Styrkr MIX90 Dual-Carb Drink. What do we think?

Hi everyone! I'm Ella, and I am going to be writing articles for XMiles about my adventures with nutrition...

The first long ride I remember doing was about 85km at the age of 14 with my friend Maddie on a rusty old mountain bike with about 2 functional gears. The top priority of the ride was to make it to Sprinkles Gelato for waffles and ice cream. I now have a car, so don’t need to cycle 85km for an epic waffle – but exercise and snacks remain two of my favourite things.

After graduating, my first paycheck went towards my shiny "not-quite new" road bike who I call Vinney (the Vitus). Since purchasing Vinney, I’ve spent many weekends on rides – usually 40-60km, taken the poor thing on plenty of gravel, cycled a couple of 100kms, and 200km in a day to raise money for charity. This year, I hope to take Vinney bike packing around South West England and into France.

I’ve surprised myself recently, however, discovering that despite my love of snacks, I have been consuming far too few carbs on rides. A quick google recommends 30-60g of carbs per hour, while a little deeper dig recommends 1g per kg of body weight. So, my usual half-way flapjack doesn’t quite suffice!

With the help of XMiles, I’ll begin the journey of finding the right nutritional supplement to have alongside my classic flapjack. I’ll describing everything I try – from the taste and texture to how it feels when I’m struggling up those pesky North Dorset hills, and hopefully take that 20g of carbs up to the 120g it should be over a 3 hour ride. 

The Styrkr MIX90 Dual-Carb Drink had a mild sweet taste, with no particular flavour. I quite liked this because I think it would be hard to get sick of. It didn’t feel heavy and over a 3 hour 66km gravel / road ride. I didn’t feel sick or crampy at all.

One of the best things about it was I got 90g of carbs in, and still felt slightly peckish after about 2 hours (I guess because I was only taking on liquids) so I would be able to take on a bit of solid food as well.

I read a bit about how much I should be eating over a three hour ride, and realized I have been massively underfeeding. On a ride over 2 hours I would think about eating, but usually just 3 or 4 dried apricots or sweets, or a cereal bar - so about 20g of carbs at most. No wonder I was bonking towards the end.

Because I usually don’t eat enough and haven’t used any sports nutrition before, just for fun I thought I would do the same 66km ride matching the 90g of carbs but in Candy Kitten sweets to see the difference. I would definitely not recommend over 100g of sweets before a 100m steep ascent - it was rough and I was dangerously close to covering the grass verge in pink and green watermelon flavoured sick. Despite matching the carb amount, I was exhausted by the end and cramping up in the legs. Also, it was a total faff reaching into my frame bag every 10 minutes instead of just drinking.

The Styrkr was so good I dropped my partner for the last 16km of the ride (he’s usually much faster than me over short distance, and we begin to level out over >60km). Might have been a bit mean of me not to share, but I was doing my own little science experiment and it had to be a fair test haha!