I spent a decade as an elite water polo player. I represented New Zealand at the World Cup, played NCAA Division 1 at George Washington, and reached four consecutive conference championship finals.
And for all those years, I had no idea how to fuel my body.
Water polo has a dirty secret: we're terrible at nutrition. We drink water, eat like absolute animals before and after games, and call it a day. No calculations. No strategy. Just survive and recover.
That worked fine until I tried triathlon.
My first half Ironman was Santa Cruz in 2023. I showed up with my water polo mindset: train hard, eat big, figure it out.
By mile 8 of the run, I had nothing. Legs gone. Brain foggy. Every step felt like dragging concrete through sand.
I finished (barely) with a time I'd rather forget.
Afterward, I called my coach expecting sympathy. Instead, I got a question:
"What did you eat on the bike?"
I didn't have a good answer.
My coach broke it down: at half Ironman intensity, your body burns through glycogen fast. If you don't replace it aggressively, you bonk. It's not about willpower. It's physics.
Here's what he prescribed for the bike leg alone:
I remember thinking: There's no way I can eat that much while cycling.
Turns out, triathlon is basically a game of how much you can ram down your throat without throwing up.
Fast forward to Galveston 70.3, 2024. Texas heat. Humidity that hits you like a wall. This was my shot to qualify for World Championships.
I followed the fueling plan religiously. Gels every 20 minutes. Salt tabs. Sipping constantly. By the time I hit T2, I felt like I might actually vomit from sheer volume.
But my legs? Still there.
I ran my best split ever. Qualified for Worlds.
The difference wasn't fitness. I'd been fit in Santa Cruz too. The difference was fuel.
After Galveston, I raced Hawaii 70.3, Escape from Alcatraz, another Santa Cruz (redemption lap), and finally the 70.3 World Championships in Taupo, New Zealand.
Each race taught me the same lesson in different conditions:
The pattern was undeniable. Every micro-adjustment in nutrition showed up directly in my performance. Skip a gel? Feel it 30 minutes later. Under-hydrate in the morning? Pay for it on the run.
Here's the thing: your body doesn't know the difference between racing a half Ironman and grinding through a 10-hour workday.
Fuel in, energy out. That equation doesn't change because you're in an office instead of on a bike.
Think about it:
We treat nutrition like it only matters for weight loss or disease prevention. But it's also the operating system for how you feel and perform every single hour.
I'm not here to sell you a meal plan or a supplement stack.
What I learned from triathlon is simpler: awareness changes everything.
When I started paying attention to what I ate and when I ate it, I didn't just race better. I worked better. Slept better. Recovered faster. Had more consistent energy.
The problem is, most of us have no idea what we're actually consuming day-to-day. We guess. We snack. We forget. We open the fridge and improvise.
That's why I built Trepo. It's a small device that sits on your fridge and helps you see what you're actually eating and using, without logging or tracking apps. It's the same principle that transformed my racing: you can't optimize what you don't observe.
You don't need to eat 100g of carbs per hour (please don't). But here are some things that actually move the needle:
The goal isn't perfection. It's pattern recognition.
Because whether you're racing toward a finish line or just trying to make it through Tuesday, fueling matters more than most people think.
Matt Taylor is the founder of Trepo and a 70.3 World Championship qualifier. He's also the 2019 Arthur Ashe Jr. Sports Scholar of the Year and former New Zealand national water polo team member. He writes about food, performance, and building systems that actually work.