Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
zach bidder 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
zack has done in the past this is a big
fascinating challenge
quick mention of our sponsors ladder
belcampo
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 zack 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
zac 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 ultra marathon 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 hundred mile
distance or anything that's like all day
long
is you're gonna 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
a full life maybe
as 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 notice 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
say like get out of here uh 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
i mean a little bit of self-doubt creeps
in you start asking yourself well you
know maybe i should 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 gonna 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
won't say it's a rule of thumb
necessarily but something i think is
fairly valuable is if you do a hundred
miler the 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 the
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
uh 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's gonna 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 that just
i think you just
add to that over a career of running
them or a series of running them and
it would it's 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
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 they he seems to almost like
separate his mind
into there's the weak
david that he hates and then there's a
strong
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
it'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 it 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 it
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
uh you know sam has obviously thought
about these things and
and uh really probably you know i see
those guys as kind of
two ends of the spectrum and just the
way that they kind of come across
in general where like david's like
really at you kind of high energy
and sam's kind of this calming soft
presence
and he's just gonna slowly methodically
lay it all out there
and i think there's value on in both of
those i think
most people are probably gonna get a
benefit from
pulling some from each i mean there's
times where
where i need a kick in the ass and then
it's like have the strong zack tell the
weak zac 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 100
mile race
you spent four months preparing for it
uh
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 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 in order to kind of figure out if i'm
doing the right things or not
and i think like in that situation um
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 yelled at and said like get going
get doing this and that helps and that
motivates and that helps them stay
accountable
other people need some softer love with
it where it's like
you know this isn't necessarily your
thought your 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 to
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 right 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 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 uh this is probably
the stupidest thing i've ever done is
the feeling i get often
and then immediately you have these
excuses they're like
there's all these other better things
you should be doing
or uh or the other alternative 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 uh so
maybe do you still go through that
process
and by way of advice for people that are
more sort of
amateurish like me uh how to deal with
that quitting boys
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
uh 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
and i think i don't think it's
necessarily
uh 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
to that date uh 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 uh 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 for
the event itself and
it's very easy to look at that and think
that's in 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 when
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 gonna 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 you don't have a good
reason
and then maybe it is advantageous to
step back and
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 yeah and i
know how to enjoy all of them
so at a certain point though you have to
say okay which one is gonna
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 hundred things that i
could otherwise be doing
then then i know that i'm in the in it
for the right reason then i just need to
identify some other things like well
why did this one take the top spot out
of the hundred 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 is going to come at some point
whether it's early
middle or late and and then you just
remind yourself kind of what you're
thinking when you had a little more of a
level head
well there's something about the thing
you mentioned when you mention 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 it you do go
through the process and realize that
it's not
uh 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 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
so i
i think i'm i don't maybe everyone is
but i think i'm kind of a quitter
you know what i mean like um 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 uh
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 uh
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
ever in 100k it's the first time i've
ever
100 miles and so on and so forth and
when you're doing that for the first
time i think there's a heightened
uh 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 you described perfectly that
quit
pops up in your head maybe a little
sooner the next time yeah 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
um 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 uh
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 will happen
is you'll find yourself in a position
where
i'll use ultra marathons 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 those
those extra opportunities to quit when i
wasn't before
and it can be easy to look back and say
and live kind of like
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 and that i just think
that's where you have to kind of catch
yourself and say no those opera
those things happen to me in order to
put me in a position where i decided
well this time i'm not gonna quit
no matter what minus my leg falling off
uh
like i'm not gonna quit and then you put
yourself in 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
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 um
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
just to do more is just gonna 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
[Laughter]
it seems like when you look at the full
arc of human history
the people who do great things
are more leaning tones than never quit
like
uh 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
telling me to relax and and have a
work-life balance and all those kinds of
things
uh we should all have a deep deep truth
to them
but the reality is like there's not
enough people
that walk up to me and like slap me and
say get your together
like don't quit work harder i think we
need to hear that more
i and like i remember that um
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 um where i think
it's maybe
to the extreme is 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
uh 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 100 mile run ever but you keep
taking on like new challenges
and there's a lot more chaos than 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 talk 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
to 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 100 milers
so
once i found that it became more of a
driver for me to see
like well how fast can i run 100 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
running 100 miles
but for me like the important part of
that is that
i can control the environment enough
where if i come back year after year
i can re-test 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
um 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 uh
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
do something a little different uh 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 runner runnable
ultra runner um but i like to do trailer
runs too so in
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 gonna you know take a brief
offseason but then i'm gonna ultimately
build up in peak for another one i might
introduce some fun trail races in the
context
but they're gonna be b races they're
gonna be training races time on feet
type of stuff that are gonna kind of
mimic like a long run essentially
and uh but the main focus the always in
the back of my mind was like
getting on the track and seeing how much
faster i can 100 miles and that just
kind of
that energy that it takes to continually
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 i took
essentially half a year away from
runnable stuff and just decided i'm
gonna prepare for the san diego hundred
mile
which is like a much more elevation
uh technical trail type of an event
isn't that trail run or no
yeah it's a trail hundred miler uh
actually just talking just outside of uh
uh san diego and yeah it goes through
it goes over part of the pacific crest
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
um it's just a different experience
different skill set and what it did is
it allowed me to kind of step away from
kind of focusing on like splits on a
track
uh running flat stuff like preparing for
things specifically for a flat
environment and start training for
something that's more
climbing into sending more technical
running skill sets and things like that
and the cool part about it was uh first
of all you know when you step away from
something and enter something a lot
different i mean it's still running
