Ultra running invented a crime and called it muling

Rules about who may carry a runner's food descend from a self-sufficiency ideal that the sport abandoned everywhere else.

Muling. A word invented by the sport for the offence of having someone else carry your gel, and the sanction ranges from a time penalty to disqualification depending on which race you entered and who saw it.

The underlying idea is honourable. Mountain and trail racing came out of a tradition where you carried what you needed, and mandatory kit lists still enforce that: a jacket, a headtorch, a whistle, checked at the start and spot-checked at aid stations. Self-sufficiency is a safety rule as much as a fairness one, since a runner without their own supplies in a storm at altitude becomes a rescue problem.

The trouble is that the sport then built pacer rules on top, permitting a companion to run alongside for stretches of the biggest events, and that companion may accompany you but not carry for you. So we have a person legally running beside an athlete, permitted to talk to them, encourage them and keep them awake, and prohibited from holding a flask. Try policing that at three in the morning at a remote crossing point.

Enforcement is therefore anecdotal. Somebody sees something and files a report, or a photograph turns up. The consistency you get from that is roughly what you would expect, which is that the rule is applied to whoever was unlucky enough to be visible and to whoever a rival was watching. Meanwhile the actual fuelling advantage in these races is decided by crew quality at legal aid stations, where a well-organised support team can turn a runner around in ninety seconds with everything prepared, and that is entirely permitted.

So the rule polices the small, visible transfer and ignores the large, structural one. That is not fairness. It is an aesthetic preference from an earlier era, enforced selectively.

I would keep the mandatory kit and delete the muling offence. Require the athlete to carry their safety equipment, check it hard, penalise anyone found without it, and let food and water move freely between whoever is on the trail. A race where the winner is decided by who was permitted to hold a flask has forgotten what it was measuring.