The following is a conversation with Zach Bitter, ultra marathon runner and coach who held multiple
world records in the 100 mile run and other ultra endurance events. He is currently training for
a run across America, which for now is planned for September this year. Like many of the things
Zach has done in the past, this is a big, fascinating challenge. Quick mention of our sponsors,
Ladder, Velcampo, Noom and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that Zach has been advising and coaching me on my own
running journey. I want to mention that Zach sent me some running shoes from Ultra,
which I think is a company that sponsors him. When I put those shoes on, I feel like Zach is
watching me and I get that extra motivation to make him proud. And by that, I mean I want to put
a lot of miles on those shoes. Running is something that has always been difficult for me,
but I love it because it is difficult. The hardest part is I'm left alone with my thoughts
for one or two hours. Some thoughts are dark, like thinking about mortality, my own and that of
others. Some are self critical, like personal weaknesses or dreams not realized. Some are simply
human feelings of loneliness, personal and existential. And yet, there are the moments
during a run when all that fades and I'm left empty of negative thoughts and full of appreciation
for the beauty of experience, of nature, life, the whole thing. This is why I return to running,
not to get in shape, but to face myself and to run through it. That's why I'm inspired by people
like Zach and by David Goggins and others like them who seek to find the limits of their body
and mind. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Zach Bitter.
Where does your mind go when you're running an ultramarathon? Are there a lot of positive
thoughts, negative thoughts, demons, inspirational things, maybe no thoughts at all?
Yeah, that's the really interesting part of the sport, I think, because you can,
essentially what it is when we're looking at like the 100 mile distance or anything that's
like all day long is you're going to have the full range of the full spectrum of emotions
of mental processes, both kind of positive, negative and in between. So it almost feels like
you've lived multiple, multiple lives or full life, maybe it was way to say it in that one time
period. So it's like a, it's almost like a simulation of what you may experience in a
long period of time in a very condensed period of time. And I think that's just a weird mental
process to reflect upon and that's what kind of draws people back to it. But I mean, it's a battle
too, because if you're looking at it from a performance standpoint versus an experience,
you obviously want to minimize the negative mindset stuff. You want to try to keep those
emotions and those thought processes at a low. And I think when you can keep yourself from
letting those thoughts creep in, they, you end up having better races and it's, it can spiral in
either direction. Like I noticed like there's, there's kind of like this scenario that occurs
where in the beginning, like a negative thing creeps in your mind, it's like super easy just
to slap it down and say like, get out of here. You know, I've did the training, I'm fit, I'm
feeling fresh still, you know, everything's going well at this point in time. You get a little
further along in the race and you're starting to feel a bit of the fatigue, maybe a little bit
of self doubt creeps in, you start asking yourself, well, you know, maybe I should have done one more
long run or did I, did I not quite taper long enough? And those things can kind of spiral
into a negative way. And if, if you let it keep going, it keeps going all the way to like,
why am I here? Why am I doing this? This is stupid. All the way to like, there's another
one of these two weeks from now, I'm going to drop out of this one and sign up for that one
instead. And then you just find yourself in the exact same situation. So you kind of have to
go through the process, I think. It's why I think the, there's kind of a, I wouldn't say it's a rule
of thumb necessarily, but something I think is fairly valuable. If you do a hundred mile
at a first time, make sure you get it done. Even if it means like, you know, death marching is
what they'll call it in the alternate community to end of the race. Just to say like, you got
that full experience, you experienced the highs, the lows, the full thing, the starting, the crossing,
the finish line, that release of emotion when you're done and all that stuff. So that when you go
back to do it again, you have like a template to build off of, then you know, or you just have
some data to pull from about how your mind is going to work as well as your body so that you
can start practicing, well, what do I have to do to kind of keep my mind from spiraling in a negative
direction? Or how do I catch some positive momentum and kind of keep sending it that way and things
like that. And that just, I think you just add to that over a career of running them or a series
of running them. And it sharpens. It's kind of like any sport with that where, you know, you
always have this balance between the youthfulness that you may have earlier in your career versus
the wise intelligence that you have maybe near the end of your career. So in terms of wisdom,
is there mechanisms by which you kind of observe the negative thoughts and let them go?
So you have people like the David Goggins who kind of, he seems to almost like separate his mind
into there's the weak David that he hates. And then there's this strong one. I mean, there's
like a very contentious relationship there. So he basically says like, I refuse to be that person.
And he's almost like angry at that person. He's almost like sometimes literally yelling at that
person, the weak version of themselves. And then there's another more sort of Sam Heresy approach,
which is like, just observe the thought and let it go. Maybe knowing that this too shall pass,
like no matter what, this moment will not last forever and kind of sort of accepting the natural
flow of things and taking one step at a time and allowing whatever the negativity, whatever the pain
you're experiencing, just to pass, even if it means a death march, which one is more effective for
you? Which one, like would you say generally speaking to the population is more effective?
Yeah, that's a really good question. It's probably unique to the individual. I wouldn't argue that,
you know, David is finding success with his approach. Some may argue it's an extreme version.
You know, Sam has obviously thought about these things and really probably, you know,
I see those guys as kind of two ends of the spectrum in just the way that they kind of
come across in general, where like David's like really actually a kind of high energy and Sam's
kind of this calming, soft presence, and he's just going to slowly methodically lay it all out there.
And I think there's value in both of those. I think most people are probably going to get a
benefit from pulling some from each. I mean, there's times where I need a kick in the ass,
and then it's like, have the Strong's act, tell the Week's act to get moving. But there's also
times where, you know, it's just like, you know, a subtle voice entering my head about, you know,
I don't know if I feel quite right now, should I maybe pull back on the pace? And I think that
little subtle voice is best approached with a subtle positive voice where it's more like,
okay, well, let's think this through here for a second. You're 40 miles into a 100 mile race,
you spent four months preparing for it. You know from the workouts you did that you're ready for
this, there really isn't any real reason for you to slow down or to fall off your goal or your pace
or, you know, reassess what you're doing. Let's just give this another mile or two. And then we
can reassess if we need to in order to kind of figure out if I'm doing the right things or not.
And I think like in that situation, you definitely probably want to lean more towards the Sam Harris
approach with that because there's really no reason to, it's almost like the same thing you see
with like, just training and even nutrition to a degree where like some folks, they just want to be
like, kind of like, drilled, they want to be like yell that and said like, get going, get doing this
and that helps and that motivates and that helps them stay accountable. Other people need some
need some softer love with it where it's like, you know, this isn't necessarily your thought,
your fault, you were put in this environment that kind of created an atmosphere of lethargy and
maybe poor nutritional choices and things like that. And, and like, so, but it's, it's correctable.
So we need to, we need to step away from that. And we need to kind of start heading in the
direction that we know is going to bear fruit down the road. And that person may respond better
than that. So I think both those guys have great value with their approaches. They're just probably
polar ends of that of the spectrum. And I think most people are probably going to benefit like
anything, right? You get the polarizing ones and those are going to work great for the polarizing
people. But then most people are going to fit somewhere in the middle. So they're probably
going to be able to kind of pull from both of those if they're able to sit down and kind of like
assess which one's going to work better in which situation.
So the quitting thing that you mentioned, the like the final stage, which actually I get to
much quicker than you seem to, which is like, why am I doing this? I get there with basically
anything I do. It's like, this is, this is probably the stupidest thing I've ever done is the feeling
I get often. And then immediately you have these excuses that are like, there's all these other
better things you should be doing. Or, or the other alternative of that, like you said,
I'm not prepared enough for this moment, I'll be much more prepared in two weeks for the next
event. So like, why, let's try this again, let's start over, let's start over in two weeks.
How do you deal with that quit? Like, so maybe do you still go through that process and by way of
advice for people that are more sort of amateurish like me? How to deal with that quitting voice?
I think a lot of times when the quitting voice kind of comes in, it, what it does is it kind of just,
it comes in with the added disadvantage, I guess, in this situation of being kind of a narrow
scoped view where you're looking at like, what it's doing to you in the moment, or how you're
feeling in the moment versus how are you feeling about the whole process. So one thing that I
started doing in 2019, and I think, I don't think it's necessarily, I think, I think, I think this
was a big reason why I had one of my best racing seasons in 2019 that I had had to that date.
It was part of it was I started, I think, putting a little more emphasis on the big picture versus
putting emphasis on like, this is one opportunity or one day of work. And this is one, one emotional
kind of flare up. But how does that actually relate to my general broader picture? So when I
decide to do a race or an event or something like that, it's often four or six months out ahead
of time, you're planning to like kind of do a series of workouts and a flow of things where
you're going through the process of getting fit, getting ready, preparing for the specifics of the
day and all that stuff. And then you get to the race itself or the event itself. And it's very
easy to look at that and think that's an isolation, like I'm going to run 12 hours today, or I'm going
to run 100 miles today or whatever it ends up being. And it's a lot easier to quit when you
think to yourself, I'm 40 miles into 100 mile race, you know, that's just a 40 mile run, which
sounds kind of silly to most people. But in perspective, and we're talking about the ultra
marathon running community, you know, it's a lot easier just to say like, Well, you know, I'll scrap
this 40 miles and try again. It's a lot harder to say, I'm going to scrap the entire last four
months, the entire reason why I was doing it, the countless hours I spent in there. So I think
I just try to reposition it of like, I'm in a bad place right now, maybe in my head or I'm
not, I'm hitting a low point here. But I'm 99% of the way towards the goal I set out four months
ago when I add in all the work I did leading up to that. So I think it's important to ask yourself
why, because I mean, there are times when you're doing something and you ask yourself why and you
don't have a good reason. And then maybe it is advantageous to step back and really reflect on
that and decide is this something I actually want to invest time and energy into because, you know,
someone like yourself who is very much into a variety of different things, it can be easy
probably to overextend and get, I mean, I'm a very curious person. So there's like 100 things I
would love to do if I wasn't doing what I'm doing. And I know I'd enjoy all of them. So at a certain
point, though, you have to say, Okay, which one is going to be the most meaningful for me? And if
the answer keeps coming back to saying, I guess this is still the most meaningful to me out of
that 100 things that I could otherwise be doing, then I know that I'm in it for the right reason.
Then I just need to identify some of those things like, well, why did this one take the top spot out
of the 100 things that I could have picked from? And keeping like a list of those in your head,
so that when you get to that point where you start saying, Why am I doing this? Why am I here?
You just have those kind of ready loaded in your head to say, Well, I already took inventory on that
before I started this. And I knew this voice was going to come at some point, whether it's early,
middle or late. And then you just remind yourself kind of what you were thinking when you had a
little more of a level head. Well, there's something about the thing you mentioned when you mentioned
the death march. It seems extremely valuable to just never quitting. Like in the moment, if you
decide to do something, like never quitting, even if you do go through the process and realize that
it's not, it's not the wisest thing to be doing within the full context of your life. Like once
you decide to do it, it seems like never quitting prevents you from sort of having that escape
clause from other things in your life. So I've quit on a few things in my life. And I think I
still, I deeply regret that because it opened that door. It's almost like a muscle. I don't know.
I don't know. So I think I'm, I don't know, I may be everyone else, but I think I'm kind of a
quitter. You know what I mean? Like, I'm really good at coming up with reasons to quit. My mind
is really good at that. And I, it feels like I have to come up with, like really work hard to make
sure that there's no quit that never allow myself to quit no matter how stupid the thing I'm doing
is. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but it just, maybe to rephrase this whole thing,
do you think is good to live life by the ethos of never quit?
Yeah, that's a really interesting thing. And I think it actually resonates with a lot of
ultra marathon runners because there seems to be a trend when you have someone who's been in the
sport for a long time where there's a point where they start the sport, right? And they're like
super excited about everything. Everything's new. It's very easy not to quit because you're like,
Oh, this is the first time I've ever run a 50 case, the first time I've ever run a 50 miles,
the first time I've ever run 100 case, the first time I've ever run 100 miles and so on and so
forth. And when you're doing that for the first time, I think there's a heightened motivation to
not quit because you don't want your first attempt to be a failure. And then you get a little further
along and you start reflecting on the landscape and all the opportunities that are out there and
you find yourself quitting on an event. And there does seem to be a trend where once you do that
once, now all of a sudden, like you described perfectly, that quit pops up in your head maybe
a little sooner the next time or maybe a little bit before. And I've certainly had these experiences
in my career as well. And what happens, I think if you stick with it, again, I think it is important
to assess whether you really want to be doing what you're doing. But if you start recognizing that
about yourself in a certain activity where it's like, I think I might be pulling the plug early on
some of this stuff. I think you just need to kind of get into a position where you just, at that
point, you need to make a decision, do I want to keep doing this? If the answer is yes, you hold
yourself accountable to not quitting. And eventually what'll happen is you'll find yourself in a
position where I'll use ultramarathon, for example, where you're just clicking on all cylinders for
that day. And you still get those scenarios where doubt creeps in your mind, you have these low
points. But for whatever reason, when those low points come, you're able to push through them
better than you would have in the past. And then you push through maybe two or three more than you
did after you had quit the time before, then it's accountability time, right? Because then you have
to look back at that and say, well, why did this time was I able to be mentally more strong and
kind of push through those extra opportunities to quit when I wasn't before? And it can be easy to
look back and say and live kind of retroactively in the sense where you're like regretting, well,
why did I drop out of those races? Why did I do this wrong there? And I just think that's where
you have to kind of catch yourself and say, no, those things happened to me in order to put me
in a position where I decided, well, this time I'm not going to quit, no matter what, minus my leg
falling off, like I'm not going to quit. And then you put yourself in a position to have that day
where you push through more times than you ever have before and you just redefine what you're
capable of. And then once I think you do that, you start looking at those earlier lessons as
lessons, you know, were they failures on paper at the time, probably, but can you pull things from
them to learn as to like, well, where is your actual threshold? Where is the limit actually for you?
And then kind of start redefining that stuff. So I think like the never quit mentality can be good
in certain situations, but I don't think it's necessarily like a, like a holistic thing where
you need to be in something where it's never quit, always do more, because then you end up in a
situation where you find this like margin of diminishing returns, especially when it comes
to training and workouts and things like that, where there are times where often there are times
where you want to actually quit a little bit before you would have to because the stress that was
required to elicit a growth response has already occurred. And then just to do more is just going
to require more recovery time to get back and do it again. Yeah, this is the tricky trade-off.
Living by the never quit mentality, you're not going to achieve optimal performance.
In your head, you might. It seems like when you look at the full arc of human history,
the people who do great things are more leaning towards the never quit. Like I feel like at
any one moment, you're more in danger of quitting than you are of being suboptimal. So like in terms
of advice, it just feels like never quitting is always the right advice unless you deeply
know the person. Maybe this is like wrestling mentality. I've seen too many, and because
I'm annoyed with the current culture of telling me to relax and have a work life balance and all
those kinds of things, which all have a deep truth to them. But the reality is like there's not enough
people that walk out to me and like slap me and say, get your shit together. Like don't quit
or carter. I think we need to hear that more. And I remember that from the wrestling rooms,
like that when you're pushed that way, when you're forced to the very limit and you don't quit,
that makes better humans. I think people need to get that in their life. I think they need to have
situations where that becomes kind of the reality for them so they can see that avenue,
experience that avenue, where I think it's maybe to the extreme as if it becomes like your entire
life philosophy where like every little thing you do is never quit.
But life is short, Zach. Like why? I mean, this is the problem I have. This is probably the
programming thing too is over optimization is dangerous. It's like every once in a while,
I mean, you're you do this kind of stuff. You're not, for example, with a hundred mile run,
you're, I mean, you could just be doing that for the rest of your life and do like the most
optimal hundred mile run ever. But you keep taking on like new challenges. And there's a lot more
chaos in that. And there it feels like the muscle of never quit will be much more important than
the optimality of your training. Yeah. So there's probably a couple sides to me with that kind of
a thing where for one, I think when we talked about the why. So like, I think the why can kind of
shift a bit and it probably will. If you do something long enough or evolve, maybe is a better
way to call put it. And for me, like one of my big drives and one of my big passions within
ultra running is to first of all find an event that I really, really love to train for and
participate in. So for me, I feel like I've kind of identified that to a degree. And that's kind
of runnable hundred milers. So once I found that it became more of a driver for me to see,
like, well, how fast can I run a hundred miles in a very controlled environment? So let's eliminate
weather, let's eliminate, you know, elevation, let's eliminate like having to wait extra long to
get crew or support and that sort of thing. And that's how you find yourself on a 400 meter track
run in a hundred miles. But for me, like that the important part of that is that I can control the
environment enough where if I come back year after year, I can retest myself and have a decent
ability to kind of say I improved or I regressed or I stayed stagnant. And I think that's a big
driver for me. But one thing I've recognized within that is if you just keep doing that,
like if I could probably pick three flat runnable hundred milers a year and optimally prepare,
race, recover and repeat without like burning myself out. But one thing I think I learned
also in 2019 was that sometimes you kind of need to step away from some of these really,
really kind of important markers in your like your performance or in whatever you're trying to do
and take a step away from it and try to do something a little different in order to kind of hit the
reset button on just like what I would call just like your mental energy to be able to continue
to do it at a high level. So almost like happiness. Exactly. Well, and here's the example, like I
mean, I love running in trails too. Most people would consider me a flat road track runnable
ultra runner. But I like to do trail runs too. So and at the end of 2018, I recognized that I had
been kind of pushing the gas pedal on trying to run fast hundred milers for quite a while without
really a break in that where it was like, okay, I did one. Now I'm going to, you know, take a brief
off season, but then I'm going to ultimately build up in peak for another one. I might introduce
some fun trail races in the context, but they're going to be B races are going to be training
races, time on feet type of stuff that are going to kind of mimic like a long run essentially.
And but the main focus, always in the back of my mind was like getting on the track and seeing
how much faster I can run 100 miles. And that just kind of that energy that it takes to continue
to think by that, that I think the motivation to keep that stoke high enough to really meet your
full potential fades if you don't step away from it for a little bit. So, you know,
so I took essentially half a year away from runnable stuff and just decided I'm going to prepare
for the San Diego 100 mile, which is like a much more elevation, technical trail type of an event.
