Mile twenty-two of a marathon is where things get philosophical. Your legs ask why. Your stomach asks what. Your heart rate monitor asks how. The answer to all three lives in whatever's in your pocket.
Standard gels work. Tens of thousands of finish lines have been crossed on Maurten, GU, Clif, SiS, and Honey Stinger. We've used them. We respect what the format made possible. Concentrated, portable, fast-acting carbohydrates at a price point amateurs could afford. But the more we read the labels, the more we wondered why a sport built around squeezing out human performance kept relying on industrial inputs.
So we built FORFUEL out of two ingredients: 100% pure organic Grade A maple syrup and sea salt. That's it. Here's how that stacks up against the rest of the shelf.
What's actually in a typical energy gel
Pick up any mainstream gel and read the ingredient panel. You'll see some version of this:
Maltodextrin — a corn-derived starch broken into shorter glucose chains.
Fructose.
Water.
Sodium citrate or sodium chloride.
Citric acid.
"Natural flavor" — a regulatory umbrella covering hundreds of compounds.
Preservatives like potassium sorbate.
Gums (xanthan, gellan) for texture.
Sometimes BCAAs, caffeine, beta-alanine, or other actives.
Sometimes artificial colors.
All of it "works". But "works" and "what your body evolved to run on" are different sentences. Maltodextrin in particular is a fast-burning starch with no nutritional context, no minerals, no polyphenols, no fat-soluble vitamins, just chains of glucose engineered for shelf life and viscosity.
What's actually in maple syrup
Pure Grade A maple syrup is one ingredient: maple sap, boiled down. Forty gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup. Nothing is added during production. What you get:
Sucrose (~62%) — splits in the gut to a clean 1:1 mix of glucose and fructose.
Glucose and fructose (~5%) — already split, hits the bloodstream fast.
Water (~33%).
Manganese — about 27% of your daily value per quarter cup. Manganese is a cofactor in mitochondrial energy production and antioxidant defense.
Zinc, calcium, potassium, magnesium — in trace but real amounts.
Polyphenols — researchers at the University of Rhode Island have identified more than 60 polyphenolic compounds in maple, including quebecol, a molecule that doesn't exist anywhere else in nature and forms only during the boiling process.
The carb profile is the hidden weapon. The single most consequential paper in modern endurance fueling is Asker Jeukendrup's work on multiple transportable carbohydrates: when you mix glucose and fructose roughly 2:1 (or closer to 1:1 in shorter efforts), your gut can absorb up to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour instead of the ~60 g ceiling pure glucose hits. Maple syrup arrives at the start line with that mix already built in, by nature.
The science of how it's absorbed
Glucose is absorbed through SGLT1 transporters in your small intestine. Fructose uses GLUT5, an entirely different pathway. When both are saturated, you absorb more total carbohydrate per minute, which means more available energy at the working muscle and less left fermenting in your gut.
Pure maltodextrin gels saturate SGLT1 quickly. Once that ceiling is hit, additional intake has nowhere to go but your stomach lining, where it pulls in water (osmotic load) and creates the sloshing, bloated feeling anyone who's run a long marathon has lived through.
Sucrose-based fuels like maple syrup have an inherent advantage here. The 1:1 split between glucose and fructose maps cleanly onto SGLT1 + GLUT5, and the body uses both lanes simultaneously.
This is also why pure maple's glycemic index (around 54) sits well below maltodextrin's (85–105). Flatter rise, longer release. Useful when "crash at mile 18" is something you'd rather avoid.
The original endurance fuel was a syrup that mountain athletes pulled out of trees for two centuries. Everything since has been a lab trying to imitate it.
Why we add sea salt
Pure maple has trace sodium, not enough. A typical endurance athlete loses between 800 and 2,000 mg of sodium per liter of sweat, and the most common cause of late-race "I've fueled fine, why do I feel terrible" is electrolyte depletion, not glycogen depletion.
We add 150 mg of sodium per pouch in the form of sea salt. That's in line with or above most performance gels, and combined with the potassium and magnesium already present in maple, it gives a more complete electrolyte profile than glucose-syrup-plus-table-salt formulations.
It also tastes better. Maple syrup straight is a sugar bomb. A pinch of salt sharpens it, balances the sweetness, and turns a gel into something you can actually swallow at mile 22 without gagging.
What this means for your race day
Functionally, a FORFUEL pouch and a typical gel are similar in the things that matter most:
Calories per serving: 110 (FORFUEL) vs. 100–120 (typical).
Carbs per serving: 27 g vs. 22–30 g.
Sodium per serving: 150 mg vs. 50–150 mg.
Where they diverge is in everything else. No maltodextrin. No citric acid for "stability." No gums. No preservatives. Nothing that didn't come out of a sugar maple or the ocean.
For most runners, the difference shows up two ways. First, gut tolerability. Many athletes who struggle to keep down concentrated maltodextrin under heat or hard effort find that a sucrose-based real-food fuel sits better. Second, no flavor fatigue. Synthetic citrus and "vanilla bean" gels start tasting like punishment after the third one. Real maple just tastes like maple.
Where some standard gels still win
We won't pretend this is one-sided. Honest tradeoffs:
Caffeine. We don't make a caffeinated version (yet). If you want a 100 mg caffeine kick at mile 18, you'll need something else.
Concentration. Some lab-formulated gels can pack more carbs into a smaller pouch. Maple's water content sets a natural ceiling.
Texture in extreme temperatures. Engineered gels are dialed in for viscosity in any conditions. Maple thickens slightly in the cold and thins in the heat. We've tested ours in both, but if you race in a Yukon winter or Death Valley, your mileage may vary.
Specialty add-ins. No BCAAs. No beta-alanine. No nootropics. If those are central to your protocol, we're not going to be your only fuel.
We made these tradeoffs on purpose: fewer ingredients, harder to fake, easier on the gut, made by a tree instead of a factory.
The takeaway
Energy gels solved a real problem. They put portable, fast-acting carbohydrates in your shorts pocket and made racing accessible to anyone who could afford a packet. We're not trying to dethrone them. We're trying to remind the sport that the original endurance fuel was a syrup that mountain athletes pulled out of trees for two centuries, and that with one ingredient added, it stacks up more than respectably against everything in the lab-gel aisle.
If you want to test it, take one of ours on your next long run. Take one of your usual gels too. Halfway through, swap. Pay attention to what your gut says, what your legs say, and what your taste buds say. We trust you to make the call from there.
