13th December: Jelly!

I’ve enjoyed having a chew on the occasional Cliff ‘Shot Blok’ since I first came across them at the Portsmouth Coastal marathon a couple of years back and when on occasions I have been given a free pack at races, or seen them at aid stations, they have always been gratefully received by me… So I looked in to what they are and what they offer you, then had a bit of lateral thinking on the matter:

Jelly!
 
It turns out that jelly cubes offer you twice the hit of sugar/ carbs by weight as do energy gels and ‘shot bloks’!.. So before the Dorset CTS I had stocked-up on some packs and chucked them in my backpack for eating on the run, and I have to say they are a success. I certainly got an energy blast off them, much more than with gels and they will become a regular staple for me from now on… There are a couple of drawbacks though over the commercially available things like ‘shot bloks’ though:

The slabs of jelly cubes are far tougher to chew over ‘shot bloks’ which have a gum mix to soften them rather than being pure jelly, so it certainly takes a while to tear and chew your way through them, although it does make you feel like you are eating something more substantial than a gel as you make you way through them. Because of how solid they are and the fact they are a dehydrated/ concentrated sugar solution they can dry your mouth quite noticeably so you need to slurp a drink every now and again as you go along to prevent cotton-mouth!

The nutritional details on the back of a jelly pack.

Cost-wise a pack of jelly is around the 70p mark, as opposed to a gel which is £1 to £1.50 and you get twice the punch by weight as the gel - ok some experts out there will say that the sugars in gels are different and are absorbed quicker etc. but at the end of the day sugar is sugar and when you are not competing at the front-end of a race are the ‘marginal gains’ that a different rate of sugar absorption offers really that important?

There’s also plenty of flavours out there to choose from so you can mix-up what you are carrying rather than being stuck with all one flavour over a long distance run… Below I have drawn-out a simplistic comparison between gels and jelly with the common factor between the two being weight (or as close as I can for parity’s sake) for a typical amount that would be carried for a marathon.

Gels                    Jelly

Weight
660g (10 gels)    675g (5pks)

Cost
£15 (10x£1.5)    £3.50 (5x£0.70)

Kcal/ 100g
144                     296

Pros:

Double the energy punch of gels.
Half the cost of gels.
No leaky sticky packaging in pocket after eating.

Cons:

Tough chewing.
Cotton mouth.
Non vegetarian/ vegan.

So on an energy return basis, so long as you are not a veggie or vegan who will not be able to have jelly, then jelly cubes give you 4x the energy over gels for the same spend (jelly half the cost and double the energy of gels so scaling to 1:1 on cost you get 2x jelly @ double the energy = 4x)… Something to chew over for all you endurance sports peeps out there, maybe we do not have to fall for the marketing all the time?

Definitely a stack of these bad-boys will be accompanying me in the future on my marathons!

Eat pies.
Drink beer.
Run far.