Is that trail run or no? Yeah. It's a trail hundred miler actually just kind of just outside of
San Diego. And yeah, it goes through it goes over part of the Pacific crash trail and stuff. So
it's very different than running on a runnable surface. So to give you some context, like I
ran was it I think just under 17 hours for that race, whereas on a flat surface, I can run 11
hours and 19 minutes. So just the environment alone added an extra, you know, five plus hours to the
day. So it's just a different experience, different skillset. And what it did is it allowed me to
kind of step away from kind of focusing on like splits on a track, running flat stuff, like preparing
for things specifically for a flat environment and start training for something that's more
climbing and descending, more technical running skillsets and things like that.
And the cool part about it was, first of all, you know, when you step away from something and
after something a lot different, I mean, it's still running. There's still a huge advantage
I had from the running I had done in the past that was going to put me in a good position to be
successful. But there was a much higher or a much bigger range of potential improvement for me.
So through the like, you know, four plus months I spent preparing for that race,
you know, I noticed, oh, wow, I'm getting faster on this climb, or I'm getting better at descending
this technical trail. It was one of the most fun races I've run, actually. So it was kind of a
cool experience. I ended up taking the lead at like 93 miles. So you were racing, racing,
like you were trying to get first. So still a race. So what was the enjoyable aspect of it?
I don't think I recognized it so much while I was doing it, actually. It surfaced afterwards. I mean,
the enjoyment of the race itself is like when you find yourself in a position where you're sitting in
basically second place all day long, and then you take the lead at 90, I think it was like 91 or
92 miles, it's like, yeah, that's kind of a cool way to race. But afterwards, I recognized a few
things just about kind of pacing and, you know, how to maybe pace the first half of 100 miler
versus a second half. I also recognized shortly thereafter, once I finished, recovered and decided
my next event was going to be a flat runnable race, that, wow, I really was way more excited to do
the workouts that I needed to do to get ready to run a fast flat 100 miler. And I don't think that
would have been the case had I just tried to do another flat fast 100 miler earlier or during
that year and end up in a situation where I maybe had normalized a suboptimal outlook on something
that I had just done so many times already. And I recognized that just every workout I did, I was
like, I did this workout a year ago, and it was not nearly this much fun. And then the interesting
thing about these track hundreds too is you find yourself doing your peaking phase where you're
running, your long runs, which for me are usually around 30 miles or so, and I'll do them back to
back days. And I try to replicate the environment that I'm going to race on. So I'm finding myself
on a four millimeter track. And it's like, when I started doing that again, I just felt like I was
super motivated to go out there Saturday and Sunday and do those back to back long runs and see the
progress and then head out again the next week and do it again. So I had some of my more enjoyable
long runs, which are going to be the most specific to race day environment that I had in quite some
time. And I think that was really beneficial in kind of putting me in a right spot to be able to
push through barriers on race day and put me in a position where quitting was going to be much
less of a likelihood given the enjoyment I had in the months leading into the race itself.
Yeah, even the thought of quitting. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned the track. You've also ran 100
miles in the treadmill and the trail 100 mile. Broadly, if we zoom out, what does it take to
run 100 miles? For most of the world, that seems like a crazy distance to run. So maybe it's
interesting to ask, not only is just setting the world record, but purely running, what does it
take to run that far? Yeah. I mean, I think people probably overestimate what it takes in terms of
just getting it done. I think this is consistent in just running in general. I think the marathon
was always a big one with that where people thought like, well, you have to do this training or you
just literally won't physically be able to complete a marathon. And then we got into an era of kind
of like running as more of an enjoyment thing versus a performance thing. And then you'd have
people running granted much slower. I think if you look at the Boston marathon, average finishing
times, it goes from like, or maybe it wasn't the Boston marathon, I might have just been
marathons in general, went from like three hours to five hours or something like that.
So it's like, people I think got past the fact that you can only do it if you're optimally
prepared to, well, I can do it and maybe not meet my full potential if I'm going to like,
not do much training, which I wouldn't necessarily advise. But I mean, I've talked to people who
basically run 100 miles, sometimes almost off the couch. And it's like, to me, what that says is
just the human body is incredible and what it can tolerate above and beyond what it's been exposed
to if it has to or if it feels like it has to. So that's the basic sort of getting from point A
from the start to the finish. It's the human body and the human mind is capable of doing it
without much preparation. But then you start to increase the goal of performance and you try to
get to actually a good like the most out of your body that you can. How does that start to change
then? Yeah, going from fun to performance. Yeah, I think once you start putting marks or goals on
outside of just finishing, that's where it starts getting interesting because now you
maybe go on with multiple goals where like if one falls off due to something that you didn't
expect, then you have another one to target. But you can always build those up and try to think
like, well, I want to run faster than last time or I want to break a course record or an age group
record or something like that. And that I think is just going to be a little bit of a different
mindset because now you're looking at every little thing from what do I need to do to prepare as
well as what do I need to do to be efficient on the day itself? So like transitioning aid stations
and things like that or do I want to pacer or not? Or does this race allow someone to like
hand me a bottle at a certain spot or do I have to be in specific areas to get that type of stuff?
And what it ends up doing is it ends up bringing a lot more variables to the table. And I think
it's interesting because there's always going to be more variables on the day than you are able to
account for. So at a certain degree, you have to kind of find yourself in a position where I'm going
to make sure I take care of the big ones or the ones that are like, obviously, I need to be ready
for like my fueling strategy, my hydration strategy, my pacing strategy, what workouts are
going to put me in a position to physiologically have this process go as well as possible. How
am I going to like, you know, hold myself accountable than aid station transition? So I'm not like
having a ton of non moving time versus moving time and things like that. So cool. So there's these
like big variables that you're aware of and you're trying to optimize over the space of variables.
Yep. So you get to start to play with that when you're looking for performance.
It's almost like moving from checkers to chess, right? You have like, or maybe even like connect
forward or something like that, where it goes from just kind of like, well, one foot in front
of the other. And when I get to the next aid station, I'll just eat whatever looks good,
drink whatever, you know, quenches my thirst and then move on to the next one to like,
well, which one of these food products is actually going to make me move a little faster
to the next aid station or, you know, which one of these pacing strategies is going to get me to
the finish line faster than the other one and that sort of stuff. So it gets more complicated,
more interesting. And in my opinion, anyway, also there, I mean, but there's a breaking
point with that too, because like I said, there's an endless number of variables you
could account for. And as a distance gets longer, that list gets longer too. So
you find yourself in this position where, where you have to at some point say, okay,
I've accounted for everything I can reasonably account for. Now I need to be in a mental space
where when something happens that I wasn't able to account for, I'm able to respond to it with
the right decision and keep going and not dwell on it. Because that's another thing. I mean,
you're running slow enough when you're doing 100 miles, where if you make a mistake, you can sit
there and just fixate on that mistake and say, why did I do that? That cost me 10 minutes,
blah, blah, blah. When in reality, what you need to do is that happened. Everyone else out here
is going to have a situation like that at some point. Mine happened now. I need to figure out
how I can move forward at the fastest sustainable pace and not think about what happened back there.
And that's where I think it gets really interesting.
What would you say it takes to set a world record in the 100 miler?
First of all, I think you probably have to focus on that specific event. I mean, there's,
the interesting about ultra running where it maybe deviates a bit from just other endurance
sports is there's such a wide range. I mean, we talked about a little bit when I talked with
the San Diego 100 versus kind of the flat runnable stuff. So can you maybe paint a picture of what
are, there's a huge range of different kinds of ultra marathon events. What are like the big ones
in your mind? So marathon, we know the distance for a marathon. There's 50K. What are different
kinds of, there's a 100 mile that in your mind, like kind of these islands where people gather
off. Yeah. So there's a few that really stand out. I would say the three biggest ultra marathons
right now, even from a historic, maybe not necessarily a historical standpoint, but
in modern day ultra running is going to be the Western States 100. That's the biggest,
most competitive 100 miler. It's on the trail side of things in the United States. Then there's
ultra trail mountain Blanc, which is probably the most competitive 100 miler on the planet right now.
In previous years, it's been debatable as whether Western States or ultra trail mountain Blanc is
more competitive. I think in the most recent few years, you're just seeing a lot more like
of the bulk of international talent on the trail side of the sport heading over that way.
And then you have the road running side of things where the comrades marathon, which is
technically 56 miles, but they call it the comrades marathon, is going to generally be the most
competitive ultra marathon. The weird thing is the distance thing, right? Cause most people
in the thing of endurance sports, they're thinking about precise distances like five
kilometers, 10 kilometers and all that stuff. And then, then you get into the ultra running
world and it's like sometimes it's the event. So like the Western itself is much more important
than the distance. Right. Yeah. So the Western States 100 is actually 100.2 miles,
which isn't that big of a deviation when you think about it, especially when you figure like
tangents are going to probably account for more than 0.2 miles on a 100 mile race,
but the ultra trail mountain Blanc, you know, that's listed as a 100 miler, but it's actually,
I think like 104, 105 miles. So, you know, it's more, there's different cultures too. So the United
States is definitely more motivated, I think, to try to get as close to the exact distance.
You're going to hear maybe a little more grumbling if someone says, I signed up for this 100
miler and it turned out to be 103 miles versus like over in Europe, they don't really care too
much about the distance. They're more interested in like a specific route or a loop. It's consistency
important in terms of the exact length of the, of the route. So like you can compare performances
from previous years, or are they a little bit more flexible? Like they redefine the trail from
year to year. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely hard to compare. I mean, there's events that
take, for example, I would say the best ultra marathoner in the world today on the men's side
is Jim Walmsley. The reason I think Jim Walmsley is the best is because he is the most versatile
and not only the most versatile, but he's arguably the best at almost everything up to 100 miles.
So there's a race called the Angela's Crest 100 miler. They, the trail has drastically changed
from when they originally had that event. And it's a different time of year. So it's much
warmer on that course. And Jim's not the kind of guy who would sit back and say like, I can't
chase that record. But I think Angela Crest, when he looks at the segments and the pacing for that
one, he's like, that one is maybe not even the same event anymore. So you have that, you have some
that are a little more controlled and a little more kind of like preserved, I guess you would say,
but I think it gets really rare on the trail side. I mean, comrades is going to be very comparable
from one year to the next, because that's a road race. And that's where you get, you maybe get
like the split in the sport from people who really want that kind of like, I want to compare myself
to someone who ran this course in 1970 versus like someone who just says, I want to be competitive
today. And maybe the weather is going to be 30 degrees different from one year to the next on
this course. But if I beat everyone on this day, then I'm the champion of that big name race,
like Ultra Trail Mont Blanc or Western States 100. And my legacy will be cemented because I won
that big race. And it doesn't matter when or how the course was or what the time even was to some
degree. When you were optimizing for trying to set the world record in the Hunter Myler,
were you doing like analysis of maybe like, what were the variables you were looking at?
Is it more in the realm of the actual race day, the track, what it looks like versus like the
variables of the training leading up to the, to the race? I mean, it evolved a bit. Like,
I think the, as I learned more about just like what is required to kind of really do that stuff.
So there's some variables you can control for, you know, I try to control for as many as I can.
The big one that kind of stands out that you can't necessarily control for is,
it's pretty rare where you get an event where they're just doing 100 miles on a track. It's
usually like, like an event of like a series of different events where they might be like,
some people out there doing 50k, some people out there doing 24 or something. Like the event I
did at there's six day folks out there, they're trying to see how far they can get in six days.
So you have like this much wider range of pacing just due to like the distance. So, you know,
track protocol is always like you pass on the outside. So if you're running one of the faster
paces of the day, which when you go on up to six days, you're going to, and you're doing 100 miles,
you're probably going to be running faster than most people out there. Then, you know,
you just end up running more because you end up running in lane two around the turns,
sometimes lane three around the turns.
So it's down to those little details that have a big impact.
Yeah. So I had to build that into my pacing strategy. I also have to build into the pacing
strategy like relative non-moving time. You know, I did a race just recently. It was the U.S.
track and field 100 mile road championships. And I did not stop once other than like, I guess
I technically stopped like in the aid station for like a few seconds to like grab bottles and
get myself wet because it was like 94 degrees that day. But I didn't like stop at all during that
race from like what I would say is like a long period of time where we're getting up to like a
minute. But that's pretty rare even on the track. Like when I ran 11 hours and 19 minutes,
I think I stopped three times for maybe a total of like, I believe I have to look back for sure,
but I think it was like three to four minutes or something like that. So you got to, you got to
figure that into your pacing strategy, especially if you're chasing a specific time.
Because, you know, if I'm pacing for, you know, at the time the world record was 11 28.
Um, so if I'm pacing for say 11 27 30 or something like that, and I don't account for that three
minutes of stoppage, then I might run the exact pace I had planned on, but then I'm a minute off
of the world record. So 11 28, we're talking about 11 hours, we're talking about 100 miles.
Can you mention what the world record was? What, uh, what kind of world record you set?
Can you tell your own story here of, uh, of what you were able to accomplish?
That world record that I broke actually just recently got rebroke by a guy over in Lithuania,
Alex Sorkin, um, phenomenal race. I mean, he's, he's won the 24 all world championships. He's
won the Spartathlon, which is another big historic ultra marathon rates, 153 miles. So it's getting
a little more lengthy than some of the stuff that I've traditionally done. Um, he ran 11 14,
I believe it was 56 or 57. Um, so his pace was 6 45 per mile. Mine was 6 47 and a half
in terms of just like the pacing strategy. I mean, it's, it's just really cool because for me,
the motivation with chasing the world record was, it was multifaceted. I think there was,
as I kind of moved through, because I mean, it took me almost six years from the day I decided
I wanted to chase that time to the day I actually did it. Uh, and through that five to six years,
I think I merged from just like my number one goal was to try to break the world record to
my number one goal is how fast can I run this thing? And then ultimately, um,
what needs to be done for a human to break 11 hours in a hundred miles? Cause I think that's
going to be, I think that's going to happen soon. I think it's going to happen in the next few years.
What pace would that be? Um, sub 11 would be, I think like, I think it's like 6 35 right about
per mile. You're moving quick, but not so quick that like you're, you're, you know, void of being
able to think about everything as it's happening. So what's the pace in terms of, if you look
for each of the one mile segments for the hundred miles, is it pretty steady six, like in order to
break 11 hours? Would it be pretty steady 6 35? Does it go up and down? Do you speed up at the
very end? Like what's, what's the pacing? If you were to, maybe how much variability is there in
the pacing for an optimal performance here? Yeah. So if you're talking about someone, let's say that
there's someone, well, let's just take me for example, let's say that we could just like,
we had this infinite knowledge and we knew for a fact, a perfect performance for me would
produce a 10 59, but I'm not going a second faster. And I need to do everything right in
order to run a 10 59. I would definitely want to either have a slight negative or a slight
positive split. So when, and I think there's, I think there's a, there's a range in there where
like being a little bit faster, the first half and the second half isn't going to necessarily
change your outcome or being a little bit slower, the first half and a little bit faster, the
second half isn't going to drastically change your outcome. So that's what you're referring to
the split is you're looking at the first 50 miles and the second 50 miles. And you can break it down
as, as tiny as you want. Like I think when you take out the outlier laps where I stopped to use
the bathroom, which would have been that like three to four minute non-moving time that I talked
about before, my splits were really tight. I had a couple that were, it was weird because that,
that track that I did that on was actually like 400 and some weird number like 400 and like 38
meters or something like that. So I actually like ran like my numbers based on that. So there,
there, normally I'm dealing with 400 meters and then it's a little more like clean as to like
what my lap splits are going to range from one event to the next. So we're talking about running
a hundred miles on a track. Yeah. And so then you can be really scientific about getting the,
the, the, the pacing right. And you're, you're running on the inside lane or is there some
kind of tricks to this? Like are you alternating directions? Yeah, they'll switch directions
at most events every four hours. So you'll do four hours one way and then they usually put a cone out
and once it hits like, like let's say it hits four hours, you finish the lap you're on and then
you do a loop around and then you start the next, your next lap. Would you say you take the exact
same number of steps? Like when you're really in the groove, when you're taking the pacing,
are we talking about that level of precision or is it a little bit more feel?
You mean like foot strike frequency? Yeah. Like frequency then over the distance to the lap,
would you say it's so precise that you're like, you get in this groove where it's like perfect?
Yeah. Gosh, you're making me wish I would have strapped more like a foot pod to my,
but like, yeah. So I think like my guess is it's pretty precise. Like it's,
Is there a video of this? Sorry, I keep interrupting. Is there a video of this? Cause I,
I've actually, this is now three years ago, build a computer vision algorithm that counts foot strikes.
Oh really? Yeah, for fun. Yeah. I was trying to understand, we'll talk about that. We have
the same definition of fun when I've got my, find myself on a track for all day and you find
yourself counting foot strikes. I was trying to understand if, if there's how much variability
there's in extreme like elite performers within a particular race, but also across races. It was
just interesting to me from a robotics perspective, if like how much variability there is in the human
body and in the way they use legs to move quickly. I think my guess would be that at the individual
level, it's going to be pretty precise, assuming the pacing is consistent. So you get, so my pacing
on that day, I ran two minutes faster, the second 50 miles and I did the first 50 miles. So my splits
were very even most of the day. I actually ran some of my fastest miles at the end. So there's
going to be probably a slight variance from my fastest miles, my slowest mile in like your cadence
or your foot strike, but probably not by a huge margin, but you might have a pretty big variance
for one person to the next. So you get someone whose gait is just a little bit different. So like
for me, I supinate, which means I kind of come down on the outside of my foot and I'm kind of more
of a mid four foot striker. So that's going to kind of impact my cadence to a degree, whereas you
might have someone who is kind of more mid to rear their foot or heel striker and they might
pronate where their foot kind of rolls in. So that person may have a little bit of a different
cadence as well. So you get someone, and I think you see this in elite marathoning too, which is
going to probably just be a much larger data pool, much, much more probably precise from just like
a number of opportunities to study this. And I think even their ranges from one person to the
next can be, I wouldn't say drastic, but you know, to the degree of like 10 to maybe even 20 steps
per minute or something like that from one person to the next. But most people, the faster they go,
the higher their cadence is going to be, the slower they go, the lower their cadence is going to be.
