The Leadville 100 is one of the most demanding races in ultrarunning, and this year David Roche delivered his best performance yet. The Colorado-based coach and ultrarunner crossed the line in 15:12:30, beating his previous best by 14 minutes.
Afterward, he shared a detailed breakdown of his fueling and hydration plan, offering a rare inside look at how precision nutrition can make or break a 100-mile effort at altitude.
Roche leaned hard into carbohydrates, taking in an eye-popping 152.5 grams per hour for the first ten hours. That meant a Science in Sport Beta Fuel gel every twenty minutes, with every sixth swapped for a 100 mg caffeine hit. In his bottles, he kept things steady with concentrated Skratch mix, averaging about 24 ounces of fluid per hour early on.
“Whatever ultra powers I have come from carbs,” he wrote afterward, reflecting on the lessons he carried over from Western States, where a fueling misstep led to what he described as a “mental shart visible from space.”
The numbers shifted as the race wore on. By the final stretch, Roche’s intake dropped to 100 grams of carbs per hour, with hydration reduced to 12–16 ounces. It wasn’t just a matter of tolerance, he believes the body’s sweat rate naturally declines late in ultras, and that many runners’ stomach problems come from drinking as if they’re still in the fresh early miles.
Sports science offers some support for that theory, with studies showing that sweat rate can change significantly with fatigue and environmental stress.
One of the more unusual elements of Roche’s approach came before the race even started. Ninety minutes before the Leadville gun, he took 4.5 grams of sodium bicarbonate, a supplement long used by sprinters and middle-distance runners to buffer lactate.
It’s rarely seen in ultras, but Roche pointed to a 2022 case study on Kilian Jornet at UTMB, which documented lactate spikes more typical of track racing. His theory is that ultras put athletes in stressed states that mimic high-intensity efforts, and bicarb might just help.
Not all of his preparation was out of a lab playbook. In the five days before the race, Roche ate four bacon cheeseburger dinners, capped with a $22 plate of enchiladas. On race morning, he got down most of a Gatorade Protein Bar, which he described as “a Snickers that went to a 24-Hour Fitness to take a selfie and then leave.”
The result of all that precision and all that personality was a near-perfectly executed day. Roche’s wife and crew chief Megan had predicted 15:12 in her pre-race spreadsheets. He crossed the line at 15:12:30, close enough that he joked the odds of such accuracy were “one in 10,000.”
What stands out from Roche’s breakdown is not just the meticulous accounting, but the larger shift in ultrarunning nutrition. Where once 60–90 grams of carbs per hour was considered ambitious, elites are now pushing into the 100–150 range, training their guts to handle the load.
For Roche, it meant trading heart hands for “carb hands” at the finish line, a reminder that at Leadville, as much as anywhere, performance can hinge on what you’re eating as much as how fast you’re running.
