Cameron Hanes - Keep Hammering Collective - KHC 076 - Let’s Talk Endurance with Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Join us for a discussion with Cam and Andrew Huberman. Today we’re talking about human endurance and how people like Courtney Dauwalter and Ken Rideout can endure the pain of long races.  Follow along: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cameronrhanes Twitter: https://twitter.com/cameronhanes Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/camhanes/ Website: https://www.cameronhanes.com   Follow Andrew: https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab  Thank you to our sponsors: GoHunt: https://gohunt.com/ use code CAM when you sign up for $50 towards the gear shop + 10% off the GoHunt store Sig Saur: https://www.sigsauer.com/ use code CAM10 for 10% off optics MUD\WTR: https://mudwtr.com/cam use code CAM for 15% off  Ketone IQ: https://hvmn.com/CAM use code CAM for 20% Grizzly Coolers: https://www.grizzlycoolers.com/ Use code KEEPHAMMERING for 20% off Black Rifle Coffee: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ Use code KEEPHAMMERING for 20% your first order Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro: A Theoretically Scientific Upper Limit to Human Endurance 0:03:28 The Importance of Salt Intake 0:04:57 Neuromental - Effort and the Perception of Effort 0:09:10 Pain, Enduring & Dopamine 0:15:34 Sleep - The Ultimate Reset & “Micro-Naps” 0:21:38 Sleep Deprivation, Hallucinations & “DPI’s” 0:23:54 The Brain’s Functions 0:28:37 A Mindset to Embrace Pain 0:30:18 Ad Break 0:32:19 CONTD: A Mindset to Embrace Pain 0:40:55 Adrenaline, Pain After Injury & Head Injuries 0:52:45 Pain Limits Between Men & Women  01:03:09 Forward Center of Mass: Enduring with Purpose 01:16:50 Outro

Every step I take, I move my truth. Every time they tell me stop I use. Every comment hate that makes my feel, gather up my energy and boom. I hear them talking, saying the way that I move it's so reckless. That is a part of my mind I've been blessed with. Giving my blood so I am relentless. We're here with Andrew Huberman and we're going to talk about endurance, willpower, what makes freaks freaks.

How about that? The endurance of life or the endurance of running? Everything. So, I have a few questions for you. Great. is there a theoretically scientific upper limit of human endurance only to the extent that you could try to predict like okay based on hydration based on caloric need based on what's come you know people are taken into the body in terms of fuel based on how much fuel is stored in the livers glycogen in the muscles etc you could come up with something on paper but i guarantee you that if the will to endure was really there

It would exceed that without question. Because what we're not talking about here is like how high a human can jump, which, guessing there is an upper limit. Yeah. No technology added. Endurance is a whole other beast because endurance is something that is not just for physical exercise. As you know, there's intense crossover between the mental will part, the will to endure and the ability to endure physically and mentally.

Whereas with jumping or with lifting a physical object off the ground, it's different. There are upper limits to strength for a given individual. And one can exceed their expectation of that based on, you know, the ability to deploy adrenaline. And this is what we hear about superhuman strength. Yeah, the cliche thing is the mom lifts the car off the kid or something. And in many ways, those superhuman strength abilities are real.

They can be accessed, mainly through the deployment of adrenaline in the brain and body. But with endurance, it's basically a mental game. But there are, of course, physical constraints, right? Yeah, where I think of endurance is I do the long endurance event, so running. Like, and there's the old fable about the first person. to ever run a marathon, ran wherever it was in Greece, and then died after they ran the 26 miles, right? Have you heard this? They died at the finish line? They died. They had to get a message somewhere. This is, I can't remember how the story goes. Had to get a message somewhere is 26 miles away,

and that's how the marathon was originated, that distance, but the runner died. So when I think of that, I'm like, if that killed somebody back then 26 miles, and now we have people running hundreds of miles, right and that's that's what's fascinating to me is like what makes somebody better at pushing their body so yeah we take in calories we take in hydration a big thing for endurance is salt like salt can make a huge difference just take a salt tablet every hour is kind of the key to finishing 100 200 mile race but why are some people so much better why is cordonie or Goggins better at pushing themselves than a regular man. Okay, well, can't help but touch on the salt piece.

