Bonking on LEJOG, Dehydrated in Mallorca

• Why I Built NooMinds Sports Nutrition
• Event by Event — Every Lesson I Got the Hard Way
• The Shift
• What I Built
• Why the EndoGusto Partnership Matters
• About the Authors

Why I Built NooMinds Sports Nutrition

A personal article from Craig Elliott, founder of NooMinds Sports Nutrition, marking the launch of the NooMinds × EndoGusto partnership.

200 kilometres into the Mallorca 312, somewhere on the long grind to Artà, my legs stopped responding. Not in the usual way, not the burn, not the heaviness you expect from 200km of climbing. Something different. My mouth was dry. My focus was slipping. My heart rate, which should have been steady, was ticking up for no good reason.

I was dehydrated. Badly. And from that moment, everything went downhill, metaphorically, and thankfully for my legs, literally.

I’d trained properly for Mallorca. I’d put in the hours. What I hadn’t done, not for a single one of those 312 kilometres, was plan my nutrition. I’d guessed. And the guess had run out at 200km.

This isn’t a one-off story. It’s every endurance event I’d ever ridden. London to Paris. Coast to Coast. Land’s End to John O’Groats. Mallorca 225. Mallorca 312. Every single one of them, my training was dialled, and my nutrition was whatever I happened to stuff in my jersey pocket.

This is the article about why that happened and why I built NooMinds to fix it.

The Question I Never Thought to Ask

Here’s the weird thing. In ten years of endurance cycling, I never once thought to reach out to a sports nutritionist.

Not before London to Paris, where I had zero nutrition knowledge and it showed. Not before Coast to Coast, where I’d picked up a bit of hearsay but didn’t apply any of it. Not before LEJOG, where I’d finally got my on-bike fuelling half-decent only to bonk on Day 3 and undo it all eating pub meals in the evening. Not before Mallorca, where my on-bike strategy was solid but my hydration plan amounted to “drink when I remember.”

Why didn’t I ask?

Three things were going on, and I think they’re the same three things stopping most endurance athletes today.

Nutritionists felt out of reach. They sounded like something elite athletes have. Not amateur age-groupers like me. I pictured someone in a performance lab with a clipboard, not someone who could help a cyclist work out what to eat on a 300km sportive.

I assumed it would be expensive. I hadn’t even looked. I’d just absorbed the general impression that nutrition advice was a luxury product, and my race budget was already going on the entry, the travel, and new tyres.

I didn’t actually know what a nutritionist did. If you’d asked me, I couldn’t have told you what I’d get for my money. A meal plan? A pep talk? A spreadsheet? I had no mental model for what the service even looked like.

So, I trained harder and ate whatever. And I paid for it every single event.

Event by Event — Every Lesson I Got the Hard Way

London to Paris. Zero knowledge. I rode on whatever the feed station served and whatever I’d bought in a Carrefour the night before. The result was predictable: energy crashes, mood crashes, and that specific kind of endurance misery that comes from under-carbing without knowing you’re under-carbing.

Coast to Coast. A little knowledge, none of it applied. I’d read a few articles. I knew I was meant to be taking in carbs on the bike. I didn’t know how many, when, or from what. I turned up fuelled on intention and not much else.

Land’s End to John O’Groats. My on-bike game had improved. I was deliberate about gels and bars on the road. What I hadn’t understood was that a multi-day event is won and lost in the evenings. Day 3, I bonked hard, and I look back now and know exactly why. Pub meals after six hours in the saddle aren’t recovery, they’re comfort. I was taking in the wrong calories at the wrong time: comfort food when I needed recovery fuel.

Mallorca 225 and 312. My on-bike fuelling was finally dialled. But I’d never sat down and properly thought through hydration. How much fluid would I actually need in 20+ degrees of Mediterranean heat over 12+ hours of riding? I ran out of plan at 200km. From there, every climb was a fight.

Five events. Five different flavours of the same mistake. A single 30-minute conversation with a sports nutritionist would have fixed every one of them.

The Shift

Somewhere between Mallorca and deciding I’d had enough of sabotaging myself on every big event, I made a different choice. I stopped trying to train my way out of the problem. I started training myself in nutrition.

