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I used to ride a lot of miles. For me acetyl L-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid seemed to help me maintain maximum energy output in rides over 40 miles where I was maintaining an average pace of 20 mph or more. So they might have been helpful for your MS150 ride, especially if you did it all in one day. If you were taking it pretty easy and riding only 75 miles a day and eating and drinking enough to maintain your blood sugar level without much of your energy coming from your body’s fat storage you probably would not have noticed any difference. Neither has any type of stimulant effect.

There has been research done on both supplements for enhancing athletic performance and for other purposes. Some people have suggested that carnitine supplements should be banned for athletic performance. They go in and out of vogue periodically. The two supplements seemed to make a measurable difference in my training regimen under specific circumstances.

Bzzzt. 75 miles a day at 20 mph is not taking it pretty easy unless you are a hardcore rider.

Today I hooked on to a paceline going 18-21 mph (two or three times we gusted up to 23-24 mph) at mile 9 and held on until mile 64.

This was the 2nd day of the ride: I don't know how to handle yesterday because I did the 72 miles yesterday in within 5 min of the wall clock time of today's 74.5 miles; but yesterday there were 10-15 mph headwinds.

That being said, I know about being fat-adapted. I've been working on doing keto combined with intermittent fasting, and have started to do 18 hours without a meal and not really noticing until about hour 20, when autophagy kicks in.

The funny part was, yesterday at dinner, I was draggy and dead until I ate 5 pats of butter, then I came back to life. Even though I had been pigging out on bugles, mini peanut butter and jelly sandwichces, bananas, power bars, and so forth. So I conclude my body was looking for fat to burn.

So yes, I thank you for the word on acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid; also, I will point out that there have been peer-review, double-blind medical studies on regular L-carnitine fumarate, and that it can reduce damage to the heart muscle, even if given in the immediate aftermath of a heart attack. I didn't read the mechanism, but I'd bet it has to do with shuttling fatty acids and/or ketones into the mitochondria, and that somehow helping prevent or mitigate ischemic damage to cardiac tissue.

I don’t know if any supplements make any difference if you are not a hard core rider. You sound pretty hard core to me however.

As far as the cardiac studies... that was my understanding of the hypothesis for improved survivability after a heart attack as well.

The acetylated form of carnitine costs more but is more easily absorbed in water.

You already have a very good understanding about when you are training for endurance events that if you are riding hard after the first hour or so, most of the glycogen stores in the muscles that you are using is exhausted. After that the ATP your muscles are using to contract is coming mostly from a combination of whatever sugars are coming from your digestive system and stored fat.

Your digestive system is only capable of releasing sugar into your blood stream at a rate that varies depending on a number of factors. Someone who is riding over 30 or 40 miles regularly can feel the effect of this on their energy level.

If you allow your blood sugar level to drop below a certain level on your ride it becomes difficult to keep up a good pace. It seemed to me that when I was taking the Acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha lypoic acid that it allowed my body to maintain my blood sugar level at a higher level longer during rides.

Of course it was probably more important to eat plenty of carbohydrates soon after a long ride to help recharge my stored glycogen reserves for the next day. So this is the type of variable which could alter one’s perception of how things felt the following day.

When I was racing, “carbo-loading” was one of the more important concepts for success in long distance events. But many people did not understand that your muscles reserves are replenished better and more completely in multi-day events if you eat as soon as possible after your ride.

Several points about the digestive system.
1. Apparently when you eat pasta, or similar carbs, your digestive tract can release about 1 g carbs/min into the bloodstream. At 4 kcal/g, obviously this won’t help much at 900 kcal/hr, where the 1g of carbs gets used in 16 seconds.
2. But “your digestive tract” might have another meaning: glucogenesis, where the body breaks down amino acids to create glucose for fuel. Apparently the body seeks out glutamine for fuel, and glutamine is prevalent in the cells of the intestines. Hint, if your sweat smells like ammonia during a strenuous cardio workout this is likely what is happening.
3. But it turns out there is a way to get some additional carbs into your blood: fruit. The sugar in fruit is fructose, not sucrose, and gets shuttled to the liver, which can process 1-1.4 g of carbs a minute into your blood.
Every little bit helps!

We all develop our own favorite foods to eat to maintain performance on long rides. Decades ago when I was racing seriously at a national level my favorite and most other riders favorites were bananas for many reasons. I ate so many that I really don’t like to eat them much these days.

These days we have tons of choices and some are a serious step backwards. The various Cliff Bars and Powerbars seem to work well for me. And I like a cold Gatoraid type drink when I take a break.

I have nothing against protein and fat. I love hamburgers, steaks, chicken and bacon. They just don’t help much when you are out on a long ride and trying to make good time. Glycogenesis in my experience has no value while you are burning lots of calories and trying to maintain a good pace. I love eating those Costco protein bars, but I found out the hard way that they are completely worthless on a long ride.

I can definitely relate to those gorillas.

The water line to our house started leaking. The soil here is glacial till with literally about half rock. I decided to put in drains for the gutters while I was digging up the water line. Because of the close proximity to electrical, gas, phone, and internet lines I ended up digging it all by hand.

I wasn’t thinking of it being serious exercise because I don’t think that it was really raising my heart rate much, but I was sweating a lot because of the warm weather. I didn’t drink enough to keep myself well hydrated. On a ride I almost always have a “camel back” type of back pack that I am constantly sucking ice water from even in cool weather. But yesterday I didn’t drink enough. So last night I ended up with some pretty serious leg cramps that work me up. This morning I am still feeling a little shakey and my tinnitus is acting up.

I mention it because we develop routines to deal with the stress of hard and long physical exercise and often forget that it is very easy to get into trouble if you let your body get out of balance. On many occasions over the years I have ended up “bonkimg” 40 or 50 miles out on a ride and have had just a miserable time getting back. Sometimes it has been bad enough that I have had to stop and just eat whatever food I could get my hands on and wait for my blood sugar level to come up before I was able to continue.

When I took my wife on her first century ride on the back of one of our tandems I kept reminding her to eat and drink to the point she was getting annoyed with me. She was used to 30 or 40 miles rides that we did several times a week and thought she knew how much she needed. But for your first 20 or 30 miles you are drawing energy mostly from the glycogen reserves in your muscles and your liver, so if that is as far as you usually ride you don’t experience the necessity of eating and drinking constantly on a longer ride.

We were riding with a group who all thought that they were pretty hot riders. When we got to the restaurant that was at the half way point they were all saying that they couldn’t believe how fresh she looked and that I must have been the one doing all the work.

This pissed her off, so on the way back, she was pushing the pace and the whole group eventually disintegrated. Apparently they were mostly used to shorter rides as well and hadn’t been eating on the way out and thought the meal stop would sustain them on the way back. But as you noted you can only turn your meals into usable energy at a slower rate than what you burn while you are keeping up a good pace. And this applies to absorbing moisture as well. If you let yourself get behind whether it is dehydration or your blood sugar levels things can go badly very quickly.

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