But there's going to be probably a range of optimal lowness and I don't know, probably
a probably optimal highness too than that. If you can just linger on the 11 hours, the person,
first of all, would you like to be the person that breaks 11 hours? And second of all,
the person that does break 11 hours, like what would, what would it take? And third question,
is it even possible in your intuition? I mean, I would definitely, I would be lying to you if
I said I didn't want to be the first person to break 11 hours in 100 miles. I think that'll be,
would be a cool like barrier to be the one to usher that in. But with that said, I think I'm
much more motivated in seeing it done from the sense that like, I think I, when we're talking
about records, it's something that is inevitable that it's going to get broken. So I mean, we're
talking about happiness before this, right? So I've contemplated this in the past, where I was
thinking to myself, like, if my motivation is to break a world record or any record for that matter,
course record, and have that be my defining reason or my defining motivator, I probably need to do
an assessment of what I'm kind of where my mind is at and where my focus is at.
And just reflect on how I'm behaving in life because it's going to get broken, right? I mean,
I could run 1050 tomorrow. And in 10 years, chances are that's no longer going to be the
world record anymore. Someone's going to run faster than that. So if you're living to hold on to a
record versus living to try to move the sport forward, which anytime you break a world record,
you're moving the sport forward, then, then you have to look at that as like, that was my
contribution. And whether I contribute again or not is kind of besides the point. What you
want is that your performance or your contribution brings new people into the sport who are excited,
motivated, and they can make their contribution. And then we can ultimately see, well, how fast
can someone run a controlled environment 100 miler? And that's what I really want to see.
Because I think I've gotten so much enjoyment from the sport. I mean, I've gotten so much
enjoyment from the sport, I mean, I'll turn it into a career. And I think there's there's
other people who can do the same thing. And it's not necessarily going to come at the expense of
my career. But it's going to bring more attention to the sport. It's going to bring more interest
in the sport. It's going to open the sport up to people who maybe otherwise would have never
thought about it, seen it, considered it. And to me, I think that's like a much more rewarding goal
than saying, I want to break this record and I want to hold it for decades or I want to die
with this record. So I never have to see someone go faster than me. Well, that's the progress of
human civilization was down on the shoulders of giants. And we keep creating cool stuff.
Well, and it's, it's the other thing is just like, if you're honest with yourself too, it's,
I mean, we're seeing this right now in the running world where, you know, new innovations come in,
new technologies come in, new nutritional approaches come in. And then we see like the
new crop of folks have advantages that the old crop didn't have. And it can be easy to look back
on that and say like, Hey, well, you know, if I would have had that product or if I would have
done that, I would have run this. But then you're getting into that negative, you know,
thought process again, which I generally try to stay out of.
I take the cave man. If I had fire, I would have done it better with this.
Look at these idiots up there with their cars. If I would have had a car back then,
I would have been ruled the world.
Let me just zoom up briefly and ask you about kind of beauty and love.
What's the most beautiful thing about running to you? Why do you love it?
I think there's kind of a couple of directions to look at it through or lenses look at it through.
There's like the in the moment, right? There's always going to be that run where
you're clicking along and things just feel great. You get some endorphins and you get the,
you know, the, the quote unquote, runner's high and that sort of stuff. And that's like just like
this great feeling that you can kind of tap into on the like real like, like in the moment type of
level. You know, you've my wife and I talk about this because she's a competitive altar runner as
well. And you will, you'll, we'll have a day where, you know, we'll take a forced day off or
something like that. And it's necessary, right? It's going to allow the enjoyment to continue.
But you get into this like routine of I wake up in the morning, I do this run and that kind of
gets my day started. That gets my, my energy's up. I get that runner's high afterwards. You
remove that from the equation for a rest day. And you just sort of like, oh, man, I don't feel
like I never got started today. Like, you know, it's just this weird thing. It's almost, I think
it's, it's funny because non-runners don't always like necessarily recognize it because for them,
it's the complete opposite. They're like, if I can get away from not having to run today, that's
going to be a good day versus. Yeah. But it's one of those things that I think gets more addictive
the more you do it. So that's purely from the running perspective, there's this joy of the
runner's high of the post after the run, you feel like you can take on the world, that kind of thing.
Yes. And I think that's one of the drivers from just a quality of life standpoint.
Just a, you know, in the moment, immediate gratification standpoint. But then there's like,
I think the bigger picture stuff or the longer term stuff. And for me, that enjoyment is like,
just the process like of, okay, I'm starting at this fitness level. And I'm going to do these
workouts. And by doing these workouts, I'm going to see incremental progress from them.
And then that's another kind of like, kind of short term gratification that's maybe a little
longer than the day to day, but still like shorter than like a career or a buildup for a
particular race, where you're saying, you're seeing yourself like, okay, maybe I'm focusing on
short intervals right now. And on week one, I covered this much distance in three minutes,
but by week four, I'm covering this much distance and you can just see that progress.
It's almost like in elementary school, when you get the gold star for reading a book,
it's like, did that gold star really mean anything? I don't know, but I felt great when
they gave it to me. It's something about just finding improvement. And people love to see
improvement, I think. So that's where I think you can also get some value in it, saying like,
I started here and I got there. And then I think there's also just like, I would call this maybe
more the cherry on top, which is like, where you express your work, which is the race itself,
where that's going to be kind of the thing that kind of like, shows up on the end result and
where it kind of identifies whether you did things right or wrong. Yeah. So there's a sense in which
training is a kind of preparation towards race day and race day being the thing where you get to
be the artist. You get to create this piece of art and they might suck and might be beautiful.
I mean, I see in the grappling world, I see competition in that same way when I feel the
best about it, which sounds pretentious to say, but I'm trying to be the best version of myself
in this particular day of competition and to do something that I'll be proud of in an artist way,
not in some kind of numerical way, but as a holistic sense, do something cool. In grappling,
that means for me, that means like not stalling, like taking big risks and trying to dominate
another person in the context of grappling and do it, like push myself to the limit,
both cardio wise and technique wise and just play beautifully. I mean, you see this in kind of chess,
there's systematic chess players and there's people that allow themselves to have those
moments of genius where they take the big risk that eventually pays off or doesn't.
And that to me is art. I mean, there's art within running, there's art within chess,
there's art within grappling and you got a chance. All the training is more like science
and then it feels like the competition day's art. Yeah, I think that's a really cool way to look at
and I think it's when you really open up the perspective of that too, it's like even obviously
having a great day, like winning the tournament or getting further than you were expected to
or beating someone who you've never beaten before or something like that or in the running
perspective, like achieving that goal time, that sort of stuff. Obviously those are kind of like
the ones you, when you're honest with yourself, you really want and you're gonna probably get the
most satisfaction out of. But even when they don't go wrong, like maybe like with your grappling
tournament analogy, the, you know, maybe the guy you're grappling against does a move on you and
you're like, I was not prepared for that move. So now the enjoyment becomes, okay, back to the
drawing board. Now I need to find out what do I do when that happens to me next time. And that's
where the, I think the why comes in again. Same thing with running, like maybe I make a mistake
and, you know, like eat something I didn't really want to eat or thought was going to work but didn't
work and it costs me more time than I gained by having it or something like that. And then I go
back to the drawing board and say, okay, well, I can't do that. That didn't work. Or if I'm going
to do that, I need to be more prepared to be able to do it. And I love that part of the sport.
Just the rearranging of things and adjusting and tinkering.
There's some sense in which the mistakes and like the flaws give us meaning.
Cause like if everything, if you weren't able to find mistakes and something you've done,
it feels like the life would be void of meaning.
It's a lost opportunity too. Like if, I mean, like when I look at even my 100 mile race of 1119,
I can find spots in there where I was like, oh, you know what? I could clean that up a little bit.
Maybe if I do this differently. And I mean, that's going to get me, you know, a little bit faster.
If I sat back and said, hey, well, things went great that day. Cool. Let's see if we can replicate
it. Then, you know, I probably run 1119 again. So can we talk about training a little bit?
Yeah. What does your training look like year round, day to day, hour to hour, like optimal,
maybe, uh, maybe you want to pick a race in the context of what you want to discuss that.
But, and also people should follow you on Instagram. You have a lot of kind of interesting, um,
like little glances into your training process, into your training thinking, which is quite
fascinating. But if you look at an optimal training process, what does that look like?
Yeah. So I think, uh, the, if we're looking at it from like a philosophical level or like an
approach level, I think there's some things that carry over from regardless of the distance. So
I think working on your weaknesses and things that are least specific to what you're going to do on
race day, but are still going to be important things in terms of improving your ability to
perform on race day or maximizing your potential, uh, with the things that are specific, you do first.
Mm hmm. I say that, but there's a caveat with endurance sport. I think maybe even more specifically
with things like our ultramarathons or hundred milers where you want a really strong aerobic
foundation or like a base before you really start, I think structuring things towards a specific one.
So for me, I think like a target for me is oftentimes like, uh, you know, getting really fit
at like what my pace would be at like my aerobic threshold or what a lot of people maybe call
like a maximum aerobic function. Um, I mean, the running world is kind of weird where we have like
these terminologies where there's sometimes multiple words that essentially mean the same thing,
but one is from like a, just an actual physiological reaction and one is just like a feeling and stuff
like that. So you mentioned time on feet versus time in optimal physiological state. Like how
important is it just to get like running done versus like running in a particular pace?
That would depend on the event, I would say to a degree. And there's contradicting ideas about
like kind of how to structure it. I think a lot of times like, uh, you do want to like time on feet
in most cases is just going to be like, I'm running easy, whatever feels easy that day.
And that can be different from one day to the next. Like I might feel great and, you know,
that produces a much faster pace than if I, you know, feel really miserable or something like that.
So that's why I think a lot of times running, well, they'll, they'll do, they'll call perceived
perceived effort or perceived exertion. And they're, you're looking at kind of understanding
the response your body has to a certain effort level and you're supposed to target a certain
effort level in order to like get a certain response. So to maybe simplify that a little
bit or make it a little clearer, like, I think I focus on essentially like short intervals.
I focus on longer intervals or tempo runs. I focus on, um, like race, pace, intensity,
which is a lot of times what I'll build my long run around. Um, but I'll also, like those are
kind of like the small pieces to the puzzle. Those are the options you're working with.
Yeah. But I'm going to always try to work with those options on top of a massive
aerobic base, which is going to probably be like 80% of the work.
So how do you build that massive aerobic base? What do we talk about? Distance?
Distance and essentially, so I like to call it micro stressing because you're going to
always start at a different spot, depending on where your fitness level is at and depending
on where you're at as an individual. I'm going to be targeting my aerobic threshold. I'm going
to get right up to it, but not necessarily cross over it. Um, it's, you know, it's,
it's been popularized as maximum aerobic function as kind of a training philosophy.
That philosophy in itself, I think maybe is a little more like holistic where they're saying,
do this basically all the time. And by doing so, you're going to like, you're going to raise your
aerobic potential by so much that, you know, you can kind of like race yourself in a shape at that
point. And this would be maybe more specific for like shorter distance or endurance runs where
you're not going to race yourself in the shape of 100 milers. But for five days, you might,
you might do like a huge base building phase where you're going up to that maximum aerobic function
or that aerobic threshold and you're watching your pace come down at that. So the rule there is
basically like, if you're seeing improvement, that's the sign you're looking for, or which would
just be your pace dropping at that heart rate or at that intensity. And, uh, if you're seeing that
continually go down, you're heading in the right direction. If you start seeing it go the opposite
way, you're, you're probably overreaching where you're trying to do too much of it. So that's
kind of dictates how much the dose, the dose, I guess you'd say. When we talk about max aerobic
function, we're talking about heart rate as the ultimate, as the really important metric here.
So maintaining a particular heart rate during the run. Uh, is that the measure that like,
how do you know you're in the right place? Yeah. Yeah. And then that's where it gets a little
tricky because like, unless you go into a lab and get your aerobic threshold tested, it's really
hard to have like an exact number on it. Um, you know, Dr. Phil Maffetone with the maximum
function process, he'll say 180 minus your age is going to give you your, yeah, that's the math 180
formula that I thought was fascinating for. It's like, uh, in the same way equals,
e equals MC squared is fascinating that there could be a formula that captures like optimal
running. Yeah. So that for people who don't know, that's 180 minus your age. If you train at that
heart rate, if you run at that heart rate, you're going to progress a lot. And here's the advantage
of that. I think like with any of these things, you want to look at it through where the advantage
is here and I need to account for those and then where the potential disadvantages and then decide
for me as an individual, do these advantages outweigh the disadvantages and what's the
alternative approach and is that going to produce more advantages or less? So with,
with maximum function, uh, here's some advantages. Like it is low enough intensity where you can train
pretty consistently at a fairly high volume with a very low injury risk with a very low
like things that are going to maybe lower your quality of life, like muscle damage and things
like that. It's a more efficient way in the sense that you're going to be like prioritizing like
fat metabolization, which, um, I mean, if you're looking at like Jeff Follick and Dr. Jeff Follick
and Dr. Dominic DiAgostino, some of their research and things like that, like they're going to show
that, you know, that's going to be a little cleaner way to go about things from just a recovery
standpoint, a breakdown standpoint. So they could be like a, what they call like a fat adapted
athlete. So you can go to your fat stores for energy. If you're applying this map, what is it
called by the way? A MAF 180? Is that a good, what are your thoughts about in general for
yourself and for the broader population? I think the MAF 180 formula is about as good of a
formula as you're going to find in terms of capturing as many people as you can get away
with capturing with a kind of a universal thing. Uh, like any of these things, I mean,
it's, it's more likely kind of on a bell curve where like the bulk of that 180 minus the age is
probably going to be a pretty good, at least starting point to kind of figure out where that is.
There's some other things you can like maybe use to kind of check it that I like to do.
If I'm, let's say I just, I did 180 minus my age and I went out and I started running and it was
like, I'm running along and I'm just like, my, my breathing is labored. I'm, you know, I'm
struggling to get a sentence out without gasping for breath. Well, that's my body telling me I'm
probably not actually at my true MAF number or my true like underneath my true aerobic threshold.
Like aerobic threshold and maximum function, you should be able to do that for hours and you
should be able to breathe pretty efficiently and talk. Yep. Carry a conversation. Other people
will say like you, another way to kind of gauge it, if you can breathe in your nose and out your
mouth, that's not necessarily the best way to do on a performance standpoint, but it can be a good
kind of governor that will allow you to like, if you can, if you can no longer breathe in your
nose and out your mouth, you're probably going too fast to actually technically be at your
MAF pace or under your MAF pace. Yeah. I had a, actually when I was in, in, in better shape,
I had trouble getting to that MAF number. I found myself like either I would be doing way too much
work. Like it's too hard to do it. It was too hard to get to that number. I was running a much lower
heart rate, like 10 to 20, what do you call that beats lower? And that's, I was still for myself
happy with the pace. It was a good pace and, and I just felt good. I was smiling and enjoying life.
And, and the moment I take myself to that level of like the MAF 180 level, that's like, that felt
like a real workout. And it felt like I can't do that for five, 10, 15 miles. Like I, I started
feeling it like this is a one or two mile thing. Now, but I think his answer to that,
I feel Mephidone's answer is maybe you're supposed to like, what, maybe do some more sprints or
something like that or build up your, maybe like I'm too weak, musculature wise to like,
yeah, like that, that's a sign that you need to work on some stuff. You can't just keep enjoying
life. There's, there's two ways to look at that. I think, and I think you're, you're, you're right
on. I think they would, what the advice from that, from that kind of a process would say is either you,
you're doing too much of it. So it's getting too hard for where your skeletal muscle system is
currently at for that particular activity. So like, I mean, it can be different too. Like if
you're cycling versus running, you know, that's a little bit of different mechanic where it can be
different where you could take a super fit cyclist and then put them on, you know, the, the, the
volume, they're going to be able to tolerate relative to what you're going to do when you remove
like impact forces and things like that is going to be lower if they haven't been practicing that
activity. So for you, like, you know, you're prioritizing like, you know, wrestling and
mixed martial art, not mixed martial arts, but jiu-jitsu type stuff. So, you know, running is
maybe kind of that, that, that secondary activity versus the primary activity. But yeah, so what
they would say is probably like, maybe instead of doing that at, let's say you were doing that for
like 30 miles a week or something like that, and it was getting too hard to continue there, they'd
say, you know, come back to 20, get used to 20, get comfortable with 20, then let's get you up to
25 and 30 and kind of just like inch you along. One of the intuitions I had about the ways I was
failing at running is the form was probably not great. Like the way to get to those 30, 40 miles
is to get the form right. Maybe I was doing too big of steps, so like playing with a different
gate, playing with a different kind of the form of the run. The economy, the efficiency, yeah.
So that was the intuition, like I was doing something wrong, but I suppose that's the
benefit of these kind of formulas. It challenges you to think like, how can I improve this kind
of stuff? Well, and it also, it simplifies it so much that you're forced to, right? You're forced
to optimize within that real strict parameter versus, am I doing my short intervals right,
but my long runs wrong, or am I doing my like long intervals right, but my short intervals,
and then you just, it kind of complicates things when you start throwing a lot of stuff there.