Yeah. Your neurons, nerve cells, essentially fire with electrical potentials. They release neurotransmitters that then cause other neurons to fire. That process involves neurons opening up little, little gates, if you will, in their outer part called the membrane. What flows through those to allow the electricity to propagate? is ions, sodium, magnesium, potassium. There's some other stuff too, chloride, et cetera.

But sodium is key for neurons to work. So if you're too low in sodium, not only do you lose water, and that has to do with a bunch of other mechanisms involving the kidney, aldosterone, etc. But neurons can't fire. And you need your neurons to fire to contract the muscles. And you need your neurons to fire to be able to think. So you've got to have enough electrolytes in there,

sodium being chief among them. Okay, so that's just a kind of a, we'll put that on the shelf for now. Yeah. As you mentioned, you also need hydration, and you need fuel, glycogen, body fat stores. There are other fuels too, their phosphorotine system. They think with endurance mainly you're going to head into the glycogen, and you're using glycogen as a fuel, using body fat as a fuel. And there's some other fuels as well, ketones eventually when it concludes.

You know, body smart has multiple fuel system for short, medium, long term, and long, long term effort. Okay. So that's kind of the fuel electrolytes piece. We can't discount that. But why would some individuals be able to push further and further? And that's going to be 100% neural, mental. And when I say neural mental, I mean, you know, the mental piece we often hear, you know, 90% of work or sport is psychological.

But ultimately, it's neural. It's the firing of neurons. So what would allow one person to push further? it's going to come down to their effort, their perception of their effort, and what that means to them. Right. The meaning piece is a little bit hard for science to really attack mechanistically, but let's be real. If somebody feels depleted, but they can set mental milestones, like, I'll just go another 10 meters and then re-up, another 10 meters, and then another 10 meters. That's one strategy. They could count steps. Yeah.

They could also distract themselves. right? You could distract yourself from the pain of the effort. Somebody who's very good at endurance is going to have a deep kit. At times they'll count steps, at times they'll go for milestones. At times they'll distract themselves. And they'll have a deep kit of meaning running for the purpose of themselves, running for maybe higher power, maybe running for family. Then they're going to have to probably shift those as time goes on.

on. But if we want to get mechanistic, there's a brain structure. Most neuroscientists until recently didn't even know what this brain structure did. Most probably didn't even know that it existed. This is a brain structure called the anterior mid-singulate cortex. Fancy name, name doesn't matter, but AMCC. The AMCC is an area in the brain that gets inputs and outputs from lots of different things, the dopamine system, the serotonin system, the memory system, the forebrain that's involved them thinking, planning, and strategy. And that's key. We'll come back to that. A colleague of mine at Stanford School Medicine, Joe Parvizi,

it's a neurosurgeon, did this really interesting studies. He's in the brain. He's stimulating different brain areas. And he discovers this anterior mid-singulate cortex. When he stimulates there, people feel as if a challenge is impending on them, a storm or some sort of physical challenge or psychological challenge. And it's kind of abstract in their mind. but their response to it when this brain area is stimulated is to feel as if they're going to go forward center of mass

into it and through it. It's the grit piece. And then he backs off the stimulation of this area and that mental effect relax. He stimulates a little bit of a distance away, completely different set of subjective effects. This brain area has been shown in other studies to enlarge or to be activated more in people

that are successful dieters, successful exercisers, And here's the key. It seems to really matter if the effort that you're engaging in is something that you don't want to do. It's painful. It's creating that internal sense of resistance. So your keep hammering mantra is hammering against something, right? We think of the hammer, right? Rarely do we think about the surface pushing back against that.