there's still a huge
advantage i had from the running i'd
done in the past that was going to put
me in a good position to be successful
but there was a much higher uh
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's 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're racing racing like you were
trying to get first
so still a race yeah 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 nice
it's like
yeah that's kind of a cool way to race
um yeah
but afterwards i recognized a few things
just about kind of pacing
and you know how to maybe pace the first
half of a hundred miler
versus the second half i also recognized
shortly thereafter
uh 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 hundred miler
and i don't think that would have been
the case had i just tried to do another
flat fast hundred miler
earlier or during that year and end up
in a situation where like i
maybe had like normalized a sub-optimal
like uh outlook on like something that i
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
or you know you then the interesting
thing about these track hundreds too is
like
you find yourself doing like your
peaking phase where you're running your
long runs which for me are usually like
you know around 30 miles or so and i'll
do them on back to back days and you
know
i try to replicate the environment i'm
going to race on so i'm find myself on a
400 meter track
yeah 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 we can
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 and kind of putting me
in the 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 on the
treadmill and
the trail 100 mile broadly if we zoom
out
what does it take to run 100 miles
for 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 it 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 gonna
like
not do much training which i wouldn't
necessarily advise but
uh i mean i've i've talked to people who
basically run 100 miles sometimes almost
off the couch and it's
like it's 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
the goal of performance and you try to
get 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 uh once you start putting
marks or goals on outside of just
finishing that's where it starts getting
interesting because now you can maybe go
in 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
you know break a course record or an age
group record or something like that
and that 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
uh do i want a 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
and what it ends up doing is it ends up
bringing a lot more variables to the
table
and i think it's 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
gonna 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
you know 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 in aid
station transition so i'm not like
having a ton of non-moving time uh
versus moving time and that's 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
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 four 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 stage 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 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
uh it gets more complicated more
interesting
and uh 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
gonna have a situation like that at some
point
mine happened now uh 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 uh
would you say it takes to set a world
record
in the hundred miler well first of all i
think you probably have to focus
on that specific event um 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 talk
with the san diego hundred versus
kind of 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 from a
marathon there's
50k what are different kinds there's 100
mile
that in your mind like kind of these
islands were
where people gather often yep 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
uh 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 mount blanc which is probably the
most competitive 100 miler on the planet
right now
in previous years it's been debatable as
weather western states are ultra trauma
and blacks 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
uh is gonna generally be the most
competitive
ultra marathon the the weird thing is
the distance thing right because most
people
think 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 force 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 they're going to
probably account for more than 0.2 miles
on a 100 mile race
but the ultra trail mount blanc you know
that's
listed as a 100 miler but it's actually
i think like 100 and 405 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 gonna hear
maybe a little more grumbling if someone
says i signed up for this hundred miler
and it turned out to be 103 miles
uh 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
is 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
um take for example i would say the best
ultra marathoner in the world today on
the men's side is jim walmsley uh the
reason i think jim wells 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 angelus crest
hunter miler they
the 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
uh
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
you know 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 montblanc 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 100 miler 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 a like an event of like a series of
different events where there might be
like
some people out there doing 50k some
people out there doing 24 or something
like the event i did that 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 um
which when you're going up to six days
you're gonna 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 and sometimes lane
three around the turns
so it's down to those little details
that have a big impact yep so i had to
build that into my pacing strategy i
also have to build into the pacing
strategy
like relative non-moving time uh
you know i did a race just recently i
was the us track and field hundred 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
uh 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 gotta you
gotta
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
um by a guy um over in lithuania
uh alex sorkin um phenomenal race
i mean he's he's won the 24-hour world
championships he's won the spartathlon
which is another big historic
ultramarathon it's 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 645 per mile mine was 647 and a
half
in terms of just like the pacing
strategy it's it's just really cool
because
for me the motivation
with chasing the world record was it was
multi-faceted 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 emerged 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 and 100 miles because i
think that's gonna be
i think that's going to happen wow soon
i think it's going to happen
in the next few years 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 100 miles is it pretty steady
six like in order to break 11 hours
would it be pretty steady 635 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 and 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 1059. uh
i would definitely want to either have a
slight negative or a slight positive
split
so when um and i think there's i think
there's uh
there's a range in there where like
being a little bit faster the first half
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 in the second 15 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 um i had a
couple that were
um it was weird because that that track
that i did that on was actually
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 they're
they're normally i'm dealing with 400
meters and then it's a little more like
clean as to like what my lap splits
are gonna range from one event to the
next so we're talking about running 100
miles on a track
yeah and so that you can be really
scientific about
yes getting the the the the um
the pacing right and uh 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 laptop 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
mine
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
because
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 uh 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 uh 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 in 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 uh so there's going to be
probably a slight
variance from my fastest mile to 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
from 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-forefoot
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 of 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 gonna
probably
just be a much larger data pool uh much
much more probably precise from just
like a number of opportunities to study
this
and i think even their ranges from one
person 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 what probably
optimal
highness too than that if you can just
linger in 11 hours
the person first of all would you like
to be a 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
is it even possible
and you're in yeah i mean i would def
i would be lying to you if i said i
didn't want to be the first person to
break 11 hours and 100 miles i think
that'll be
um 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 when when we're talking about
records it's something that
is inevitable that it's gonna get broken
so i mean we were 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 uh and just
reflect on how i'm behaving in life
because
it's gonna get broken right i mean i
could run
10 50 tomorrow and in
10 years chances are that's no longer
gonna be my the world record anymore
someone's gonna 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 any time 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
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
hundred miler
and that's what i really want to see uh
because i think i've gotten so much
enjoyment from the sport i mean i've
gotten so much enjoyment from the sport
