Bondi to Manly Ultra

Given the early race start, Steph chose to skip her pre-race gel as she felt confident she had sufficiently carb-loaded. Once the race began, she took a PF 30 Gel every 20 minutes, and impressively stuck to this routine meticulously across nearly seven hours of racing, providing her with high energy availability throughout. This meant she averaged ~90g of carb per hour, perfectly aligning with her target and the upper end of the fueling recommendations for a race of this intensity and duration. This was the first race where Steph had consumed this level of carb across this duration, and the fact that she experienced no gut discomfort or flavour fatigue demonstrates how well she practised her strategy in training.

The Bondi to Manly race posed a new challenge for Steph as it was her first race where she needed to carry and refill her own flasks along the way. She used two 500ml soft flasks and refilled them throughout, one containing a PH 1500 (Tablet) and the other with plain water, allowing her to drink according to thirst and avoid flavour fatigue, whilst taking on a moderate relative sodium concentration. Across the 80km, Steph drank ~5.65L of fluid in total, adjusting her hourly fluid intake as temperatures rose to 23℃. Although looking back she noted she would have refilled earlier and used the first aid station to stay ahead of her hydration, subjectively she felt she drank enough overall and avoided any performance decline or other symptoms of excessive dehydration. She did experience minor quad cramps in the second half of the race, but she attributed this to muscle fatigue. Still, a sweat test would help fine tune her sodium replacement strategy to meet her individual needs and ensure her electrolyte and fluid balance isn’t one of the factors at play in future races.

Steph demonstrated one of the most common timings of caffeine supplementation by taking a large dose of ~6mg/kg within the final 60 minutes before the start. This meant her plasma caffeine levels would have peaked between 3-6mg/kg around the time the race started, increasing her concentration and alertness in the early hours. She then topped up with a PF 30 Caffeine Gel around the halfway mark to avoid a drop-off in the stimulant which could impact her perceived energy levels. Though this put her total dose over the recommended range, it helped maintain stable caffeine levels in her system throughout and is a similar strategy to what she has tested and used on previous race days.