I’d just spent a glorious sunny day cycling through the Surrey Hills. But I was utterly spent. The plan was to get on a train back into London, making the return journey of the train I caught out that morning to avoid spending time and energy cycling on the dirty city roads. So I went direct to the station, only to suddenly realise I was more than likely going to suffer the next day if I didn’t take on some food or drink to help my muscles recover. And I needed it within that critical 20 minute period.

Alas, the newsagent at Dorking station is no sports drink specialist... and then I remembered... something about milk? Was it chocolate milk? Yes! Problem solved.

I went back home and googled it just for peace of mind and future reference. It turns out that previous academic studies have shown that milk, and chocolate milk in particular, provides a perfect combination of carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals to aid recovery from exercise. Leaving you ready for more of the same. As an example, here’s a quote from an Australian medical website:

This result supports other studies that show that chocolate milk is a good way to recover ... Karp and colleagues (2006) showed that endurance cyclists could ride for longer periods on chocolate milk when compared with other recovery beverages. Thomas and others (2009) showed that chocolate milk was significantly better at improving time to exhaustion in elite cyclists than other recovery beverages one of which was a carbohydrate and protein mixture.

There is a huge amount of investment made into cutting edge scientific, processed solutions for recovery drinks, yet these solutions seem to make only marginal gains over what mother nature has evolved to provide already: milk. What’s more, if its organic milk, then you’re onto an environmental winner and can sleep even more soundly at night. And milk is a hell of a lot cheaper too!

I feel good today, so it seems to have done the trick. I couldn’t help but imagine Cadel Evans drinking a tall glass of Australia’s favourite, Milo, after that day climbing the Alps before the final stage time trial... who knows, hey?

We cyclists can sleep soundly at night. We are fit and healthy, leave our end of the day stresses behind as we put the hammer down on the way home from work, and we are users of low carbon transport! In fact, many of you might even pick up some organic food on the way home to refuel. In fact, the food you eat to fuel you're cycling has a big impact on the carbon savings versus doing the journey by car - 1 mile of cycling fuelled by a bacon butty or a cheeseburger has a carbon footprint 2-3 times larger (200-260g of CO2) than doing the same mile fuelled by a banana or bowl of cereal (60-90g).

Can we boast the same green credentials on sportive day though? The right food, gels and drink can be critical on the way to getting a decent time or getting through those tough spells when you've hit the wall, so we don't want to get it wrong. There are a whole host of high energy foods on the market - Maxifuel or Science in Sport to name just a couple that you might use. There is also a growing market of ethical lines of sports nutrition. The likes of Mule Bar, Pulsin and Torq for example. But how good are they? Do we concede performance in exchange for an organic or fairtrade option? Can green be high performance too? We at RacingGreen wanted to find out.

To answer the question, we signed up to do an 80 mile sportive in Cambridgeshire in April to try out the ethical brands and compare them with the conventional options. We thought 80 miles and plenty of hills should put them all to the test! Our criteria for judging were practicality, impact on performance, price, taste and environmental credentials. So what did we find? Well as you'd expect the usual suspects came out well on performance practicality - Maxifuel gels gave a great boost, though we found the bars slightly dry. While Mule Bar (the market leader for ethical energy foods who source organic and fairtrade produce) scored very highly on performance, up there with Maxifuel - the official supporter of the British Triathlon Federation. In fact, Mule Bar scoring best on taste grounds with their new range of gels making an instant hit. Torq are a midway option on environmental credentials as they source fairtrtade fruit for their bars, but offer some great flavours on the gels which has real performance impact - banoffee was a particular favourite. Science in Sport offered reliable performance at good value, though no environmental plus points. While Pulsin offer top quality environmental credentials, their packaging slightly let them down on practicality grounds as they were tricky to open on the run. Prices varied, but the ethical options tended to be slightly more expensive, though not break the bank expensive.

Our trials suggest there are some great options on the market already, and more on the way with PowerBar now making bars from "natural ingredients", and Science in Sport offering an organic energy drink mix. So next time you're preparing for your weekend ride, why not give a green option a go? If you do, we'd love to hear from you and keep our reviews up to date! racinggreen.info@gmail.com 

On Sunday just passed, 8 of us were pedalling furiously to complete the Wiggle Super Series no excuses sportive. A great event at 80 or 45 miles long and with some money going to NSPCCC. Good day out, smiles all round as the spring sun reared its head!

We also used it trial and compare ethical and conventional energy products for energy impact, practicality, vfm and environmental credentials. We used a mixture of mule bar, pulsin, torq, science in sport and maxifuel between us over the ride. The results were very interesting, but the trial isn't over yet! We are now going to also trial them in a running context, as the practicality issues and energy needs are slightly different. 

 We'll share the results with you very soon and hopefully they will help you and others in choosing your energy products for the summer events ahead! We're pitching the story to Guardian bike blog and other channels.

Watch this space! In the mean time, here's a bit of entertainment. Impressively, 4 of us who took part in the Sunday cycle made it into the event video! Check out Andy, Sam, Patrick and I representing.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJHsapbgPs&feature=player_detailpage