About Carb Hack

I grew up riding bikes, playing pond hockey, skiing, snowboarding, and playing tennis — but I always took a pretty casual approach to my snacks and hydration. For longer tennis matches on hot days or long bike rides I'd grab a Gatorade or some granola bars, but that was about as much as I'd ever thought about my fueling.

In college I studied biomedical engineering, started doing a lot of rock climbing, and spent more and more time in the mountains. A few years after graduating my girlfriend Emma and I moved to Boulder, where biking, running, and skiing became an even bigger part of our lives. Two years after moving out here Emma ran her first ultra — a 30-mile trail race — and followed it up with a 50-miler the next summer.

I've always been frugal, had a mind for numbers, and been a bit skeptical of the status quo. It became obvious that modern sports nutrition made a huge difference for the kinds of rides and runs our friends were doing — but I had a hard time justifying how expensive gels and drink mixes could be. Weren't they basically just sugars and salts? When did sugar and salt get so expensive?

I started with some light research and a spreadsheet. It quickly confirmed what I suspected: you could match the macros — same carbs, same glucose-to-fructose ratio, same sodium — for a fraction of the cost. The proprietary stuff like Maurten's hydrogel texture stays on the shelf, but the part that actually does the work in your gut is commodity sugar and salt. My spreadsheet got messy and complicated fast. We wanted a tool that let you quickly compare different products, see exactly what it would cost to recreate them with bulk ingredients, and add your own tweaks as you see fit.

That led me to build Carb Hack. Our hope was to help other athletes save money, get outside more often, and stop letting fuel cost gate their training and racing. As I built it, I was also surprised by how much fun I had using it — experimenting with different mixes, watching how the critical parameters shifted with each adjustment, and gaining a real understanding of what had previously been a black box.

We hope you enjoy it.