what you eat depends on timing and what your stomach can handle. If you’ve got a couple of hours before you head out, a normal breakfast with carbs and a bit of protein works well: porridge with fruit and yoghurt, toast with eggs, cereal and milk with something alongside it. If you’re up and out early with minimal time, you keep it simpler: a banana and a yoghurt, toast and jam, a cereal bar and some juice. The main thing is that you don’t roll straight into a two- or three-hour session completely fasted by accident and then wonder why the second half feels grim.

Think of the night before and the pre-session breakfast as your base layer of fuel. Then what you take with you keeps topping that up as you go.

What to take with you

Once you’re out the door, fuelling becomes a little simpler but more deliberate: you’re trying to drip-feed your system with enough carbohydrate to keep the engine turning over.

You don’t need an exact grams-per-hour calculation to start with. Begin with the idea that once your sessions go past about 75–90 minutes, especially if they’re steady or include efforts, it’s wise to start treating fuel as part of the session, not a bonus.

For many athletes, that means taking something small every 20–30 minutes: a gel, a handful of chews, a piece of a bar, half a banana, a small homemade snack if you prefer “real food”. On the bike you can get away with a bit more because your stomach usually tolerates it better; on the run you might need to stick to easier-to-digest options and smaller, more frequent bites.

The key is not to wait until you feel awful. If you only start eating when your legs have gone, your mood has crashed and you’re fantasising about roast dinners, you’re chasing the problem. Starting early and topping up regularly feels almost too easy at first, but later in the session you’ll notice the difference.

Fluids sit alongside this. If you’re using sports drinks, some of your fuel will come from the bottle. If you’re using water or water plus electrolytes, your fuel comes from whatever you’re eating. Either way, you’re thinking about carbs and fluids working together, not separately: sip, nibble, keep moving.

Learning what your stomach likes

No guide can tell you exactly what products your stomach will tolerate – that’s where practice comes in. The good news is that your long training days are exactly where you’re supposed to experiment, not race day.

Pick a long run or ride and test one or two options. Maybe you try gels from a brand you can get easily at your target race. Maybe you experiment with chews, homemade flapjack or jam sandwiches on the bike. Notice how you feel during and after: any cramping, bloating, urgent toilet stops, or do you feel surprisingly okay?

Over time you build up a shortlist of things that:

You don’t hate the taste of after two hours.

Sit well in your stomach.

Are practical to carry and use.

You’re not trying to turn your jersey pockets into a picnic hamper. You’re just assembling a small toolkit of carb sources you trust, so that when it comes to race day, you’re not guessing.

The “no fuel, massive binge” cycle

One of the biggest patterns I see is what happens after long sessions when fuelling during has been poor.

You head out under-fuelled, take very little with you because you “don’t like to eat on the run”, and crawl home. For a while you don’t fancy food because you feel a bit off. Then, a couple of hours later, you open the kitchen door and suddenly everything looks like fair game. Biscuits, crisps, leftovers, kids’ snacks – you name it. You’re not being weak or greedy; your body is simply trying to fill a big hole quickly.

Over weeks and months, that pattern is exhausting. Long-day nutrition becomes a pendulum swing between “nothing” and “everything”. You feel out of control with food, even though what’s really happening is that training stress isn’t being matched with enough fuel at the right time.

When you start fuelling during the session – and a bit more thoughtfully before and after – that evening raid loses its edge. You might still be hungrier on long days (quite normal), but it’s a manageable hunger, not a desperate smash-and-grab. Energy, mood and recovery all improve, and suddenly you’re not terrified of what the weekend does to your appetite.

Matching fuel to the purpose of the session

Not every long session has the same goal. Some are genuinely easier, social or exploratory – longer time on feet or in the saddle at a comfortable pace. Others are key workouts with chunks of race-pace work or structured intervals built in. It makes sense to fuel them differently.

For genuinely easy, low-intensity long outings, you might keep things very simple: a solid breakfast, then a small top-up every half hour or so. You’re still fuelling, but you’re not trying to crush high carb numbers.

For key long sessions where you’re practising race pace or specific efforts, you treat fuelling as part of the session, not optional. If you intend to take a certain amount of carbs per hour on race day, long bricks and simulation days are where you test that. Can your stomach handle it? Does it feel manageable to eat and drink at that rate? Do you need to adjust the timing, the mix of drink and solid food, or the exact products?

Training is where you train your gut as well as your legs and lungs.

Bringing it all together

Fuelling long sessions well isn’t about perfection. It’s about respecting the fact that asking your body to work for two, three, four hours or more is a big request, and giving it something back while it’s doing the job.

That means a sensible meal the night before, some sort of carb-containing breakfast if you’re training in the morning, and a habit of taking on small, regular amounts of fuel and fluid once the session gets past that first hour or so. It means using training to figure out what sits well with you, instead of leaving it to chance on race day. It means noticing that the way you feel at 90 minutes is linked to what you did in the first thirty, not just how tough you are.

Get this roughly right and long runs and rides stop feeling like mini races against your own energy reserves. They become what they’re meant to be: purposeful, challenging sessions that build fitness rather than chip away at you. You’ll recover better, stack good weeks together more consistently, and arrive at your events with a body that knows how to do the work and how to stay fuelled while it does it.