Jeff Vierling started looking for the right nutrition to keep endurance athletes fueled after he finished his first 100-mile mountain bike race in Leadville.

His wife and business partner, Jenny Vierling, was there waiting for him with a video camera and a hug at the finish line.

But his stomach betrayed him at the very end and his breakfast, in recognizable form, ended up in a trash can.

“That was the inauspicious moment that got it started,” he explained. The Vierlings told the story of their Durango-based company, Tailwind Nutrition, from France in August when they were promoting their products at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, an event that draws about 10,000 runners from all over the world.

After the stomach-turning ending to his first race, Vierling went looking for a solution, trying products and then diving into the medical literature.

“I started to realize that most of the products I was trying had ingredients that were challenging to digest and that didn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

So then he started making his own mix based on how the small intestine absorbs energy and sharing it with athletic friends in Durango, meeting them in parking lots to hand off baggies full of white powder.

The powder turned into Tailwind’s endurance fuel, a mixture of carbohydrates and electrolytes, focused on keeping athletes going hour after hour.

Jenny Vierling, a cyclist herself, was convinced of the effectiveness of the mix after her stomach shut down during a long-distance race to Leadville. After that, she was convinced to try it and during another long-distance race, experienced the difference it could make.

It also offers simplicity to athletes that can be overwhelmed with options.

“It’s your carbohydrates and your electrolytes and your hydration. … It’s really those three components, sticking it all in a bottle, pour, shake, go, you’re done, and you just do that every hour, and it’s consistent,” she said.

Since the company was founded in 2012, its distribution has expanded across 40 countries. They have also introduced new products focused on recovery and hydration.

In addition to a quality product, the Vierlings brought entrepreneurial skills to the company with experience in other start-ups, such as a software company in Durango that was building an online community for spine surgeons. Jenny brought the marketing skills, while Jeff had a program management background and could work on the internal infrastructure of the company, they said.

They also had strong local support.

The late Ed Zink, the owner of Mountain Bile Specialists, offered their mix for sale in his shop and allowed them to set up a marketing table at the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, the race he founded.

The endurance fuel was a hit at the 2012 race.

“We were selling it so fast that one of us would be running home to make more,” Jeff Vierling recalled. In the early days, the company made the powder in a kitchen aid that filled the kitchen with the smell of pixie sticks.

As the company grew, the Vierlings bought their first mixer to make 100 pounds at a time, but it was $800 more to buy one with a motor, so Jeff would hand mix the product, 50 cranks at a time.

Then they partnered with High Dessert Food Company in Dolores, sharing space and employees with them.

After more than a decade of growth, the company now manufactures its products in a 15,000-square-foot facility near the Durango-La Plata County Airport and while transportation in and out of the area can be tough, with the nearest interstate hours away by car, the couple was committed to keeping the operations local.

The company still does all its own research and development, and running its own manufacturing allows them to make smaller batches, respond to the market demands and ensure quality, Jeff said. Keeping manufacturing local has allowed them to employ about 30 people with well-paying work, critical in the community with higher costs of living.

Into the future, the company wants to focus on environmentally friendly practices and it recently introduced scoops for its mixes made from the stems left over from sugar cane production that would otherwise be burned. When customers are done with the scoops they can be composted, Jeff explained.

The two want to bring innovation to sports nutrition, an industry awash in single serve packets, and help reduce the amount of material used that ends up as waste, he said.

“We’re really excited to tackle that,” he said.