The Block
An illustrative composite — not a real customer. We built these to describe who this product is for.
Dani · 34 · product manager · Chicago
Sixteen weeks out from a marathon, and still lifting twice a week because she has watched what happens to people who drop it.
The long run is Sunday. Tuesday and Thursday are the gym, after work, starting somewhere around 6:40pm once the last call finally ends. She is in bed by ten because Wednesday starts at seven.
Her problem is a sequencing problem. Everything marketed to her is built for one side. The endurance products assume she's a runner and nothing else — gels, sodium, carbohydrate, no thought given to a barbell. The gym products assume she's lifting and nothing else — stimulants, pumps, and no fuel at all for a ninety-minute aerobic effort.
She is not an edge case. She is what a lot of people in their thirties actually do.
The other thing: she trains at 6:40pm. A stimulant load appropriate for a 6am session is a night of poor sleep, and poor sleep is what actually breaks a marathon block. She has learned to read caffeine content the way other people read calories.
What she needs from a label: a caffeine number low enough to take in the evening, and enough carbohydrate that a session at the end of a long day isn't running on empty.