I thought about that also. Thanks for suggesting. I’ve seen many of the world tour teams are doing something like this also in feed zones. Funnily a lot of the times it seems the riders try to discard the gel or whatever it is that is attached. It might be a good solution for the gels, and I could tape them on so they would be “easier”, but I think I’d need two hands to do that. One to hold the bottle and one to rip the gel off.
My current thought is the top tube bag, put the gels and pre-opened waffles in there. They are different enough in their shape that I can probably sort them somewhat and have all the waffles at the front and all the gels at the back or something like that. Then I can discard my trash in my pockets. I’m going to use my vacuum sealer to make a few custom pickle “sleeves” just for the hell of it. Something slightly shorter than the pickles, but the bags are sturdier than the average zip loc and should stand up on their own. I can put those in my left back pocket to keep them separate. I’m going to be adding a fair amount of sodium to my bottles, so I have no idea if they will help or not, but I like the taste of pickles and think it would be nice to have something “not sweet.” I think I’m going to try my vertical wine bottle rack I cobbled together. It seems rather perfect. However to all the folks mentioning that it’s easier to know how much you’ve consumed, my counter will be if I don’t get through an entire bottle in 45 minutes and I’m discarding a bunch of 75% empty bottles, I also won’t really know how much I’ve eaten. With the camelbak at least, when it’s empty, you know you finished essentially 3 bottles worth. The other thing I’m giving up is that I did want to reserve the bottle cage for some pure water in case I needed to drink something other than mix for a bit or pour some water on me. I think I"m going to solve that by loading 6 black bottles with mix and 4 clear bottles with water and then decide which to grab at the pit depending on what I need. The laps are 45 minutes so I should be able to get by on food if I take a pure water bottle on that lap.