And for most people, especially when they're first getting started, you know, you're,
you can't over complicate it, or you're just going to like, you're going to do like a bunch of half
right, half wrong things, and then not really know where your progress or your deficits are
necessarily at. So I do think this is an amazing approach, especially for people who are just
getting into it and building that, that foundation, where, where I think maybe you want to deviate
from that a little bit, especially when you start to getting to these events that are operating
well outside that intensity. So you take something like, you know, let's say it's a race that takes
you in the neighborhood of around like 12 minutes or something like that, then you're going to be
running significantly faster than your maximum function pace. So most of the research is going
to say at some point in time, you need to get around to practicing the pace at which you're
going to perform at, and really fine tuning the mechanics, the efficiencies, how it feels, how
to judge it, how to pace it at the pace you're going to try to compete at. So there's obviously
like a large range of targets there when we're talking about the endurance world in general,
where, you know, you have these shorter events, like five kilometers, and then you also have
100 mile races, which are going to typically be quite a bit below your maximum rowing function,
especially on these trail races. I need to admit something. So I don't measure the runs at all
in terms of time. I get competitive with myself. So I kind of decided that running for me is going
to be this thing where I just go by feel. Is it possible to be that kind of runner and, you know,
still have running as part of your life and be a good performer in running? I actually think that's,
that's where you want to get to. The problem is most people have a hard time getting to that,
because they'll go out and they'll run with a friend and match their pace, or they'll go out
and they'll say, well, I want to run this pace, or they'll target that pace, or target a specific
heart rate, which is, you know, not necessarily how they maybe feel good doing it. So I think,
like, once you, I mean, obviously, I think when you put a race on the calendar, if your goal is
performance, it's a little harder to just say, like, well, I'm going to run where it feels good
today, because eventually you have to get around to doing what's specific. But from just a fitness
standpoint, health standpoint, enjoyment standpoint, I think it's totally fine to go out and say,
I'm going to run what feels good today. And, you know, maybe someday you will feel like at the
end of the run, I'm going to do a couple sprints just to get some, you know, that because it does,
that one's a hard one to kind of jumpstart. But once you do it, and you realize how kind of good
it feels, maybe to throw in a few accelerations at the end of a run. And then you, you say,
oh, wow, that feels pretty good to do that. I feel a little more accomplished.
That's right. That's a forcing function. But I like to finish runs with sprints anyway.
Okay. You're already there.
Without, right. You don't need to, the timing, I'm afraid of the time becoming a drug.
But the flip side of that, it's a useful tool to get you to learn the right form, the right feel,
like what it feels like to have, to be in good shape. And then you can throw out the time.
Well, I think too, with, with feel running, and what I mean by that is X kind of back to that
perceived effort thing where like, you do enough of it and you start being able to recognize,
like, I can go out. And if you said, okay, run, you know, 60 minutes at your aerobic threshold,
I could go, I could know where that is on my heart rate. And I could go up there and just say,
like, okay, I know what that feels like and go and run that feel. And I'm going to hit that spot.
Like, I bet you if we looked at my heart rate data after they'd be right in there,
and I wouldn't have to look in some of that's just experience. Some of it's just understanding,
like when, like not noticing the physiological responses when you cross over versus step a
little bit too below it, you can catch yourself daydreaming and forget I'll do this sometimes too,
where I'll be tart because I'm kind of like you too, where when I'm getting really fit,
especially with my foundation, like, I got a, you know, I'm moving pretty quick at my aerobic
threshold. So like, if I start daydreaming too much, I can notice, oh, I'm drifting back a
little bit, I look down at my heart, oh, yeah, I'm 10 beats under. You know, so you do it,
it does take a little bit of, I think, just awareness. But it's also not necessarily something
where you have to be so exact that you're hitting, you know, an exact heart rate all the time,
there's usually a range. And there's even like, some fluctuations where like, if you've been
healthy for a year or two, without any injuries, and you've been fit, that you can probably add
five beats to your maximum aerobic function. If you're using that as kind of your, your target
from the 180 minus your age formula. So let's try this lay this out for yourself. But for others,
you, you offer ready made plans for people, you know, depending on the, I think the key that
thing there is the distance, maybe you can elaborate. But what does that plan look like
usually? What are the key options as you already kind of mentioned? And how does your week look
like? How do a lot of people's week look like in terms of splits? Are we talking about, you know,
in terms of rest days, in terms of how often do you speed work versus longer distance,
you mentioned long runs? Like, is there something you could say that's generally applicable about
the structure of these plans? The ready made plans, I definitely follow like a philosophy.
And it's going to be the kind of like lockstep in that. So for those, like, there's always going
to be a sacrifice when you do like a ready made plan, because there's you're removing the individual
context there. So for folks who are like really want to get into the weeds, I usually do like a
personalized coaching plan with them, where we sit down, we actually look at their strengths,
their weaknesses, and really kind of go in from that perspective, and fine tune it. And it also
like, it avoids a situation where, oh, my ready made plan says, I'm supposed to do this run today,
but I don't feel great today. So what do I do? And some people are fine with that because they're
aware enough of like the process that they can adjust it themselves. Other folks just need a
little more support. So that's kind of the difference there. But in terms of the structure of it,
it kind of goes with an approach where we were saying you build this foundation, you're going to
spend, you know, usually anywhere between eight to 12 weeks, just building up your your aerobic
foundation, you're going to be doing a lot of stuff that are kind of at I call them base runs.
But they're basically your maximum aerobic function or you're up to your aerobic threshold type stuff.
And they're really going to get really fit with that. And once they kind of have that foundation
laid, then it's time to get into the specifics of whatever distance they're doing. So if it
where it'll differ will be like if they're doing right now on those plans, I think I've got 5k,
half marathon, marathon 50k, 80 to 100k and then 100 miles. So if they pick a 5k plan,
the order of operations is going to be different than if they pick the 100 mile plan, you're going
to see some of the same workouts show up in that plan. It's just going to be different areas of it.
So once they're really fit at that, you know, that foundational level, then, you know, if they're
doing say a 100 mile plan, they might start doing some short intervals, which I would on my
plans, I usually range between 30 seconds up to four minutes. It's kind of that short interval
range. Can you describe what you mean by short interval? It's like a sprint and a rest?
Yeah. Yeah. So I'll use basically like I'll use like a basic a 12 minute time trial. And that's
going to kind of like dictate for them what the intensity and the pace is going to be for some
of those. When they're under a minute, they'll push past that a little bit. But usually when we're
up to like above a minute and certainly up to four minutes, the like whatever pace or intensity
that they get for that kind of 12 minute time trial, where they're just seeing how far they can
go in 12 minutes is going to be kind of like about where they're going to target for those
intervals. So then those intervals are going to be structured. Let's say they're doing two
minute intervals, they're going to do two minutes at that intensity that they could do for 12 minutes
at a time trial. Then they're going to do a two minute real easy job or maybe even walk just to
kind of bounce back and they're going to repeat it. How do you figure out how far you can go in
12 minutes? Is that just trial and error? You build up to it, there's formulas. Yeah, there's some
newer formulas that are probably a little less brutal where you kind of, I haven't really dove
into these that in depth yet. I know that you can kind of replicate it by doing like a very
short interval and then a slightly longer one. And then like another one where like at the end
when that last one will kind of indicate what it is. And so you're doing less of it to get the same
answer to the question. But sometimes I think when it's someone who's new, I'd rather them just do
a 12 minute time trial because it's easy for them to execute in the sense that it's pretty clear.
You do a warm up, you do some strides, maybe some dynamic stretches and you just run as hard as you
can for 12 minutes as evenly paced as you can manage. And I mean, if it's going to produce
the data I'm looking for, no matter what happens, it'll produce the data. I mean, you can screw it
up, I guess you can go way too fast. Then you have this scenario where like, oh, it looks like
you're, you know, your first two minutes were drastically faster than your last two. And then
it's like, oh, we maybe screwed that one up. But I mean, really, like you don't even need to do the
time trial technically. A lot of times you can go off of feel like what we described with the
threshold stuff. And it's a high enough intensity where you can start to kind of like, your body's
going to kind of limit you to a degree where if I said we didn't do the time trial and just started
doing the intervals, we could figure out that if they're doing them right or not, if we see a
scenario where, oh, it looks like these first two intervals were significantly slower than the last
two, chances are we're still not quite dialed in in terms of what the intensity is that you
should be targeting for those. And as you do a few, you just get to know the pacing of it a little
better. And then you start seeing more even splits. So like, you know, their first two minute
intervals pretty close within a couple seconds of their second, or, you know, I guess we'd be
looking at distance if we're doing time. So like you went approximately the same distance on that
last one as you did the first one. And then we're just looking for improvement over time. So, you
know, we might spend four, six weeks kind of focusing on improving that, we're going to still
include kind of foundational running volume where you're going to be running like an easy pace and
enjoyable pace kind of in the interim. And then there's going to be some rest days. And that's
going to be where the levels come in my like level one plans are going to be like four day a week
training plans level two, we're going to be five day level three are going to be six day with one
day off. And you can obviously operate outside of those. Those those are just the ones that I put
up for the ready made when I'm coaching people kind of personalized, we just we look at like what
their history is with running their schedule, all sorts of stuff because oftentimes people get hung
up on like, well, what are the elites doing? What are the professionals doing? What are the
Olympians doing? It's like, well, it's like, what the Olympians are doing is they're waking up
and they're living and breathing everything around this one race that they're going to do in four
years. Or so it's like, we need to step away from that if you're working, you know, 10 hours a day
and you got kids and all this other stuff too. So there's a lot of variables that make it more
interesting to coach someone who's actually like not an elite athlete, or someone who's a professional
athlete, I should say. But yeah, so they're going to do that stuff, those shorter intervals, for
probably about like four to six weeks, if they're doing, if they're doing a longer race, like 100
miles, if they were doing say a 5k, we'd start bringing those workouts in near the end of their
plan, because that's going to be specific to their race pace. That's going to be the intensity that
maybe they're doing for, you know, like a 3k or 5k or something like that. So it's just going to be
more relative to what they're going to use. So it follows that philosophy, the plans follow that
philosophy of weaknesses and least specific stuff early. And then we start phasing closer to
most specific stuff and strengths as you get kind of near to the end of the plan.
And then the distance of or the time that you're going to spend out doing whatever
event it is going to dictate how those kind of get ordered in there.
I wonder if I could ask you for some sort of advice, maybe almost maybe look at me as a case study
of a particular runner and then see how we can plan stuff out. So which context to give? Okay,
so I have been first, let me say how much we're currently in Austin. I want to say how much I
love Austin for many reasons. First and foremost, people are super kind and just like, there's so
much love that I've experienced immediately when I came to the city versus many of the other cities
I've been in. It's not quite as welcoming and full of kindness immediately. I really love it here
in Austin. And because I've been going through a bunch of stressful stuff, I just kind of gave
myself a chance to say, okay, I'm going to stick to a diet of carnivore, keto, but I'm going to
eat as much as I want. Because primarily because just barbecue was part of the love I was getting
here. And I was like, either I resist or just give in. And I decided to give in and actually use
this as an opportunity to relax and have fun for the past three, four months, plus whiskey and so
on. And then the training kind of all, I also let go of the training a little bit just to relax,
to really focus on the work, focus on the love I've been getting, all those kinds of things.
But now I just kind of want to set a goal for myself to get back into both competing and grappling,
but also doing a hanging out with David Goggins and doing a conversation with him. But almost,
this is my own personal kind of race that I'm looking forward to. And in terms of distance,
that means running with David, something like a marathon plus plus, it's like, it's unclear what.
Plus, so my goal would be to continue eating carnivore, which is a whole other topic of,
I'd love to talk to you about. I feel great psychologically, sort of in terms of mental
performance in my work when I eat carnivore. And physically, I love it. I've never felt any kind
of need for carbs to improve performance in my running or anything else. Combine that with
fasting, intermittent fasting or eating once a day. I just, that's when I feel the best.
What else? I also feel best. And this is something you can push back on. I feel best when I just
run every day, like no breaks ever, and usually the same way every day. So like, I know this is
suboptimal. It'd be interesting to hear your opinion of just how suboptimal that is. So,
I think that actually lays out like where my mind is. I'm happy eating carnivore once a day.
I like running every day. The goal is to run a marathon in two months-ish,
two months plus, and then about three months to do a bunch of competitions and grappling.
Okay. With those parameters, I think like you actually probably would be a great candidate
for a maximum heroic function training strategy. Like you want that consistency where I'm going
to do the same thing each day. You don't want to beat yourself up so much any one day that you
can't get out and do the next one. That's the sweet spot with maximum heroic function,
is the trademark there is that you can keep going and keep doing it again and again and again,
because as long as you're not going out one day and trying to do twice as much as what you're
ready for, for that one specific... So the key for you is going to be picking the right starting
point and then building from there on what that day kind of entails in terms of how much running
you do. Where you could maybe get creative would be if you decided that it's a hard fast rule that
you run an hour every day, seven days a week, but we find out that to run your maximum heroic function
means you probably are better off sticking to 30 minutes. Then what you would maybe do is you would
run underneath your maximum heroic function for the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes.
Maybe throw some of those strides in there if you want to do that at the very end.
Then that middle 30 minutes is going to be maximum heroic function target. Then maybe after
four weeks, you start noticing, you know what? This 30 minutes isn't wearing me out near as much
as it used to. I feel like I could easily push past that. Well, let's up that to 40 minutes of that
60. You're always staying within that 60 minute parameter that keeps your schedule consistent,
your routine consistent. I'm wearing a heart rate monitor as I run to monitor it.
Sure. Yeah. You could do that. You could go perceived effort. I like to use them in tandem
in the sense that early on, I'll maybe look at my heart rate a little more often, especially for
shorter length. Heart rate can get messy the longer you go. I end up maybe stepping away
from heart rate a little more than some will at a certain point because ultimately I'm going to be
usually training or working with someone to run a race that's really long and they get cardiac
drift, dehydration, heat, things that are going to make the heart rate super messy. Yeah, but you're
probably your ability to measure perceived effort is exceptionally good. Mine is actually really
weak. Okay. Heart rate then. I need to do the still the work of connecting heart rate to the
perceived effort. Yep. That's exactly what I would use heart rate for then. You'll get to a point
probably by like in the first couple of months where you can still lean on heart rate if you want,
but it'll be kind of one of those things where you keep looking at it. You're like,
oh, wow, I can guess it. You play a game with yourself too. And you say, well, how close can
I guess? Yeah. You'll get it. So like for me, what I'll do is I'll do the run and then I'll look
at the heart rate afterwards and be like, oh, cool. I was right there. Or I remember feeling
like I was speeding up a little bit there and there are shows right there on the heart rate.
I also love sort of something we haven't talked about. I love push-ups and pull-ups,
so like body weight workouts. Again, it's mostly mental. I just enjoy the mental challenge of it.
I also like it makes me feel like if all I'm doing is running, it makes me feel I'm not like
one-dimensional. Yeah. One-dimensional. I mean, there's some aspect to running that's
not to be like hippie about it, but like, you know, you're with nature. You're running.
It's like we're born to do this thing. And in that same way, I feel like when I'm doing push-ups
and pull-ups, I feel like I was born to do that kind of stuff. Like it's like this
body weight exercises have that way about them. It doesn't have that dumbbell feel or doing bench
press or squats. Squats with weight. When you're just doing squats, body weight, when doing push-ups
and pull-ups, body weight, you know, just basic abs stuff, core stuff, body weight. I don't know.
I just love the way I feel doing that. So it's usually, I forgot to mention that part,
combine that with the running afterwards, doing some basic body weight stuff.
Yeah. And I think like you're going to get from, if we're not looking at it from like specifically
like training at a pace in order to get both the skeletal muscle adaptations as well as
the cardiovascular benefits, you're probably tapping into some of the higher intensity stuff
with that body weight stuff. Unless you're doing, I guess, no rest. It's very quick.
Okay. So is it, you're getting pretty high heart rate from that?
Yeah. Yeah. Very hard. Okay. Higher than running. Yep.
So you're checking that box there from just like a lifestyle, enjoyment, fitness, overall fitness
standpoint. I think you want to keep your running more aerobic then because you're getting that,
and you're probably getting it from like your grappling workouts too, I would guess. So
there's just not as big of a need for you from a big picture standpoint to be
doubling down on that stuff with your runs as well. And it sounds like you prefer not to.
That's right. So I mean, what about the distance of marathon versus 100 miles? Is that big
difference? What's a good goal to work towards? Is it marathon and the rest of it just takes
care of itself? Yeah. So you want to do a marathon and then ultimately do 100 mile after that? Is
that what you're saying? I have no idea what the guy wants to do.
Oh, so he's going to tell you spot on what you're doing so you have to be ready for anything.
Right. My own personal goal is to feel somewhat challenged, but comfortable running a marathon.
The longest I've ever run is 22 miles. But I, you know, there's been many stretches in my life
where I would regularly run like the long run would be close to 20 miles. So I, you know,
and then I was comfortably running 10 miles four months ago. It was like forever ago
until I injured myself a little bit by running in the snow and stubbing my toe to where it was
like, you don't realize how much you appreciate your toes until you stub them. That big toes
where all that power comes off. And so it's, it was surprising how long it took to heal
and how essential it was and how unpleasant running, how much you're running with it.
And then I kept like coming, trying to get back out there to run to think, I think it's okay.
And no, it's not okay. You really need to let it fully heal. At least that was my experience.
I couldn't like just suck it up. It was making it worse every time. It's one of those injuries
that could really feel even though it's so small where it's essential. So is there any difference
between the goal of marathon or 100 miles? Would you say, should I be prepping for 100 miles if
that's at all a possibility? The big difference is going to be like you're dropping intensity
significantly by going up to 100 miles versus the marathon. So the maximum rolling function,
I think is actually going to feed into that maybe a little bit better. It's probably going to be a
little closer. Depending on where, I mean, it all, it all varies a bit because like people,
people will focus on specific distances and they'll get very efficient and very adapted to that. So
like the, it kind of like, it's what makes running kind of messy where like you'll get,
for example, like the average person can hit their like lactate threshold for probably about like
60 minutes or something like that. Whereas you get these elite marathoners who've been
basically spending their entire life preparing for a marathon race, they can push almost up to
their lactate threshold and at their lactate threshold for almost like two hours. So it gets
a little messy when you start looking at it from that lens, but you don't really have to worry
about that too much because you're not really focusing on being the best possible 100 miler
or the best possible marathoner you could be. You want enough overall fitness that you can
just do either one of them without absolute misery because you did the couch to 100 mile.