So when Courtney or Goggins or you or anyone is pushing through a mental barrier, they are enduring without, question this anterior mid-singulate cortex is highly active and what's interesting is that this brain area is not designed for running it's not designed for getting up for the seventh time in the middle of the night when your newborn is crying it's designed for all of that this is something that's essentially in all of us smaller in some larger and others and the act of enduring makes it more accessible and there are a bunch of really interesting studies that also show when people fail at reaching a goal when they tap out. Yeah. Especially long-term goals. And if you think about it, for somebody who's struggle with their weight or with other issues

or quitting smoking or something like that, it's an endurance race, really. It's not a one-off. This brain area seems to be less engaged, maybe even atrophies a little bit, shrinks a little bit. So I've been talking a lot about this brain area recently because it's super exciting. A number of different studies converge on a common theme, which is that it's involved in enduring and pushing through. So when Courtney's out running, I don't know what's going on in her head, but presumably at some point, she might have a clamp. Cramp in the leg or something. It's like, oh. Now you have an option of thinking about that cramp, making it disappear that way, or taking your attention to something else. When I've had experts on the podcast who talked about pain, Dr. Sean Mackie, he's a medical

doctor and Ph.D. Director of the Pain Center, essentially, at Stanford School of Medicine. He's talked a lot about what's called the biopsychosocial model of pain, which means that pain is an emotion. It's something that exists in us as a thought and an emotion. So that's the psychological piece, right? Courtney or Goggins or you, no doubt has a memory of, I've been here before where there was pain. It went away. Or I remember leaning into the feeling of it and that pain got smaller. That's what's interesting about how the brain registers pain. Sometimes by focusing on it, we can mentally shrink it, sometimes by focusing on it, it grows. You kind of have to explore that. I think the cold plunge is a really nice way to explore some of this. You get into really cold water,

it's uncomfortable. And you can either embrace the discomfort and move through it or you can try and distract yourself. So having those options in mind is key. Because of this mental part of pain and struggle, it gives us options of ways to push through it. It's kind of like finding your way through a jungle, right? Sometimes you want to hack low on the plant. Sometimes you want to hack high. So one of the key things here is the fact that this anterior mid-singulate cortex gets input from the dopamine system, you know, and people make a lot of dopamine, and it's involved in a lot of different things, not just reward and effort. So one of the cool things about the anterior mid-singulate cortex is that it gets input from the dopamine system. And, you know, people hear

about dopamine a lot these days. Dopamine hits and dopamine's involved with the reward and motivation, and that's all true. It's involved in a lot of things. It's even involved in stuff within the eye, believe it or not. But the interesting thing about the dopamine system as it relates to endurance is that when we set milestones and we reach those milestones, dopamine is deployed and that changes our physiology and allows us to go further. So, for instance, let's say Courtney's running and she got a leg cramp and it's painful and she's wondering if she's hydrated enough. She's starting to flag. I mean, I have to imagine, I'm not her obviously, but I have to imagine at some point she thinks like, this really sucks. but she decides, okay, 15 more steps.

Now, if she reaches that 15th step, no doubt there's a reward released in the brain in the form of a chemical. Made it. Yeah, made it. Dopamine is released other things too. Okay, I don't want to give the impression. Dopamine's the only currency of reward in the brain. But at that point, her physiology is different than it was 15 steps prior. Why?

Because dopamine is deployed along with two other chemicals, epinephrine and norephenephrine, which together those three we call the catecholamines. And those three change the way that our brain networks work. They give us a new sense of what's possible. Now she can set a new milestone. Okay, I'm going to go another eight minutes. Or I'm going to go the duration of some song in my head. Or I'm just going to focus on the trees around me.

So the incredible thing about human endurance is that we can use our cognition, our thoughts, our emotions, meaning to set miles. and push through what would otherwise cause us to tap out if we were just focused on the perception of the paint. Right. So it's almost like a vehicle that, you know,

it's almost like an automatic vehicle where you program in the destination, but then it's a thinking vehicle that can change the destination, re-up the destination, and actually change the amount of fuel it uses to go a given speed across a given distance. What do I mean by that? You know, if we look at the body and endurance and the brain, if we look at the body and endurance

just as what we call like a linear system, like calories in, calories burn, VO2 max, you know, firing of slow twitch muscle fibers, et cetera, a lot of sense can be made of that. But ultimately the mental piece is the one that can change the, you know, how much effort is put in is largely dictated by how much we perceive that effort and how much we perceive, okay, the effort I just went through

the last hundred miles, well, I'm here now. If I could do 100 miles, I can do another 100. You know, there's also true for psychological stress. You know, and this is taught a lot in addiction treatment communities. If you can be uncomfortable for one second, well, then you can be uncomfortable for two seconds. You just made it through that second. You can be uncomfortable with two seconds. You can be uncomfortable for five minutes.