i've been able to 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
this board 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 we stand
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 uh
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
um 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 it
i think the caveman if if i had fire i
would have done right better with this
look at look at these idiots up there
with their cars if i had a car back then
i would have been
yeah ruled the world um let me just zoom
out
just briefly and 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 uh there's kind of a couple
directions to look at it through
or lens is looking through there's like
the in the moment right there's always
going to be that run where
uh you're clicking along and things just
feel great you get some endorphins
and you get the you know the the quote
unquote runners 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 uh you
know you've
my wife and i talk about this because
she's a competitive ultra honor as well
and
um 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 gonna
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 energies up i get that runner's high
afterwards you remove that from the
equation for a rest day
and you just sort of like uh 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
uh 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
uh just uh you know and in the moment
immediate gratification
uh standpoint but then there's like i
think the bigger picture stuff for the
longer term stuff
and for me that enjoyment is like
just the process like of uh 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
um still like shorter than like a career
or a
or a build up 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 uh 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 it felt great when they
gave it to me yeah
there's something about just finding
improvement and people love to see
improvement i think so
that's where uh i think you can also get
some value and it would be saying like i
started here and i got there
um and then i think there's also just
like uh
what 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
uh 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 which
in which training is a kind of uh
preparation
towards race day and race day being
the thing where you get to be the artist
you get to create this
this piece of art and they might suck it
might be beautiful
i mean i i i see in the grappling world
i see competition in the same way when i
feel the best about it
which is like it sounds pretentious to
say but like
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 in
an artist way not in a kind of some kind
of numerical way but
like as a holistic sense like
do something cool like 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 and do it like push myself to limit
both cardio wise and technique wise and
just
play 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
that i mean there's art within running
there's art within chess
there's art within grappling and you get
a chance like all the training
is more like science and then it feels
like the competition day's art
yeah i think that that that's a really
cool cool way to look at and i think
it's
when you really open up the perspective
of that too it's like
even uh obviously you know having a
great day like winning the tournament or
you know 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
uh that sort of stuff obviously those
are kind of like the ones you
you if when you're honest 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
uh 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 and 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 y 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
or thought was gonna 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 gonna do that i need to be more
prepared to be able to do it and
i love that part of the sport um
just the rearranging of things and
adjusting and tinkering
there's some sense in which the mistakes
and like the flaws give us meaning
because like if 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 hundred mile race of 1119
i can find spots in there where i was
like uh you know what i could clean that
up a little bit maybe if i do this
differently
and i mean that's gonna 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 11 19 again
so can we talk about training a little
bit yeah what does your uh
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
i say that but the there's a caveat with
endurance sport i think
maybe even more specifically with things
like our ultra marathons or 100 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 may 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 and there's contra
conflicting 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
um so that's why i think a lot of times
running will they'll do they're called
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 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 gonna 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 are we talking
about just 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 your fitness level's
at and depending on where you're at as
an individual
i'm gonna be targeting my aerobic
threshold i'm gonna get right up to it
but not necessarily cross over it um
it's it you know it's
it's been popularized with 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 gonna like you're
gonna raise
your aerobic potential by so much that
you know you can kind of like
race yourself into 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 5ks 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 or
you're trying to do too much of it so
that's kind of dictates how much 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 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 in the same
way e equals
e equals m c squared it's 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 are the advantages here and i need
to account for those and then where are
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 work 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 uh
very low like things that are gonna
maybe lower your quality of life like
muscle damage and things like that
um it's a more efficient way in the
sense that you're gonna be like
prioritizing like fat metabolization
which um i mean if you're looking at
like jeff folick and
or dr jeff folik and dr dominic
d'agostino 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 math 180
is that is that a good is it 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
like any of these things i mean it's
more likely kind of on a bell curve
where
like the bulk of that 180 minus three 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 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
like math 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 from 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 actually technically be
at your math pace or under your math
pace yeah i had a
actually when i was in in better shape
i had trouble getting to that math
number
i found myself like either i would be
doing way too much
work like it's too hard to do 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 good pace and
yeah and i was felt good i was smiling
and enjoying life
and yeah uh i did and with the moment i
take myself to that
uh level of like the math 180 level
that's like definitely like a real
workout yeah 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 uh
i feel me don't answer is maybe
you're supposed to like uh what
maybe do some more sprints or something
like that or build up your
maybe like i'm too weak yeah musculature
wise
to like uh 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 that
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 amount of volume they're gonna be
able to tolerate
relative to what you're gonna do when
you remove like impact forces and things
like that
is gonna be lower if they haven't been
practicing that activity so for you like
you know you're prioritizing like uh
uh wrestling and mixed martial are not
mixed martial arts but jiu jitsu type
stuff so
uh you know running is maybe kind of
that
that uh 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
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 the way to get
to those 30 40 miles is to get the form
right
maybe i was doing too big of steps not
so like
playing with a different gate playing
with a different kind of um
the form kind of you have your form 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 run is wrong or am i doing
my like long intervals right but my
short intervals and
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 gonna like you're gonna 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
um where where i think maybe you want to
deviate from that a little bit
especially when you start to get into
these events that are operating
well outside that intensity so you take
something like um 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 gonna be running
significantly faster than your 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 talk about the
endurance world in general where
you know you have these shorter events
like five kilometers and you also have
100 mile races which are gonna
typically be quite a bit below your
maximum road function and especially on
these trailer races i need to admit
something so i
don't measure the runs at all in terms
of uh time
uh because 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 so
they'll target that pace
or target a specific heart rate which is
you know not necessarily how they maybe
feel good doing it right 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 whatever 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
um i think it's totally fine to go out
and say i'm gonna run what feels good
today and you know maybe someday you
will feel like at the end of the run i'm
gonna do a couple sprints just to get
some
you know that because it does that one's
a hard one to kind of jump start 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 i like to finish runs with sprints
anyway
