Upcentrale started as a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet was mine
I was training for a marathon and trying to work out what to carry. Sixty to ninety grams of carbohydrate an hour is the advice. Nobody tells you what that means in sachets — from brands whose gels are not the same size, sold in boxes of twelve and twenty-four regardless of how long your race is.
So I built a planner to do the arithmetic. It became an app. People used it, learned they needed 274 grams of carbohydrate for their marathon, and then hit exactly the wall I had hit: knowing the number does not tell you what to buy.
That gap is what this store is for. Not new gels — there are already good gels. A box that matches a plan.
We do not make energy gels. Krono makes them, in Quebec, and they are better than most — the maple gel has two ingredients, no gums, nothing you need to look up.
What we do is the part nobody sells you: deciding how many you need, in what order, with the electrolytes and the real food a race weekend actually takes, and putting it in one box.
Everything here is specified in grams of carbohydrate rather than gel count, because grams is the unit your fueling plan is written in and gel count is the unit that misleads you. A 24 g gel and a 30 g gel are not the same purchase, and a box of ten tells you nothing about whether it covers your race.