You know, the whole notion of one day at a time is like that, that segment seems to work. You know, you try and segment your whole life. That's a big, that's a big elephant heat all it wants. So the point here is that these. reward systems that we can set up through just our own spontaneous creation of what the subjective milestones are, in theory, can allow us to run until we are on nubs. In theory. Right. Right. And at that point, of course, you know, you could bleed out. You could need sleep so much that you collapse. But in speaking with people in communities, you know, that go through like military screening where they have to

stay up many, many days. A lot of those guys will tell you, you know, you're better off not taking the nap. Right. You're better off not dropping it. Just keep moving. And the hardest thing to do is sit still. But as long as you keep moving, you're good. And that without question is because you have a task. As long as you're complete task, you're reupping these reward systems, which then changes your physiology, which then allows you to move forward. In those conditions, they're being given a task, run this distance, dig this sand, get back in the cold water, or what have you. Yeah. but in a foot race or a race against oneself, which is ultimately what it becomes,

you just keep changing the goal, changing the goal, changing the goal. So it's a constant re-upping of finish lines. And it's essentially like taking a trophy each time, except that trophy, think about that trophy that you get when you reach that next mental milestone. Imagine that trophy's filled with a fuel, and that fuel is endurance.

I got a couple questions on that because there's one. You talk about the military guys, they keep going. There's a strategy in ultra running in the multi-day ultra-running steer where you take a nap, and Courtney has talked about this, took a nap for two minutes. And I fell asleep one time for a minute. And I woke, my brother was pacing me. I woke up and I said, how long was I asleep? And he's like, one minute. And your brain resets, your body resets. That one or two minutes, you're good to go again. I mean, so I heard you say the military guys, they just push through. But can you explain that one or two minute map and why that feels like you just did a control, delete reset?

How does that? Yeah, I'm obsessed with this kind of stuff because for those that, you know, have followed me or that haven't, you know, I'm big on helping people get their sleep right. Because sleep is the ultimate reset for endurance and life, right? but I'm a big proponent of things like non-sleep deep rest, which is similar to an ancient practice called Yoga Nidja, where you lie down, you deliberately stay awake, but you relax your body, and you try and get your brain out of thinking and doing

and more into just pure sensation. Sometimes people fall asleep. This done for 10 minutes or 20 minutes can partially offset some of the effects of sleep deprivation. But we know naps work too. Now what we're talking about is very, very short naps. So what happens when you're sleep deprived and you take one of those mental micro naps, or let's just call it a micro nap, is no doubt the brain goes into a state of sleep that's much deeper than it normally would

had you been on a more standard schedule, about awake for 12 to 16 hours or something, that you want to sleep. So what you're getting is a bunch of sleep-like stuff in that very compact time frame. Now, what's happening there? Okay, well, we know that fatigue and sleepiness comes from the buildup, of a molecule called adenosine. Incidentally, caffeine interrupts the adenosine system. So you don't feel that sleepiness,

then the caffeine wears off and that adenicine hits those receptors and you feel extra sleepy. But no doubt in those short microdamps, some adenosine is being cleared. We also know that there's a bunch of changes in the neurons themselves. Those, what we call ion channels,

a potassium, sodium thing gets altered, let's say, in sleep. You know, it's about altering the amount of potassium in and outside of the cells and in naps. You adjust some of that. So when you are really tired and you kind of do that little micro nap, you wake up and you're like, I feel better. What's going on there? Well, it's a very compact replenishment of some of the cellular and kind of body things like clearance of adenosine changes those, the amount of potassium inside and outside of the cell, these kinds of things. Now, are you clearing all that adenosine away in one minute?

No. but no doubt there's a more rapid clearance than will normally occur in one minute of sleep. There's also something very powerful, and this is the reason I mentioned non-sleep depressed, there's also something very powerful about just letting your mind go idle for a period of time. You know, from the time you wake up until you go sleep night, you're in what I call DPO's. You're doing duration path outcome. You're trying to figure out what to say next, what to do next. You're trying to get to that milestone. You're trying to navigate through your day. when you go into one of those one minute micro naps or you do a non-sleep deep rest,

you're essentially shutting down all that planning. What's planning? The prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex we talked about earlier is this very dynamic strategy setting system. So like we're here in my yard. We have a strategy. We have a plan and we're carrying out that plan. The moment you get in your car, you have a different strategy plan to get where you need to go and so on and so forth.