Yeah, exactly. So I think like for 100 miles, the biggest difference I think,
given your context is just like the more physical things you are doing,
the better prepared you're going to be for the 100 mile. So it's almost given your context.
I wouldn't say irrelevant. You want to be doing running, but you're going to be doing that. Once
you put it in your program, it sounds like it's going to be pretty locked in. If you view it this
way, it's probably going to be more mentally beneficial too where, hey, today I did my run,
I did my body weight exercises, I did some grappling practice. I spent three hours working
out today. If you think of it like that, then you're moving your body, you're doing things that
are active for a good chunk of the day, especially relative to most people. So that's going to
actually be very helpful for you. The problem or the battle to get over is going to just be
you're going to break down physically running 100 miles and you're going to break down physically
running a marathon too. So you might just have to push through a little more discomfort
like from a physical standpoint compared to be a few decided, I'm going to do everything I can
and in these next 24 weeks to be able to run a full 100-miler.
Would you say it's physical or is it mental discomfort? I mean, isn't everything physically
uncomfortable? What do you train for if you're training for the chaos of, so it's not necessarily
the 100 miles, it's the chaos of the unexpected, which might include a 100 miles, but it might
also include a thousand push-ups in my case. You need a bit of jack-of-all-trades, which
you need to be. Yeah, but also like building up the confidence or maybe not, I don't know,
how do you survive a thousand push-ups? It's a combination of confidence that you have to
know that you can do that kind of thing, not necessarily the actual number, but like doing
crazy stuff. And the second is probably the base strength and endurance and also just the
practicing that process of not quitting. I feel like that's one of the things I really need to
do in the running space is like doing slightly unpleasant things where I'm practicing that,
like bringing my mind back and saying, nope, I'm going to keep doing it. And part of the running
every day has that benefit because some days you really don't want to, don't feel like running
and doing that, then you're practicing that muscle of doing it anyway. I don't know if there's
something you can say in terms of advice, how to practice the like doing something unpleasant
every day. Yeah, what I would do with that is I would try to make the unpleasant thing
be different from one day to the next if you can. So the fear I would have with making running
unpleasant every time would be it becomes like a negative feedback loop in your physiologically,
potentially as well as mentally where if the entire running process is miserable,
you're going to be miserable when you step on that starting line, whether it's a marathon or 100
miles. You've trained yourself that running equals miserable. Well, and here's the thing,
like if you look at just like, here's where the literature says on paper are like the,
you know, dozen workouts you should do in a training plan. And this is how you should
structure them right down to the minute. And you just say like, I'm going to give everyone this
schedule and they're going to do this every time rinse and repeat. My biggest concern with that
approach is you are potentially putting them in a position where the training is so boring and so
monotonous that like if they hit a roadblock mentally, they're going to fall apart very quick
because they've already exhausted themselves mentally just trying to do the same old interval
every time doing the same old, you know, workout and it doesn't necessarily have to be like
like one specific plan in its entirety could just be like, like the mix of things within it. So like
rather than like, if I just said, well, we're going to do three minute intervals, this entire
short interval process or two minute intervals or four minute intervals or 60 second intervals,
you know, by that sixth week, they might be so sick of that that they're not actually maximizing
their potential within that because there's no flavor there. And then they're also actually
getting less out of themselves than they would if we just got a little more creative and said,
okay, let's mix this up and let's do, you know, four one minute intervals, then take a little bit
of a break and then we'll do three minute intervals or at least changing it up from week to week so
that they have something different showing up even though we're addressing the same kind of
physiological adaptation. So like, I think what you want to do is you want to introduce the misery,
you want to be able to test yourself to the degree where like when you can recognize these
points if I don't want to be here, but I can do it push through it, but recognize that like
there's not necessarily going to be one event that you want to lean on to get that from because
you won't want to make that one event so miserable that you don't want to do it when it comes time
for the challenge. So if you can possibly say like, okay, on Tuesdays, the pushup workout,
I'm going to go 10 pushups more than I want to I'm going to get to that point where I'm like,
there's no more and then I'm going to do 10 more. And you're going to make that one miserable.
And then maybe on, you know, Thursdays, you decide to do like some of those sprints or
something at the end where you do a few of them and you're like, okay, this is where I'd be
comfortable to stop. Like, well, I'm going to do two more of them because I know I don't want to do
two more of them, but mix that up. So you're not, so at least you're getting enjoyment from some of
it and not just getting complete disgust from the entire process. There's actually quite a lot of
ways that I can introduce misery into the pushups and the running get creative, including, you know,
even just like stuff outside of the running, like taking a freezing cold shower or those kinds of
things, just introducing random kind of chaos into the system or having conversations with
people as an introvert. It's terrifying. More podcasts. More podcasts. So now starting the
training and Zach, you've been kind enough to also kind of be willing to help me out throughout
this process. So I look forward to where that goes. It's kind of fascinating. On the diet side,
you're one of the many things that make you fascinating is you've played with diet as well
and you're somewhat famous, I would say, for doing low carb or playing with low carb or meat-based
diets. Can you describe the potential, like how you're thinking about that has evolved
and the potential beneficial role of a carnivore diet or keto diet or a meat-based diet in training
as an ultramarathon runner? Yeah. And I think like where a lot of times things get confusing for
people here is the context of it too, where it's like they want an answer as to what do I eat for
endurance sport? And it's like, well, endurance sport is quite wide ranging as we've talked about
many times here. So there's going to be differences, I think, in just like what you want to maybe
necessarily prioritize both for the event you're doing and the intensity that's required for it,
training that's required for that event. And then also the individual component to where I think
this one often gets overlooked, where we tend to say like, well, we've got all these Olympic
medalists at the marathon and below distance who are eating a moderate to high carbohydrate diet.
So everyone needs to do that if they want to reach their potential in say the 3K to the marathon.
And in a perfect world, maybe that would be true, but there's a lot of other variables that often
get forgotten then that could positively or negatively impact that decision choice. So
I think Dr. Jeff Volk has done a great job of kind of highlighting this in the sense that
when he works with people, he works with people in the health sphere as well as the performance
sphere. And he's one of the main guys at Virta Health who's they've got like a 60% success rate
with working with folks with type two diabetes to reverse their type two diabetes. And I mean,
that's an astounding when you think of just any nutritional protocol, its success rate,
they're all incredibly low. They're very, very low. And the big difference with his
is the coaching aspect of it. Like they give support so these people like have someone to
turn to when they make a mistake or if they're thinking about doing something differently
or they don't know what to do rather than just kind of throwing it all up in the air and quitting,
they have a resource there. And that's probably a big reason why that's the success rate that
they have with that is they put those support mechanisms in place. That picture needs to
be carried into the performance world or the running world too, where we may have just been
identifying that Olympic distance athletes that can tolerate a very large portion of their diet
coming from carbohydrate is going to just it's going to filter those ones towards the Olympics,
filter those towards the same. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that like, if we would have taken,
say the gold medals in the 5k and put them on a low carb diet, they'd run faster. They probably
wouldn't because we may have already selected that that person's thriving on carbohydrate.
What I would be interested in is like, you have, let's say we have someone with equal talent,
but got weeded out along the way potentially because for whatever reason, they just weren't
able to tolerate like both the training and the nutrition requirements that they're being told to
do. So the coach is kind of, there's a culture where the coaches would really push a carb-heavy
diet and that that in itself would do the filtering process of people that are not,
it would filter out the people that are not able to tolerate carbs as part of their training.
I mean, I might be an example of this actually where, you know, you take someone where they,
for whatever reason, the carbs aren't working for them. Like it's unsustainable for them to
continue that path or if they do, they might have a shortened career. So they might be able to eke
out a few really good years, but then, you know, they're not going to be the person that are like,
wow, that person's 38 and they're still competing at the Olympics type of a person.
And, you know, you put them on a low carb diet. If you can control everything else,
like their entire lifestyle is based around training and racing, then, you know, they may
still have better potential by introducing carbohydrates at a higher level. But if that's
not going to be sustainable for them as a person, then, you know, what's the point kind of at
that unless they want to be like a kind of a spark in the pan, so to speak?
I just feel good eating meat performance wise.
Well, I think there's that group too. They may just not be the Olympians.
Yeah. And so we're not talking, I guess this conversation has several layers. One is for
the Olympics and one is for like, what is it, active athletes, they're like amateurs, whatever,
whatever category I put myself into, like people that exercise regularly and then maybe people
and then there's people who like exercise rarely. So on all of those fronts, I mean,
do you think it's possible to live a happy, active life eating meat only or mostly meat?
Yeah. What have you learned about this?
Yeah, I think so for some context, like I followed what I would call a low carbohydrate
diet for the last 10 years and just like kind of the training, I periodize it to a degree where
there are parts of my training where I do bring back a little more carbohydrate and there's periods
of my training, especially like the off season where I'm like very low and I might be like kind
of in that ballpark of like, you know, ketogenic, strict ketogenic or no carbohydrates for periods
of time. And what kind of food are we talking about? What's a strict low-carb diet?
I've ranged everywhere from like mostly plant-based, low-carb keto to like mostly animal-based.
I've very rarely gone much more than like two weeks strict where it's like I'm strict carnivore
or strict plant-based or anything like that. Like we're talking probably more like 95%
at the peak in terms of any type of like longer lasting from my personal experience of like being
like either in like the animal food camp or like the plant-based camp kind of a process.
So I've tried all of them things that stayed consistent over the 10 years as a kind of the
macro nutrient profile that I've done throughout the course. So one didn't win over the other
until it was a meat-based versus plant-based? Oh, for me, meat-based definitely. What was,
I mean, I was my highest meat consumption in 2019 and that was by far my best racing season.
Yeah, we keep coming back to that year. That was a good year for many reasons,
philosophically and nutritionally. Yeah, well, in 2020 happened and now I haven't had a really
good chance to... To improve. We'll see. Hopefully I've got some more in the tank.
That's strange. Most athletes that competed at your level have more carbs integrated into their
diets. So what have you learned about using meat in high performance? I think it's maybe less about
the meat and it's more about like what are you, what is it replacing? So if we go, if we step away
from like me specifically and just like the people that, because I mean, we're getting to the point,
I get its anecdotes, but like that's what we have at the moment because there's, I mean, there is
actually a study being done on like, I think, I guess they'd call it hypercarnivore where they're
like, I think above 80% of their intake from meat and they're looking at a few different things there.
But it's so weird and I keep interrupting, but so weird that it sounds unhealthy, hypercarnivore,
but it makes me feel really good. That's the individual thing. There's countless people now
who like, and I'm not saying that they could not have found another route, myself included.
Like in 2011, when I switched from moderate to high carbohydrate to low carbohydrate and saw
some very noticeable differences in the way I felt, the way I performed and all this stuff,
that doesn't mean that there wasn't another path. I just did not find that path. And the fact that
I found a path that was producing the results I was looking for is really all that matters in my
mind. I don't really care if there was a parallel path that works just as well or
something like that. Because ultimately, we only have one shot at everything we're doing,
so it'd be great if I could go back and try four or five different things.
Well, the annoying thing is that the body adjusts to whatever the heck you're doing,
so it's hard to do good science even on yourself.
Yeah, I've referenced my 2019 racing season a few times and it's like, it'd be silly for me
to put all of the emphasis on my nutrition plan for that because it also comes with
two decades of endurance training. So it's possible and it's very likely that a huge portion of that
success was just the culmination of a lot of work over time from the training side of things.
I just think anytime you hyper-focus on one area or pick a couple variables and just target those,
you find yourself in a position where you're putting other things in the most uncharitable
light possible. So then you have this situation where it's actually a combination of a variety
of different things. So where are the big movers? And for me, nutritional shift was pretty clear
that that improved my sleep and my recovery. And I mean, people can say, well, there's the placebo
effect, which is a very real concern. But for me personally, a 10-year placebo effect would be a
quite lengthy placebo effect. And I do think it's individual though. I emphasize that a lot
because I've worked with tons of people with this and I do see a range from person to person.
I've worked with people who come to me and they're like strict keto and we raise up their
carbohydrates a bit and they're like, okay, I feel way better doing it this way. And I've worked
with people who they come to me moderate carbohydrate, but they're interested enough.
They want to try a lower carb. So we, you know, we titrate them down and I've had clients where
I'm like, okay, I'm going to give them this workout and they're going to wish they brought back a
little bit of carbohydrate and then they go and they nail the workout and I'm just like baffled
that because they're different from me. And every time, you know, when you have your own
personal experience, the first kind of guttural response is, oh, if I had done it, would have
gone this way. Why did it go the complete opposite way for them? And you kind of have to just kind
of step out of your own perspective a bit and say like, okay, well, they're different, you know,
for whatever reason, they're getting, getting along like this. I've had like several moments
in my life where you kind of realized the body is weird and it's weirder than the average advice.
Like one of them is how well I perform for my own standards when I fast. First of all, intellectually,
but that's more known and understandable. But like physically, the fact that I could train
like not eat 20 hours, 24 hours, and then do a hard like jujitsu session for like two hours,
like hard, it's incredible to me. Like this makes no sense because I used to eat like many
times a day. Of course, you have to eat like you don't want to eat too close to the training
session. What's my thinking? But you definitely need to load up on carbs like three hours before
like in order to have enough energy. The fact that I could not eat and have like incredible focus,
but also athleticism, like both endurance and explosive. I mean, jujitsu is a special thing.
It's like more like chess. It's not like powerlifting or no, not powerlifting, Olympic
lifting, or it's like true explosiveness. But that's fascinating. And it makes me wonder like
what other things are there to discover about yourself? The annoying thing about food is
it's delicious. And so it's hard to do good science on yourself. Like to do, you know, for two weeks
or a month to do like strict no carbs. And then maybe next month you add 20 grams or 40 grams
of carbs and see how you actually feel. Not like in that moment, but over a period of several weeks.
And then doing everything else like right with based on best available science,
like with electrolytes and vitamins, but then also like remove all the humans from your life that
affect you positively or negatively because you might feel amazing because you're hanging out
with cool people and then, you know, like removing basically all the variables. It's kind of fascinating
and you kind of all of us land in a place where we find something that worked for us
and then we maybe use some of the placebo effect to help us out to stick in that place.
And then I suppose that's the way to live life. I guess it's possible to find the optimal for
any of us, but carnivore is an interesting new kind of caveat and you challenge to the
nutritional community because more and more people seem to be doing well under carnivore.
Yeah. Well, the nutrition community is probably, we just got done like dealing with the vegans
and now we got this opposite end of the spectrum coming at us. But I think, well, I mean, what
this all tells, what this all tells me is like, there is for one, like in our food environment,
like the failure rate of any one approach at a population level is going to be incredibly high.
I mean, it's why we have, you know, what is it like 88% of the population has some sort of like
metabolic syndrome. And it's like, you know, it's because there's an endless quantity of
everything that you can get your hands on for relatively cheap. And I think that's, that
presents a problem. If your mindset is going to be, we need this set of parameters for nutrition
and everyone needs to adhere to that, or you're wrong. And it's like, well, tell that to the
person who like went carnivore and cleared up some like crazy skin ailment or something like that.
That's a weird one. Like where the carnivore seems to treat like, like depression. It's like,
like mental stuff. It's fascinating. There's all these stories. Again, it's anecdotes, but it's like
the mental one, I think may, I'm stepping out a bit on a limb here, but I want to say like,
some of the research of Dominic DiAgostino and Jeff Ollick was looking at the ketogenic diet,
which a carnivore diet is basically going to be a part of a ketogenic. I mean, you could always
go like way too high on the protein, I guess. But most people that I see doing carnivore,
they're cognizant enough that at least if they're doing it for therapeutic reasons,
they're not going like, you know, 50% protein, 50% protein. They're more like 70, 30, 80, 20,
something like that. And, and I think like you, you do see some, some work with like the brain
and so the mental stuff. I know some of the, I'm not sure if this was part of the DARPA funding
that, that Dr. Dominic DiAgostino had, where they were looking at things like mental stuff,
like post-traumatic stress disorder and that sort of stuff with, with like a strict ketogenic diet.
So I wonder if some of that, like the depression related stuff has to do with that, where now
like their body is just fueling their brain differently than maybe they were in the past.
But that's just, you know, wild guesses on my part. And I'm deviating from the conversation.
But like, no, that's brilliant. In terms of your own story on food, can you say something? I think
we're kind of referring to diet broadly. Can you say something about how you like to fuel
your like, whether it's race or great training sessions, like maybe the day before, let's go
even that far during and maybe a few hours after. Okay. It'll be a little different for racing than
it will be for like a big workout just because the interesting thing about ultra running is just
like, you never do the race even like most endurance races, you're going to cover the distance,
you're going to replicate the race almost up to it in training. Whereas with a hundred miles,
you might replicate a third of it. So, so I'll do, I'll walk you through kind of my approach for
for like a hundred mile race. And I can tell you maybe what I would do differently on like a training
day. But yeah, so for where the community is an agreement is that you do want to be
very good at burning fat for ultramarathons. I mean, there's just like the intensity is low.
If your ratios are skewed very high towards carbohydrate metabolism, then you're going to
have to defend your muscle glycogen through tons of carbohydrate consumption. And that's just going
to be very hard to do over the course of an entire day, even at low intensities. So it's a fuel
tank thing. I mean, it's like your, your leanest endurance athletes have way more fat than they
do glycogen stores. When you're doing low intensity performance, you want to be burning high levels
of fat and sparing that muscle glycogen. What I tend to do is I want to start the race burning
really high levels of fat. So I'm going to, I'll maybe have some carbohydrate the night before
for dinner, but then I'm going to lean into the overnight fast breakfast the morning of
I'm going to stay away from carbohydrates for a hundred mile or anyway. And I'm going to have
something like something that's pretty like the high energy, low volume. So like I'll do like an
S fuels life bar. They've got like, what's in an S fuel life bar? Are we talking about carbs or
we're talking about protein? Fat protein. Fat protein bar. And then they make some awesome.
Yeah. So it's not as low carb. Yep. Yeah. They make S fuels makes a whole product line that's
like kind of positioned for a low carb athlete. So they have some products on their lineup that
offer some carbohydrate, which is perfect for me because I do introduce some carbohydrate on racing
and some of my bigger training sessions and things. But the majority of their products are low carb.
