Andy Blow was a competitive triathlete who kept falling apart in the heat. He'd do well in cold races and then the temperature would rise and he'd end up in the medical tent with hyponatremia, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what. A friend who was a medic finally sat down with him and explained that electrolyte loss is individual — that you could do a sweat test and actually find out what your body was losing. Andy did the test, found out he was a heavy sodium sweater, changed his approach, and then realized the test wasn't available for athletes anywhere.

That problem became a business.

Fifteen years later, Precision Fuel and Hydration is crewing eleven athletes at Western States, working with Rachel Entrekin on the data that backed her Cocodona course record, and partnered with Ironman globally. Andy stepped out of the CEO role in January and handed it to his co-founder Johnny, who has been there since the beginning. The company has never taken outside capital. They built it one foot in front of the other and nearly went under more times than Andy can comfortably recount.

This is a note before anything else: this conversation first aired on Long Run Labs, Jon's podcast about the business of endurance and the outdoor industry. It's being shared here because Andy's story is worth hearing and because there's genuinely useful information in it for anyone who runs long. Precision sponsors For the Long Run. This episode wasn't recorded out of obligation.

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The core philosophy behind how Precision builds its products comes down to a simple idea. You need to hit three numbers per hour when you're racing — carbohydrate, fluid, and sodium. And those three numbers are different for every person. If you try to put everything into one product, you lose the ability to adjust any of them independently. Someone who needs twice the sodium that you need would have to double their carbohydrate intake just to hit their sodium number, which creates a whole other set of problems.

So the products are separate. You pull the three levers independently. You figure out your numbers, you build your plan, and you test it and refine it over time. It's not a magic formula. It's a toolkit.

Andy is also working on an electrolyte gel to add to that toolkit, which Jon is personally invested in given his 1310 milligrams per liter sodium test result.

Jon asked Andy directly about the low carb versus high carb debate and specifically about Tim Noakes, who has spent years arguing that high carb fueling is essentially sugar addiction. Andy's answer is worth reading carefully because it's more nuanced than a straight dismissal.

He agrees that there's a danger in taking the high carb narrative too far — that the average recreational athlete probably doesn't need to be consuming 130 grams of carbohydrate an hour and that overconsumption is a real thing. But he also points to the pro peloton as the best available science experiment for what actually works. Three weeks of all out racing, the best athletes in the world, every team with sports scientists and nutritionists tweaking everything in real time. If low carb actually worked, the peloton would be doing it. They're not. They're going higher every year.

The Darwinian argument, as Andy calls it, is pretty simple. If sweat testing and electrolyte supplementation were a complete waste of time, it wouldn't have survived fifteen years in the market. And it has.

Precision was crewing Rachel at Cocodona this year and had people weighing gel packets going in and out and measuring drink bottles. Real field data over 56 hours. Andy is careful not to overclaim what the data shows — Rachel is an extraordinary athlete who would probably find a way to perform under almost any conditions. But what he can say is that whatever she did nutritionally did not negatively impact her performance, and that getting her confidence in the plan to the point where she would actually follow it was a significant piece of the puzzle.

He also notes that they've been building that data set for years. Caleb Olson from top ten to a win. Chris Myers from tenth to second. The case studies are all public on the Precision website because the whole point is that the data should be visible and people should draw their own conclusions from it.

Even with all the conversation around fueling that exists right now, Andy thinks the biggest failure is a lack of planning. Most athletes still have what he calls a suck it and see approach to race nutrition — they know vaguely that they should eat something and drink something and they figure it out as they go. They don't track what they consume on long runs. They don't weigh themselves before and after to understand fluid loss. They don't have a number for carbohydrate, fluid, or sodium per hour.

The free fuel and hydration planner on Precision's website was built specifically to solve this. It takes inputs about your physiology, your race duration, the conditions, and gives you a starting ballpark for each of the three numbers. It's not a magic formula. It's a starting point that's better than guessing.

The story of how Precision ended up with Ironman as a global partner involves renting a house at the Ironman World Championships in Nice, marketing hard from that house without being an official partner, getting a visit from Ironman's legal team, and then a few months later getting a call from Ironman looking for a new hydration partner. That's not a strategy. That's just showing up.

Most of Precision's relationships have evolved the same way. Andy was aware of Jon using the product before they ever talked about working together. Brad, their athlete manager, was a professional triathlete using the product before he ever joined the team. Rachel Entrekin was using it before they formalized anything. The pattern is consistent enough that it's not really a pattern anymore — it's just how they operate.

They've also had to turn athletes down. People who were authentically using the product but wanted a number that didn't make sense for what Precision could sustain. Andy doesn't begrudge that. He respects it. But the goal, as Brad frames it, is to be the last nutrition company an athlete ever signs with. Not everyone, but that's the intention going in.

Andy stepped out of the CEO role in January. Johnny, who went from world silver medalist in kayaking to Precision's COO almost overnight and made that transition look easy, is now running the company. Andy is still in a strategic role and still very much involved, but the operational weight has shifted.

What he believes now that he would have laughed at in 2011 is that the company would still exist. There was a period where they shipped a container of product to the US without getting the import paperwork right and received a letter saying it would either be burned on the dock or returned for eight thousand dollars. They didn't have eight thousand dollars. There were days in the shed with his head in his hands.

The lesson he took from all of it is one that sounds familiar to anyone who has ever run a long race. Don't think about the finish line. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. When you ask yourself what you'd rather be doing, if the answer is probably not much else, you double down and keep going.

Precision is proof that it works.

🎧 This episode first aired on Long Run Labs. Listen to the full conversation with Andy Blow on For The Long Run wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want more of the business of endurance, Long Run Labs is worth finding.

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Jon is a runner, cyclist, and podcast host from Boston, MA, who now lives in Boulder, CO. For The Long Run is aimed at exploring the why behind what keeps runners running long, strong, and motivated.

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