The prefrontal cortex is involved in all. all of that dynamic planning. And when you run, as we were talking about before, prefrontal cortex is going to be engaged. This is important when you actually have to plan milestones. But there's also that beautiful part of endurance running, what I would consider myself an endurance runner, but I've tried to ruck long on Sundays

and I ran cross country a bit to know that there are those times when you just went 20 minutes, 30 minutes, you weren't planning anything. You're just cruising and you're just in the sensation of running. And I would argue that when you're doing that, at when any of us are doing that, we're, we are allowing our prefrontal cortex to go slightly offline. Okay, it's always online to some extent, but slightly off lost a little bit. So this is rest while moving. Okay, this is rest while in effort. So this is another kind of drawer in the, in the

cupboard of option, sorry, this is another covered in the options of ways to push through. So you can plan milestones, but that's planning. That requires that prefrontal cortex. Okay, I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do that, I'm going to do this. It's like the list that people cross off during the day. But then there's the just running, not thinking about anything. And we know that that allows the brain to some areas of the brain to get some quote unquote rest during those times. So I would argue that provided one doesn't go off track, off course, provided that one is staying with their pace, the more that one can rest while in effort, the more resources you're conserving. What resources are we talking about? We're not talking about caloric energy.

at the level of muscles. We're talking about caloric energy and neural energy. Right. Okay, which sounds kind of woo, neural energy. No, but think about most of our metabolic needs each day

are for brain function. So the ability to just let the brain idle a little bit in certain areas is energy conservation. And so that's got to play in also. So we're not just talking about a vehicle that can like milestone go, milestone go, go push through endure.

It's also about knowing when to hit. Like in a vehicle, you know, you're and then you get up in those high, RPMs and then what does a good transmission allow you to do? Yeah. And you can go the same speed, right, at lower RPM. I see. Yeah, so there are a couple different things there too. What I've noticed on the road, you can turn that off that, the frontal cortex, I guess, kind of get into a groove.

We're not really thinking, you're just, you're just cruising. Those miles come easy, you know, because you turn that off. And so it's just, in the mountains, much tougher because every step has to be calculated. That's why, like, in the mountains, that your nervous system seems like it's firing all the time because you're correcting and you're anticipating footfalls and things like that. It happens fast. But I wonder if Courtney can turn that off even in those situations, because I remember I saw her when she was going for the Colorado Trail Records, middle of the night, she's running, and she fell asleep. You're running while running. And Maggie, who is with us too, was a great ultra runner herself.

We were all three running that night. And Maggie caught her because she's going to go off right off the, and there's a cliff. So she had, I don't know what happened. I don't know if she's so tired or was whatever, but she actually fell asleep and just like, she caught her like that. So that's pretty fascinating. Oh, yeah. I mean, I've never been out to SEAL team training, but friends that have been through it successfully

told me that, you know, there's multiple points where people start hallucinating. Yeah. People fall asleep. You know, right before people fall asleep like that from sleep deprivation, they're going to start hallucinating. I mean, you can make anybody legitimately psychotic by sleep depriving. Yeah. The brain just does not want to go there. It will go there, but it doesn't want to go there. And if it does, you'll start, you'll start hallucinating. I mean, if you've ever been in a late-night conversation with someone and you start nodding off and you say, it's, it's, it's, it's, you'll start, Typically, you start saying things that don't make any sense. First, you know, we've all been there.

Yeah. And it's kind of funny and then you're gone. Right. Right. So, yeah, as you mentioned, when you're running on terrain where you really have to pay attention, that's multiple what I would call DPO's duration path outcome is a lot of involved in the prefrontal cortex. Got to step here, got to step there. That's also what happens when you're paying attention to an injury.