So like they have like, you know, how you get like the powders that you put into like your
drinks that are like high carbohydrate, you know, sports products, they make a version of that.
That's like fat based. Oh, cool that you can mix in with water. Yep. Cool. Yeah. So they've got like
a creamer version and then a fruity flavor version. So you can like replicate the taste and the feel
of drinking like a like, you know, a sports drink. That's awesome. I know it is. Well,
and that's so much of it too, because people are always like, I don't know, I just like to have
my Gatorade or whatever. It's like, well, you can have it now. Just it won't have all that.
You can see you can bring that kind of thing with you. Yeah. So I'm leaning on a lot of those
like kind of liquid calories, like those low volume, high energy, fat protein stuff the morning of
so that when I start the race, my body is going to be encouraged to start out burning high levels
of fat. Once I get going, probably about 45 minutes in, I'll start introducing small amounts of
carbohydrate. So at that point, my body's revving pretty high fat metabolism. And by introducing
some carbohydrate in the context of the, you know, let's say my 100 mile personal record,
you know, I'm running approximately nine miles every hour. So I'm probably going through about
a thousand calories in an hour's time. I'm going to start just like defending muscle glycogen by
burning super high levels of fat at the heart rate I would do for that. I'm probably burning
somewhere between 80, 90% fat, you know, 12 hours of that you can chip away at your muscle
glycogen to the point where you don't necessarily want to go zero carb. So I'm basically just
trying to defend what I know I'm going to be burning from the carbohydrate side of that
80 to 90% fat, 10 to 20% carbohydrate by taking in like usually, you know, I've gone as low as
about 15 grams of carbohydrate per hour and as high as 40 grams. And the reality is somewhere
in between is probably the sweet spot, but 40 I can get away without any digestion issues.
So I'm not really concerned pushing up to that during a race since I'm only concerned about
performance on that day. Is it the carbs that's the problem? Or is it fiber? Oh, just oh,
from going above 40 grams? Or just because you mentioned digestion issues. Like one of the things
for me, like one of the cool things about fatty protein, protein and fat is like my stomach
just feels way better. Yeah. So like carbs introduce like bloating and just not feeling great.
Yeah. And I think the funny thing is like if you look at the position paper for ultra marathon
single day events and it's, you know, it's very limited in the sense that then it's not anyone's
fault, it's just we don't have a lot of great research on 100 mile races. It's really hard
to study what's going on when someone's running 100 miles. But they will say a moderate carbohydrate
diet is recommended, but they'll also say that it's like something like 60% of participants
are going to report some sort of like digestion issue during the event. So then it kind of
becomes an issue of do you want to flip that coin? Do you want to flip that coin?
It wouldn't be the 40%. Right. Exactly. So for me, what I found is like,
I can push up to 40 grams without getting any digestion issues. Do I need 40 grams?
Probably not at least not based on kind of the numbers that would be like that I would see on
like if I went and actually got like a metabolic heart test or something like that. But it's
possible. I mean, if I had a really good race that I would get close to burning that per hour.
For most folks that are following a moderate high carbohydrate diet are going to be recommended to
like 50 to 70 grams during a single day ultra marathon event. And you'll see some, you know,
some recommendations of up to like 100 grams, not so much for ultra marathons, but just in general
for like a performance standpoint, which I mean, it's one of those things where it's like
application versus like what you can do in a lab for one hour is going to be a lot different,
especially when you're stretching out distances well past that. And I'm diverting a little here,
but I mean, there's like an approach of like training your gut so you can like
be able to tolerate that much carbohydrate, which you can do and you may have to if you're
going to follow a high carbohydrate diet. But again, we go back to that practicality standpoint of
if you're a professional Olympian who's living and breathing performance and you're burning two
to three times, you're messing resting metabolic rate on some days, like you, you may be able to
actually consume 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour during your training sessions and and just,
you know, barely stay on top of your nutritional needs. Most people who are running ultra marathons
aren't going to be, you know, probably training much past 10 hours per week. And they're probably
not going to have the, I'll call it they're a dietary budget to tolerate 100 grams of carbohydrate
consumption during their workouts and still be able to stay healthy. And, you know, so I think
that's kind of like a bit of a, of a non, a non starter for the majority of people, unless we
want to talk about like a tiny percentage of the 1% of top performers. So maybe you can talk about
the training, like fueling yourself during training as well. Is there, and also as part of that,
is it possible to train mostly fasted? Because as a side comment, let me just say, I like, again,
not anywhere, not even like one tenth of your level of performance, but you know, I try to push
myself and I just feel much better when I'm fasted. So water and maybe some salt for longer runs for
anything over like 10, 15 miles, but no food. Yeah, I think, I mean, I like to train on empty stomach.
I do most my, my biggest training session usually in the morning and it usually what'll
determine whether I eat something or not before that is like how much do I need to eat that day
in order to stay on top of it to be able to train again the next day. So I'll, I'll, I'll usually
do something similar to what I do before a race if I need to kind of stay on top of calories for
the day. So I'm not like at noon with like no calorie intake and like 5,000 calories to try to
consume before I go to bed that night and get out and do the same thing the next day. But yeah,
I think if I were, if I were doing what you're doing, like if that were my lifestyle, I think
I would do almost all my runs fasted. I don't see why I would be eating a lot before it because
it's like I'm just introducing something that could, especially if you're noticing like here's
what I'd say. If I was doing that and I was like, wow, this run sucks. And then I introduced something
beforehand and now my run was feeling great and my progress was getting better. That's when I would
maybe consider having something before. But if you're running both of those, those like self
experiments, you're noticing, yeah, if I eat something before I go on this workout, the
workout's less enjoyable. I'm not noticing any, any increased improvements on it. Again, it's a
little messy, like we said before, it's hard to really, you can't go back and try it a different
way on that specific day. But I think, I think most people, if they're just like, they go at it
with like no bias in the sense that they're like trying to make one work versus the other, you
can get at least a good enough look at it. And if absolute peak performance in one activity,
one very specific activity, isn't your goal, then it's like, do you really care if one has a 2%
performance increase that you won't even probably notice because there's other variables that will
clearly overpower that 2% one way or the other. And there's some benefit in terms of freedom
and letting go of like having to think about some of these variables. I see sort of fasting is
even if it's like a hit on the performance, it's worth it to just not think about it.
There's some really nice aspect to just putting on shoes, not caring like what shorts you wear
or like what you're outfit is, like not being optimal in every way and just not caring and just
enjoying the purity of just running, no matter what, just enjoying the natural aspect of it.
There's a side to me that sometimes just like craves a lifestyle where it's like,
I have like such a small house and only what I need and just like a handful of food products
that I know I enjoy and work well for me. And I don't even have the distraction of the other stuff.
There's like a, there's like a, there's almost like a weight that comes off your shoulders when
you can, when you think, even just thinking about it, like it's so simple.
So the reason I, I'm mostly a minimalist like that. The reason I have stuff is I realize like
you probably have to fit into society. And if you want to have other people in your life,
you should probably get used to having stuff because, because most people like stuff.
Right. Well, yeah, there's that side of it too. And there's, there's a whole,
you don't want to ostracize yourself too much. And I think anything you can kind of like,
you can manipulate that a little bit where there's things that are like not specific to,
you know, that's going to negative impact the people around you or your experiences with them.
So there's a balance like everything, I guess.
Yeah. I mean, that's why I drink, I think I mentioned you offline, drink vodka, whiskey,
sort of alcohol, because I don't feel good about it the day after or sometimes multiple days after.
So I know it's not good for me. So I do a lot of stuff that's good for me.
We, everything we talked about, exercise and diet and all those kinds of things.
But the alcohol almost symbolizes embracing the chaos of life, the, the wild and the amazing
things that could happen. And I think that's really important because if you optimize everything
about life, then you're going to miss most of the fun stuff that happens in life. So it's not
all about the optimization. It's some of it, like everyone has different things on what they,
how they introduce that chaos in a controlled way. For me, alcohol is that because I'm okay
drinking not too much. So I can control that aspect. Even though it's unhealthy, it introduces
just the right amount of fun that I embrace it. Yeah. And I mean, it is one of those things where
it's like, I'm going to benefit now and pay later a little bit too. Where like, and hey,
if you go and you, you go out with some friends and drink and you have memories that last a lifetime
from that experience and you paid for it for a couple of days after, then hey, maybe that's a
fair trade off from life experience. And part of the vodka thing is I need to honor my ancestors.
So it's like you have to, you know, you can't, you can't turn your back on your past.
Let me ask about the 100 mile world record on the treadmill. So for most people, running a
treadmill is really boring. So that's kind of their experience of it. That's probably the
first thing that would say that seems like really boring to run 100 miles in a treadmill.
So would you say it's boring? Like what were some places your mind went to make that happen?
So this one is interesting to me because I definitely recognized the boredom and the,
the difference. The thing that the question I can't quite answer, I think with it is like,
could I have remedied that with better preparation? Because the scenario that put me on a treadmill
for 100 miles was, you know, it was March, 2020, basically the cascade of every race on the plan
it got canceled. And I was in a position where I was going to be doing a runnable 100 miler
on a track in mid to late April. So I had like the majority of my training under my belt. So I
was like kind of putting the finishing touches on that. And I was like, Oh, great. Here we are.
Like, you know, what do I do with this fitness? Do I just scale back and hope the events come back
and fall and then peak again? Or do I find something to use this fitness for? And the
treadmill was the closest thing to what I had been training for in terms of just like a mechanical
like flat running, essentially, that I could, that I could think of. And my thought was, okay,
well, I'll just live stream myself on a treadmill and see what happens. It ended up turning into
like a quite a big event, but you don't usually incorporate treadmill running into your running
into your training. I don't not incorporate it. I just don't incorporate it in the way that would
be necessarily conducive to, you know, dealing with the mental aspects of being on a treadmill for
a hundred miles. Was it that different than running on a track? It was from the sense that
here's the way I describe it is when I'm on a track, it's a controlled environment and everything
can be very uniform. But there are tiny little micro adjustments in pace that that I'm doing
subconsciously that give me the sense of control. Right. No, I might run the exact same split,
but there's like a fraction of a second or, you know, a fraction second faster than a fraction
second slower that equals the same outcome. It gives you that sense of control. You're
determining how fast you're going on a treadmill. You're responding to the belt. So the advantage
is you can set a pace and know you're hitting it. The disadvantage is you're being told what to do
by that machine. And that gets very frustrating. I've felt like I wanted to step off. Like you get
to like certain points where you're just like, like even stepping off what I noticed, I learned
this on the day of actually, I noticed there's something where it didn't really matter how
long I get off. Like I get off to use the bathroom and that was a little bit of a longer break.
Then I had like a hiccup during my event where we ran so much power through one end of the house
that the screen on the treadmill was blacking out. So we ended up, so I ended up jumping back
and forth on treadmills for quite a bit in the beginning. And I noticed even turning it off,
stepping on the other end, starting the other one up gave me like, you know, a handful of seconds
between was enough of a mental break of just like that release of being told what to do to reset.
So maybe if you were in the future, you would figure out what exactly how much is needed to
have them at the break. I never actually thought about that. I mean, obviously for you, but also
for people like me, like amateur runners, that that's the source of frustration with the treadmill,
that there's sometimes a small adjustments in pace that we do running, not on the treadmill,
on the ground that feel like essential for that. Just like you said, that experience of control,
like feeling like you're in control, somehow that's really, I don't know, that's somehow
liberating in the way that a treadmill can be just the source of frustration.
The funny thing though about the treadmill is I actually like to do faster workouts on the
treadmill, like long intervals or something like that or tempo runs, because for that,
for that type of stuff, sometimes for those, I want to release the brainpower required to hit
that pace and say, you take care of that. And for that, it's fun, but those are over quick,
so you don't really run into the times. Yeah, that's fascinating for like precise control of pace.
You've also during that stream got to interact with the greatest athletes of all time, but
for sure, what's your, he's actually doing, I don't know if you're paying attention to this,
but I guess he has a goal of running 2000 miles this year. I have a guy and she has to talk to
Joe Rogan yesterday about this, which is fascinating. I think he's a little bit doubtful of Bert's
ability to be the ultra performer that he so naturally is. What's your thoughts about Bert
as a runner? What's your advice to him? And what was your interaction like as part of this treadmill
challenge with him? I love Bert because he's such a nice person. I mean, as a guy who's just
accelerated in popularity over the last few years, like he is like super kind. So for folks who are
curious, like I've met Bert a couple of years earlier and I just randomly asked him like,
Hey, I'm doing this live stream thing. We're doing it for fight for the forgotten. We're
trying to raise some funds for them. Would you want to come on the live stream for a bit? And I
thought maybe he'd come off like five or 10 minutes and I thought that would be amazing if he did
that. He ended up coming off like over an hour. He said he went past his slot, sat in the next
slot and just started talking with some of the other guests. I feel like he's as unchanged from
like his popularity as one can get away with. And it's just like his lifestyle I think is very
unpredictable in the sense that like if he wants to run like X time for a specific race,
that's going to pull away from his lifestyle so much to focus on that. Luckily for him,
he's actually a great athlete. Like it's under that layer of a fat. Yeah. So if people who are
not familiar, Bert crushes a comedian who takes off his shirt often has a elegant layer of fat
around him. He's also a party animal. So he's a weird balance of like healthy and unhealthy.
So he drinks a lot during, I think there's some debate about that, but certainly after
his performances. But at the same time, he's into kind of the running thing and he does
quite a bit of treadmill running I think. So and like I said, has this challenge of running
2000 miles this year. So it's fascinating to have somebody who so fully embraces life and the full
joys of life as represented by the huge amounts of drinking and partying and just being a wild man.
But also at the same time, like being at least curious about this challenging yourself in
the physical realm. It's kind of fascinating. It reminds me of one of my favorite comedians
like Eddie Isard who's been doing those challenges basically off the couch just running a marathon,
a day kind of thing. It's fascinating to see the purity of those challenges when like exercise
hasn't necessarily been deeply ingrained in your life. And you kind of just embrace the challenge
anyway and take it on. And that's another way of looking at it because we've been talking about
running as a performance like optimization thing where training is such a huge part of
this process like race day is just the cherry on top. But there's for some people where the race
is the cake. Yeah. It's like they just take it on as a pure challenge as the as the as the thing
you haven't really trained for is the thing you haven't you don't understand the intricacies of
but you take it on anyway. And that that reveals something about the human spirit as well.
Yeah. And there's definitely like a switch that flips when you in your mind decide I'm going to
do this where then all of a sudden it goes from like you stop thinking about oh that's not possible
to like well I'm just going to do it. And I think Burt highlights that perfectly in a lot of cases
where like he's he's maybe not even thinking it through enough to get to the point where it's
like he gets the point where he thinks this is not possible where most people would look at it
and think huh I don't know if I can actually physically accomplish that task. Burt's just
like oh yeah I'm going to do it. And my my thing thought with Burt was the 2000 mile thing is
where are we going to find him at the end of the year with like 36 hours to go on 100 miles.
And that's right. That's right. That's what's going to happen. And it's going to be hilarious.
So speaking of things that are insane and like taking on challenges that don't seem like you
didn't you didn't think through you're thinking about running across the country in in a challenge
you call the transcontinental run. Can you describe this challenge and what the heck you're thinking?
Yeah. Yeah. So this is you know one thing that is exciting about ultramarathons I think in a lot
of places especially early in someone's ultramarathon adventure if they decide to do that as a you
know part of their life is you have like these early years where you're doing things for the
first time and it's like so cool and scary at the same time to think today I'm going to run 100
miles and the furthest I've ever run before is 50 or something like that. And you just know you're
going to do something that you've never done before you're going to experience things you would have
never been able to predict. And it's like this really interesting unique like human experience
I think. So for me I've spent most of my career at this point like doing I got through that phase
in a lot of the events I'm really interested in. And then it was like now let's repeat it and see
if we can do it better. And you get into that mindset for a while which is also a fun mindset.
But there is that kind of like desire to kind of have that human experience again of like
you know not knowing what could happen or is this doable type of a thing but still doing it and
figuring it out along the way. So I would describe the transcontinental project as something like
that it's not anything unique to me or anything new there's been a lot of people who've done it
before but essentially it's a route there's different routes there's one kind of main one
that's done for like that is used as the record route more or less that you go from San Francisco
to New York and essentially you live out of an RV while you're running. So you run as much as you
can during the day then you go to bed at night and then you get up and do it again. And you're
handling all the logistics in the process of trying to make sure you can get up the next day
and do again what you did the day before which is going to be the biggest difference. So for me
I've done all single day ultramarathons where you're going to wring yourself dry at knowing the
next day or week or however long you need you're going to be able to just kind of like shut everything
down and let everything catch back up whereas with this like you know you're doing it again and again
again. Yeah. And you know the record is by a guy named Pete Kosselnik who average just over 72 miles
a day finished in 42 days six hours and 30 minutes. And I mean just like 72 miles 73 miles and then
like next day again next day again just knowing every day when you finish you spend a whole day
running and then okay I'm gonna go to bed I'm gonna wake up in the morning I'm gonna have to do this
again and then you know have that happen for six weeks and that's if it goes very well. So luck I
assume is a big part of this. Yeah for sure. I mean there's just so many variables that are
uncontrollable on this type of an experience just because I mean you go over this year as maybe you
hit a storm. You know you try to time it most people do it in start in September so you can get
over the mountain passes without a big storm coming through but then also get to the east coast
before it's like the middle of winter. So like September early September start is kind of ideal
but you can you know I mean Pete was very fortunate from a weather standpoint I think he made one big
mistake we got a little too aggressive in the beginning had to take a full day off so he actually
averaged from a moving day standpoint closer to 75 miles per day. But yeah I mean there's gonna be
things that I can't prepare for won't know it's gonna happen you know a lot of that will get a
lot of the logistical stuff will get leaned on with the crew. So that's I mean that's the hardest
part right now is just like getting all that put together where it's like okay I need to have the
RV ready I need to have all the stuff and we need to have the places figured out where we're gonna
stop and and the people that can you know dedicate that much time to an activity like that you know
there's a lot of moving parts even before you start the adventure itself. When you see you're
taking the San Francisco to New York right? Yeah. And when are you doing the the run? September first
is when you know barring anything like catastrophic between now and then. This is really exciting but
I mean this is incredible so you you'll probably have a bunch of people just randomly running with
you are people going to be tracking where you're located? Yeah so I'll be documenting everything
because I mean my hope is that I'm doing it primarily to raise awareness for Fight for the
Forgotten Justin Reigns charity but with that said I think I am capable of if I have a good
experience you know chasing the record or going after the record or at least getting close to
it so. Oh shit so you're gonna try to beat this record? Yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna go out with the
I'm gonna structure the process in a way that leaves that door open is the way I would describe it.
