Written and reported by
Logan Jones-Wilkins
The Life Time Grand Prix wraps up on Saturday with the Big Sugar Classic and Carbs Fuel has numerous athletes lining up to close their seasons with a bang.
Two of these athletes will be fighting for top results in the elite fields. For the men, Alex Wild is looking to jump up into the standings after another volatile season on the top off-road series in the United States. For the women, it will be all about Cécile Lejeune as she looks to defend her top-five position in her first go at the Grand Prix.
Carbs Fuel runs deeper in the development fields, too, with riders like Kash Steele, Wiley Close, Isaac Allred, and Samantha Campbell gunning for the top results in the U23 LTGP in the men’s and women’s competition.
While all those athletes are fueling with Carbs, the separate paths each have taken to this point is a wonderful example of the power the Grand Prix has to bring cycling’s different personalities to one series. Considering the elite riders, Lejeune is a French rider living and racing in the United States; Wild is an American in his 30s with a full-time job at Specialized as a global supply planner. Lejeune is coming off a start on the road; Wild grew up racing NICA.
All of it has now led them to Northwest Arkansas to fight for one of the biggest prizes in off-road racing. We caught up with them before the race to get a sense of what brought them to this point and how Carbs has helped them along the way:
Cécile Lejeune: from novice mountain biker, to off-road expert in one short year
The Life Time Grand Prix often gets called a gravel series. That, of course, is not correct, especially if you ask a road racing convert like Lejeune.
There is more than enough mountain biking to see some doubt in their chances before the season starts. Nevertheless, for the courageous types, there isn’t enough single track to quite chase them away from targeting the series.
“I was scared of not being able to pick the skills up, but I've really been enjoying it,” Lejeune told us before the final race of the series this weekend. Up until this spring, all of her riding has been done on drop bars. Fortunately for her, the mountain biking portion of the series wrapped up last week. Yet, that hasn’t been as hindering as she thought.
“The atmosphere is great, I’m managing to stay on my bike mostly, which is good. I've made a lot of friends, and I feel like I'm part of a community now. The racing is so much fun, and I think I've really found what is suited to my physiology.
“I think my apprehension fueled my mountain bike rides. Before those events, I would only ride my mountain bike, ride the trails two to three times a week, and really try to catch up on all the time that I didn't spend mountain biking when I was younger. I don't have a lot of confidence other people might feel, and I know I still have some improvement to make in order to contend with the best, but I've been working a lot on it.”
In fact, it has let her embrace something new in a sport she felt was well-trodden ground.
”It's something that I didn't think I would enjoy, but it's actually fun seeing progress over something that's not fitness. With fitness, you can put hundreds of hours into gaining a small percentage, and it's getting ever more marginal. But with these skills, I have a big margin of improvement by putting in just a few more hours.
“I've been seeing a lot of improvement. It's encouraging to have that experience of learning something new and going out with friends and following their lines and finding play in the sport again.”
Alex Wild keeps coming back for more as the Life Time Grand Prix’s king of work-life balance
For Alex Wild, most of Lejeune’s story simply doesn’t apply to the Life Time Grand Prix stalwart. Wild has podiumed the first-ever Grand Prix race, been left out of the roster, and done pretty much everything in between. He has yet to win a stop on the series, but came as close as possible at Chequamegon when he lost to Keegan Swenson in a photo finish last year.
So, mountain biking isn’t the least bit scary for a veteran of top-level XCO racing. He’s got it covered.
Nevertheless, what they do have in common is passion. With Wild holding onto his “real” job despite having enough performances to cobble together a professional level of support, racing is tapping into a more pure passion for him.
“I still feel a bit on the back foot,” Wild said of his status as a fully employed “professional” cyclist. “I feel like every year I kind of figure something new out, and that's kind of what keeps me coming back. Not really in results, but learning just how good I can be at this thing.
“It has allowed me to see riding and racing for what it is in terms of really enjoying it. Whereas I think some athletes may be good at it, and then it becomes a job. Don't get me wrong, sometimes you don't want to ride four hours in the rain or whatever it may be, but 95% of the time, I'm loving riding my bike and I think it gave me that freedom to explore cycling for myself. I didn't need cycling to survive.”
That lack of the proverbial fire at his feet seems from the outside as if it might be depriving Wild of a certain amount of motivation. The single-mindedness that always gets touted by many of the sport's bests, for instance, is just not a way to describe Wild’s approach. Yet, grindset-mindset is always worth taking with a grain of salt.
You know what else can help performance? Peace of mind.
“It also allows me to do adult things, like I've been contributing to a 401k for the last 15 years and I didn't chase this dream to then kind of be thrown into reality later,” he said.
