This Sports Gel Built a Cult Following Among Extreme Athletes

In 2008, while running a film production company in Prague, amateur triathlete Joel Einhorn was training on his bike when he crashed, resulting in a traumatic brain injury and a broken collarbone that required surgery. He couldn’t sleep for two days, nor could he close his eyes without spinning. Two weeks after the incident, Einhorn was at an Indian restaurant and got to talking with a doctor who practiced Ayurvedic medicine. Soon Einhorn was taking seven daily herbal remedies, including botanicals such as ashwagandha and amalaki, which he’d mix into tea or water or take as tablets. His head cleared quickly, he says, and after three months he was swimming, running, and biking again. “I wondered, Is it these herbs?” says Einhorn, now 41. “I found that they were good for stamina, endurance, anti-inflammation, and recovery.”

Einhorn started making his own concoctions, stirring the herbs with brewed green tea and honey. He’d pour them into a water bottle and go on six-hour bike rides. “It tasted awful,” he says. “But there was no doubt that it was allowing me to maintain a higher level of performance.” In 2013 he began to build a business around his mixture, which he’d fine-tuned with the help of a second Ayurvedic doctor, into a black paste consisting of honey, ghee, sesame oil, sugar cane, and 30 herbs. Einhorn named the formula Hanah One, a tribute to Maui’s Hana Highway, the most beautiful place he’d ever seen.