okay because you're already there
without right you don't need to the
timing
i'm afraid of the time of 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
that's 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 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 right
dad after it'd be right in there and i
wouldn't have to look in some of that's
just experience
someone's just understanding like when
like
noticing the physiological responses
when you cross over versus step a little
bit to below it
uh you can get yourself daydreaming and
forget i'll do this sometimes too where
i'll be tar because i'm kind of like you
two or when i'm getting really fit
uh especially with my foundation like i
gotta 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 on my heart right now oh
yeah i'm 10 beats under
you know so you do it does take a little
bit of i think just uh awareness
um 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 rolex 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 their i think the
key the 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
um you know in terms of rest days in
terms of
how often do you do speed work versus
longer distance you mentioned long runs
like is there something you could say
that's generally applicable
about the the structure of these plants
the ready-made plans i definitely follow
like a philosophy um and it's gonna be
like kind of like a lockstep in that
um so for those like there's just always
gonna be a sacrifice when you do like a
ready-made plan because there's
you're removing the individual contacts
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 then some
people are fine with that because
they're
they're they're aware enough of like the
process that they can
adjust it themselves other folks just
need a little more support so
um that's kind of the difference there
but in terms of the structure of it
it kind of goes with an approach where
we're saying you build this
foundation you're going to spend you
know usually anywhere between 8 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 we'll 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 picked 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
hundred 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
intervals it's like a sprint
and a rest yeah yeah so i'll use
basically like i'll use like a basically
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
um but usually when we're up to like
above a minute and certainly up to four
minutes
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 gonna be um kind of like about where
they're gonna target for those intervals
so then those intervals are gonna be
structured
let's say they're doing two minute
intervals they're gonna do two minutes
at that
intensity that they could do for 12
minutes at a time trial then they're
gonna do a two-minute
real easy job or maybe even walk just to
kind of bounce back and they're gonna
repeat it how do you figure out
uh how far you can go in 12 minutes is
that just a trial and error you build up
to it there's formulas what
yeah there's some newer formulas that
are probably a little less uh
um brutal uh where you kind of
uh i haven't really dove into these that
that in depth yet i know like um
that you can kind of replicate it by
doing like a short a very short interval
and then a slightly longer one um
and then like another one where like at
the end when that last one will kind of
indicate what it is
uh 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 then you just run
as hard as you can for 12 minutes as
evenly paced as you can manage
and i mean if the if it's going to
produce the data i'm looking for
uh no matter what happens it'll produce
the data
yeah i mean you can 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 we
maybe screwed that one up but um but i
mean really like you don't even need to
do the time trial technically
um a lot of times you can go off of feel
like what we described with um
the threshold stuff and and you know
it's a high enough intensity where where
like you can start to kind of like your
body is going to kind of limit you to a
degree where
if i just said we didn't do the time
trial and just started doing the
intervals
we could figure out that you know 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
gonna be running like an easy pace an
enjoyable pace kind of in the interim
and then there's gonna be some rest days
and that's gonna be where the levels
come in
my like level one plans are gonna be
like four day a week training plans
level two are gonna be five day level
three are gonna be six day with one day
off
um 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 personalize
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 gonna 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've got kids and all this
other stuff too
so um 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
the but but yeah so they're gonna do
that stuff those those shorter intervals
um 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 gonna be specific to their race
pace
that's gonna be the intensity that maybe
they're doing for you know like a 3k or
5k or something like that so it's 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 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 uh maybe look at me as a
case study
of a particular runner and then
see how we can plan stuff out so
which contacts 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
uh 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 uh
it's not quite as welcoming and full of
kindness immediately
i i mean i really love 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 gonna stick to
a diet of carnivore or keto
but i'm going to eat as much as i want
because uh primarily because this
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 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 um hanging out with
david goggins
and uh 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
uh 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
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 uh 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
uh 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
uh you don't want to beat yourself up so
much any one day that you can't get out
and do it the next one that's the sweet
spot with maximum rolex function is
the the the trademark there is that you
you can keep going and keep doing it
again and again and again because
as long as you're not you know going out
one day and trying to do twice as much
as what you're ready for
for that one specific the key for you is
gonna 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 so um
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 robot function means you
probably are better off sticking to 30
minutes
then what you would maybe do is you
would run underneath
your maximum aerobic function for the
first 15 minutes in the last 15 minutes
maybe throw some of those strides in
there if you want to do that at the very
end
and then that middle 30 minutes is going
to be maximum rolex function target
and then maybe after you know four weeks
you start noticing you know what
this 30 minutes isn't wearing me out
near as much as it used to um
i feel like i could easily push past
that well let's up that to 40 minutes so
that's 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 to sort of
as i run to monitor it sure absolutely
you could do that you could go
perceived effort um i like to use them
in tandem in the sense that like early
on i'll
maybe look at my heart rate a little
more often especially for shorter
length there is heart rate can get messy
the longer you go so
i i end up kind of maybe stepping away
from heart rate a little more
than some will at a certain point
because i'm ultimately i'm going to be
usually training or working with someone
to run like you know a race that's
really long and they have cardiac drift
dehydration
heat and things that are gonna 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 this still the
work of connecting heart rate to the
perceived effort
yep and that's exactly what i would use
heart rate for then and you'll get to a
point
probably by like in the first couple
months where
you you can still lean on heart rate if
you want but it'll be kind of one of
those things where you
you keep looking at you're like oh wow i
can guess it you play a game with
yourself too you can say well how close
can i guess
yeah you'll get it so like for me what
i'll do is i'll go i'll do the run and
then i'll look at the heart rate
afterwards and be like oh cool i was
right there yeah 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 uh one-dimensional
yeah one-dimensional i mean there's some
aspect to running
that's not to be like hippy about it but
like you know you're it's you're with
nature you're running
in it's like we're born to do this thing
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's it doesn't have that dumbbell feel
or doing bench press or squats
squats with weight when you're just
doing squats
uh body weight when doing push-ups and
pull-ups body weight
and just basic ab 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 i combine
that with the running afterwards
doing some basic body weight stuff yeah
and i think like you're gonna 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 this
and unless you're doing i guess no rest
it's 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
tracking that box there from just like a
lifestyle
uh enjoyment fitness overall fitness
standpoint
uh 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 an
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 um
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 like yeah so
you want to do a marathon and then
ultimately do a hundred mile after that
is that what you're saying i have no no
i have no idea what the guy uh oh
he's gonna tell you spot on what you're
doing so you have to be ready for
anything
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
uh
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 step big toes where all that
power comes off yeah
and so it's it it was surprising how
long it took to heal
