Proof
Every tool claims accuracy. This one shows its homework.
Including the races it got wrong. You can check it against your own results before you pay anything.
Retrodiction
Absorb rewinds your account to the morning of a race you have already finished and throws away everything after it. Then it states a range, and checks where you actually landed.
Races it could not call are listed with the reason, so one it left out is never mistaken for one it got right.
Honesty enforced by code, not by good intentions
The app will not start if a recommendation reads as a prescription
The research library is checked at load. Causal or prescriptive phrasing throws, and the process refuses to boot.
A race result cannot carry a rank, a score or a personal best
Seventeen field names are rejected outright, because those concepts do not exist in the data model. Competitors ship exactly those as the headline feature.
Making something up fails the build
The race-page reader is scored against ten real race pages, hand-labelled by consensus. Declining to answer counts as correct; a confident value where the page said nothing counts as a fabrication.
The note on the gate reads: fix the change, do not raise the thresholds.
It retracts its own citations in public
Several research figures in the engine have been re-checked and withdrawn in the source after they did not hold up. That is a position you can defend under scrutiny in a way that "our algorithm" is not.
Built for every runner, not just the ones who got studied
Most fuelling guidance comes from a narrow slice of the running population and is then handed to everyone as a prescription. Your body is not that sample and your answer is not the average of theirs.
So published guidance is a starting point, your own logged runs are the evidence, and where Absorb applies a research prior it says which one and how far that study actually reaches. Fade over distance is adjusted for sex, and declining to answer is pooled rather than treated as an answer.
The optional cycle space records the phases you name, on the dates you give, in your own words. Absorb never predicts a phase and never adjusts your fuelling or pacing by one, because the conventional four-phase model is wrong for a large share of female endurance athletes.
Prescriptions assume you are the average. Absorb assumes you are not.
Same gel. Different day. Different gut.
Four studies. Four things that were not the carbohydrate.
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The hour
The same three hour run at 9pm emptied slower than at 9am.
Randomised crossover in runners. More gut symptoms, and a much larger cortisol rise.
PubMed 33065594 -
Three days before
The runners worst hit had eaten more polyols in the days beforehand.
Field study at a 56km trail ultramarathon. Total FODMAP intake showed nothing.
PubMed 38637153 -
The heat
Yesterday’s dinner changed symptoms during today’s run.
Randomised double-blind crossover, 18 endurance runners, two hours at 35 degrees.
PubMed 31652404 -
Your head
How anxious you were on the start line tracked with how your gut went.
Prospective field study at a 56km ultramarathon, strongest in the final 24 hours.
PubMed 34897557
Running has a prescription problem. Take 60 to 90 grams an hour, as though the gel were the only variable in the room.
Absorb is the other way round. Your runs are the evidence, published guidance is a starting point, and the answer is allowed to be yours rather than the average.
Absorb never predicts a phase and never adjusts your fuelling by one. It records what you tell it, in your words, and shows you what your own runs say.
Be there when it opens
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