Twenty Five Years of Reading Athlete Bloodwork Turned Into One Orange Drink

Dr. Marc Bubbs has spent 25 years looking at the bloodwork of professional athletes, Olympians, surgeons, and law firm partners. When you do that for long enough, the same handful of things keep showing up on the panel. Low vitamin D. Low magnesium. Iron, especially in women.

So he and his co-founder built the product they had been trying to assemble by hand for two decades, and then spent 18 months selling it only into pro teams before letting a single consumer buy it.

We recorded this in Boulder this spring after BolderBOULDER weekend, four hours after we scheduled it. It’s a conversation about performance nutrition, but it’s really a conversation about how you build something when you already know exactly what problem you’re solving and the hard part is getting anyone to care about a boring answer.

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Who: Dr. Marc Bubbs, performance and clinical nutritionist, co-founder of ProBio

Where: Toronto and London, in Boulder for race weekend

Day job: Building ProBio with co-founder Paul Winsper, plus clinical consulting through doctorbubbs.com

Marc started out as a strength coach in the late 90’s, back when nutrition wasn’t on anyone’s radar unless you were a dietitian. He could see the impact in real time as a trainer, and he could also see that the medical side wasn’t trained for it and mostly still isn’t.

Since then: Canada Basketball, US Soccer, Olympic programs, and a stretch with the NBA. He and I first crossed paths when he was with the Atlanta Hawks and InsideTracker was running performance labs for the team. He now co-founds ProBio with Paul Winsper, who put in thirty years in pro sport across the Premier League and MLS, ran a program at Nike, and led global performance at Under Armour for a decade.

His framing of what has changed over that career is the cleanest version I’ve heard. At the start, the problem was a complete lack of information. Now the problem is too much of it.

Here’s what stuck with me.

Marc spent his career chasing athletes around with pill packs. You find them stuffed between airplane seats. You find them in someone’s shoe. As a practitioner you know the guy is low in D and low in B, and you cannot get the intervention to survive contact with a travel schedule.

The category answer to that has always been the all in one, which practitioners have historically hated because those products were built for marketing claims rather than for purpose. So ProBio started from the other end. Rather than solving ten separate problems on a panel, raise the floor far enough that 80-85% of it is handled and only a couple of things are left to solve individually.

What they deliberately left out tells you as much as what’s in it. Creatine is out because the dose is personal, five grams for one person, ten for another, three for many women, and supplements don’t divide cleanly. Calcium and iron are out because both are often better absorbed from food. When Marc wanted to move iron in elite female athletes, he wasn’t reaching for a supplement first. He was doubling the red meat.

The orange color, for the record, was not a positioning decision. It comes from the lutein and the CoQ10. In his words, orange kind of picked them. It also took over a year to sweeten naturally, because amino acids are bitter and there are no artificial sweeteners in it.

This is the part I’d send to anyone building a health product.

ProBio had longitudinal data from an NBA team, fifteen players. Marc could pick out the two who weren’t taking it. Vitamin D is fat soluble, so it sticks to you in a way the water soluble markers don’t, which makes it a clean proxy for whether a person is actually doing the thing. We used to see the same pattern at InsideTracker. Can you open your mouth, put this in it, and swallow, consistently, for months.

And the outcome he points to isn’t a marker at all. It’s missed training days. Big track and field groups came back to him this past year reporting the fewest missed days and the fewest illnesses they’d had in five or six years.

That’s the whole game. In the research you can separate international level athletes from national from regional partly on who showed up the most. Marc took it a step further: it isn’t only full illness that costs you. Upper respiratory symptoms, the scratchy throat and the dark circles without a diagnosis attached, predict worse performance on their own.

If you can keep someone healthy and training, you almost don’t need another form of validation.

The best thirty seconds of the episode is Marc doing math on a snack.

You skip one small meal a week. Call it 500 calories. That’s 7,000 calories every couple of weeks, 14,000 a month, 170,000 calories a year that you are down. Then you sit across from someone complaining about low energy and achy joints and wondering which supplement will fix it.

He runs macros through what he calls the three Ts. Total for the day, timing through the day, and type. Complex carbohydrate away from training, faster carbohydrate around it. Same lens for protein. His two automatable levers are total protein intake and meal frequency, and he will tell you that experienced athletes visibly glaze over when he brings them up.

He has a good explanation for that. However systematic someone is in their actual job, and he works with surgeons, traders, and law firm partners, health decisions run through the emotional part of the brain. He uses the elephant and rider analogy: the rider is the thinking brain, the elephant is everything else, and if you’re counting on the little guy on top to steer, you have something coming. So the work is building an environment that nudges the elephant, not writing a better protocol for the rider.

The client model that came out of that is a martial arts belt system. You don’t advance until you’re actually executing the current thing. Hard sell for high achievers at first. Then they make one small change, feel a real difference, and the trust compounds, because most people are used to doing a lot and getting very little back.

I’ve been seeing more of this go to market pattern lately. Put the product on the best bodies in the sport, let the validation trickle down, treat media as a way to elevate the athletes rather than the other way around. Cole and Ben at Kila are running a version of it with insoles. I’ve been giving Hytro similar advice on blood flow restriction shorts.

When I asked Marc why he chose that model, he pushed back on the premise. It wasn’t a model. It was just who they were. Twenty five years in team sport meant that when he brought a product to an athlete, nobody was scanning for an angle.

The order is inverted from how this normally goes. Usually you sell, hit a revenue number, and then buy athletes. They started with the athletes. Paris was the first real test, and it had to clear NSF certification before he could even hand it to anyone.