uh and how essential it was and how
unpleasant running how much hey hated
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
[Laughter]
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 roving function i think is
actually going to feed into that maybe a
little bit better it's probably a little
closer
um depending on where i mean all it all
varies a bit because like people people
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 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
after lactate threshold for
almost like two hours so it gets a
little messy when you start
um 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 miles
exactly so i think like for 100 miles
the biggest difference
i think given your contacts 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 um you're going to want to
also
like it 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
bodyweight exercises i did some
grappling practice
you know i spent three hours working out
today yeah if you think of it like that
then
you know you're 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 gonna
actually be very helpful for you
uh the the problem or the the battle to
get over is gonna just be like
the you know you're gonna break down
physically running a hundred miles
and you're gonna break down physically
running a marathon too so
like the you might just have to push
through a little more discomfort
like from a physical standpoint compared
to be if you decided
i'm gonna do everything i can in these
next like
24 weeks to be able to run a full
hundred
a hundred miler would you say it's
physical or is it mental discomfort like
uh i mean isn't everything physically
uncomfortable like
what uh do you train for if you're
training for
the chaos of uh so it's not necessarily
100 miles it's the chaos of the
unexpected which might include 100 miles
but it might also include a thousand
push-ups
yeah in my case so like you need a big
jack-of-all-trades it's what you need to
be yeah but also like building up the
confidence
or maybe not i don't know how do you
survive um
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
the second is probably okay the 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 uh i'm gonna 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 um
of doing it anyway um 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 frequently 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 gonna be miserable when you step
on that starting line whether it's a
marathon or a hundred miles so
you've trained yourself then running
equals miserable well and here's the
thing like i mean 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 gonna give everyone this
schedule and they're gonna 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 gonna 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
have to be like one specific plan in its
entirety could just be like
like the the mix of things within it so
like rather than like
if i just said well we're gonna do three
minute intervals through 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
they're not actually maximizing their
potential within that because there's no
flavor there
and 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
uh you know four one minute intervals
then take a like 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
uh 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 push-up workout i'm going to go 10
push-ups 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
uh 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 gonna 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 yeah
there's actually quite a lot of ways
that i can introduce misery into the
push-ups and the running get creative
including um you know even just like
stuff outside of the running like taking
uh freezing cold showers those kinds of
things just introducing
random kind of chaos into the into the
system
um or having conversations with people
as an introvert it's terrifying
more podcasts so
i'm now starting uh the training and
zac 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
uh fascinating um on the diet side
you're
one of one of the many things that uh
make you fascinating is you've played
with diet as well and you're
um 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 a keto diet or a
meat-based diet in
training as an ultra marathon 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 it's like well endurance sport is
quite wide ranging as we've talked about
many many times here
so there's going to be differences i
think in just like what you want to
maybe necessarily prioritize
uh both for the event you're doing and
the intensity that's required for it the
training that's required for that event
and then also the individual component
too 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 in below distance who
are you know eating a moderate to high
carbohydrate diet so
everyone needs to do that if they want
to reach their potential in
you know say the 3k to the marathon and
you know 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 you know when he works with people
he works with people in the health
sphere as well as the performance sphere
and you know he's one of the main guys
at virta health who's uh
they've got like a 60 a success rate
with working with folks with
type 2 diabetes to reverse their type 2
diabetes
and i mean that's an astounding when you
when you think of just any nutritional
protocol at 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 throwing it all up in
the air and quitting they
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 in to
the performance world or the running
world too where
you know we may have just been
identifying
that uh you olympic distance athletes
that can tolerate a very large portion
of their diet come from carbohydrate
is gonna just it's gonna filter those
ones towards the olympics
filter those towards interesting yeah
and that doesn't mean that like
uh 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 the both the
training and the nutrition requirements
that they're being told to do so the
coach is kind there's a culture where
the coaches would really push a carb
heavy diet
and that that would 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 uh 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
they're like wow that person's
38 and they're still competing at the
olympics type of a person yeah
and you know you you put them on a low
carb diet
uh if you can control everything else
like their entire lifestyle is based
around training and racing
then uh you know they may still
have better potential by introducing
carbohydrates
at a higher level but if that's not
gonna
if that's not gonna 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
and 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 um 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
uh active life eating meat only
or mostly meat yeah what have you
learned about this
yeah i think uh so for 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 uh like you
know ketogenic strict ketogenic or no
carbohydrates for
for periods of time and what kind of
food are we talking about
what's 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
percent at that at the peak
um in terms of any type of like like
longer lasting
uh from my personal experience of like
being like
either in like the animal food camp or
like the plant based camp kind of of a
process
um so i've tried all of them things that
stayed consistent over the 10 years is
kind of the macronutrient profile
that i've done throughout the course so
one didn't win over the other in terms
of meat based versus plant-based oh for
me meat based definitely
was i mean i was 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 only 2020 happened and now i
haven't had a really good chance to
improve we'll see hopefully i've got
some more
yeah some more in the tank that's
strange there's so most athletes that
compete 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
it's anecdotes but like
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 call it hyper
carnivore where they're like
i think above 80 percent of their intake
from meat um
and they're looking at a few different
things there but it's so weird and i
keep interrupting but it's so weird that
it sounds unhealthy
uh hyper carnivore yeah but it makes me
feel really good
so it's the individual thing right yeah
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 low carbohydrate
and saw some very noticeable differences
in the way i
felt the way i performed in all this
stuff
that doesn't mean that there wasn't
another path i just did not find that
path and
the the the fact that i found a path
that
was producing the results i was looking
for is really all that matters in my
mind you know like
i don't really care if there was a
parallel path that works just as well or
you know something like that because
ultimately we only have one shot at
everything we're doing so like
it'd be great if i could go back and try
four or five different things well the
annoying thing is
that the the body adjusts to whatever
the heck you're doing so
you can't 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 like any time you hyper
focus on one
area or pick a couple variables and just
target those
you find yourself in a position where
you are you're putting other things in
the most uncharitable light possible
so so then you have this situation where
like it's actually a combination of a
variety of different things so where are
the big movers
and you know for me nutritional shift
was pretty clear that that improved my
sleep in my recovery
and i mean people can say well there's
the placebo
effect which is a very real concern but
you know for me personally a 10-year
placebo effect would be a
quite lengthy placebo effect and
i do think it's individual though i i
emphasize that a lot because i mean 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
um 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 gonna give them this
workout and they're gonna 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 because they're different from
me and every time you know when you have