Like, got to keep your gait a certain way to stay off that thing, you know, to stay off that pain, pain in the right leg or whatever it is, because it's just constant strategy implementation. Remember, if we just step back for a second and we just say, like, what does the brain do? Well, it's got a bunch of parts that connect to the body. They're involved in keeping us breathing, keeping our heart rate going, keeping our digestion, what we call autonomic or automatic functions. And then it's got a bunch of brain areas involved in memory and perception of, you know, sounds and sights and smells and tastes, et cetera.

And then it's got the thinking and planning stuff that takes our memories, takes what's going on now and can move us through our current goal. life. You know, perhaps the most demanding, metabolically demanding aspect of all that is the autonomic stuff, because it's always ticking in the background, keeping us alive, and the thinking and planning stuff. Now, when we engage in some intense learning or we're really trying to dial in and pay attention and, you know, really, really extract information to use that information quickly, you know, metabolic needs in the brain go way, way up, understandably. But when out on a long run, You know, there are going to be times, I'm guessing, if we were to, unfortunately, you can't do this experiment because the person's moving.

But if you were to measure brain activity in different areas, I'm guessing that certain areas are going to be very active during the strategy and planning phases and then less active. And then the brain, when you're in a kind of a, I don't know, people like to talk about flow states, but when you're not thinking too much about the effort required and you're actually engaging in the effort beautifully for purposes of that race or what have you, well, when metabolic activity in the brain is going to be overall slightly low. So all of these things are playing into endurance. Yeah. But I think that, you know, I think the meaning piece is critical to touch on because, you know, the meaning piece is it's a pretty broad bin.

Like let's say you're running for a charity. Right. It's like one thing in your mind you just reach to and keep going back to that, that then there's all sorts of stuff associated with that memory. You want to make people happy. you want to help people. There's all sorts of things that are that are tucked under that. You don't need to think about all of those.

You're not thinking about that one person or millions of people that are going to benefit from it. You're thinking, oh, yeah, I'm doing this for another purpose. That also allows us to get out of our sensation of how painful something is. So our ability to direct our thinking and to direct our attention away from physical sensation, but also to physical and sensation, all that's critical. So as we talk about this, you know, it's coming clear, hopefully that, running a long endurance race is a mental marathon times whatever number of miles. It's a, I mean, it's no less complicated than trying to get through a four-year degree

or, you know, a 20-year relationship or raising kids in the sense that the brain needs to have a bunch of dynamic strategies involved, you know. And these days we hear so much about optimization, you know, optimize this. So optimization is really about optimizing for what's in front of you over the course of, you know, whatever time frame matters that day, that morning, that afternoon. Now, why are some people just better at this? Well, first of all, the intermit-singulate cortex, we know can, it's plastic, it can grow, it can shrink.

So some people just trained it up really well. Yeah. And I think we- Like Goggins has done that. Yeah, and you as well. You know, I think we look at people who have incredible endurance and we often think, oh, you know, they're just really good at embracing the suck. but I'd be willing to bet that they've trained that up in themselves. They really trained it up in themselves.

And it's no coincidence that, you know, people who are in professions where they have to embrace a lot of hard situations are pretty good at embracing hard stuff outside of that. Unless, of course, you deplete this resource. And this is important. This is not a resource that is infinite. And so when does it stop? Well, I suppose at some point, the person falls asleep and collapses. I don't know if we've ever seen that. I did an episode of my podcast on hydration and water, and, you know,

I read some really tragic cases, you know, runners finishing Olympic races and then dying or going into coma or, you know, hyperneutremias and like, things like that. It's a little bit different, but, you know, there are physical limits, but I don't know, all you have to do is hear the, you know, Marcus Lattrell lone survivor story. And like that's the case of, you know, just it's forward center of mass under any and all conditions. And that's also what happens when people endure long, long term psychological

confinement, stress, etc. Yeah. You know, you talked about maybe that development because almost anybody who starts off running, you have this, it's not a real threshold. but it's a perceived threshold. So you run a 5K, you can't run another step. Then you run a 10K. Then you run a half marathon.

Then you run a marathon. Then you keep working. And all of a sudden, you're the same person. But when you couldn't run 3.1 miles where that was your limit, now you run hundreds. And Courtney is an example of this. She started off like everybody running shorter distance. She entered her first 100 mile race and quit at mile 60 because it hurt too bad. And then she realized, oh, the pain, that's just, that's what this is.

