The Business That Wouldn’t Die
Andy Blow on sweat tests, the discipline of saying no, and building Precision Fuel & Hydration one foot in front of the other
A quick note before we get into it. Precision Fuel & Hydration is a longtime sponsor of my main podcast, For The Long Run, and I want to be upfront about that. I was not obligated to record this episode or write it up. I have been running on PF&H for more than three years, since Hayden Hawks handed me a few gels/chews and told me to try them, and I have wanted to sit down with the person who built a product I actually use ever since. This one was for me as much as for you: a chance to learn from a founder I admire and hear the real story of how a sweat test in a hospital turned into a company with fifty-odd people.
So with that out of the way, here is what stuck with me.
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It started as a problem, not a market
The origin story is the kind I love, because it begins with a person and a problem rather than a spreadsheet and an opportunity. Andy was a triathlete who kept falling apart in the heat, ending up in the medical tent with hyponatremia race after race. A friend who was a medic walked him through the idea that electrolyte loss is deeply individual, and that you could actually measure it. He got a sweat test in a hospital, found out he loses an enormous amount of sodium, changed his approach, and the problem went away.
Here is the part most people miss. Precision did not start as a product. It started as a sweat test, one more thing Andy could offer athletes out of the sports science lab he was running at the time. The ambitions were tiny. It caught on, it broadened, and only later did it become a product line. Fifteen years later it is Precision Fuel & Hydration, with a fueling range that got added during COVID when there was finally time to stop and build it.
The toolkit, not the magic powder
If you have ever wondered why PF&H separates fuel from hydration instead of cramming everything into one do-it-all gel, this is the cleanest explanation I have heard. Andy frames it as three levers: carbs per hour, fluid per hour, sodium per hour. Your numbers are not my numbers. If you bundle all three into a single product, the moment you need to pull one lever harder you end up overconsuming the other two. Separating them lets you dial each one independently.
I am a useful test case here. I just did a sweat test and came back at 1,310 mg of sodium per liter, which is high. My current setup is the carb and electrolyte drink mix plus two gels an hour, and I am still chasing a full gram of sodium per hour without over-diluting my hydration. Andy’s response was to offer me a spot on the early test list for an electrolyte gel they are playing with. That is the toolkit philosophy in action: more ways to hit your number, not one product that pretends to be everything.
The line that landed for me was about the industry’s incentive to mystify. A confused athlete is easier to sell a magic formula to. PF&H goes the other way and treats their job as educating you on how to assemble your own tool bag for a race.
Where anecdote and science meet
We got into the dogma, including Tim Noakes and his low-carb position. My framing is that the pro peloton at the Tour de France is the best science experiment that exists, three weeks of all-out racing with no room for things that do not work. If low carb were the answer, the peloton would be doing it. Andy agreed and added the nuance: pros get to test and refine far more often than ultra runners do, so trends show up there first. He called it a Darwinian filter on ideas, and pointed out that PF&H spent its first few years justifying why it disagreed with Noakes when “Waterlogged” came out. The fact that sweat testing and electrolytes survived the test of time is, in his words, the answer.
What I appreciated was his caution about the data. PF&H has a lab now, but most of their evidence is collected in the field with elite athletes, and the case study database is open for anyone to view. They are not telling you what to take. They are showing you the direction the data points, from Caleb Olson going top ten to winning, to Chris Myers going tenth to second, to Rachel Entrekin weighing every gel packet and bottle on her way to taking down the men’s course record at Cocodona while running just over 56 hours. Andy was careful not to over-claim there. His phrase was that the nutrition was “a brick in that wall of performance,” one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
For the rest of us, the takeaway is blunt. The biggest failure he sees in amateurs is not engaging with a real plan at all. Not recording intake, not weighing before and after a long run, treating fueling as suck-it-and-see while obsessing over marginal gains everywhere else. Be planned, be intentional, and use the free fuel and hydration planner (which, fittingly, started as an Excel algorithm Andy and his business partner Johnny built to argue with their own expo recommendations).
The part I really wanted: how they think about partnerships
This is where the conversation got personal for me, because PF&H’s approach to sponsorship is the clearest mirror of my own thesis I have come across.
Every partnership they have, including the giant ones, grew organically. Ironman is the best example. Nobody at PF&H decided to “go win Ironman.” They showed up at races, bought expo space, and at one point rented a house at the World Championships in Nice and marketed so aggressively that Ironman’s legal team came knocking about infringement. Months later, Ironman called looking for a new hydration partner. It started small in Europe and is a global partnership in 2026. Andy keeps using the word authentic, and apologizes for over-laboring it, but the pattern is real: the relationship comes first, the contract comes later, and only when it already feels true.
That maps exactly onto the filter I try to hold myself to. I will not partner with a brand I would not recommend for free. The deliverables and the assets are why it is not free, but the recommendation itself has to be something I would give away. Andy described his side of that same coin through Brad, their athlete captain, who was a pro triathlete using the product before PF&H ever sponsored anyone. The two non-negotiables for their roster are simple: the athlete has to genuinely want to use the product, and genuinely want the sports science support. They have made the mistake of signing people who “looked good” with no prior relationship, and it never developed into anything real. They have also turned down athletes they could not afford, and respected those athletes for taking the bigger check elsewhere. Brad’s stated goal is to be the last nutrition company an athlete ever signs with.
If you are on the brand side of this world, that is what it’s all about. Authenticity is not a vibe; it is a filter that forces success, because it makes the marketing true before money ever changes hands.
On F1, broadcast, and the business that wouldn’t die
Andy spent time in Formula One as a sports scientist over twenty years ago, and the lesson he carried out was the power of associating a brand with visible high performance. But he was clear-eyed about the divergence: F1 is a pure shop window operating at a scale where a major running brand’s entire sponsorship budget is a rounding error, while trail and ultra are fundamentally about community and marketing to participants in the same sport. On the dream of an F1-style broadcast for ultra, his advice was to start simple. Get accurate, fast, granular live leaderboards right before worrying about pulling physio data off athletes’ bodies. (I could not resist plugging Laurel Innovations here, whose satellite-based timing does not need cell coverage or timing mats and can blanket a course like Western States or Chamonix in redundant trackers and provide much more regular and reliable updates than what we’re used to.)
And then the line that gave this piece its title. When I asked what he believes now that he would have laughed at in 2011, Andy said simply that the business is still alive. He talked about sitting in a shed with his head in his hands, down to the last couple grand, and the time they shipped their first big container of product to the US, botched the import paperwork, and got a letter saying pay $8,000 or watch it burn on the dock. They did not have $8,000. They came to call it the business that wouldn’t die, because every near-death experience stayed exactly that. The lesson, in the most ultra-running terms possible: keep putting one foot in front of the other and stop fixating on the finish line.
He stepped out of the CEO role this past January, handing it to Johnny, his COO since day one, and slid back into the strategic and creative seat he always loved most. He called himself an accidental owner, and a happy one.
That is the whole thing, really. A guy solved his own problem, refused to fake any relationship he was not actually in, and kept showing up for fifteen years. I have been running on his product for three of them, and after this conversation I understand exactly why it works.
You can find Andy and the PF&H team this summer at Broken Arrow and Trailcon, crewing eleven athletes at Western States, with new watermelon chews fresh off a soft launch at Cocodona (they’re delicious, trust me), and a presence at UTMB, Boulderthon, CIM, and the Honolulu Marathon later in the year.
See you out there.
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Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.