Does It Work: CarboPro

Rachel tweeted me yesterday with a request: “@steveinaspeedo a post request: maybe you and pharmie could give your two cents about why you use carbo pro instead of heed or other stuff?” GREAT idea! Here it is.

Pharmie heard about Carbo-Pro as she was training for her first Ironman back in 2006. Therefore, I started using it when we trained for IM together in 2007. Carbo-Pro is a flavorless powder that you add to any beverage to add calories for long workouts. And that’s exactly why we like it. We usually make it with a little diluted Gatorade so it has a little flavor, but it’s not overwhelming.

Here are 2 photos from our first 100-mile bike ride in early August, 2006. We made some Carbo-Pro so strong that we used a blender to help get it thoroughly mixed. FYI: besides this time, we’ve NEVER had to use a blender. But being we were hoping to get about 1200 calories / water bottle, we grabbed a blender to help get everything mixed well:

1200 calories of Carbo-Pro waiting to be blended


Pharmie holding 2400 calories for our ride

Last April, Carbo-Pro made another appearance on my blog in my Ironman New Orleans 70.3 race report. The first image in that post is Pharmie getting some Carbo-Pro ready for the race and then shaking it in her bottle to mix it:

Nutrition is a VERY personal choice, and Carbo-Pro has worked for me for years.

I’ve tried Accelerade: can you say “cottonmouth?”
I’ve tried Heed: not enough calories for long distance training.
I’ve tried Perpetuem: it made my stomach upset 70 miles into a ride.

(For the record, I don’t really know if it was Perpetuem’s fault that my stomach was upset. But you all know that if you try a new product and that hampers your ride, you’ll most likely never use that product again. So I haven’t touched Perpetuem in nearly 3 years.)

Those photos above of 1200 calories in a water bottle are a little extreme. Usually, if I’m just going out for a 40+ miler, I’ll just throw in a few scoops to add a few hundred calories. Here’s a photo from IM WI 2007, and the water bottle on my seat tube (partially behind my foot) contained my Carbo-Pro mix:

Carbo-Pro: Grade of A / A+. It’s flavorless. It dissolves easily. It’s not syrupy (unless you’re making 16 oz of liquid into over 1000 calories, then it does start to get a little syrupy). It just adds calories to whatever you mix it with. How can you go wrong?

Click here to learn more about Carbo-Pro. That link is to a Canaidan site, so you can order through them if you live in Canada. Otherwise just Google it, and you’ll see you can order it from a number of different online retailers. There’s only 1 store in the Minneapolis / St. Paul metro area (that we’ve found) that carries Carbo-Pro.

(Click on the “Does It Work” tag to see all posts in this mini-series. I did a number of posts like this back in February.)