I spent $3,100 trying to fix my energy at 44. Turns out I was solving the wrong half of the problem.

By Ray Callahan · Fort Collins, Colorado · Updated July 2026

I need to tell you about a Saturday in October that I'm still not proud of.

My son had a soccer game at nine. I watched the whole thing from a folding chair and I was fine. We got home around noon, he grabbed the ball, and he asked me to kick with him in the yard.

I said what I'd been saying for about a year.

"Give me twenty minutes, bud."

I fell asleep on the couch for two hours. When I woke up the light had gone orange and he was inside on the Xbox.

I'm 44. I'm not sick. I lift three days a week. My bloodwork is normal.

And I was hiding naps from my kids.

The three o'clock thing started about two years before that.

Not tired. Flat. Like somebody reached around and pulled the plug on the back of my head. Same time every day. I could set a watch by it.

I'd get through the morning fine. Then somewhere between two thirty and three, the room would get heavy and every task would suddenly need more effort than it was worth. I started scheduling my hard calls before noon. I started taking the long way to the parking lot so I could sit in my truck for ten minutes.

You don't tell anybody about that. You just build your day around it.

You don't tell anybody about it. You just quietly build your whole day around it.

So I did what you probably did. I threw money at it.

• $89 on a sleep tracker. Eight months of data telling me, over and over, that I sleep fine.
• $240 on a pre workout that made my scalp itch and did nothing after two.
• $60 a month on magnesium, then ashwagandha, then a mushroom coffee that honestly tasted like a wet basement.
• $350 for a consult at one of those men's clinics where the second thing they say is a monthly number.
• The free stuff too. Cold plunges. Thirty days off alcohol. Creatine. More protein. An earlier bedtime I stuck to for eleven days.

I added it up one night out of morbid curiosity. Around $3,100 over two years.

Every single one of those things had one thing in common, and I didn't see it for another year.

I went to my doctor in February. Good guy, known him nine years. He ran a full panel because I asked him to.

Thyroid, fine. Iron, fine. Vitamin D a little low, which he said was Colorado in February. Everything else sat right in the middle of the range.

He looked at the sheet and then he looked at me and he said, "Ray, you're 42. This is pretty normal."

I was 43 by then. I let it go.

I sat in the parking lot afterward for longer than I want to admit. Because when a doctor tells you nothing is wrong and you know something is wrong, you're left with two options.

Either you're broken in some way nobody measures.

Or this is just what you are now.

I wasn't ready for the second one. I've got a nine year old.

When a doctor says nothing's wrong and you know something's wrong, you only have two options. I wasn't ready for the second one.

Here's the part I never said out loud to anybody, including my wife.

It wasn't only the three o'clock thing.

• Recovery stopped working. A hard Saturday used to cost me an afternoon on the couch. It started costing me three days.
• Eight hours of sleep that didn't land. I'd wake up feeling like I'd been awake for most of them.
• The mornings changed. Guys my age know exactly what I mean, and not one of us brings it up.
• A shorter fuse. I got snappy with my wife over nothing. Twice in one week.
• And the one I hated most. I stopped saying yes. Camping trip in June, hockey game in Denver, help a buddy move on a Sunday. My first thought stopped being "sounds good" and turned into "what's that going to cost me tomorrow."

That's not being tired. Tired is a Tuesday.

That's your whole life getting smaller by about two percent a month, and it's so slow you don't notice until your kid stops asking.

So at one in the morning on a Wednesday in March, I started reading. Not blog posts. I went past those pretty fast, because they all say the same nine things and then sell you a powder.

I ended up somewhere I did not expect, which was cell biology.

Here's the whole thing, in the version I actually understood at one in the morning.

Your body doesn't run on food. It runs on a molecule called ATP. Food, oxygen and sleep are the raw material. ATP is the finished product. Little factories inside your cells called mitochondria do the converting, and they do it every second of your life without asking you.

Now here's the part that stopped me.

Every single thing I bought over two years was an input. Not one of them touched the conversion.

That's how you can do everything right and still hit the wall at three.

Coffee was the one that finally made sense to me.

And once your body stops turning fuel into energy as well as it used to, hiding the message doesn't help. You can put as many cups behind it as you want.

That's why the second coffee at two thirty did nothing for me. I was covering up the warning, not fixing what it was warning me about.

I spent $3,100 putting more in. Not once did I ask how much of it my body was actually getting out.

I started calling it the conversion gap, because I needed something to call it. There's no test for it. You can't walk into your doctor's office and ask what percent of your fuel is making it through. Every number on my panel measured what was going in.

Which is where I ran into a mushroom with a ridiculous name.

Cordyceps.

I'd seen it on a bag of coffee at the grocery store and ignored it the way you ignore everything on that shelf. It grows high in the mountains where the air is thin, and people have been chewing on it up there for a very long time. That part is folklore and I treated it like folklore.

What kept it on my screen was a compound in it called cordycepin.

Cordycepin looks almost exactly like adenosine.

Yes, the same adenosine from the coffee part. It turns up twice in this story doing two completely different jobs, which is either confusing or the best thing I learned that night, depending on how awake you are.

In your head, it's the tired message. Inside the cell, it's one of the letters your body uses to spell ATP.

Cordycepin looks so much like it that it gets into the cell through the same door. It isn't blocking a signal the way caffeine does. It goes to the place where the energy gets made.

