I used to think nutrition was the boring part of endurance sport. Eat enough, drink enough, don’t make any catastrophic choices, finish the race. That’s not wrong exactly — the fundamentals aren’t complicated — but it dramatically undersells how much a well-constructed fuelling plan changes what you’re capable of over a very long day.
The Everesting in April made this concrete for me in a way that racing alone hadn’t.
Eleven Hours on a Hill
For those who missed it: in April 2026 I set the women’s off-road Everesting record. 11 hours and 5 minutes, 65 laps of Sheep Pasture Incline in Derbyshire, 8,848 metres of climbing, 157km of distance. I beat Emma Pooley’s previous record by nearly two hours.
An Everesting is a unique nutritional challenge because it’s not a varied race — it’s the same hill, over and over, at a controlled effort, for most of a day. The mental attrition is considerable. The physical demands are sustained and repetitive rather than variable. And crucially, you can plan the nutrition almost exactly, because the conditions don’t change in the way they do in a race with unknown terrain and weather.
Working with OGT before the Everesting attempt, we mapped out the fuelling hour by hour. Not “eat something every 45 minutes” — specifically what, when, in what quantities, how that changes as the effort extends into hours seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
What I discovered is how much the appetite changes across a very long effort. The body becomes increasingly reluctant to process solid food as the hours accumulate. The gut, which is working hard to direct blood flow to the working muscles, becomes conservative about what it wants to handle. You have to get ahead of this — eating before you feel like you need to, in forms that your gut will accept when it’s under stress.
The OGT nutrition plan got this right. Not perfectly on every lap — there was a moment around hour seven where I genuinely wanted a donut and instead had a gel, which is not the same experience — but the overall strategy held. I crossed the line with energy left. That’s the target.
What the Everesting Taught Me About Racing
Everything I learned on that hill is directly applicable to Unbound Gravel in May. 200 miles across the Kansas Flint Hills is not an Everesting — the terrain is completely different, the pace is variable, the tactical demands of racing against other people change the picture entirely — but the nutritional principles are the same.
Start eating early, before you need to. Prioritise carbohydrates as the primary fuel source and don’t let that slip in the back half of the race. Keep drinking to a schedule rather than waiting for thirst, because by the time you’re thirsty you’re already behind. Have food you can eat at race pace without stopping — things that work with a closed body rather than requiring a picnic.
The Gravaa data from the Everesting gave me power and heart rate data that I could correlate with the nutrition plan. Where the fuelling was right, the power held steady. Where I slipped — a late intake, a missed window — there was a measurable dip ten or fifteen minutes later. That cause-and-effect is now visible to me in a way it wasn’t before, and it changes how I approach every long effort.
The Traka
The Traka is a different kind of nutritional problem because it has feed stations, but also long stretches without them, across terrain where your calorie burn is highly variable. Descending costs almost nothing. Climbing at threshold in hour ten costs a great deal.
OGT have built the race bag plan specifically for the Traka route — what goes in the drop bags, what I carry on the bike, what I use at feed stations and what I ignore. There’s a natural temptation at feed stations to eat whatever looks good, which is not always what you need at that point in a 360km race. Having a plan that I stick to removes that decision from a moment when I’m fatigued and not best placed to make good choices.
For Anyone Doing Long Events
I’m aware this reads like a nutrition manifesto, which wasn’t entirely the plan. But I get asked about this so often — particularly from people doing their first 100km-plus event — that it feels worth being direct.
The single most common mistake I see in long gravel events is under-eating in the first three hours. The effort feels manageable, the appetite is normal, it seems unnecessary to push food in. By hour six, those riders are in trouble that didn’t need to happen.
Eat early. Eat to the plan. The discomfort of eating when you don’t feel like it is much smaller than the discomfort of bonking at kilometre 200.
OGT — performance nutrition and kit. Full 2026 sponsor support from Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, Gravaa, Questa Financial Planning, and JT Performance Coaching.