Regarding Carbopro : is there any point in using it if my longest race is less than an hour ( recreational SUP 3 milers)?  I roughly follow the beginners training program from the Riding Bumps book.

The Carbopro literature seems to suggest that for such a short race the glycogen already in our muscles will suffice.

Please let me know if I understand this correctly or forward it to Carbopro if that makes sense.

Nice question right there. Seems easy but most people screw it up. Here is the low down.

You are correct. Your race is only one hour long. You are also correct about the literature by stating that you won’t need to ingest calories in a one hour race. A race that short is pretty much an all out effort. Most experienced athletes can go at threshold for about an hour before they puke and throw in the towel. If your plan is to race seriously, you probably won’t have time to grab the spout on your Camelback and take a sip and even if you could spare the time you will be breathing so heavy you probably won’t be able to choke down much nutrition anyway.

THAT SAID – it does not mean you need to not worry about your nutrition. Your nutrition plan starts a few days BEFORE the race. As you say, you are going to be relying on your glycogen stores so you better have them topped off. This is what most people forget. They taper for the race and they simultaneously go on some idiotic starvation diet because they think they are going to puff up in the 48 hours before the race because they are resting. They then go on with their life or maybe take in a surf, play with the kids, walk the dog, etc.etc. because they are going nuts because they are not training. If that is you – epic fail. You  gotta rest and eat before your race. As we describe in the book your best bet is to determine how many calories you need each day and eat a little more carbohydrate on top of that. Cant hut (trust us you wont puff up in the 2 days before the race) and will likely help.

The other thing you need to focus on is what you eat before the race. Get up a few hours early and put in several hundred calories. A banana is not enough. A single Fig Newton is not enough. Many athletes start drinking calories about an hour before the race (Carbopro would work). Many athletes also choke down a GU or other gel with caffeine 30 minutes before the race. Another option is to down a bottle of the new Carbopro C5 with caffeine in the hour before your race. Each 100 calories of the new Hydra C5 also has 50 mg of caffeine (NOTE: we are told that n non-caffeinated version is coming).  The caffeine should hit you right about 20-30 minutes in the race when you need it most.

Hope that helps.

Full Disclosure: Carbopro is a sponsor of this website. This was a real question we got from a reader. We promise we would not invent questions just to create some sort of fake advertisement for our sponsors. We also would not allow anyone to advertise on this site unless we used their products. We were using Carbopro long before SUP or prone paddling were on our radar.