We made this because
nothing else worked.
4 Hour Fuel started as a recipe we typed into a spreadsheet at 2 a.m. on a kitchen counter, after struggling to find something that let us focus on the task at hand without getting behind on our calories.
Dan went face-down in the Fijian mud.
Day one, Eco Challenge Fiji 2019. We went from first place to dead last in the space of a few hours. Dan went from being a paddling powerhouse to face-down in the mud. Dozens of teams passed us as we waited for him to recover. It wasn't fast, and it wasn't pretty, but we clawed our way back to being the top American team.
It shouldn't take that much grit. We knew we had the physicality, we knew we had the teamwork, we knew we should be able to do better.
We needed focus.
We designed 4HourFuel to let us focus on the race, and to be the backbone of our long efforts.
One bottle. Four hours. Real food.
The brief was small: a powder that puts a ridiculous amount of calories into one bike bottle, that still goes down on day eight, that doesn't require any thought.
We landed on a dual-source carb mix (real fruit + complex carbs), a small amount of pea protein for the long efforts your body craves protein, and some BCAAs and salt to round it out.
We mixed it at the kitchen counter, raced it, mixed it again, raced it again. Eventually friends started asking for it. Then their friends. Eventually we started selling it.
We Found Our Stride
We started winning world series races, world championships, and set course records on ultra-endurance paddling races. The focus that we found, and the fuel that made it possible, led us down a path of profound growth - a path that we're still on today.
Now teams around the world are reaching for bottles of 4HourFuel for lots of reasons, but the most common one is that it's the thing that most effectively gets out of the way, and frees your mind to do things that seem impossible - like paddling 1000 miles in 5 and a half days.
“Obviously it's not just 4HourFuel, but it sure helps!”
Daniel Staudigel · Team Bend Racing
Bend, Oregon. Race-fed. Slow on purpose.
We're still a small operation. Production batches are made just north of us in Washington state. We mix prototypes in Bend, ship out of Bend, and answer our own email. We sponsor a handful of athletes who pressure-test every batch in the world's longest, ugliest races. We use this stuff ourselves - and we're proud of it.