Secret Drink Mix...
From Allen Lim (here) as reported on bike radar. Some interesting stuff on sodium citrate vice sodium chloride, but note he says that loading calories in your drink as fuel "never works." Wonder what infinIT would have to say about that???
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"[Sports drinks] exist because drinking a solution with a little bit of sugar and electrolytes in it – in particular sodium – is far better than drinking water alone," Gatorade labs - no matter what you think of their marketing - proved this years ago: water gets into the stomach faster if it's mixed with a little (4%, hypotonic) solution. So this is meant as a hydration solution, not a calorie solution (double entemdre intended).
"You don't want to mix your calories with your drink," he said. "You want to eat real food to get your calories and then you want to use a solution with some sugar and enough salt to help push that fluid through and not inhibit it. If you have too much sugar in solution in the drink, what happens is that your body has to pull water out of itself into your small intestine to then bring that fluid in. In effect, you have to dehydrate yourself to rehydrate yourself and it ends up creating a big cluster." All true, again proven years ago, and the reason to not tank up on H2o in a race.
But yet, how to stoke in the needed calories during a 10-14 hour race - longer than anything Lim's charges have to deal with - in which you must run for 4 hours at the end? Solid food like boiled potatoes is not the answer, we have learned. The trick is to make the calories easy to ingest (sugar in a liquid), and then easy to absorb, by diluting them sufficently with more water or sports drink. Lots of solutions out there which will do this, just a question of finding one which you can tolerate.
For some reason, the Secret Drink Mix packaging is taking me back to the good ol' days of Gookinaid ERG. In the 80's, a friend used to bring it up from California for us Northwest triathletes cuz there was no web to order it from back then...