The Fuel You Don’t Have to Think About

What the newest CurraNZ research means from inside the athlete experience, by Hillary Allen, silver medallist, Team USA, World Mountain Running Championships (80k)

Hillary writes:

One of the most humbling parts of training is realizing how much of our performance depends on things we can’t see. We obsess over splits, vertical gain, HRV, lactate, but the quiet machinery inside the muscle is what truly dictates how long we can stay strong, how deep we can go, and how well we bounce back.

That’s why this new CurraNZ research stopped me in my tracks.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I don’t get excited about supplements easily. I’m skeptical. I ask a lot of questions. I’ve spent enough time injured,  and enough time as a scientific researcher,  to know that most products promise a lot and deliver very little.

But this new CurraNZ study reveals something different.

Not a marginal gain.
Not a small metabolic shift.
But a legitimate change in how the body stores and uses fuel.

And for an endurance athlete, it’s pretty compelling.

Starting the session with more in the tank

One of the biggest findings of the study: athletes who used CurraNZ (Seven days of supplementation, 1 capsule with breakfast and 1 with dinner for 6 days, and the final two capsules 2 hours before the exercise trial on day 7) had higher pre-exercise muscle glycogen, essentially beginning a run, workout, or race with more usable energy already inside the muscle.

As athletes, we spend hours trying to perfect carb loading, timing, fueling strategies… and here’s something that quietly raises the ceiling before we even lace up.

Beginning with more glycogen means you have more available when it matters — during surges, climbs, intervals, or the final stretch when the legs usually start bargaining.

The second piece of the study was equally compelling: those using CurraNZ showed a significant increase in fat oxidation during long-duration exercise.

This matters because most athletes live in a very fragile relationship with glycogen. We burn through it quickly, then spend the rest of the session trying not to fall apart. That’s where fat oxidation comes in.

What the researchers saw was a shift, athletes burned more fat without sacrificing their ability to use carbohydrates when intensity demanded it. That combination is rare.

As someone who spends hours on long climbs, unpredictable terrain, and cumulative fatigue, this feels incredibly practical. It means your body doesn’t panic when it hits the middle miles. It

Recovery: The invisible advantage

Another quiet but crucial finding: CurraNZ supported faster replenishment of intramuscular fuel after exercise, which changes how you handle heavy training weeks, doubles, or stacked sessions. This has to deal with recovery.

Anyone who’s trained for ultras or mountain races knows:

It’s not the single big workout that breaks you.
It’s the inability to recover from it.

The researchers called this a “repeatability effect,” and that’s exactly what it felt like to me, I’ve been using CurraNZ regularly for a year now, and I’ve continued to notice that my body is less fragile in big training blocks, and more willing to show up again the next day. Read more about how I’ve been using CurraNZ throughout my season HERE.

What this means to me as an athlete

As endurance runners, especially in the mountains, we spend a lot of time trusting processes we can’t fully see. We hope the work is adding up. We hope our fueling is enough. We hope our energy will hold.

This research doesn’t solve all of that, but it does something important:

It gives me a little more confidence in the engine.

It supports the part of performance that happens long before the starting line.

It takes pressure off the “perfect fueling day” and gives me a more stable platform to train from.

For me, CurraNZ isn’t about magic.

It’s about reliability, something I’ve learned to value more than anything.

And when a team of researchers tells you they haven’t seen a nutrient deliver this combination of effects before… that’s worth paying attention to.