The two developers of Team First Endurance—Robert Kunz and Mike Fogarty—considered what a real athlete wants, which is either a PR or a qualifying spot. Moreover, they want knowledge, and a way to test products in their own training that will help them develop a solid nutrition program.

First Endurance has a stable of doctors and research board members in their stable who actually race as well, including Bob Seebohar (a former U.S. Olympic Committee sports dietitian and the 2008 Olympic Triathlon Team dietitian who is also an Ironman athlete) and Neal Henderson, the director of the Sports Sciences Department at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, who’s also a Masters road racer. They actually get what endurance athletes need. They do the studies on subjects and then they do the studies on themselves.

As a result, the pros who have joined First Endurance, including Ironman athletes Michael Lovato and Donna Phelan, Olympian Sarah Haskins and Xterra’s Ryan Ignatz, have joined because they believe in the product line, not because of money, shirts or jerseys. I’ve spoken to longtime First Endurance athlete Michael Lovato about his association with First Endurance in the past, and for him, it was never about money; it was about the product and the people behind the product who wanted him to perform better. To that end, Kunz and the team were at his beck and call, explaining everything from the benefits of a gluten-free diet or salt supplementation to calorie intake.

Which was great for him. But what about us age groupers?

Enter Team First Endurance. They have just launched their team website: http://team.firstendurance.com, and it has grown by word-of-mouth. The premise is not about getting a free jersey and a box of expired bars. It’s about getting through an Ironman without puking your guts out or bonking. Wouldn’t that be worth infinitely more than a cheap jersey? Methinks so.

The impetus behind the site is to provide a place for athletes to learn about key components in endurance sports nutrition. It’s about putting testing into practice, relaying data, examining cumulative data from other athletes and First Endurance docs, talking with them about personal nutritional experiences and finding a way to identify the best nutritional plan for your own body. It’s a version of a personal nutrition testing protocol—for free.

“People can truly learn a lot about their own nutrition by going through the programs we have on the site,” Kunz told us on a visit to our Competitor Group offices last week. “We have three programs set up—sodium loading, gluten and caffeine.”

Of course, Triathlete publisher John Duke had to chime in: “Is that like eating French fries the night before a race?” Kunz’s reply: “Lots of them—loading with two to three grams of sodium the night before a race. Bob Seebohar is testing this new concept on some athletes at the Olympic Training Center, and now we can test it on the masses, within our team.”

This is why so many pro athletes—including ones that have had nutritional issues in the past—particularly Joanna Zeiger, have joined the team. To solve the conundrum of GI distress, a problem that befalls many of us. This type of distress can derail the “A” race that has been circled on our calendar for five months.

“Mike and I talked to our pro athletes and our customers about how to finish the race and not bonk, not have gastric distress,” Kunz said. “There are so many variables, and everyone is so individual. So we created this website to work in both directions—we gain a lot of very valuable data, while at the same time each member who joins gains a lot of information.”

A simple email and password makes you a member, and allows you to create a page, where you can update it with images, blog posts and much more.

But the biggest benefits are located in the “Programs” tab. They have three big subjects on at the moment—salt loading, gluten and caffeine—along with pH-balanced foods, low- and high-calorie training, anti-inflammatory food studies and product testing coming soon.

So we come back to the question, which is more valuable: a jersey, or a chance at racing without GI distress? The latter is the stated goal of Team First Endurance; A high success rate among its team members of staving off GI distress and avoiding bonking. I know which team I want to be a part of.