I'm gonna try not to do anything that would potentially put it in a situation where that
becomes the primary goal just because I want to make sure that the reason I decided to do the
first place was for Fight for the Forgotten so I want to make sure that I don't end up
two-thirds way across the country with a broken leg and I'm like hey guys uh I guess the donation
button's turned off. So folks don't like don't sacrifice that right that goal but also there's
a community aspect to it that I feel like are you going to I mean so you're going to document and
post yeah but are you going to also is there a safety perspective here it's like the Forrest Gump
thing you might have large numbers of crowds that run along with you for a while yeah worried about
that kind of thing. I wouldn't say I'm worried about I mean I think there's probably there's
remote enough spots along the way where you'll get some alone time more more likely I don't
necessarily mind if people want to jump in there'll there'll be some people that will
definitely want to do that and and they can come in and but the reality is like it's probably not
going to be a scenario where there's like you know 40 people following me at all times. You say that
now. Yeah you never know just wait for this podcast. Yeah and then if Joe finds out you're doing this
then we're really in trouble. All right so um I mean what are the things that you think will be the
hardest for you and also like how do you train for this kind of thing um and what yeah what are the
hardest things you anticipate and how do you train for them? Yeah so the way I'm looking at this is
it's much less about performance from the traditional sense where I need to be able to be x fit. I think
I need to be injury proof. That's what's going to be a detriment. If you think about it like
if I managed to average nine minute mile pace for a day that would be 80 miles in a 12 hour
time frame so I'll easily have 12 hours of moving time per day. Um nine minute pace I think is slow
enough that it's not an unreasonable clip so like when you I mean obviously there's things that
slow you down or I'll probably take walking breaks you know stopping breaks you got to
stay on top of nutrition that's the other big thing too I'm you know probably eating like anywhere
between 10 to 15 thousand calories a day which is you know I could probably count on my hand a
couple of occasions where I've eaten that much in my life so now I got to do that for six plus
weeks in a row and you don't want to have any stomach problem or try to try to minimize the
amount of stomach problems so would you estimate about 12 to 13 to 14 hours of running every day?
Yeah that's probably like from from the first step to the last step it'll probably be somewhere
around like say 14 hours 13 hours or something like that would be a pretty good estimate.
And then getting rest and so and then minimizing the risk of injury which could be as small as like
like literally uneven surfaces resulting to like stepping the wrong way I mean that's going to be a
lot of steps. Yeah yeah uh-huh. So the probability of injury are you worried about that kind of
stuff? Can you strengthen the ankles or those kinds of things that prevent possibility of injury?
And that's that's where I'm putting a lot of my focus in is uh I think like just being running
fit is going to be like generally speaking is going to be important. I'm going to I think just
from a lifetime of running is going to be a huge advantage. A lot of these like kind of like
mechanical movements are going to be very established it's just going to be about can I
tolerate that volume of it. There I think that I'm doing more strength work. I think this is
something where it's like you know maybe adding five pounds of lower body muscle is going to be
an advantage versus a disadvantage when you're looking at power weight ratio because I just
really don't I never need to be running a 648 mile for this adventure. And I so I'm looking at
that I'm doing a lot more of that stuff focusing on that. The training is changing a fair bit where
it's more polarizing versus kind of being I mean I've always had some polarization in my training
but this is even to an extreme where like I'm going to do some simulations where uh you know
I go out and do two or three days where I target the exact thing I will be doing on the Transcon.
You were on Instagram posting about the simulator run so you legitimately like trying to perfectly
copy what would happen one two or three day segment on that run. Yeah just to kind of start to weed
out where are the potential problems. So let's say I do a two or three day simulation where I'm
averaging 70 miles a day and I find out at the end of three days there's a really weak spot here.
I need to address that or I need to find a way to make that not a weak spot. I think that's the
only way to really get as close as you can to avoiding injury. Have you done that yet? Have
you done a two day Sony mount like even that's incredibly difficult? I haven't yet I'm going
to build up to it because that's the other thing too is like I don't think you want to be so aggressive
with that where you get injured trying to figure out how not to get injured. So I'll I'll what I'm
going to start do what I just started last week is I've uh it looks really weird on my training
schedule because like last week I ran almost 150 miles but I took two days off so it's like
usually for me to get to 150 miles that's a seven day training week. So that's the way I'm doing it
like I did I did a day where I did uh you know two like just over 20 milers separated with by just
like a couple hours and within that couple hours I did like a three three mile walk the following
morning I woke up and ran I think it was like just over 36 miles first thing in the morning
just to get an idea of just like kind of like what does it like to be I mean this was in Phoenix
too so it was 100 degrees for the majority of that to suffer then rest yeah suffer again how
that feels there's enough precedent with this sort of an activity where like everyone I've talked to
so far has told me like there is going to be like this kind of like gradual decline in the early
stages where you're just like okay it's getting worse it's getting worse it's getting worse and
you hit a point where you're just like it hits kind of rock bottom and then like it starts to
kind of gradually improve so you kind of have to let yourself get it's weird I think I can maybe
eliminate I'm trying to find a way to eliminate some of that by doing the simulations whereas I
from what I've seen I haven't seen a lot of people do the simulation route yet I've seen
people just do like a lot of training and then say like okay I'll spend the first seven to ten
days adapting to this and then I'll get comfortable within this environment and be fine whereas I'm
going to try to get to a point where like some of that is already kind of cleared up before I start
but not so much that I'm like adding like an extra essential week to the trip with worth of running
what do you think would be the hardest simulator run leading up to like will you do three days
yeah I think I'll probably try to do three days somewhere between 70 and 80 miles each
will be kind of like the goal will that be in August you think how close to yeah I would
like it to be in August like early August would be ideal I think like maybe the first week in
August because that gives me kind of three weeks to let things kind of settle down from that but
then it's crazy this is incredible it's it's actually interesting because like if I did let's
say I did the simulation now the problem with that is like the adaptations from just like the
breakdown and the strengthening would likely be gone unless I did it again so I want to inch up
to it so that like and get close enough to the starting date so that I'm still kind of like
you know holding on to that adaptation when I start it so then those first few days maybe
aren't quite as miserable and you said if everything goes amazing and you're challenging
the record it'll be like a 42 day run yeah so that's what the record is almost exactly six weeks
and that's at 72 and a half miles per day so will you be posting online and like yeah yeah
Instagram's gonna be a big one I think I might do a few like YouTube stuff along the way too
yeah I'm still iron out exactly how much I think at minimum I'll do I'll do some Instagram stuff
I think I'll go live on Instagram a few times during the day when I take like walking breaks
partly just to kind of I think keeping people in I mean it stays true to the the goal of
raising awareness but it also I find when you bring people in there is an added pressure to that
but there's also this sense that I've learned from the treadmill experience since we had like
a pretty big production for that in the sense that I mean as much as you can turn on a camera in
your own house but like the I remember thinking we had like 30 people lined up to come in and
guest speak during that and there's points of that where I was like you know you get that voice
we talked about at the beginning where it's like you know maybe you could quit like do you really
need to run 100 miles on a treadmill is this really gonna be valuable for you yeah and then
you think about oh you know what there's you know Courtney DeWalter one of the best female
ultra runners to ever exist is taken in the 30 minutes to an hour out of her day to come on
in two hours to you know help me you know amplify this event and do I really want to be sending
emails out to these people saying hey guys I know you were gracious enough to block out time of your
day you know I think there's a little bit of that to do where you're like you're you're jumping in
with the community that is following along and saying here's how things are going show them the
best the worst and everything between and then ultimately have that hold you accountable a
little bit too it's like harder to get up in the morning and not go back out I don't know how you
are but I had to uh whenever I did any kind of physical stuff like the 48 hour challenge or just
any kind of running I hated turning on the camera I hated it like because you have to like smile and
be friendly and stuff oh I'm just gonna be super miserable if I'm miserable well that's it so like
exactly in some sense that's what people we're gonna get a happy zacker name exactly it's like
you're making bets and I'm sure there'll be some days maybe not many maybe very few or you're truly
happy with yourself like for some weird ecstatic reason maybe if you get over the hump whatever
that you mentioned that this dip I mean it's fascinating how many how much suffering this
actually entails I wonder well and one thing I'm gonna definitely try to leverage to my advantage
and one of the reasons why I think fight for the forgotten was the charity that really triggered me
to decide to do this the transcontinental route was something I learned about early in my ultra
running career and I thought to myself I want to do that someday but it was one of those kind of
far off distance things that it never really like actualized in your mind until you put a date down
or you know mention it on the Joe Rogan experience or something like that when then it then it's like
people want to know when is this happening and you know what I try to think about is you know
the reason Justin identified the pygmy tribe was because they were super forgotten where you know
we think about just like some of these third world countries where it's a scenario of like
some people it's easy for us here in the US to think to ourselves well why don't they just
industrialize why don't they just like you know start to innovate a bit why are they so primitive
what's wrong with them and in reality like when you take when you scale things down to the degree
where you need the entire day because of the situation you're in just to take care of your
basic needs of water and food you never get the opportunity to even build a real like establishment
or you know a build on that like you need you need the free time or you need a portion of your
population to have the free time available to innovate and the pygmy tribe just hadn't had that
historically in fact they weren't even considered humans by like the local government for quite
some time and you know the people that really pay the price in some of these situations are the women
because they're the ones that get saddled with like the water gathering and things like that so
the reason that Justin picked wells to build was because he thought to himself if we can get them
wells then now these women don't spend all day walking and carrying water now they can just get
that water and now we have half the population freed up for other things now maybe they can start
farms they can build some housing and stuff like that and it just it exponentially improves once you
take care of some of those big key early things so when i'm thinking about like you know do i
really need to go out here and travel another 12 hours a day my mind's gonna hopefully go to well
if one of those women woke up in the pygmy tribe one morning decided you know what do i really
need to go get water today it's like well yeah you do you really do have to yeah you're running for
that yeah and that that will give you fuel hopefully but yeah yeah i mean the reality is
always there where i don't have to do it like they do have to do it so you know but i think
just keeping that perspective it it puts us back to the beginning where it's this is one of those
situations where i think it's like a no quit situation you have to put yourself in a no
quit situation here because it's uh you know it's just bigger than you i can't wait to see like the
dark places you go i mean there's some yeah the the quit situations and hopefully we get to have a
glimpse of those because i think those are really inspiring when somebody is uh both gets broken
by them because you know how tough you are but also is almost broken and overcomes it i mean
that's just fascinating stories i can't wait i know does joe know you're doing this by the way
yeah i sent him i sent him a note a while back because he was the first spot i mentioned it on
so i think he knows i'm not sure if he's following about the exact starting date or not but he will
know this is great you'll probably think you're a crazy uh mf for for doing this but uh i think
you'll love it and i think i love it and i think the world will love it ridiculous question who's
the greatest endurance runner or endurance athlete of all time oh that's a good question um i think
i'd probably go maybe two directions here uh i think uh heli geber lassi is one of the best
in my opinion because just i mean 27 world records like like not all the different distance but like
breaking and re-breaking and that sort of stuff um i mean he ran two what was it 203 59 before the
shoe technology came in that is estimated at anywhere between a two to eight percent performance
advantage about a two hour marathon two zero three yep two hour three minutes yep yeah so he did that
with the old shoe technology which uh essentially dates back to anything if if you were a Nike athlete
it could date back to as early as i think early 2016 is when the first prototype started showing up
so if you're before that in your career you were using you're guaranteed to be using the old shoe
technology um and i mean just the range of it too and uh yeah it's it's hard i mean there's there
it's uh is he a marathon runner purely no he did everything that's why i pick him i think because he
he he went everywhere everything from the 800 and is like at a national level 800 yeah at a national
level i don't he wasn't competing at like olympics or anything in the 800 but he was he was mostly
like 5k to marathon um yeah yeah so just incredible i mean i i could go a totally different direction
too i think like steve pre fontaine stands out in as an american runner just because if you look at it
outside of just like performances and stuff like that i think um he based like you can't find an
american male runner who probably didn't get some motivation or some catalyst into their
running journey from a pre fontaine story or what would you say is inspiring about pre fontaine uh
like from the philosophy from the technique from his story uh i think there's a few things i mean
there's a lot of things which is why he is who he is it's uh one was just his attitude about it
where um he wasn't like this picture ask runner i mean he was obviously talented but you know
he had the perfect story of like he wanted to be good at something like most american kids tried
football was no hard work was going to get pre fontaine starting in varsity for football
starts running fell in love with the mile uh his college coach told him no you're not going to be a
mile or you're going to be a 5k guy and he popularized the 5k in the united states or three mile in
some cases and uh i mean he the way he would race i think is what really made him interesting for
folks where he would he was just like all guts runner where he's like he's like i mean one of his
famous quotes was like if you beat me you're gonna have to bleed to do it because he's gonna be an
all guts race and in a sport where it gets very tactical at times especially at the like national
or i shouldn't say national but at the like competition level the championship level where
it's like kind of more of a sit and kick approach a lot of times where everyone's kind of waiting
for someone to make a move like pre was going to make a move really early yeah so this idea of
leading from the front which i guess is tactically really a bad idea well from a from a running a
pr standpoint it's a bad idea in most cases but so race i guess is not just about the pr so race
winning in a lot of cases and that's what he thought was going to put him in the best advantage
to win i think it's just to run from the front i mean what what do you because you mentioned this
um the hundred mile you ran you were in second place and then in 90s you were able to get to
the first place how hard is it to run when you're in first place you know i think this is
really different some people thrive under it where it's like for them i mean like i talked
about jim walls before i think he loves being in the front if he's in the front he loves it that's
where he's excited that's where he knows he's he's doing what he's doing where he's pushing his limits
and things like that uh pre was probably the same way and then i think there's other folks who are
much more comfortable kind of saying let's let things settle down here a little bit
and uh then i'll make my move when it's time to make my move or they think of it as
and this is a very important i think lesson for for the average ultra runner is just like
knowing what you're capable of is going to be an important piece to the puzzle because you can like
you you you can try to say i want to run faster than i'm capable of in an early part of a 100
miler but then you're going to pay for it at the end so really unless you're trying to go for the
win and that's a tactic that you think is going to produce a win versus trying to run your fastest
time you got to run within yourself within your parameters obviously there's a big question about
where those parameters are in a lot of cases which makes ultramarathon even more interesting
because it's like there's so much unknown about it it's like well maybe you can go faster and we
just don't know yet so there's in the face of that uncertainty there's something admirable like it was
with prefrontain where you take the risk and run faster than you know you you think you might be able
to run in terms of pace that you can hold so push the pace that's possible yeah explore the unknown
it's like a pioneer spirit right yeah the next frontier kind of a thing but i mean prefrontain
also there's other angles with him too where he was like in the amateur era where to be an olympian
you couldn't be pro so he's turning down i mean the guy was on food stamps and living in a trailer
because he wanted to run at the olympics and there was a lot of like politics involved with not being
able to take take sponsorship money and things like that which has changed since then but so he
was huge in the movement for that to kind of like you know have a situation where now as an athlete
you can finish in most cases finish college sign a big contract with you know a sponsor and then
also still compete in the olympic games and could go to the events that are actually ones that are
gonna likely catapult your career in most of the olympic distance endurance events so so he just
revolutionized the sport and then to add even more flavor to the whole thing i mean he died of
very premature death he got a car accident and died before he would have likely probably meddled
at the olympics so and there is a tragedy the fact that he didn't yeah well he was fourth place at
the olympics the prior his first go of it and it was kind of one of those things where it's like
fourth place at the olympics is the first man looking out of the first woman looking out and
for a guy that had as much hype as him i think like a medal was something he really wanted to
take home with him there and especially how that race went i mean yeah i don't know it's it's it's
tragic the whole thing but that's one of the things that makes olympics amazing is the tragedy of it
like one race decides the story of a lifetime which is like yeah that's why it's that's why it's
amazing even if a lot of people get hurt because of it tragedy makes the the triumph special right
yeah i know it makes i mean it makes life like a movie almost where exactly you know if everything's
all sunshine and rainbows and it's not as entertaining to watch yeah there's no adversity to overcome
you mentioned uh shoe technology how much has shoe technology advanced through the past few decades
how much has it changed running generally but also running like ultra marathon running i would say
in ultra running it's had much of a less of an impact because ultra running is still heavily
skewed towards the trails so the technology at least from what we know isn't necessarily translating
over to these like massive very terrain certainly not the technical terrain and things like that
now on road races flat stuff like the track stuff the roads the run i guess you a runnable trail um
where it's just like basically crushed limestone more or less uh you definitely get an advantage
from it it's uh and essentially what what happened um is in this probably dated back actually before
2015 uh you know nike decided well their their their uh development team uh was ahead of the
curve they developed this new foam they call like a peabock foam uh and they they realized that
like when you step down into a shoe the reason like uh racers a lot of times would wear these
flats because they're trying to take out any of that lost energy into the foam in the shoe
well this foam that nike came out with is so good that it actually returns way more energy
than the average foam did to the point where like when they test these things on like force plate
treadmills and things like that it's like a depending on the person's gait and some of
things like a two to eight percent improvement in performance i mean we've seen records just
across the board get broken since this came out all distances basically yeah yeah i think from
at least from the 5k up through the marathon and i mean we've seen some insane improvements in the
marathon i think like uh the women's marathon went from what was considered a relatively untouchable
like 216 to a 214 and i mean like it was like 218 was like just world class like if you could
run a 218 marathon as a woman that was like i mean it still is to a degree but then you know
you now you have someone run a 214 just like that's a huge and you attributed a lot of that to the
the shoe yeah mm-hmm yeah i think there's probably other things that come in mind too like now that
people know there's a performance advantage from a mechanical standpoint it's also a confidence
thing where it's like oh no i can probably try going five seconds per mile faster and maybe
they could have anyway and they just now they think they can so they are so there's probably a
