Your plan, built from the fuel you already train with
Tired of a fueling plan that says take a gel, when the gel in your pocket has 40 grams of carbohydrate and the one it was written for has 22?
CarbRate is built on 163 gels, chews, drink mixes, bars, real food and electrolytes, every one of them checked against its own label.
Pick what you actually carry and the whole plan re-counts itself around it: how many, at what times, and how much of your carbohydrate is already in your bottle.
Why take a gel is the vaguest line in your fueling plan, and what it does to your race
Gels are not one thing.
The packets in the same jacket pocket run from about 22 grams of carbohydrate to 40. A plan that says a gel every 30 minutes can be off by nearly half depending on which one you grabbed.
Then there is the drink. Most runners take water at the stations and carry their own carb mix in a bottle.
If your plan does not count the carbohydrate already in that bottle, it stacks gels on top of it and doubles you up.
That is how a runner who followed the plan exactly ends up thirty grams an hour short, or thirty over and bloated.
And swapping a product in race week, because your usual one sold out, is how you find all of this out on race day.
Luckily the answer is printed on the label. CarbRate has the labels.
Not all carbohydrate goes in at the same rate
A single source of carbohydrate can be used at . Past that, it stops being about willpower and starts being about transporters.
Blend glucose with fructose and the ceiling rises toward 90, because the two cross the gut wall by different routes.
In the heat the gap widens. , a glucose and fructose blend was oxidized at 1.14 g/min against 0.77 for glucose alone.
So the product in your pocket is not just a number of grams. It decides how much of that number your body can actually use.
There are things that work against you too: protein in a during-race product slows how fast your stomach empties, and a big single hit of fructose or a sugar alcohol is a common reason a gel turns on somebody.
Reading all of that off a label, for every product you are considering, is an afternoon's work you will not do.
That is why CarbRate scores every product in its catalog against the research, and tells you the reason in plain English.
CarbRate counts your actual product, not a generic gel
Search for what you use and pick it. Your gel sets the real carbohydrate in each feed, and your drink sets the concentration in your bottle.
Your timeline then says take two of your gel, rather than take a gel.
It also asks the question almost nobody else asks: how much of your drinking is your own carb mix, and how much is water from the stations.
Half water and half a 6% mix is an effective 3%, and that changes the count.
CarbRate takes the carbohydrate in your bottle off your gel count, so it never doubles you up.
You end up carrying the right number of the right thing, and you know it before you buy them.
CarbRate tells you why a product scores what it does
Every product carries a score out of 100, built only from published, verified fields.
It is judged against its own category, so a gel is scored on how fast its carbohydrate delivers and an electrolyte tab is scored on its electrolyte profile.
And every score comes with a plain-English reason and a list of stomach flags: sugar alcohols, juice concentrates, big single hits of fructose.
Affiliate relationships never move a score, and anything sponsored is labelled as sponsored.
You can see exactly what a product is made of and exactly why CarbRate rates it the way it does.
CarbRate shortlists the fuels most likely to agree with your stomach
If gels have gone badly for you, the problem is rarely gels in general. It is usually one ingredient in one product.
Answer three questions and CarbRate gives you the three fuels to test next, the ones to avoid, and the reason for each.
Then it does the part nobody else does. It puts those tests on the long runs you have left before race day.
The scarce thing in a training block is not products, it is long runs.
It is free, and it does not ask you to sign up for anything.
CarbRate adds the product you use when it is not in the catalog yet
Paste a link to the manufacturer's page and CarbRate reads the nutrition panel off it, keeps the receipt, and adds it to your plan in about a minute.
If it cannot read a field with confidence it leaves that field empty rather than inventing a number, and it tells you it did.
You can also enter one by hand, and it will be honestly marked unverified.
Nobody should have to abandon the gel they have trained on for two years because a database has never heard of it.
Homemade mix? Changing products mid-block?
The best fuel is the one you have already proven on a long run
Nothing in your race should be new. Not the shoes, not the shorts, and least of all the thing you have to swallow at mile 20.
CarbRate builds the plan around what you already train with, and tells you honestly when something in the catalog scores higher.
- Fueling plan built on your exact course
- Personalized to your sweat rate, weight, and goal
- Adjusts when the race-day forecast moves
- Week-by-week gut-training practice schedule
- One prescribed change after every rough run
- The dress-rehearsal run, scheduled early
- Live guidance through every gel and drink
- All 163 gels, chews, and mixes built in
See how CarbRate handles the rest of your race
A page for each one: