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By Gavin Kentch
Fueling in high-level ski racing, once you venture outside of the pro marathon circuit where athletes habitually race wearing a drink belt with an insulated hydration tube snaking up their torso, has always felt to me like a ready spot for conflict between theory and practice. On the one hand, World Cup skiers are world-class athletes who are well aware of the burgeoning science behind high carbohydrate loads in endurance sport (180g CHO per hour is the new 120!) (that’s a joke) (sort of). On the other hand, how much fuel are they really taking in during a few brief swigs from a bottle while passing through the chaos that is a race-pace feed zone? [see file photo below, from the 2024 Canmore World Cup]
I have long been curious about this. So, following last weekend’s 50km classic races that closed out cross-country skiing events at the 2026 Winter Olympics, I asked a half-dozen athletes about their fueling for the day. Everyone I talked to was quite forthcoming; there are few secrets here, slash as you will see basically everyone is doing basically the same thing. Okay, one athlete was so thoroughly boxxxxed that he couldn’t fully answer my questions, but he did the best he could, which is all that any of us can ever do.
Here’s what I found out. TLDR, athletes are of course taking in carbs and electrolytes during a long race in warm temperatures. This part did not surprise me. But they are also getting more grams of carbohydrates into their system, even at race effort, than I would have expected. This part did surprise me, given my layman’s perception of what seems to be fairly limited time in the feed zone. This is why you ask the questions. #insights
Anyway, here’s what I got back from the athletes last weekend. In no particular order:
Joe Davies (Great Britain)
How many carbs are you actually taking in?
“Basically, just as many as possible. We’re doing like a super concentrated mix of Maurten, ideally each time getting in somewhere around, like, 60 grams, hopefully. We’re doing like two packets per bottle.”
60 grams in just those couple of sips?
“Normally it’s hard to drink a lot, so it’s better to just have it almost be gel texture and get as much in as possible.”
Does that work?
“Yeah. Sometimes I have to mix it, and I get water or Powerade or something to kind of hydrate, because the main thing is you just get super thirsty. So it’s a good kind of balance to go super heavy carbs, and then try and get some water to stay cool.”
Andrew Musgrave (Great Britain)
“We use Amacx sports drink, and I try and do 120 grams an hour. So just pretty standard, nothing too fancy. And when you’ve got a lap like this, you’ve got coaches two, three places around the track, then it’s easy enough to get in that amount of carbs.
“We do [the mix] more concentrated, I think we do double concentration of what’s recommended, but then we have water in backup spots, ’cause the problem with that is you can get super thirsty. So we have some water backup spots. And it’s not too much of a stress, just standard what everybody else does, I think.”
Antoine Cyr (Canada)
“I’m feeding with Amacx gels. I was doing the Turbo, which is 40 grams of carb, and I was doing the gel per lap, plus some sport drink. So that’s pushing probably 80 to 90 grams of carbs an hour, something like that.”
Gus Schumacher
“I like to do gels in a little bit of water so I know exactly how much I’m getting. I do Maurten 100 gels, so they’re 25 grams [of carbs per gel], and I did five of them, like all the laps besides the first and the last one. And then a couple Maurten drink feeds, but I don’t think I’m getting that much through that.
“And then I have two gels like right before the start, so that sort of counts in the two-hour total, so I guess that’s seven times twenty-five. You guys can do the math. [This comes to 175, volunteered a reporter who had been sitting on his butt for the last two-plus hours while eating snacks, instead of covering 50 kilometers of skiing and 1,897 meters of elevation gain while shoving down gels.]
“There you go. So close to two hundred [grams of carbs], I guess, over the two hours.”
Hunter Wonders
“I tried taking about two feeds per lap. It was mostly a mix of Tailwind and Maurten. My goal with the Tailwind is that it has more electrolytes than the Maurten, and trying to keep from cramping. Obviously it didn’t quite work, but I don’t know what I would do differently.”
I want to ask, Do you have a guess for how many grams of carbohydrates you took in? And I’m aware that’s a really unfair question because you probably don’t know your own name right now.
“At least two to three gels, and probably… I bet eight to nine hundred carbs, maybe a thousand.”
Calories, maybe?
“I have no idea.”
[I am *not* trying to poke fun at Hunter by leaving this in verbatim. I am rather just trying to convey that, if you are curious what post-50km brain looks like, it looks like a deeply thoughtful and cerebral athlete losing sight of the distinction between calories and grams. Skiing is fun.]
Kendall Kramer
“We typically try to be pretty homogeneous, just so they don’t have to accidentally give someone the wrong thing. We usually all take the same thing, like Maurten gels and Skratch, and just water. So when you cycle between those, it can be very refreshing.”
Astute readers of this site may recall that (a) I asked Kramer about this same topic two-plus years ago following her second-place finish in the 20km skate at 2024 U.S. Nationals at Soldier Hollow, and (b) Kenny is very patient.
At the time, she told me that she was fueling with Nuun (fruit punch flavor, to be precise) mixed with yerba maté tea, which was a recent refinement of her longtime go-to for electrolytes plus caffeine, Gatorade and black tea. You may find that full piece here if you would like to know more. And you may draw your own conclusions about the likely fueling budget of even a very good NCAA ski program versus the U.S. Ski Team at the Olympics: Maurten for all is not gonna be cheap.
The aftermath
While skiing is, everything else being equal, easier on the GI tract than, say, marathon running, 100+ grams of carbs an hour is still a lot, and can have potentially, shall we say, unwelcome effects on one’s overall system. Let’s do a quick point–counterpoint here to close things out:
Any stomach issues after all those carbs?
Andrew Musgrave: “I don’t have any problems with that. I could do 200 grams [an hour] now if I wanted; it wouldn’t be an issue.”
Antoine Cyr: “My stomach’s fucked now.”
Scene.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American skiing. We started with nothing and now we’re at the Olympics. You can read more about our first three years here, and donate to the Olympics fund here. Thank you for consideration, and, especially, for reading.
In women’s ski marathon translation, I’ve seen Teresa Stadloeber throwing up — or stomach cramps that looked like throwing up to the side of the track — in her last (or pre-last) lap during tv translation… Yeah, racing well demands a healthy stomach.
Could be the carbs, or standard-issue stomach cramps. Could also be the newish bicarb products, from Maurten first and now others as well. That has led to… a great deal of emesis.