A starter catalog for the crew box

The hourly targets are the easy half of race-day nutrition. We went through them in Fuelling a Backyard Ultra by the hour: 60–70 g of carbohydrates, at least 450 kcal and 300–600 mg of sodium, from loop 1. The harder half is knowing, at 3 a.m. and without a calculator, what the thing in the runner's hand actually contains.

That is what a catalog is for: every product in the crew box, with its values written down once, before the race.

Count units, not grams

Nobody weighs food in the start corral. The crew hands over one gel, one bread roll, half a bottle. So every product in the catalog carries its values per unit, the unit being whatever the crew actually hands over: a gel, a tablespoon of honey, a quarter of a pizza, a cup of broth. Logging an intake is then a count, and the totals follow from it.

A value nobody knows counts as zero. That is deliberate: it is better to undercount a product than to invent a number for it.

Twelve products to start from

This is the starter catalog in Betweenloops. The values are typical per unit, not the label of any particular brand:

The list covers most of the usual groups: fast carbs (the bottle, gels, honey), real food (bread roll, pizza), something sweet (dates), something salty and warm (broth), electrolytes (salt stick) and caffeine on its own. The file below also carries protein per unit.

What an hour adds up to

Two plausible hours, built only from the list:

Neither one hits every target, and that is the useful lesson. The bottle hour is over on carbs and still under 450 kcal. The pizza hour lands on carbs but runs high on sodium and low on fluid. Carbohydrates carry about 4 kcal per gram, so 70 g of them are under 300 kcal: the rest of the 450 has to come from real food with fat and protein in it, which is why the hot meal every few loops matters.

It also shows how quickly caffeine adds up. One caffeine gel and one cap in the same hour is already 150 mg, and cola or coffee on top is easy to forget. A catalog that lists caffeine per unit is what makes that visible at all.

Make it yours

Treat the list as a starting point. Replace the values with the ones on your own packaging, add what the runner actually eats, and delete what they never will. Nutrition is individual; the catalog should be tested in training, not assembled the night before.

The file

The list below is a CSV with one product per row and one column per value:

• name, emoji, and tags (separated by |: carbs, salt, water, protein, caffeine)
• carbsG, sodiumMg, fluidMl, proteinG, caffeineMg, kcal, all per unit

It opens in any spreadsheet, and it is the format Betweenloops imports. Only the name is required, missing numbers count as zero, and a spreadsheet saved with ; as delimiter or 2,5 as decimal works just as well.

name,emoji,tags,carbsG,sodiumMg,fluidMl,proteinG,caffeineMg,kcal
Carbo Fuel Bottle,🍶,carbs|water,80,200,500,0,0,320
Caffeine gel,⚡,carbs|caffeine,25,50,0,0,50,100
Liquid Energy Pure,🧃,carbs,25,20,0,0,0,100
Liquid Energy Plus BCAA,💪,carbs|protein,25,25,0,1,0,105
Honey (tbsp),🍯,carbs,17,1,0,0,0,64
Caffeine cap,💊,caffeine,0,0,0,0,100,0
Salt stick,🧂,salt,0,215,0,0,0,0
Bread roll,🥖,carbs|protein,38,400,0,6,0,200
Pizza quarter,🍕,carbs|protein|salt,35,700,0,12,0,300
Dates,🌴,carbs,18,0,0,0.5,0,70
Cup of broth,🍵,salt|water,1,800,250,0,0,10
Water (250 ml),💧,water,0,0,250,0,0,0