Once it's in there, it appears to nudge an enzyme called AMPK. That's the switch that tells a cell to start making energy instead of storing it.

I'm not a scientist. That's the version I got at one in the morning and it's the version I still use when somebody asks.

But it was the first thing I'd read in two years that wasn't another input.

It was pointed at the other half.

But there was one thing about it I had to get my head around first, and it's the thing that changed how I shopped.

If it only works when you take it for two months straight, the strongest bottle on the shelf doesn't win. The one you're still taking on day sixty wins.

And consistency is exactly where every bottle I'd ever bought went to die.

I have a drawer. You've got one too.

Half empty bottles of things that might have worked and I'll never know, because I took them for nine days. There's a tub of green powder in mine that cost $54 and has been used four times. There's a bottle of fish oil from a Costco run in 2023.

Capsules die in that drawer. You take them with breakfast for a week, then you have one breakfast in the truck, and that's it, it's over. Powders die faster. Anything with a scoop and a shaker bottle is a chore, and a chore has to beat everything else competing for your morning. It won't.

The best supplement is the one you'll actually take.

Not the strongest one. Not the one with the busiest label. The one that's still in your hand on day sixty.

So I stopped looking for the strongest cordyceps and started looking for the one I'd never skip.

What I landed on was a gummy. Strawberry. One or two a day.

Two seconds in the morning, and the rest of my morning stayed mine. No water, no timing it around breakfast, nothing to rinse out in the sink.

And then it started. Not all at once, and not the way I expected. Here's exactly how it went.

That's it. That's the whole story. I said yes without doing the math first.

Week nine. He asked me to kick the ball in the yard and I said yes without doing the math first.

I'm 44. I have a mortgage, two kids and a job that does not care how I slept. None of that changed.

Here's what actually changed, as plainly as I can put it.

• Three o'clock isn't a wall anymore. It's not that the afternoon got exciting. It's that I stopped building my day around it.
• Saturday costs me Saturday. Not Sunday and half of Monday too.
• We get through an entire movie. Both of us. Awake.
• I said yes to the camping trip in June and I didn't spend three weeks dreading the drive.

And the mornings. I'll just say the mornings are more like they were, and leave it there, because that's between me and my wife.

In June my brother in law asked me what I was doing different.

He's 47. He's had my exact problem for longer than I have and he's the last guy on earth who takes supplements. He told me two years ago that the whole industry is people selling sawdust to men who feel old.

I told him what I told you. What goes in against what comes back out. The conversion gap. The nine weeks.

He didn't say anything for a bit, which for him is a lot.

Two weeks later he texted me at seven in the morning: "ok what are these things called"

They're called Performance+ Stamina Gummies. Savaya Botanicals makes them.

Strawberry. One or two a day. That's the entire routine and that's the entire reason it worked on me and the green powder didn't.

Cordyceps is the ingredient doing the real work in there. There's ginkgo, which supports the blood flow that carries the energy where it's going, and GABA, which helps keep the whole thing calm instead of wired. No caffeine. Nothing that makes your chest go.

I'm a guy in Colorado who read too much at one in the morning. I'm not a doctor and I've never worked in this industry.

So all I'll hand you is the thing I wish somebody had handed me two years and $3,100 ago.

If you're doing everything right and you still hit the wall at three, you don't have an input problem. More sleep won't touch it. More coffee definitely won't. You've already run that experiment for two years, same as I did.

And they back it for ninety days, so the only thing you're really deciding today is whether you want to find out.

 

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Questions guys ask me

Does it actually taste good, or "supplement good"?

Strawberry. It tastes like a strawberry gummy, which is the entire reason this works where capsules didn't. There's no mushroom taste and nothing earthy. If you've tried mushroom coffee you know exactly what I was worried about. This isn't that.

When should I take them?

Morning is easiest, because that's when you already have a routine to attach it to. One or two a day. Some guys take one in the morning and one before the gym. There's no wrong window here. There's only the version you'll remember to do.

How long before I know if it's doing anything?

For me the afternoon was the first thing to shift, and that was week two. It builds from there. It isn't caffeine, so there's no spike and no drop, it just keeps adding. That's also why they hand you sixty days instead of seven.

I've never taken anything like this. Is that a problem?

No. There's nothing to build up to and nothing to cycle. You eat a gummy. That's the protocol.

Can I keep my coffee, my creatine, my pre workout?

Yes. This isn't a replacement for any of them, it's aimed at a different part of the problem. Plenty of guys keep their morning coffee and just stop needing the second one at two thirty.

Why gummies instead of capsules?

Because the drawer. Everybody has a drawer full of half finished bottles. A product that only works over months lives or dies on whether you keep taking it, and nobody has ever forgotten to eat a piece of candy.

Is there caffeine in it?

None. No jitter, no crash, and it won't sit on top of your sleep if you take one late.

What if it does nothing for me?

Sixty days, money back. That's two full months to make up your mind, which is longer than almost anyone in this aisle will give you.

Who shouldn't take these?

Anyone under 18, anyone pregnant or nursing, and anyone on blood thinners should talk to their doctor first because of the ginkgo. It's on the bottle.

Ray Callahan, 44, lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife and two kids. He got back on his mountain bike in July for the first time in three years and has the road rash to show for it. He can be reached through the Savaya community group.

 

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