Budget Nutrition: How to Fuel Your Triathlon Training for $3 a Week 

During his post-race interview at the T100 final in Dubai, Marten Van Riel joked that his prize money meant he wouldn’t just be eating Nutella sandwiches all winter. Well, for the rest of us who didn’t walk away with $196,000 in prize money last triathlon season, Nutella sandwiches are very much still on the menu and not just because they are delicious and cheap.

The more you train and race, the more you need to eat. That sounds like a pretty good deal, but it comes at a cost–literally. With current recommended carbohydrate targets in the realm of 60 g/hr and higher, a long distance race can cost upwards of $50 alone on fuel. If you train 10 hours per week and average 60 g of carbohydrate per hour, half from gels and half from sports drinks, that can cost around $40 per week. Add in normal (or above normal) meals and “expensive to feed” should be a warning on any triathlete’s dating profile. 

So, I decided to crunch some numbers…

Crunching the Numbers

To keep it simple, I decided to compare options based on price per gram of carbohydrate. I left electrolytes and any other ingredients and factors (like whether a food was considered “more healthy” or “better” for performance) out of the equation. I took even more liberties, using the average retail price of products, excluded any labour or packaging costs for homemade recipes, and included my personal preference for Percy Pigs and pancakes as fuel. In other words, this is researched, but far from an exact science. I let AI do the math, and I’m not recommending this as a permanent, or holistic, nutrition strategy. 

For the homemade options, I used a few of my favourite recipes: Canadian long distance pro Cody Beals’ recipe for his Homebrew sports drink; UAE Team ADQ senior nutritionist Dr. Gemma Sampson’s recipes for Oreo rice cakes, muesli bars and Rice Krispie treats (which are apparently all the rage in the pro peloton these days); and my own easy pancake recipe (below). As an homage to Van Riel, who sparked this whole idea, I chose Nutella as my pocket-friendly pancake topping for both added carbs and a price point (and flavour–because who doesn’t like Nutella); we used the average price in US dollars to come up with the below chart.

No surprise, gels are the most expensive, while homemade options are the cheapest, but we already knew there was a cost to convenience and sports formulations. In the middle we have candy and some drink mixes. While the cost savings are pennies, extrapolating the example above of 10 hours per week averaging 60 g of carbohydrate per hour, getting your energy by getting half from homemade sports drinks (300 g = $1.20) and half from homemade rice cakes (300 g = $1.80), you can bring your cost down to a shocking $3 per week. Drawing out the example even further, if you trained 44 weeks a year, that savings can increase to $1,760.

A Time and A Place

The cost analysis wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t address the obvious trade off: time. You need time to prepare homemade food, from shopping to cooking to figuring out how much you need. The frugal or cooking enthusiasts might immediately see it as an easy and worthy investment but, for most, the lesson here is to be more flexible to alternatives–especially during the winter. Heading into, and during, race season, no doubt you should be practicing and training your race day nutrition; but the winter months, when the intensity is lower and the hours are longer, might be the perfect time to use alternate sources.

Beals (the Canadian long distance pro who’s homemade sports drink recipe was part of the study) is a testament to this approach. He is outspoken about adequate fueling for training. “Big training demands big eating,” he says on social media. For the long, low intensity rides that make up so much of winter training, he is quick to reach beyond gels and sports drinks for high calorie, carbohydrate-dense foods like pizza, juice, candy, sticky buns, ice cream and even “emergency nachos.”

“How I fuel racing is quite different from lower intensity training,” he explains. “I practice race nutrition during some key sessions and mix it up the rest of the time. My unscientific theory is that 100% carb race fuel goes down smoothly if your gut is used to playing on legendary difficulty.”

As a pro athlete, Beals’ long six hour indoor rides can demand 5,000 calories (approximately 700-800 grams carbohydrate). Going back to our athlete math, 700 g of carbohydrate could mean a ride fueling cost of $80 in sports nutrition (half drink, half gels). If you opted for homemade and food-based options (including, as Beals calls them, “cheap carbs”), you can get that cost closer to $15. But while we can laugh at Beals’ take on “legendary-level” race day gut tolerance, and even enjoy the small monetary savings, his approached is seeded in something deeper.

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A post shared by Cody Beals (@zootsports)

Deeper Benefits

Fueling has a lot of behavioral, emotional, and cultural elements tied to it and, while popular beliefs are shifting from “eating is cheating” to “high carb is king,” what foods are acceptable in that category can still be limited to performance-based solutions. But as Beals stresses, energy requirements, first and foremost, need to be met.

“What works for high volume athletes is very different from a healthy diet for more sedentary people,” he says. “I see very few accurate representations or expectations of how pro endurance athletes typically eat. These misconceptions contribute to a sports culture rife with disordered eating and RED-S, especially among younger athletes.”

(Beals has has been public about his experience with RED-S.)

“Eating this much day after day is a chore!” he continues in his post. “The only way I can hit these numbers is a combo of tempting, processed, digestible foods supplemented with more nutritious foods. I’m less concerned about dietary composition than energy balance, since the most harmful thing I can do is run a large energy deficit.”

Taking the stigma out of eating “less healthy” or processed foods to reach your energy demands in training is work that still needs to be done (and in no way replaces the necessity of having a healthy diet), so expanding what is acceptable sports nutrition is part of that process. So, if Van Riel is chowing down on Nutella sandwiches, and Beals is staying fit and fueled on nachos, choosing to spend $3 a day on candy instead of $15 on gels just might be the smarter investment.

Easy-Peasy Pancakes

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tbs baking powder
• 1 tbs sugar
• 1 cup milk (soy, almond, oat, etc.)
• 1 tsp vanilla 
• Pinch of salt 

Mix dry and then stir in wet ingredients to combine. Pour 1/4 c of batter in a frying pan and cook on medium-high heat until edges are bubbling and then flip. Once cool, spread jam, Nutella, peanut putter, etc. for flavor and extra carbohydrates. Fold over (to make a sandwich) and wrap in tin foil to eat on the go. Makes about 8 pancakes. Double batch for more. 

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