your own personal experience
the first the kind of guttural response
is oh if i had done it would have gone
this way why did it go completely
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 uh first of all
intellectually but that's more known and
and understandable but like physically
yeah the fact that i could train
like not eat 20 hours 24 hours and then
do a hard
like jiu jitsu 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 he could not eat
and have like incredible focus but also
athleticism like both
endurance and explosive i mean jiu-jitsu
is a special thing it's like more like
chess yeah it's not like power lifting
no not power lifting olympic lifting
where it's like true explosiveness but
that's fascinating and it makes me
wonder like what other things
are there to to um to discover about
yourself
the 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
right 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 the
electrolytes and then vitamins
but then also like remove all the humans
from your life that affect you
yep positively or negatively because you
might feel amazing because you're
hanging out with cool people and then
uh 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 uh
i suppose that's the way to live life
because it's impossible to find the
optimal for
any of us but carnivore is an
interesting
new kind of caveat a new 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
uh 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 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 um
and i think that's that 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 we'll 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 yeah like where the
carnivore seems to treat
like like depression uh-huh 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 d
agostino and and jeff wallick 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 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 d'agostino 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 um that's just you know wild guesses
on my part
um 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
we were i think we were 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 100
miles
you can't you might replicate a third of
it so so
i'll do i'll walk you through kind of my
approach for like 100 mile race and i
can tell you maybe what i would do
differently on like a training day
uh but yeah so for um
where where the community is in
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 you're 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 gonna i'll maybe have some
carbohydrate the night before for dinner
but then i'm gonna lean into the
overnight fast breakfast the morning of
i'm gonna stay away from carbohydrates
for a hundred miler anyway
and i'm gonna have something like
something that's pretty
like a high energy low
volume so like i'll do like an s fuels
uh life bar
they've got like what's in an s fuel
life bar are we talking about carbs or
we're talking about
proteins basically fat and protein yeah
fat protein bar
and they make sure that's awesome yeah
so it's it's not it's low carb
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
uh 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 uh
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 flavored
version so you can like replicate the
taste and the feel of drinking like a
like you know a sports drink science is
awesome i know it is
well and that's so much of it too
because people are always like well i
don't know i just i
just like to have my gatorade or
whatever right yeah it's like well you
can have it now just uh 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
um volume high energy fat protein stuff
the morning of so that when i start the
race my body's gonna be encouraged to
start out burning high levels of fat
once i get going
probably 45 minutes in i'll start
introducing small amounts of
carbohydrate so at that point my
body's been revving pretty high fat
metabolism
and by introducing some carbohydrate in
the context of the
you know let's say my hundred mile uh
personal record
you know i'm i'm running approximately
nine miles every hour so i'm
probably going through about a thousand
calories in an hour's time
uh i'm gonna 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
uh 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
is it the car's that's the problem or is
it fiber
or just oh from going above 40 grams or
just because you mentioned digestion
issues
like one of the things for me it's like
one of the
cool things about fatty protein protein
or fat
is like my stomach just feels way better
yeah like for
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 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'll say moderate carbohydrate
diet
is recommended but they'll also say that
it's like something like 60
of participants are gonna 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 maybe the 40
right exactly so for me what i found is
like
i can push up to 40 grams without
getting any digestion issues
um do i need 40 grams probably not at
least not based on kind of the numbers
that would be like that 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
um most folks that are following a
moderate high carbohydrate are going to
be recommended do 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
uh not so much for ultramarathons but
just in general from 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 gonna be a lot different
especially when you're stretching out
distances well past that and you
there's there's 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 gonna 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
ultramarathons aren't going to be you
know probably training much past 10
hours per week
and they're probably not gonna have the
i'll call it their
a dietary budget to tolerate a hundred
grams of carbohydrate consumption during
their workouts and still be able to
stay healthy and uh you know so i think
that's kind of like a
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 one percent of
top performers so maybe you can talk
about the training like feeling 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
you are not even like one tenth of your
level of performance but you know i
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 not no food yeah i think i
mean i like to train on an empty stomach
uh i do most my my biggest training
session usually in the morning and
it usually will 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 build training
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 uh
but yeah i think uh in 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
um 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 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 if 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 x
has a two percent performance increase
that you won't even probably notice
because there's other variables that
will clearly overpower that two percent
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 your outfit is like not being
optimal in every way just not caring and
just enjoying the
purity of just running yeah no matter
what
just enjoying the natural aspect yeah
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 yeah
because because most people like stuff
right yeah 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 uh
you know that's gonna negatively impact
the people around you or your
experiences with them
uh 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 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 and
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 yeah i embrace it yeah and i mean
it is one of those
things where it's like i'm gonna 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
and drink and you have memories that
last a lifetime from that experience and
you paid for it for a couple 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
yeah you can't turn your back on your
past
um 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 a
hundred miles on a treadmill
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 planet got cancelled and i was in
a position where i was going to be doing
a runnable 100 miler
uh 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
uh 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 so 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
uh you know dealing with the mental
aspects of being on a treadmill for 100
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
of a 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
um i 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'd get off to use the bathroom and
that was a little bit of a longer break
then i at some i had 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 yeah so
uh 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 over and 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
yeah to reset so maybe if you were in
the future you would
figure out what exactly how much she's
needed to have them at the bank i never
actually thought about that
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
yeah for that feeling just like you said
that experience of control
like uh 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 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 brain power
required to hit that pace and say you
take care of that yeah
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 uh you've also during
that stream got to interact one of the
greatest athletes of all time burke
pressure
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
yeah i've got a chance to talk to joe
rogan
uh yesterday about this which is uh
fascinating he i think he's a little bit
doubtful of
bert's ability to be the ultra performer
that he so naturally is
yeah um what's your thoughts about bert
as a runner what's your advice to him
and what was your interaction like on 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 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 on for like five or ten minutes and
i thought that would be amazing if he
did that he ended up coming on for 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
