Built by someone who got it wrong.
Ironman Malaysia. One of the toughest full-distance races on the planet. Temperatures above 35°C. Humidity above 80%. 226 kilometres.
It was my first professional full-distance Ironman.
Years of short and middle-distance racing had led to that start line. I arrived fit. Prepared. Confident in my training.
What I didn't fully understand was what extreme heat and humidity do to sodium.
Three hours into the bike, everything unravelled. My bottles were gone. At the aid stations, the only options were water and the on-course electrolyte drink — something I had never used before. My stomach shut down. Vomiting. Cramping. The taste became unbearable.
I was drinking at every station. But I was getting worse.
What felt like dehydration was something more specific. I was losing sodium faster than I could replace it. The fluid was there. The sodium wasn't. My body couldn't retain what I was taking in.
I finished. Well short of what I was capable of.
Even when you're the fittest you've ever been, poor sodium management can destroy your race.
After Malaysia, I began approaching hydration far more deliberately in my coaching — working with endurance athletes across Australia preparing for long-course racing in heat.
The same problem appeared everywhere.
Athletes arriving at races fit and prepared, then falling apart in the back half. Not from lack of fitness. Not from poor fuelling. From sodium mismanagement — either under-dosing, over-relying on fixed drink formulas, or making gut-wrenching compromises just to get enough sodium in.
Then I watched it happen to athletes who had no excuse to get it wrong. Coached, supported, racing at the professional level — and still losing significant time in the final third. Not from fatigue. From the physiological cascade that follows inadequate sodium management in sustained heat.
If this problem exists at the professional level, it exists everywhere.
The issue was never the athletes. It was the system. Sodium locked into fixed drink formulas. No way to adjust without changing fluid volume or carbohydrate intake. No tool to calculate individual need. No product designed to solve the problem on its own terms.
In 2024, I was involved in a catastrophic accident in the Busselton Ironman that nearly cost me my leg.
The recovery has been long and the road back harder than anything I've faced in sport. The version of competition I'd known was gone.
But the accident didn't take the athlete. It changed the arena.
What it gave me — unexpectedly — was the space to address this problem properly. Not as an athlete chasing a result on a start line, but as someone who understood the physiology, had seen the same gap repeat across hundreds of athletes at every level, and finally had the time to build a solution worth building.
Some of the most important work gets done when the original plan falls apart.
There are athletes I care about who are still out there racing. I can't be on that start line with them anymore — but I can make sure hydration isn't the reason they slow down when it matters most.
That purpose is what Lytework is built on.
Sodium capsules already existed. That wasn't the gap.
The gap was a system. A way for athletes to understand their individual sodium needs, calculate a precise dose based on sweat rate, conditions, and session length — and execute that protocol without compromising their fluid strategy, their carbohydrate intake, or their gut.
That system came from inside a coaching environment. Over four years working with more than 400 endurance athletes across Australia, the same failure pattern appeared at every level — amateur, age group, professional. Fit athletes, well-prepared athletes, losing significant time or abandoning races entirely because sodium wasn't treated as the individual variable it is.
Lytework is the system built to fix that. For athletes who prepare properly and deserve a hydration strategy that matches the standard of everything else they do.
Hydration is a performance variable. It should be treated like one.
Over the past two years, Jonathan's coaching operation has worked with more than 400 endurance athletes across Australia, providing the real-world testing ground that shaped Lytework's dosing system.
Standards we hold ourselves to — publicly.
We cite our science
Every physiological claim we make links to peer-reviewed research. We do not use research selectively. We acknowledge where evidence is strong and where individual variation applies.
We do not incentivise reviews
Every athlete testimonial on this site is from real field testing with real protocol data. No free product in exchange for positive reviews. No curated or manufactured social proof.
Tools that work without buying the product
Our calculators, protocols, and guides are free and useful regardless of whether you use Lytework. We earn trust by being genuinely helpful — not by gatekeeping information behind a purchase.
We say what the product cannot do
Lytework is a sodium dosing tool. It does not replace fuelling, recovery, or training methodology. We are precise about what it solves and what it doesn't.