little bit of that that's just adding to it do you think there's a lot of extra innovation
that's still possible like what if you could do this kind of big leap uh with a little innovation
of foam is there other stuff that you can do or further innovation of materials that make up the
foam yeah so they can definitely go much more advantage they put a cap on it essentially so
there was a there's also a carbon plate element to this too where they put like this carbon plate
in there in between the foam so like i believe when when kipchagi broke well when they did that
that that kind of uh uh the sub two hour project he actually had on a shoe if i'm not mistaken that
never got to market because they put down some parameters on it after uh before it that one
came to market where it was actually like stacked up to i can't remember how many millimeters was
an insane amount and they had like i think maybe even three layer plates in there and those are
nike shoe his way yeah yeah so what makes it kind of controversial or difficult is nike came out
with these prototypes so prototype for people don't understand shoes like these these companies
they'll develop a shoe and it usually takes like somewhere in the neighborhood of like probably
18 months to hit the market so if you're like a sponsored athlete or work for the company you can
get your hands on these shoes before they actually come to market so we had an issue i think this
wasn't necessarily as big of an issue in the ultra running community but uh in the track and field
olympic distance stuff was a big issue because you had nike athletes having these prototype shoes
before anyone could get them and then you had athletes who were sponsored by these other brands
who couldn't wear them even if even when they did come to market so then we had this like chase to
catch up where uh other companies are starting to make their own version of it and now we're getting
to a point where most companies have a version of that shoe um but we had a huge transition phase
that impacted the olympics big time i mean think of here here's a here's an example of it uh there's a
there was a an athlete kara goucher um she was not she wasn't like the athlete wasn't uh when they
came out with this shoe and she ran the olympic trial marathon and got fourth place the first person
out and two of the people had ever had that shoe on and she was maybe a minute or two i'd have to
look to see exactly but it was within the the performance advantage range and so you could
argue that she was the first person in modern running to lose an olympic spot due to a technological
disadvantage wow and and it's like i mean it's kind of profound yeah i mean it's one of those
things where like um it's it's a transition right so there's gonna be bumpy road and there's gonna
be people that get caught in that transition that it's unfortunate for but it's also like uh you
know once everything does catch up and every shoe company has a version of this there's still problems
i mean these are incredibly expensive shoes it's like a 250 dollar shoe so it's like a what point
do you tell like a wealthy family with a high school kid that you know you can get that 250
dollar shoe but then you go and this kid's family can barely afford a pair of shoes for them much
less a 250 dollar pair of shoes like where do we draw that line and that sort of stuff um also
just here's the other big one like let's i mean two to eight percent is a massive range what if
you're on the two percent versus someone's on the eight percent you know chances are if you're
you know blowing a record out of the water you're probably closer to that high end percentage versus
someone who's maybe getting incremental gains you're probably closer to that lower end so is it
fair to have a piece of equipment that has that big of a range when we're talking about
less than a percent determining these races when all is held constant those are fascinating like
philosophical questions that i think it's nice to solve that for the shoe or to raise those
questions for a shoe because the more complicated place where they will be raised is probably
genetics genetic engineering all those kinds of things yeah it'll get you'll get a lot more
complicated so it's nice when you have like a particular piece of technology that's just like
right there it's a shoe we can understand it we can study it right and we may be coming on the
precipice of like human powered sport performance is no longer being something that we like look at
as this like pinnacle of uh like i don't maybe entertainment's the wrong word but like is that
a pursuit you know do we end up just going a different direction i mean i think it's like
it's so hard for us to think about that right now because it's so part of like the culture
and the lifestyle of the average person where like sport is a hobby of theirs as well as a passion
to follow and it's like how complicated does it need to get before people lose that interest
and and there could be a future where most of the olympics is esports somebody told me
that esports is in the olympics i've been meaning to look this up which is you know like what video
there's a video games on the olympics yeah yeah it could be as as like a trial that they're doing
yeah if this is true i'm trying in real time look it up but if this if this esports joining
olympics in 2024 wow so that could be just a that could be a fun side thing but it could be a first
step into a complete transformation what sports mean because you can control video games better
than you control for genetics and humans well and in reality we've been dealing with this
problem in other areas just with the performance enhancing side of things with drugs and all that
stuff too and anyway that that conversations flared back up with track and field too where
we are seeing a lot of records get broken a lot of it probably is to shoot technology but
you know in 2020 with the covid stuff you have all these out of competition testing protocols
that a lot of these top tier olympic athletes are getting uh to try to eliminate like if you
just do indoor competition testing like there's potential for people to do things that are
going to give them a performance advantage but not going to show up on that test on the day of
or after their race where now you have these like limitations of being able to test so do we have
a like a group of athletes now who decide oh i'm not going to get tested in 2020 do the covid
restrictions this is the time to dope up and then you know hit some stride and some records and then
you know taper back off when they get this thing fired back up again and so there may be some of
that as well and i mean that's always been an ongoing problem and yeah but the boost you get
from performance enhancing drugs could be tiny relative to the stuff we have in the future
right yeah so you might be the last generation of like natural unmodified humans that uh we're
running and who knows maybe that's already over who knows who's who's modified that's that's true you
might we might be living through that transition to the new Nike shoe but broadly defined uh yeah
yeah so you'll be uh in some sense in in the history books as uh humans used to run without any
modifications used to destroy their body and let it recover and then do it again and they used to be
impressed with a with an 11 hour 100 mile time when we could do it in under an hour now yeah yeah
so uh but nevertheless it is incredible the four mile the four minute mile was incredibly
impressive uh the i i really love the 11 hour mark for the 100 miler and the two hour marathon by
most people um for the longest time was thought to be impossible you know there's still people that
think it's impossible with under certain constraints so uh uh elliott kipchogi afghania as you mentioned
ran a one hour 59 minute 40 second marathon but he had like he said the prototype shoes
and he had the the pace setters yeah i don't know how essential that is but it seems quite essential
do you think it's possible first of all what do you think about that accomplishment
and he is one of the greatest if not the greatest marathon runners of all time
what do you think about that accomplishment and do you think it's possible to run a two hour marathon
without any assistance yeah i mean i think yeah there's no question about it regardless of technology
he's world class if not the best um the i think he i think he could go under two hour someone
equivalent to him could go under two hours with with the shoe technology probably what it will
take is it'll take a fast course a course that has like very few tangents because like you know
turning on a course they estimate it adds about a percent to the to the distance so you know when
we're talking about a marathon you're getting up to like a quarter mile extra running you know
that alone could potentially put you down near near too flat based on what you know we're seeing
because i mean kipchogi's got a was it 201 40 i believe this is actual world record where it's
actually like you know certified so i mean he's right on the door knocking knocking on the door
there um yeah the prototype he had since then they put in a regulation where you can't stack a shoe
for the roads more than 40 millimeters so you can only have so much of that energy returning foam
and you can only have i think one carbon plate in there now uh so that puts a little bit of a ceiling
on that technological thing uh but but who knows what else will come out in that and and to be honest
who comes out with it because the fact that nike came out with this technology is the reason why
it's being allowed to be be used if it would have been like you know another running company that
that came out with it i'm sure the the the regulations would have been slapped down on it
immediately and they would have probably just thrown it out altogether would have been this politics
yeah oh yeah well and i mean it's it you can go you can go super like you know negative with that
and say like hey like this is like this is terrible or this is like super nefarious when in reality
it's like you know you have a company that has you know billions of dollars and is interested
enough in the sport that otherwise doesn't generate a ton of revenue to you know pick up a big tab
and support like uh you know track and field and things like that but you know with that you know
you want to be the guy who says yeah thanks for the millions and millions of dollars but we're
going to all those years and money you spent on that foam you wasted it we're not going to let you
use it but you know if you're another company who uh you know revolutionize the sport in potentially
a negative way uh you know maybe maybe you say no to them so it gets interesting that's the way
that's how it always happens yeah yeah there's really no way around i think phil mephitone
i think it's him that he wrote a book about a two hour marathon what are the limits how fast
could we run and i think he puts it like an hour and 42 minutes something like that or 40 something
minutes it's kind of an interesting question of what are the limits do you think do you think
we'll just keep pushing the limits of what humans are capable of in the ultras in the marathon is
this just like the way yeah the uh the way of sport i think ultra for sure because that is
a vastly growing sport and it's there's there's a lot of potential for a much bigger pop or
much pool bigger pool of like talent to pull from uh that could really push the needle down on
some of these performances and things like that especially as it becomes more popular if if people
start realizing or i shouldn't say realizing but if a scenario happens where like oh i'm one of the
best endurance athletes in the world i make more money running ultra marathons than i do running
the marathon then you know all of a sudden we see every record get broken in the matter of a couple
of years uh but the the for the marathon i mean it's gonna get faster i think but like to what
degree is so hard to know it's very hard to know and it's the one hour and 40 minutes seems like
that's pretty fast that's that's very fast i mean for folks for some perspective there the current
world record is like in the four forties per mile per mile like just to add a little flavor to that
you're basically sprinting yeah i mean go out to a track and run one lap as fast as you can
and then reflect on what time you get and realize like the world record for the marathon is
is that is that lap at just over 70 seconds per lap so minute and 10 just over that but you're doing
it 26.2 miles yeah so so over a hundred times it's mind boggling but watching Elliott uh
keep chogi just first of all he was like smiling at the end of it so the there's an extreme efficiency
here too so he's not he's able to just find the right way to maximize yeah maximize efficiency
it makes it look easy i mean that that's true for basically every olympic athlete
when you watch gymnasts they kind of make it look easy yeah but there's like tens if not hundreds
of thousands of hours behind that training yeah just to be comfortable enough to even attempt
some of the moves they do in gymnastics is is mind boggling with that one is super awesome because
how tragic it is like one little slip up yeah four years of work and you're it's all gone
not just four years of work for many of them it's like a lifetime of work and they're teenagers
and they're teenagers and they get dedicated everything to it that's that's what makes the
pursuits of humans so fascinating we kind of talked about this a little bit already but
is there something that stands out to you as one of the hardest things you've had to overcome
in all the either training or the competing that you've done has there been moments that
kind of stand out where you're proud of yourself that that you were truly tested and you overcame it
i think i'd be more inclined just because it stands out to me much bigger than anyone like
hard decision or outcome i had from a particular race is just like the trajectory of like you know
doing what i'm doing now is so much different from what i would have ever expected uh you know i mean
i was a talented enough runner where i could make the state meet by my senior year at a small
division three school and you know compete at a division three college and be pretty modest
talent comparative to my to my peers at the top level of division three to think that like i'd be
doing anything that was revolved around running as as an occupation is is uh i still second guess
that that's actually occurring makes me wonder about the whole simulation theory thing it's like
who's got my joystick and what exactly uh but g codes yeah exactly yeah because i mean i went
to school to be a teacher and i really loved that profession i taught for about five years and i
got to a point where you know some of it's just perfect timing too like the sport gain enough
popularity where there's enough money in it where like i could start a coaching business i could get
sponsorships and things like that and actually look at it and say financially i can make a go of
this or at least risk it but there's such a fine line between like deciding to do that or kind of
staying comfortable because uh i mean i was at the perfect teaching spot for me i was at this uh
like project-based learning school and just outside of madison wisconsin loved it um one of the hardest
decision my life to make was to step away from that to pursue running it more holistically um and i
mean i almost didn't i had a co-teacher who was uh i was thinking myself i knew that was like a
decision i was gonna have to make the next few years but it was such an easy decision to say well
wait one more year and he was just like he was a little more of a free spirit than i was certainly
at the time he's like dude what are you waiting for just go why are you here like like after i
told him that he like every time we i'd come into i'd come into school the next day and he'd be like
why are you still here but i mean that was there's a tongue in cheek for sure but uh but it's hard
to know that you're gonna be successful right that kind of leap given your like you know because
it's easier when you're like an ultra performer early on but to have the faith that you can
accomplish something in some regards it's a blessing in the sense that like uh you know
failing would have been fairly predictable right whereas if like you know i always wonder i mean
i think of these like especially the big sports like baseball football and basketball and you get
you know guys who guys and girls who are like identified in like early high school as being
the next and it's like what kind of pressure is that to think like well if i'm not like literally
one of the best players in the nba in 10 years i failed yeah it's like it's just mind-boggling
i think if i'm not one of the best at one of the most competitive sports on the planet in what is
an athletic i think an athletic state of an nba basketball player is probably one of the most
athletic human beings on the planet and to know like in a teenage year that your your your success
bar is being the best one of the best in the league or the best ever and that conversation
floating around everywhere you look and see versus being able to kind of quietly fail and go back
to teaching this makes it a little more digestible i think you have a little bit more freedom to be
great right because nobody's expecting you to be right uh is there from that is there advice you
can give to young people today high schoolers college students taking on trying to figure out
their career trying to figure out their life advice on how to succeed in either yeah i think uh you
know one thing i was always interested when i was teaching was like you'd have these you'd have
students who had like interests they had what they were good at and sometimes those ran in in unison
with one another other times they didn't and it was always interesting to me when you'd have a
student who's like i'm really into like you know guitar or i'm really into skateboarding or something
like that where it's like pretty small like success rate on that avenue versus what you
could maybe accomplish by focusing on just something like a little more standard and
i think like really like besides the likelihood of it becoming something you can turn into a
professional or not you should just ask yourself like is this something that i want to spend
my free time doing uh and because if it is then you want to keep that in your life because that's
something that's rewarding motivating it might be the catalyst that gets you out of bed in the morning
and you know go to another job in order to go do that thing afterwards i think nowadays we're
getting to a point where like the your reachability from even a really small like unmonetized thing
previously is now an option where if like you live in a city where there's only two other people
interested in your topic of area so you're not going to turn into a job now with the internet
you have the world at your disposal so that two to three people in every town can turn into thousands
tens of thousands hundreds and millions of people and if you really focus your time and
energy into that thing then you know who knows where you can go and how much more enjoyable
your life can be if you're able to turn your career into a passion of yours so i think like
like that is something i would tell tell people um focus on that see the thing you're good at and
you kind of sparks that flame and uh go with that even if society doesn't really want you to uh like
it's non-traditional uh and the odds are low of like traditionally defined success just do that
thing i've i've struggled with that it's like it was always clear especially like in school
there's stuff i'm actually good at and stuff that the world wants me to do right yeah and
i kept wanting to be a plumber when i took that test my sophomore year but even like like academically
just going to university and uh academia there are certain ways even in i would say even in the
thing you want to do the way you do that thing the world will want you to do it a certain way
and even just like finding your way of doing that thing is uh is really powerful like for me the way
i do research the way i learn is is different than colleagues of mine and i've realized that
that i really like to follow things i'm passionate about versus sort of the rigor of studying every
of like the fundamentals all across the board and building up in castle um on the fundamentals
like layer upon layer just there's a bunch of details in the way i pursue the very thing that
i currently do that's different than others and it took me quite a long time to accept like
you don't need to do it the way everyone else is doing it doesn't not everyone else but majority
people are telling you to do it because one is beneficial to do it different because then you'll
more likely stand out and two like why the hell are you doing it the way it's not working for you
yeah you know i saw that all the time when i was teaching i was dual certified i was my my
certifications were in history and broad field social studies so like econ uh psychology history
all that stuff and then i also had a certification of special education which was you know people
think of special education and a lot of times as like oh it's the you know the k2 is not smart
enough to do the regular thing when reality it's like i mean there is some you know there's obviously
like you know like certain things like downs syndrome and stuff like that but like there's
also like a huge population of groups of both like gifted and talented on one end of the spectrum
where they're incredibly smart and they're like the geniuses but for whatever reason the standard
method of learning does not click with them does not work with them and then they just need a slightly
different path or maybe a drastically different path and they're gonna just flourish and you have
kids that end up falling on the other end where you know maybe it's really difficult for them
to be able to read at the speed of other students but if you give them this specific
direction they can just thrive in a certain area and just seeing that like the you know like that
there's multiple ways to do stuff and there's not necessarily one path to the end is i think such
an eye-opening thing to learn especially if you learn maybe that's what i should answer the question
that you're asking me with is you know keep an open mind as to what paths there are forward and
know that you know maybe just because even if you look to your left and right and all your
classmates are successful doing it one way it doesn't necessarily mean that's going to be the way
for you yeah so that could land you in eating a meat-based diet running across the country
like the the incredible madman that you are is that i'm a huge fan as i told you many times
you're an inspiration to many i'll be there checking in every day if you somehow make it out
the starting line on september 1st i know i know joe rogan and millions of others will be as well so
i'm excited to see all the suffering that you're going to go through i wish you the best of luck
and thank you so much for talking today i really really appreciate it well thanks a bunch of likes
it's been an honor to come on your podcast i've been a fan of it for uh for quite some time and
i thought about wearing a white suit but michael malis already took care of that one so it was
optimal well and uh i think it would be really good for the ratings of this conversation if you
end up dying during that run so i'll do my best so the everything that could happen it will be
positive for for the world you're saying i should try to average 100 miles a day 100 miles well i
think you're gonna push yourself to again it's not the main priority but it's trying to beat that
record that's probably going to take everything you have and that that that's truly inspiring i
wish you the best of luck man thanks a bunch thanks for listening to this conversation with
zack bidder and thank you to ladder belcampo noon and better help check them out in the
description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from steve
pre-fontein i'm going to work so that's a pure gust race at the end and if it is i'm the only one
who can win it thank you for listening and hope to see you next time