IRONMAN® World Championships

Louella strategically combined bars and chews with PF 300 Flow Gel and PF 30 Caffeine Gels to prevent ‘flavour fatigue’ and hit her target of 75g/h to fuel her to a top-10 finish. To maintain this average, she consumed an impressive ~91g/h during the seven-hour bike leg before scaling back her intake to a respectable ~60g/h on the run, where mechanical and logistical challenges make sustaining high fuel levels more difficult.

Louella averaged just over 500ml/h of fluid, ‘frontloading’ with ~712ml/h on the bike before scaling back to ~328ml/h on the run. Her bike intake effectively replaced most of her sweat fluid losses, helping her maintain an appropriate hydration status, as shown by the fact she urinated multiple times during this part of the race. However, her intake on the run was relatively low especially as the temperature rose, and she did not make another toilet stop after T2, so could have been accumulating race-impacting levels of dehydration. Thankfully, she didn’t feel like this significantly affected her marathon performance, likely because of her proactive frontloading on the bike. Picking up extra plain water on the bike diluted the relative sodium concentration she was consuming to a level below her sweat sodium concentration. Considering her plan was to pick up additional plain water, she may have benefitted from the stronger concentration of PH 1500 in her bike bottles, bringing her average intake closer to her losses and in doing so helping with fluid retention.

Louella dialed in her caffeine intake, keeping it well within the recommended range. Given her strong tolerance for caffeine and regular use of Caffeine Gels in training, she could consider making her final pre-swim gel caffeinated to maximise the ergogenic effects earlier in the race.