Sports nutrition is sold with more chemistry than it needs. Underneath the branding, almost everything on the shelf is carbohydrate, water, salt and flavour — arranged at very different densities and very different prices.
The short answer
For runs under an hour, water is enough; your body carries the fuel. For longer efforts, the working range most brands and coaches converge on is roughly 30–60g of carbohydrate per hour, with well-trained guts pushing higher on race day. Start at the low end, practise in training, and never try anything new on race morning.
Gel, mix or chews — it's all carbs
The format war is mostly about delivery, not chemistry:
- Gels are the race-day default: dense, portable, dosed in known grams. The cost is palatability — by hour three, sweetness is a chore.
- Drink mix does fuel and hydration in one bottle and is the easiest on the stomach, but you have to carry the bottle, and dosing depends on actually drinking it.
- Chews and bars are the training-run option: cheaper per carb, nicer to eat, slower to get in. Fine at easy pace, fiddly at threshold.
Most distance runners land on a blend — mix in the bottle, gels for the back half — arrived at by trial and error in training, which is the only lab that counts.
The number on the packet vs the number that matters
Packets advertise flavour and caffeine; the numbers that should drive the buying decision are grams of carbohydrate per serving and what a serving costs. A premium gel and a scoop of own-label mix can deliver the same grams for wildly different money, and "sports pricing" leans on you never doing that arithmetic. We do it on the fuel board: every product's live price sits next to its size, so the cost of a training block is a multiplication, not a mystery.
Train the gut like it's a muscle
The limit on how much you can take in per hour isn't willpower, it's practice. The gut adapts to processing carbs at effort the same way legs adapt to mileage — gradually, and only if you rehearse it. The practical rule: fuel your long runs the way you plan to fuel the race, weeks out, at target dose. Race day is for executing a routine, not discovering one.
On the board now
Fuel we track live — gels, mix and chews, each linking to its price history and current offers:
| Product | From | Colours | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
 OTE Sports Tropical Super Gel | £7.05 | 1 | 48h ago |
 OTE Sports 24 Mixed Super Gel Pack (Cherry & Tropical) | £52.45 | 1 | 48h ago |
 Skratch Labs Super High-Carb Sport Drink Mix | — | 1 | — |
 Skratch Labs Hydration Sport Drink Mix | — | 1 | — |
 Skratch Labs Energy Chews Sport Fuel | — | 1 | — |
Cheapest live colourway per product — prices move, the board follows.
Changelog
- — First published.
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running, running is an independent UK price board for people who run. The data, the crawler and the words are all produced in-house; prices quoted in articles come live from the same board as everything else on the site, each with the time it was last checked.