It's just dealing with pain. So now, instead of like being afraid of the pain, her thing is she loves going into the pain cave. And you mentioned a few different things about different parts of your brain, but she says she liked to go on the pain cave and explore. Dude. And make it bigger. So there's that, there's that part of it where her threshold was this and now who knows what it is. and she's developing the pay gave, which maybe that's the part of the brain you're talking about,

that can be developed. But also there's another thing, which I tried in this last ultra that I ended up winning, it was a smaller one. But I was miserable, and I remember like you can smile and change your mental state of mind, or your state of mind.

And so I was smiling by myself like some lunatic, running through the woods, but smiling, trying anything. thing to like can we make this stop hurting yeah so so expand on that yeah you know we are so subject to our own perceptions of what's happening and we can tweak those i don't think that there's anything specific about smiling per se that changes the pain it's our understanding what smiling represents oh i see which is oh like this this is a pleasure right you know it's not a pleasure but you can kind of trick yourself into believing it is.

I think you had Ken Rideout. Yeah, on your podcast. Great guy. Stad. Just amazing. He told a story to a friend who told it to me, so I hope I get this right. He did that Gobe Desert run, and I'm not sure he was, he conditioned for it going in. I think he had a pretty rough first day, as I recall.

And then at some point in the race later, several days, race, right? Yeah. I think he was neck and neck with a guy. guy and he turned to him and I think he said take your headphones out and they had to him out and he said this is typical Ken ride out fat stuff you know Ken nicest guy but wouldn't want to compete with him in anything he's willing to die he's willing to die and he's from New England so he's got an extra gear yeah we think and he says you know the thing about me is I never get tired. I don't know what it is. I just never get tired. At that point, yeah, that was it. Now,

what happened there? Did Ken get a boost or did the other guy clip himself mentally when he heard that? Probably both and probably seeing the distance between them further exacerbated whatever was going on and the guy that dropped behind and Ken, I think he won that leg. Maybe he won the race. He won the race. Amazing. Yeah. Okay. First, ultra. Amazing. That was his first alter. He was a beast. Yeah.

And also an amazing friend to his friends and an amazing dad to his kids and he's got a bunch of kids. And he's a great husband to his wife. He just like manages it all. You know, he's one of those people. And no doubt same mechanisms involved. Right. Yeah. But I love that story.

Um, because it captures this whole picture of, you know, what we tell ourselves and what and how we perceive ourselves relative to others. for better or worse, does play into our perception of how we're doing, right? I mean, when I was in college, they would put up the, in those days, they'd put up a piece of paper, and they'd show you the distribution of scores, the curve, and you'd see your number and, you know. Compare it. Yeah, and if you happen to land, you know, the far end of the distribution and the good side, you're like, whoa, like, that told you something relative to the pack. And if you didn't, if you're at the other end of the distribution,

that also told me something about my performance relative to the pack. we're we come to an understanding of who we are what we did and what we're capable of in part through an understanding of of who's winning and who's losing i mean i think goggins was talking about um seal team training again and um and other people have talked about that you know every time they hear the the bell they talk about you know like too many foot taking souls and that kind of thing and it was it's pretty foreign concept i think to folks like me who are in you know i'm in a field where you know sure it's competitive but it's not like that where you're looking for people to drop out. But certainly when I was a postdoc,

you know, super competitive. I was a postdoc at Stanford and, you know, and you see people in your lab getting great papers and that actually excites you because you're like, oh, like, people are, what's possible? So there's that kind of rising tide raises all boats kind of thing. But when it's competitive like in a foot race and there's one winner, even the smallest notion of somebody being ahead of you or falling behind you, that can be a really powerful psychological driver of then the physiology of your body. That reward system, it's that those catacolamines and other things get deployed and it's like you get a nitro boost. You've got something there. Now I think that, you know, and there's all sorts of societal implications for this too and

people can go there, but we keep it restricted to running endurance races, you realize is that sure, there's going to be some physical differences, some stride differences, but since you're Oregonian and I always go up to the U.S. track and field qualified. and it's Hayward and it's pre-Fontaine territory. I mean, I think one reason we hold him in such high regard in the world of running is because, at least from what I understand from the documentaries and the dokey dramas that have been made, that he had it in mind that no one could beat him. And he would sometimes lose.

