I would 100% recommend bringing one. Especially if you are a heavy sweater. The weight won’t stop you from winning. And if you get thirsty during race and don’t have one it can mess with your head a bit.
I have done two races without a drink, both times I regretted not having one. One time I got dry mouth and the other time I sweated way more than anticipated and got dehydrated.
100% false, I take a sip of drink on every rep of a 30/30 an I promise you it’s over in 3-4 reps once I run out of bottles.
From personal experience, if I’m absolutely smashing my wattage limit, I think that I start to fade after about 50minutes. I’ve noticed this both on a trainer and outside. There is one particularly long hill climb (think Strava glory for climbers) near me for which my best time is just over an hour, and if I don’t take in any carbs, the last 10minutes is much worse than if I’m getting sugar in.
I wonder if it becomes more important as someone’s power increase. For example, if I could somehow hold 400W for an hour, would I need to start fueling earlier? If I could only hold 200W for an hour, could I go 80minutes without fueling (at 190-195W).
I’ve been running into this. For a long time, I was doing early morning 1 hour fasted workouts. I could get by with a bottle of Skratch and then breakfast afterwards.
For the past few months, my workouts have been later in the morning and I was still trying to do them fasted. As the duration increased, I noticed I started to fade around 1:10-1:15 into the workout. Been slowly adding more carbs before and during the workout.
I found that just doing more carbs during the workout wasn’t enough. Latest experiment was a banana and a bagel with jelly right before the workout and a bottle of Skratch and two gels during. I felt much better during and after the workout.
So my learning is that I don’t deal well with fasted riding unless it’s just an hour and not too difficult.