“When I first started, it was the dream to do it full-time to be like Chris Blevins or what Todd Wells was doing at the time. That was the goal and the dream. And then I feel when I got to the point that I could make that financially possible, it was less appealing.”
That being said, don’t take that life balance and think Wild is just coasting to the success of a cloud of mindfulness. If anything, his job managing massive global logistics for cycling’s most notable brand has helped him internalize one key thing: fueling.
Divergent paths to the Grand Prix, divergent paths to fueling for success
Of all the nutrition brands on the market, few are as simple as Carbs Fuel. Simplicity is baked into everything we do, from the name to our ingredients; it’s all simple.
Yet, that simplicity doesn’t extend to the fueling strategy Carbs pros use to unlock the fuel we provide. That is part of what makes athletes like Lejeune and Wild so interesting to follow. As it turns out, there are many ways to consume a Carb, especially when you need a lot.
“Well,” Lejeune said of her big takeaway from her season, “I've learned that you have to eat a lot in races and in order to do that, you've got to eat a lot in training. It’s just practice.
“Another valuable lesson I've learnt that cost me a lot was that if you are eating a lot, you also need to drink a lot. They go hand in hand. It's just learning to dose all of that according to race pace, to the weather, to the temperature, and being able to gauge how much your body needs from the conditions.”
For Lejeune, that mix of needs is balanced through careful consideration of when to employ gels, when to bring out the Carbs drink mix, how to pair that with water, and how to keep it coming at regular intervals.
“I've done different things. I've had races where I've been doing like 100 grams in each bottle and then a pack with just water. I've also had races where I've only had gels and just water in the bottles. It's really dependent on the races, but generally, I try to get at least 120 grams of Carbs an hour.
“It doesn't always work out if the race is a bit chaotic and I miss my feeding alarm – I try to feed every 20 minutes – or I’m on the mountain bike, when things are crazy.”
That feeling-out process for Lejeune has been enough for her to find the balance and push her limits. She’ll also freely admit she has it easy. She’s always been a good eater.
Speaking of good eaters, Wild has taken the supercharged carbs revolution to its limit. For him, it all started like most of his work days do: “I think it just made sense from a numbers perspective, right?
“If we're doing like 280 to 300 watts an hour, that's over 1,000 kjs, and you're only going to have like 1,200 kilojoules on board and maybe 800 or so from breakfast. Once you start getting over two or three hours, you have to find fuel somewhere, and I think it's really easy to just look at it and realize it's always a losing battle. You're never going to be able to fuel back to 100%.”
While looking at it as a losing proposition might seem backwards, it gave Wild the urgency to try his best to plan around it. For him, fueling in races was equivalent to bailing water from a leaking ship while also trying to row it to shore.
“I'm not a scientist or an expert, and I've never tested what carbs actually get taken in, but the general rule of thumb is if you don't have any GI distress, then it's doing its thing. It's just about finding the limit. I did 120 an hour, and I didn't have any GI issues. I did 150 an hour and I didn't have any GI issues, and I kind of just thought as high as I can get it, the more fuel I have on board.”
This process has pushed his consumption deeper than many of his peers. If you thought Lejeune’s reminder every 20-minutes was quick, Wild pushes it even further.
“With the exception of Chequamegon, every other Grand Prix race, I'm at a minimum of 150 grams an hour,” he said of his Carbs program. “Normally, that's what I do for the first three hours because I still have some breakfast on board, and then pretty much from then on I switched to 200 grams an hour, so essentially a Carbs gel every 15 minutes. And that's something I had tested in training with no GI distress, so it was worth a shot.”
To make it all the more impressive, Wild makes it gut-wrenchingly simple. All gels, no funny business – flavor fatigued be dammed.
“I personally believe flavor fatigue is a choice. With that said, the Carb Fuel flavor isn't something I've ever gotten sick of. So that's a bonus because I fuel 100% on gels.”
Wild is truly an exception with his fueling. For most people, 200 grams per hour is a staggering number that is not only hard to reach, but also unproductive for many. In fact, for many women, Lejeune’s number of 120 is high. The point here, however, is not to necessarily copy and paste the routine of the best off-road racers. It’s to understand who they are, how they approach the sport, and how they came to the nutrition plan that has given them success.
For us at Carbs, we couldn’t be prouder of Alex and Cécile as examples of this. Hopefully, these ingredients are enough to hit pay dirt at the end of a long, rocky race in Northwest Arkansas.
Logan Jones-Wilkins is a journalist and cyclist based in the southwest of the United States. As a writer, he has covered cycling extensively for the past year and has extensive experience as a racer in gravel and road. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and PPEL from the University of Richmond. Outside of his work in the cycling world, Logan is also a Carbs Fuel athlete, racing road, gravel, and mountain bikes alongside his reporting.
