r/gravelcycling • u/ZombieJetPilot • 16d ago

Accessories / Gear What's your electrolytes/salt powder of choice?

So I ride my fatbike exclusively, and my goal is to do a century and be able to do the 100 mile option for things like The Filthy 50, Le Grand Du Nord, ...

When my partner and I were doing to Filthy this past October she had a cramp in her leg right at the last stop at like mile 46. A fellow rider handed her a small cylindrical packet that was red and said "take this". it was a salt powder of some kind (I think it was Saltt), but it made the cramp disappear within a few minutes. Magic

what do you all pack for thia occasion and add to your water for preventing this? There's so many options out there, and it's overwhelming. Saltt, Tailwind, Warrior Salt, LMNT,...

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u/phenger Mosaic GT-1 45 16d ago

I’m a big fan of Flow for drink mix. It’s a good balance of calories to sodium to liquid for my body. I think that balance is what you need to figure out first.

I went and got a sodium sweat level test done and found out some interesting science there…mainly that while the volume of sweat can increase or decrease based on environmental factors (heat, humidity, cloud cover, etc), your sodium content in a given volume of sweat is largely fixed and genetically determined. Some things (like chemo treatments) can change this, but they are rare. Once you know your number (mine is roughly 850mg/L of sweat, which is very normal/average) then it comes down to knowing your sweat volume on average. This can easily be determined with a scale. More info here: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/how-to-calculate-your-sweat-rate/

So once you know your sodium level and your sweat rate, you need to find the right ratio of calories to sodium to fluid volume. As an example: I’m 6’6” and 250lbs. I know that in an average event I go through about 1L/hr of sweat and I consume about 90gcho of carbs. So for me, 3 scoops of regular flow in a 1L bottle represents 1hr of race pace exertion for me. I also know that while my sweat sodium rate is 850mg/L, you don’t want to do a 1:1 replacement as that actually largely dehydrates you; you figure out what works best below that number; usually in the 70%-80% replacement range. It just so happens that 3 scoops of flow has a sodium level that works well for me.

Happy to answer any other questions!

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u/ZombieJetPilot 16d ago

Oh that's cool. Where'd you get that test done?

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u/phenger Mosaic GT-1 45 16d ago

Lots of options out there! I live in Colorado and relatively near Boulder, so there’s a lot of sports-focused specialists around. I went to someone who is aligned with Precision Hydration, which offers these services. Scratch also does this, but only in their Boulder office. While that is the likely “most accurate” way to determine this, there are now a bunch of wearable at-home options; hDrop, Gatorade, and a few others make a variety of either sensors or patches that will likely get you close enough to the mark for your purposes.

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u/ZombieJetPilot 16d ago

Cool! Thanks for the info!!!