No Gels. No Powder. The Maple Syrup System I Race On.

Tomorrow I race my fifth ultra marathon this year alone. No gels. No powder. What I have used through five years of racing is pure organic maple syrup. On paper that reads like a gimmick. It is not the syrup that makes it work. It is the system built around it.

It is easier to find. It is a lot cheaper. It is a lot less weight to carry through an ultra. If you need four to six gels an hour, imagine hauling all of those for fifty miles. I use five-ounce flasks from Amazon, six for ten dollars, and one flask holds about 160 grams of carbs. They ride in a waist belt.

Sixty grams an hour is not the ceiling

I have trained my body over the years to go from 100 to 160 grams of carbs an hour, and this is where I perform the best. On race days I sit at 140 to 170. It is why I never bonk. It is why I always feel good. It is why I recover extremely quick. The number itself is not the point. The years of gut work underneath the number are the point.

A lot of runners are doing 40, 50, 60 grams an hour. The research has moved past that. There is a study on elite mountain marathoners taking 120 grams per hour that found less muscle damage and lower internal load than at 60 or 90 grams. The catch is honest. You have to train your gut to handle it, the same way you train your legs.

There is one more legal edge and it is caffeine. The ISSN position stand backs 3 to 6 mg per kilogram about an hour before endurance exercise. I barely touch it in training, maybe 100 mg once a week. So on race day a Coke at an aid station shoots me out like a rocket.

And none of this is about the first hour. It does not matter what you take in during hour one. It matters what you can intake and sustain in hours two, three, and four. Steady intake beats gel spikes.

That is the whole game.

Hydration runs the show

The way I found my own numbers was a sweat test. You weigh yourself before and after an hour at race pace. Every pound lost is 16 ounces of fluid you need back. I sweat heavy, around 1,500 milligrams of sodium per liter, so in the heat I am drinking up to 50 ounces an hour with electrolytes dosed to match.

Hydration comes before carbs. You can live longer without food than without fluid.

And that brings me back to where this started. Tomorrow I race my fifth ultra marathon this year alone. No gels. No powder. Nothing but pure organic maple syrup. But more than that, it is five years of patience, testing, and trust in something simple. It all fits in a five-ounce flask that costs less than two dollars.

More from me: the fueling system in action and dialing in carbs per hour.