it's he's just uh bert is definitely
like i feel like he's as unchanged from
like his popularity as one can get away
with
and it's just like his his lifestyle i
think is very
un 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 you it's it's under that
layer of uh
fat yeah so for people who are not
familiar burke crash is a comedian
who takes off his shirt often has a uh
elegant layer of fat around him he's
also a party animal
so he's a weird balance of like healthy
and unhealthy
yeah so he drinks a lot during
i think there's some debate about that
but certainly after
his uh 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 his 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 um
one of my favorite comedians like eddie
izzard who
has 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 great 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
a performance like optimization thing
where
training is such a huge part of this
process like grace 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 gonna do this
where then all of a sudden it goes from
like
you stop thinking about oh that's not
possible it's like well i'm just gonna
do it and i think
bert 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 gonna do it
and my my thought with bert was the two
thousand mile thing is
where are we gonna find him at the end
of the year with like 36 hours to go on
a hundred miles and he's gonna say
that's right
that's right that's what's gonna happen
and it's going to be hilarious uh 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 uh you know one thing
that is exciting about ultra marathons i
think in a lot of places especially
early in someone's ultra marathon
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 gonna run a hundred miles and
the first i've ever run before is 50
or something like that and you just know
you're gonna do something that you've
never done before you're gonna
experience things you would have never
been able to predict
uh and it's like this really interesting
unique
like human experience i think so for me
i 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 uh
um 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 trans
continental
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
the 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
uh 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 you're handling all the
logistics and 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 ultra
marathons 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 costner who
averaged 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 the sierras
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
uh 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
um but yeah i mean there's going to be
things that i can't
prepare for won't know it's going to
happen and 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 right we need to
have
the places figured out where we're going
to 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 are you so you're you're taking the
san francisco to new york right yeah
and when are you doing the run september
1st is when uh you know barring anything
like catastrophic between now and then
it's really exciting but i mean it's
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 ren's
charity
uh but with that said i think i am
capable of
uh if i have a good experience uh you
know
chasing the record or going after the
record or at least getting close to it
so oh 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 going to 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 in 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 focus on 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
forest 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
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 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 manage 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 probably eating
like anywhere between 10 to 15 000
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 any have any stomach
problems my friends are trying to
minimize
the amount of stomach problems 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
is it can you strengthen the ankles or
those kinds of things that prevent
yeah 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 gonna be like generally speaking
is gonna be
important i'm gonna i think just from a
lifetime of running is gonna be a huge
advantage
uh a lot of these like kind of like
mechanical movements are gonna be very
established it's just gonna be about can
i tolerate that volume of it
there i think 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 don't really don't i
never need to be running a 648 mile for
this adventure
um and i so i'm looking at 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 gonna
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 these simulated runs so you
legitimately like trying to perfectly
copy what would happen one two or three
day segment
on that right 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
um 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 amount 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 uh so i'll all
what i'm going to start 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 150 miles that's a
seven day training week
uh 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 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 is 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's gonna 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 gonna 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
worth of running what what 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
uh that'd be in august do 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 that's
crazy this is incredible it's it's
actually interesting because like if i
did let's say i did the simulation
now um 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
uh 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 started
so then those first few days maybe
aren't quite as miserable and you said
uh 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 72.5 miles per day so will
you be posting online and like
yeah instagram's gonna be a big one i
think i might do a few like youtube
stuff along the way too
um 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
uh 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 was points of that where i was
like you know you get that voice you
talk about 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 going to be valuable for you yeah
and then you think about oh you know
what there's uh
you know courtney dewalter one of the
best female ultra owners to ever
exist is taking an 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 hard 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
you know we're going to get a happy zac
or an angry exactly it's like you're
making bets
and i'm sure there'll be some days maybe
not many maybe very few where 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 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
but then then it's like people want to
know when is this happening and uh
um 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
in reality like when you take uh 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 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 to 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 going to 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
well yeah you do you really do have to
yeah you're running for that uh-huh
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
uh 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 it's almost broken and overcomes it
i mean that's just fascinating stories i
can't wait
i 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 he knows i'm not sure if
he's followed along about the exact
starting date or well he will no
this is great you'll probably think
you're a
crazy uh mfr 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 helly gabor lassie 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 rebraking and that sort of
stuff um
i mean he ran two what was it 203
59 before the shoot technology came in
that is estimated at anywhere between a
two to eight percent performance
advantage talking about a two hour
marathon two
zero three yep two hour three minutes
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
uh so if you're before that in your
career you are 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 his like
at a national 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 prefontaine
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 basic 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 prefontaine story or what would you
say is inspiring about prefontaine
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 you have the perfect story
of like he wanted to be good at
something
like most american kids tried football
no hard work was going to get
pre-fontaine
starting in varsity for football starts
running
he fell in love with a mile uh his
college coach told him no you're not
going to be a miler you're going to be a
5k
guy and he popularized the 5k in the
united states or three mile in some
cases
and i mean he would the way he would
race i think is what
really made him interesting for po 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 if you beat me you're gonna have
to bleed to do it because he's gonna be
in old guts race in
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 priy was going to make a move
really early yes 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 mm-hmm so race it's
about 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 the run from the front i mean
what what do you cause you mentioned
this
uh the 100 mile you ran you were in
second place in the
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 walsh
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 pree was probably the same way and 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 prefontaine
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
experience i think it's like a pioneer
spirit right yeah you know the
next frontier kind of a thing but i mean
