The longest game in PWHL history featured mustard packets taped to the glass. Why?

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Editor’s Note: This story is a part of Peak, The Athletic’s new desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Peak aims to connect readers to ideas they can implement in their own personal and professional lives. Follow Peak here.

Just as overtime was about to begin, Amanda Deluca knew what she had to do. As the players on the Ottawa Charge bench fought off the exhaustion and soreness that comes from an intense playoff hockey game, Deluca, the team’s athletic therapist, reached for her phone and sent a message.

Within minutes, the mission began.

Members of the Ottawa hockey operations staff began scouring Place Bell arena, in search of what Deluca calls “an edge.”

That edge? Good, old-fashioned yellow mustard and pickle juice.

“So they’re able to perform,” Deluca explained.

Soon after, a now-viral image was posted on X by reporter Kelly Greig during quadruple overtime. The photo revealed dozens of packets of mustard that Ottawa had hung from the glass.

So I reached out to Deluca and a sports nutritionist to learn the full story and answer the question: Is mustard actually good for performance?

What exactly happened?

Game 2 on Sunday between the Ottawa Charge and the Montreal Victoire was the longest game in PWHL history, lasting five hours and 34 minutes.

As Deluca watched the players exert themselves, she remembered something she learned while at York University. One of her professors had explained that in an emergency, mustard could alleviate muscle cramping.

“So that’s where I thought, OK, we’re going into overtime, it’s playoffs, let’s just grab any little bit of an edge that could help them perform,” Deluca said.

After a team effort from the entire Ottawa staff, pickle juice and mustard packets were secured and brought down to the bench. But only the mustard was allowed to stay.

The method required some explanation to players.

“Some of them haven’t used that method before,” Deluca said. “So we just had to explain the premise behind it. It’s all evidence-based practice. That’s how we like to keep everything. They were so willing to try what some people think are unconventional methods. But they trusted us and they played so well.”

By hour five of Sunday’s game, Ottawa’s strength and conditioning coach, massage therapist and team doctor were making peanut butter and jam sandwiches on the bench for fast fuel and easy-to-digest carbohydrates, while the equipment manager taped the mustard packets to the glass, making sure the players had easy access.

Deluca confirmed that no one experienced major cramping or pain despite playing for 135 minutes. Ottawa lost the game in four overtimes but now leads the series 2-1.

So … is mustard actually helpful for performance?

I called Dr. Susan Kleiner, who has studied high-performance nutrition for years and has worked with pro teams.

“They’re not making it up,” she confirmed.

Kleiner introduced me to something called the transient receptor potential (TRP) channel activation theory. Luckily, unlike its name, the meaning behind the term is pretty simple.

When you trigger a reflex through the nervous system with a strong flavor, like mustard, it resets the misfiring of nerves that cause cramping. Basically, it stimulates the sensory receptors in the mouth, the esophagus and the stomach, and triggers the reflex.

So, in a way, it’s a distraction for your brain.

“Medically speaking, we’ve always known if you have a mild ache and somebody pokes you with a needle, you’re not going to notice the ache,” Kleiner said. “That’s most likely what’s happening.”

Mustard has vinegar, or acetic acid, which has been shown in some studies to improve endurance and glycogen replenishment. But that’s not instantaneous, which is why in this case, during overtime, the reason it helps is most likely due to the intense flavor and the neurological response.

It’s more of a trick of the mind.

“When you’re exhausted, if you can have something like that, it does lift your mental energy,” Kleiner said. “And when you lift your mental energy, you lift your physical energy. But it’s not that it’s giving you energy, like carbohydrates. And it’s not a stimulant like coffee. It’s a completely different biochemical pathway. It lifts your sense of energy through the taste, smell and brain receptor, but also this neurological resetting.”

It hadn’t even been 24 hours since the game ended before the Ottawa staff was already crafting plans for an emergency mobile snack station for future games. There will be, Deluca said, two things.

“It’ll have pickles and mustard,” she said.

Elise Devlin is a writer for Peak, The Athletic’s new desk covering leadership, personal development and success. She last wrote about leadership lessons from Steph Curry. Follow Peak here.

(Photo of the Montreal Victoire’s Jennifer Gardiner and Ottawa Charge’s Katerina Mrazova during Game 3 of the PHWL playoffs in Ottawa: Troy Parla / Getty Images)

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