In these austere times cycling can start to become a burden on your finances – club runs at £25, the privilege of riding local roads with some red arrows painted on the ground for £28, or being persuaded by ‘helpful’ club mates to try latex inner tubes only for them to last half a race before puncturing (equating to about 70km for £8, or 8.75p per km). I suppose you could put this all down to inflation (4.4%!) but that would just be the makings of a poor inner tube related pun.
Fortunately there are many areas of cycling life where it’s possible to make savings – I’ve previously covered thrifty solutions to chamois cream, embrocation and recovery snacks. Now I turn my penny-pinching attention to energy drinks.
Some of you may have laboured under the illusion that water is a satisfactory source of hydration, but being a free and widely available commodity this is not something either myself, the cycling media or the cycling industry can endorse. If it hasn’t got a little picture of a man on a bicycle on the packaging and is exclusively available only from specialist suppliers, then I’m afraid it’s not suitable for the serious cyclist.
Fortunately there is a third way. Jim Ley, club run hero and previous contributor to this blog, has put together a recipe of powders that can be mixed together and then added to water – homebrew energy drinks if you will.
Think of it as like buying components for your bike, but rather than relying on the bike shop to do the mechanical work, you grapple with spanners and allen keys and sort it yourself. In addition to frugality, this approach allows you to customise your recipes, add specific ingredients, and then tell anyone who’ll listen about why off the shelf products aren’t suitable for a serious endurance athlete (such as yourself). In short, it’s yet another opportunity to indulge your racing cyclist’s superiority complex and to sneer at Sportivists still paying through the nose for overpriced drinks.
Both these recipes work out at under £5 for 1kg – which equates to about the third of the price of SiS, Torq, High5, Lucozade and various others.