The constraint that comes with it is funny. Some of the biggest clubs and athletes in the world are using the product and ProBio can’t say so. You might recognize the color of the drink. You won’t see the label.

He named two levers for building trust in a market where everyone is being pitched constantly: authenticity and vulnerability. The authenticity is the 25 years. The vulnerability is admitting that the Olympian also struggles to eat the right breakfast.

The thing that didn’t work is worth hearing too, because founders rarely say it out loud. Early on they paid for reach. Someone with broad distribution who was not bought in. It did nothing, and Marc’s read is that they had drifted outside their own values to chase a shortcut. Their instinct from the start had been to double down on people who already had a relationship with them, because those people will go the extra bit for you when you’re small.

I released an episode with Des Linden the same week we recorded this, and she described her partnership framework in almost identical terms. She doesn’t work with brands that hand her a script, because if she’s partnering with you she already knows the product. On the creator side we talk about that constantly. Turning down a check costs you something in the short term and builds the thing that actually compounds. It’s useful to hear the same logic from the brand side of the table. Two of our network shows, Brady Holmer at Run Long, Run Healthy and Amanda Brooks, work with ProBio for exactly that reason. Brady had been using it long before there was a deal, and Amanda is always looking for tools to help her athletes and readers.

The initial money came from a small group of investors out of Marc and Paul’s world in sport. The early team took roles for a fraction of what they were worth elsewhere, which Marc treats as a litmus test for who actually cares. He’s clear that you can’t run on that for long, because people have to feed their families.

The part I keep thinking about is what he said about asking. A practitioner spends an entire career giving to patients, clients, and athletes without asking for much back. So the first time he called and asked someone to try the product or pass it along, it landed differently, particularly in pro sport where those people get asked for things constantly. Decades of giving, one ask.

Where it goes next is open. There are a few lanes, raise or bootstrap, and he expects clarity in the coming months. I’ve worked at a bootstrapped company and at VC backed ones and the day to day feel is wildly different, which is the part of that decision people underrate.

I wrote more about fundraising in the endurance space, in case you’re curious.

I’m about a year into my own version of this, and at the time I was writing a reflection piece about it, so I asked how he decided.

He pointed to a friend in the UK, Andy Kane, whose company Zero works with people who are successful in their domain and not fulfilled by it. The nice house, the happy kids, the top of the bell curve, and no longer any reason to get up for it. Marc’s version of the itch was that 20 years of 1:1 clinical work is fulfilling and also tiring, because you carry other people’s problems.

His actual trigger was finding the right person to build with. He describes it as knowing it when you feel it, and once Paul brought him the idea, you light the match.

Two lines I wrote down. The first is that you’re either moving toward the mountain or away from it, so you don’t need to hit the goal every day. The second is about his three kids. He wants to walk them to school and pick them up, because that time is gone when it’s gone.

My version is simpler. Freedom is owning your schedule. Time is the only asset you can’t get more of.

Halo is our newest partner at Long Run Labs, and if you’ve been listening you already heard the long version, because Hilary Fenet, Halo’s founder, and Monica Devreese from rabbit came on the show on July 28th and got into exactly this. That one is written up here.

Halo is a hospitality platform built by runners for the way people actually travel to races. They work with brands, event organizers, and leagues to fix one of the most operationally painful parts of any event, which is lodging.

There’s a real overlap with what Marc is talking about in this episode. Most of what gets built in this industry is sizzle attached to a trend rather than an answer to a problem someone deals with every single time. Race lodging is a problem every single time. Runners spend three or four days in a destination and almost none of that time has anything to do with the event.

If you’re a brand, Halo turns a hotel into your home base at a race. A branded clubhouse where your athletes and your community actually stay together, the experiential piece done right, without you managing hotel logistics from scratch, plus better rates for your customers. If you're an event organizer or a league, Halo houses your people, locks in better rates, and layers in real community and perks, so the lodging becomes part of the experience instead of a headache.

And if you’re just heading to a race yourself this year, it’s worth a look. Same platform, better rates, real community, and perks from their brand partners, with a lot less hassle.

If any of that sounds like you, reach out to their team and tell them you heard about Halo on Long Run Labs, or send me a note and I’ll connect you.

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• Compliance is the product metric. Vitamin D worked as a proxy. If you’re building anything in health, find the marker that tells you whether people are actually doing it, not whether they say they are.

• Availability beats optimization. The research separates elite from very good partly on who showed up the most. Fewest missed training days is a better success measure than almost anything you can put on a claims panel.

• What you leave out is positioning. Creatine, calcium, and iron are out of the blend on purpose, because dosing is personal and food absorbs better. Saying no to ingredients is how you signal that a practitioner built it.

• Elite first only works if it’s already who you are. Twenty five years with athletes meant nobody was looking for the angle. That’s not a channel strategy other founders can copy without the history behind it.

• Paying for reach that isn’t bought in does nothing. Their one real miss was a paid partner with distribution and no belief. The people with a relationship to you will go further for you when you’re small.

• ProBio: probionutrition.com

• Consulting and clinical work: doctorbubbs.com

For The Long Run is a podcast about the why underneath the miles. Since 2019 I’ve been sitting down with athletes, coaches, founders, and industry people to talk about what actually drives them, and Long Run Labs, the show this episode lives on, grew out of those conversations into a look at the business side of the sport.

If you’re new, start here: forthelong.run/start-here

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Marc Bubbs on Long Run Labs wherever you get your podcasts.

We also published a panel from BolderBoulder that I hosted for ProBio that Dr. Marc was on, with Jason Fitzgerald and Charlie Sweeney.

Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.