About

I built this because I kept failing at it

I'm Conor Farrell, 29, five years into running and ten into building software. Absorb started as a side project for one runner, and that runner was me.

The deep end

Three years ago my brother and I ran the South Downs Way. A hundred miles, self navigated, target under 24 hours, and an incredible support crew who handled every edge case we threw at them. We finished in 29, held together by injury and a stomach that had stopped cooperating somewhere in the dark.

Then I went travelling and entered Ultra Trail Australia. I trained as hard as I knew how. Race morning was thick with humidity and fog, and because I was cold I never thought to take on more. Twenty miles in, an injury arrived out of nowhere and I did not finish.

Hundreds of hours of training. Thousands on kit, thousands on fuel, and the entry on top. I felt like I'd failed at the thing I'd decided I wanted to be good at, so I stopped, and enjoyed the rest of the trip.

I trust my training. I do not trust my gut.

The pull back to the South Downs started the week I got home. What I couldn't shake was that I had no idea what had actually gone wrong, or where, or whether the answer had been sitting in my training all along while I told myself everything was fine.

I am gluten and dairy intolerant, so almost everything affects me to some degree. That makes general advice close to useless: the answer was always going to have to come from my own runs. So I started building somewhere to say I felt sick, here, at this point, and an engine that could line that up against what my body had actually been doing.

The crew side came from the same place, pointed at somebody else. My crew gave up a weekend to stand in car parks in the dark, working out from a tracker ping whether they had ten minutes or two hours. A job as hard as mine, done off a document that was already out of date. Making it easier for them was never a feature I planned. It was a debt I owed.

Not for anyone else. For me, because I wanted to find out how good I could get, and for them, because they deserved better than a spreadsheet.

Then the weather explained it

I got a coach, and I entered five ultras in 2026 to learn on. After Chester I wrote up the rundown and sent it over. He's a superb coach and he's not a nutritionist, and fuelling is individual enough that guessing on someone else's behalf is not much better than guessing on your own.

So I bolted weather onto the thing I had built. And there it was: Ultra Trail Australia and Pennine 50, the two races where my gut had collapsed, had almost identical conditions. High humidity. In Australia it was thick enough to sit on the start line as fog, and I still read it as cold and took on less.

It was never only about what I was taking. It was when, and where on the course, and how much, and every variable in between that nobody writes down. That's the whole idea behind Absorb, and I didn't arrive at it cleverly. I arrived at it after two DNFs.

2026, without the edits

Four of the five. The results are ordinary. The last column is the one I care about.

  • Chester 50 miler 10th

    Bad gut. Wrote the rundown, sent it to my coach, changed nothing yet.

  • Pennine 50 4th

    Flared again. This is the one where the weather data made it click.

  • Scotland 57 miler 4th

    First race of my life where fuelling was not the problem. 11 minutes off the win.

  • Brecon Beacons 100k DNF

    Hot, and I had trained for hot. It was working. Then I tripped, hit my head hard, and could not eat.

Scotland is the one that mattered. I changed my approach mid block off something I'd written down in my own feedback, and for the first time, fuelling simply wasn't the story of the race.

Where I am now

My next A race is 5th December: a 100k, 55 miles, on home soil, over part of the same South Downs Way course that started all of this. My body feels ready, the fuelling is in a good place, and the pacing plan Absorb gives me supports a time I'd be genuinely proud of.

It isn't solved and it isn't finished. There are far more variables left to learn than I've learnt. What's changed is that I'm no longer guessing, and I enjoy every run more for knowing my body will respond to what I give it, because the answer came from my own runs rather than somebody's average.

My coach is Hayden Hawks. I write about the running side at @farrellruns, and about the tool at @absorb.run.

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