Race planning
Grams an hour is the wrong unit for a race with stops in it
An hourly rate is a laboratory unit. It comes from stationary bikes at steady intensity, and it assumes you can eat at any moment. A trail ultra is not that. You eat where you can carry it to, where the gradient lets you, and where somebody is standing with it.
What an hourly rate cannot tell you
Take 90 grams an hour over a fourteen-hour race and the arithmetic says 1,260 grams of carbohydrate. True, and almost unusable. It doesn't say what you carry from the start, what's waiting at kilometre 62, what you eat while walking a climb you can't chew on, or what you skip because you arrived ninety minutes late.
The unit a race actually runs on is the stop. Between two stops you carry a fixed amount, you cover a fixed distance with a fixed amount of climb, and you arrive in a window rather than at a time. Everything a plan has to decide happens inside that leg.
So the useful question isn't how many grams an hour. It's what's in your vest leaving this stop, and what has to be in somebody's hand at the next one.
What a per-stop plan has to contain
Each of these changes what you carry, and none of them is derivable from an hourly rate.
The distance and climb of the leg itself
Two legs of the same length aren't the same job. One with 900m of climb takes longer, is walked more, and is often where eating gets hardest.
When you arrive, as a window
A single predicted time is a fiction the moment the day differs from the plan. A window tells a crew when to be there, and tells you which forecast hour you're running into.
What you can physically carry
A vest has a volume. A leg that needs more than it holds is a planning problem to solve beforehand, not a discovery to make at hour nine.
What somebody hands you
The difference between a plan and a document is whether the person at the checkpoint knows what to have ready before you arrive.
The cutoff
A cutoff makes a leg non-negotiable. A plan reporting a finish beyond one isn't a plan, and a probability of finishing that quietly includes impossible outcomes is worse than no number.
What happens when you are behind
The version of the plan where you're ninety minutes down is the one you'll actually run. It should exist before race day, not be improvised at a checkpoint.
The crew are running a different race
A crew member isn't reading your plan. They're answering one question, repeatedly, in a car park in the dark: do I have ten minutes or two hours, and what am I supposed to be holding.
That's a different document from the runner's, built from the same decisions. It wants stops in course order, drive times, where to park, an arrival window rather than a time, and a per-stop list of exactly what to hand over. Most crews do this off a spreadsheet that stopped being current before the start gun.
The part almost nobody does
A race plan is a hypothesis: given what I've run, this is what I think I can carry and when I think I'll be there. The only thing that tests it is the race, and the only way the next plan gets better is if somebody wrote down what actually happened on each leg.
That's the loop, and it's why a plan built on your own fuelling record beats one built on an average of other people. Not because the average is wrong, but because it was never about you.
Where Absorb comes into it
Absorb reads a race page into a stop list, projects a range for each stop from terrain you've actually run rather than from a multiplier, plans fuelling per stop from your own numbers, and gives your crew the same plan on their own phones with no account and no signal needed. Afterwards, the race becomes evidence that sharpens the next one.
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For people aged 16 or over.