I did my Level 5 Advanced Sports Nutrition. Then my Level 7 Gut Restoration Advisor qualification. I read the papers. I ran the protocols on myself. And the more I learned, the more I realised something uncomfortable.

Sports nutrition is the single most neglected area of endurance sport. Not because athletes don’t care, of course they do. Not because coaches don’t care, they desperately do. But because the infrastructure to deliver it hasn’t existed for the 95% of athletes who aren’t sponsored pros. There are elite dietitians charging elite prices. And there’s the free internet with its endless forum myths. In between, for the weekend warrior, the age-grouper, the first-time marathoner, the club coach, there’s basically nothing.

What I Built

So I built it.

NooMinds Sports Nutrition is what I wish I’d had before London to Paris. Before Coast to Coast. Before every event where I guessed and paid the price.

The Carb Coach app. For any athlete, at any level, to see what their fuelling actually needs to look like. It starts free and you choose when to upgrade, somewhere near event day so you can take advantage of the carb loading and event day nutrition meal plans.

Event Day Plans. For when a 300km sportive, a marathon, or a full-distance triathlon is on the horizon, there’s a specific plan, built for that event, on that course, with that weather, for that athlete. Your personal plan £27.99. Not £179.

The Coach Hub. For coaches to manage their athletes’ nutrition the way they manage their training. One dashboard, one data view, every athlete they work with.

Every piece of NooMinds Nutrition exists because of an event where I got it wrong and didn’t have a nutritionist to get it right for me.

Why the EndoGusto Partnership Matters

Which brings us to EndoGusto

Tina came to EndoGusto after a competitive athletics and marathon racing career. In the build-up to competing in the 2012 London Olympics marathon for Greece, she was continually sidelined by injuries, illness, and severe thyroid problems. Looking back, the pattern was clear: she was chronically under-fueled, trying to support high-volume training with guesswork instead of a plan. When she moved into coaching and started supporting her running club, she ran into the same gap from the other side: athletes drowning in information they couldn’t filter, and proper guidance priced out of reach. When another EndoGusto coach recommended NooMinds and she first connected with Craig, it clicked immediately. He shares the same drive for helping people maximise their efforts, but in a practical, low-key way that’s effective rather than just loud for the sake of it.

That’s what made the partnership feel obvious. EndoGusto was built to give coaches a modern, affordable platform to manage their athletes’ training without the complexity and cost of legacy tools. NooMinds was built to do the same thing for nutrition. Both came from the same frustration: the gap between what endurance athletes actually need and what’s been available to them.

From Craig’s side, the answer is simple. EndoGusto helps coaches manage the training plan, NooMinds builds the nutrition plan. An athlete with both has the equation covered: how they train and how they fuel. And a coach with both has a complete toolkit they can put around every athlete on their roster, without cobbling it together from half a dozen different sources.

That’s what it looks like when the tools are built by people who’ve actually been the athlete on the road.

But what this partnership is really building toward is something bigger than two tools side by side. An athlete whose coach can see both their training load and their fuelling picture stops falling apart for reasons that were never fully explained. The next step in endurance coaching isn’t a better training plan or a better nutrition plan; it’s both, joined up, from coaches who know what it feels like when the plan runs out at kilometre 200.

For the Athlete Reading This

If you’re training for a big event right now and you haven’t spoken to a sports nutritionist because it feels out of reach, too expensive, or unclear, I get it. I was you, for a decade.

Start with the free Carb Calculator. Use it to understand your next event’s fuelling strategy. No cost, no commitment. A better starting point than “I’ll grab something from the café.”

And ask your coach about the Workout Meal Planner, a new weekly meal-planning tool that builds a fuelling plan for every training session in your week. Week 1 is free. After that it’s £9.99 a month. We’re launching it first for EndoGusto’s coach network, so if your coach works with EndoGusto, you’re in the first wave of athletes to get access. Wider release to follow.

The coaches and athletes who get nutrition right in the next 12 months are the ones who stop watching races fall apart in the last hour. I should know, I spent a decade being that cautionary tale.

“Let’s make sure the next generation of endurance athletes doesn’t have to learn it the hard way.”

About the Authors