prefontaine 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
uh 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 uh you know a
sponsor and then
also still compete in the olympic games
and go to the events that are actually
ones that are going to
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
in a car accident and
died before he would have likely
probably meddled at the olympics
so he and there was 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 or 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 and well it makes i mean it
makes life
like a movie almost where exactly if
everything's all
sunshine and rainbows then it's not as
entertaining to watch yeah there's no
adversity to overcome
you mentioned 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 varied terrains 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
it this probably dated back actually
before 2015
uh you know nike decided well their
their their
their development team uh was ahead of
the curve
they've developed this new foam they
call it like a peabod 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
sometimes it's 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 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 now you have someone run a 214
like that's and you attribute a lot of
that to the the shoe
yeah 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
with a little innovation of foam is
there other stuff that you can do or
further innovation 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 kipchaki
broke well when they did 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 that was a nike shoe he was wearing
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 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's a here's an
example of it uh there's a
there was a an athlete kara goucher um
she
was not she was a nike 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 like
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 one of
those
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
shoe so it's like at what point do you
tell like a wealthy family with a high
school
kid that you know you can get that 250
shoot and then you go and this kid's
family can barely afford a pair of shoes
for that much less a 250
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 or 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 like
genetics
genetic engineering all those kinds of
things yeah 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 and we can study it
right 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 oh
huh which is you know like what video so
video games are in the olympics
yeah yeah it could be as like a trial
that they're doing
mm-hmm um yeah
if this is true i'm trying in real time
look it up but if this is 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 yeah because you can control video
games better than you control
for genetics and humans well 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 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 is it like
if you just do inter competition testing
like there's potential for people to do
things that are
uh going to give them a performance
advantage but not going to show up on
that
test on the day of or after the 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 decided
oh i'm not going to get tested in 2020
do the covert restrictions is the time
to dope up and then
you know hit some stride and some
records and then 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 you might be the last
generation of like
natural unmodified humans that
we're running and who knows maybe that's
already over who knows who's
who's modified that that's that's true
you might we might be living through
that transition to the new nike shoe
but broadly defined yeah
so you'll be uh in some sense in in the
history books as
uh humans used to run without any
modifications they used to destroy their
body and let it recover and then do it
again
and they used to be impressed with the
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 incred the four mile
the four minute mile was incredibly
impressive uh
the i really love the 11 hour mark for
the 100
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 um uh elliot kipchoge
of kenya 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 uh
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
the i think he
i think he could go under two or someone
equivalent
to him could go under two hours with
with the shoe technology probably what
it'll 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 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 kitchen keys got a was it 201
i believe is his 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 and that and 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 that
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
all together 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 you want
to be the guy who says
yeah thanks for the millions and
millions of dollars but we're gonna
st all those years and money you spent
on that foam yeah you wasted it we're
not gonna let you use it
but you know if you're another company
who uh you know revolutionizes 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
yeah
there's really no way around i think
phil methatone 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 uh
of what are the limits
uh 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 and i think
ultra for sure because that is a fastly
growing
sport and it's there's
there's a lot of potential for a much
bigger pop or a 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
uh especially as it becomes more popular
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 a 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 that's
the one hour and 40 minutes seems like
that's pretty fast
yes that's very fast for folks for some
perspective there the current world
record
is like in the 440s per mile a 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 that is that lap
at just over 70 seconds per lap so
minute
and ten just over that but you're doing
it 26.2 miles
yeah so so over a hundred times it's
mind boggling but watching elliot
kipchoge 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
yes 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
mind-boggling
that one is super awesome because uh how
tragic it is like
one little slip up four years of work
and your room
it's all gone not just four years of
work for many of them
like a lifetime of work and they're
teenagers and they're teenagers
and they get dedicated everything yeah
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 any one 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 iii 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
um to think that like i'd be doing
anything that was revolved around
running as
as an occupation as 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 exactly
with it
they've got cheat codes yeah exactly
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 a
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 decisions
my life to make was to step away from
that to pursue running
more holistically and i mean i almost
didn't i had a co-teacher who was
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 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 why are you here
like like after i told him that he like
every time we'd
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 in 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 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 your success bar is being the
best one of the best
in the league or the best ever and that
conversation is floating around
everywhere you look and see
versus being able to kind of quietly
fail and go back to teaching
it makes it a little more digestible i
think you have a little bit
more freedom to be great 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
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 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 can 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 that is something i would
tell
tell people um folks 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
like it's non-traditional uh
and the odds are low of like
traditionally defined success
just do that thing 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 the world wanted
me to be a plumber when i took that test
my sophomore year
but even like like academically just
going to university and
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 really powerful like for me the way i
do research
the way i learn is is different than
colleagues of mine and i realized that
that i really like to follow things i'm
passionate about versus sort of the
rigor of studying ever
like the fundamentals all across the
board and building up and 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 it's 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 a lot of times as like oh it's
the you know the kid who 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 down
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 going to
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 asked 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 you look
to the 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
uh like the the incredible madman that
you are zach 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 gonna 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 lex it's been a
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 malus already took care of that
one
[Laughter]
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 yeah
i'll do my best so the everything that
could happen will be positive for uh for
the world
so you're saying i should try to average
100 miles a day 100
well i think you're going to 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 zach bitter and thank
you to
ladder balcampo newm and betterhelp
check them out in the description to
support this podcast
and now let me leave you with some words
from steve prefontaine
i'm going to work so that it's a pure
guts 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