Training and fuelling for an event

Training for a race, not a stage

The same countdown, pointed at a different job. Setpoint works back from the date — but the goal here is arriving able to perform, not arriving at a weight, and almost everything follows from that one difference.

Twenty-eight events across seven disciplines, because not everybody runs. Running from a 5k to an ultra, and trail as its own thing. Walking and trekking — a 5k walk, a half marathon walk, and the 50 and 100 km charity treks that have taken six figures of Australians over a coastline. Cycling, road and mountain and multi-day. Open water swimming, from an ocean swim to a marathon channel crossing. Triathlon from sprint to Ironman, plus duathlon, aquathlon and adventure racing. And fitness racing — Hyrox, DEKA, Spartan, Tough Mudder.

It asks how long you expect to be out there rather than how far you are going, because that is what decides the answers. A four-hour marathoner and a two-and-a-half-hour one are running the same race and solving different nutrition problems — and a 5k walk and a 5k run are the same distance on opposite sides of the line where eating during it starts to matter at all.

It does not rewrite your diet to suit the race. Endurance runs on carbohydrate, and Setpoint will say so if your plan is low-carb and the day is a long one — but saying so is where it stops. Your calories move, because that is what working back from a date means. What you eat and how you split it stays yours, and the app tells you what it would recommend rather than quietly doing it. The race-day fuelling plan applies whatever you eat the rest of the week.

Losing weight is off by default, and the default is the advice. A deficit is a cost paid against the race. Setpoint will run a shallow one early if you ask, and switches it off entirely once the taper starts — glycogen cannot be filled out of a deficit, and the last few weeks are when the training you have already done actually lands.

Then the part most apps have nothing for: what goes in during it. Grams of carbohydrate an hour, scaled to your expected time, with the reason the number changes rather than just the number — above about 60 g an hour one of the gut transporters saturates, so it needs glucose and fructose together. More of a single-source gel does not absorb faster, it just ruins your stomach at 30 km. And the carb load before it, with no depletion phase, because the deplete-then-load protocol is decades out of date.

And then the part that makes the second race better than the first. When you finish, Setpoint asks one question: did you run out, did it hold, or did your stomach turn — and what did you actually take an hour, not what the plan said. Next race that comes back to you instead of the textbook. 60 to 90 grams an hour is a population range, and nobody’s gut is a population. The rate that stayed down in a real race is your own number, and a year later nobody remembers it. Setpoint does not change your plan on the strength of it — it puts last time in front of you and the call stays yours.

It writes the training as well as the meals, and the shape of the week is the point. Most of it is easy — one long session, at most two genuinely hard ones, and everything else at a pace you could hold a conversation through. That is not a soft option, it is the most robust finding in endurance training, and the failure it prevents is the common one: a whole week at a middling effort that feels productive, is too hard to recover from and too easy to adapt to. The plan is built so it cannot write that week.

Strength work stays in rather than being dropped, which is the first thing endurance athletes cut when the hours climb and the thing the evidence is clearest about for staying uninjured. An easier week every fourth, because adaptation happens during the recovery and not the work. And the taper cuts the volume while keeping the frequency — dropping sessions instead feels like resting and loses the feel for the sport in the fortnight it matters most.

Sessions come in minutes and effort rather than sets and reps, and the app logs them that way: a treadmill session asks for time, effort and incline. It will not write a programme for something else — if Setpoint has not been told the sport, a session plan would be invented rather than worked out, and it says so instead of guessing. None of this is coaching. It is a defensible default week, and a coach who knows your history and your injuries beats it comfortably.

The event screen is the prep screen, deliberately. The same countdown in the same place, the day’s calories and carbohydrate under it, the week’s carbs moved towards the days you actually train, what the week’s shop costs against your grocery budget, and one tap each to log your food or open your session. Two different sports, one screen you only have to learn once.

And when the day has been — or when it is not going to happen, which is the more common ending — Setpoint hands you back an ordinary plan. Your calories go back to what the app would set for you now, and the meals and the training are rewritten to match. That matters more here than it sounds: a programme written for a 90 km ride is still a programme written for a 90 km ride the week after you have stopped riding it.

There is no trajectory here and nothing telling you that you are behind. That belongs on a contest prep, where somebody is genuinely racing a body composition. Telling a marathoner six weeks out that their weight is not falling fast enough is not motivation, it is bad advice.

Are you eating enough for what you are doing?

Eating 2,600 calories sounds like plenty. It is not, if two hours of running took 1,100 of them and you carry 55 kg of lean mass — that leaves 27 calories per kilogram to run everything else on, and the line most sports scientists draw is 30. No calorie total on its own shows you that.

That gap has a name and a long list of consequences: stress fractures, cycles that stop, suppressed hormones, and the run of colds that ends a season. Endurance athletes are the textbook case, and almost every tracker will happily watch it happen while showing green numbers all week.

So Setpoint does not use a flat calorie floor for somebody training twelve hours a week. It works out what is left after training, measured against your lean mass, and raises the floor to cover it. It only ever raises one — a watch's calorie estimate is never allowed to lower your target, which is the same rule the rest of the app follows. And if it does not know your body composition it says so and asks, rather than estimating your lean mass and then passing judgement on your fuelling.

A contest prep gets the same number and none of the enforcement, and the difference is deliberate. A prep is the one place in the app where somebody is supposed to spend months under that line — coming in stage-lean is what it costs, and a rule forbidding it would forbid the sport. So the prep screen shows what is left after training and changes nothing about your target. Setpoint does not stop you, does not mark it in red, and does not offer to fix it: the fix is time at maintenance after the show, not a change this week.

It matters most in the last stretch, and that is exactly where nobody is doing the sum. Prep is the one diet where the app itself is pushing cardio up while pulling calories down, month after month — the gap widens on both sides at once. Knowing you are there is worth a great deal more than finding out afterwards, which is how most people find out.