But he had this self-perception that, you know, he could just go harder and harder. I think he was calling for the 5,000 or 12 laps. He was calling it at 12, 60 second laps was what he wanted to do, which is outrageous. Yeah. That's a 12-lapse sprint, essentially. And I don't doubt he would have done it. Yeah. And so that's a mindset, right?

And they tried to drill that mindset out of them too, right? He said famously, he wants to get into a suicide pace, and it's a good day to die. I mean, so if you're running against... There's so much in that statement. Yeah, if you're running against a guy who wants to run a suicide pace, because it's a good day to die. You know, you see that guy get a little stronger. You're like, it's over.

I can't. He's going to die or he's going to win. I can't compete with that. Right. It's something like in races there's a tactic. Like if you're running at night, some guys leading will turn off their headlap. So it doesn't give the people behind them hope, right, to see how close they are. Or if you're running in this daylight, you want to get around that corner before somebody behind you comes over the hill.

Because if they see you, that's their carrot. They're like, oh, I'm closing the distance. But if they don't see you, it's like, God, who knows how far they are, right? So it's that, it's just that, everything's exactly the same. You're running, they're running, but it's that perception is so powerful. Right. And I think that, you know, one thing that all people would, I believe, would do well to explore is, you know, what's the relationship to the pain cave, psychological or physical, in a safe way, right?

I want people self-injuring psychologically or physically, right, to the point of no recovery or trauma or something, that's not good. But to learn what's available inside the pain cave. And because there's carryover, right? Again, these are brain areas that are used for psychological stress, for physical endurance, that, you know, often for the different stressors in life, different challenges, same mechanisms. You know, I've certainly experienced times when I was like, oh man, I don't know how I'm going to make it through this morning. You got to go someplace. You have to find the portals.

And sometimes it's, you know, I'm going to text this friend or something. And then that doesn't, and you don't feel any better. You kind of have to go inward often. Then you find it. And then you, oh, like that. And there's the learning in there. It's the learning of, oh, that's the algorithm. You go there, then go there and it works.

And sometimes it doesn't work. So then you have a bunch of different things in the kit. It's a kit. And I think that, you know, we undervalue the usefulness of that. Of paying attention to the different portals that one has in and the through things. But if one can do that a bit, especially through physical exercise, where it's also good for the body. I don't know if 100 mile races are good for the body. No, probably not.

But there's great learning. there. And I think, you know, most quality schooling involves some of that. Right. You want kids to be challenged by the material. Yeah, you want to push yourself. You know, nowadays there's a lot of debate of how hard to push and, you know, et cetera. But internal friction is good. If you can lay or sandpaper out that friction and then turn it into a smoother road, there's learning there. I think that, you know, it's clear that the more sleep deprived you are, all that gets harder. Then try.

The less fuel you have, all that gets harder. So all of this is resting on a baseline of, you know, of easier, harder as that baseline drops, excruciating. And as you said, at some point, right, that we should acknowledge there are physical limit. Someone will just collapse or, you know, or sadly dogs. Yeah. You know, in the fight game, right, there's been some deaths from him.

head hits and things like that. And it's often been discussed, you know, when to send somebody back in. You know, part of the job of the corner crew is to keep that person alive. And now I think about that sometimes in the larger context of life because one thing that we know from an endurance rates or from a fight or from anything where there's adrenaline deployed in the body is that sometimes we're not the best to recognize when we've hit our limit. And that's part of how we push through these barriers. So, you know, it's interesting that we all probably have the experience of stubbing our toe really hard and how much that hurts. We've all had blisters. There's nothing worse than a blister or a splinter.

But what I'm always amazed at is how much a splinter or a blister hurts after a run and how much it could, what I'm always amazed at is how little a splinter or blister hurts after a run. and how much it could what I'm always amazed at is how little a splinter or blister hurts after a few minutes while you're running and how much it hurts later that's a that's adrenaline you know if you ever been hit hard you know in a fistfight or something like that when it happens it doesn't really hurt right but later it hurts a lot once that adrenal that's right that's adrenaline. adrenaline masks a bunch of psychological and physical aspects of our nervous system that allow us to keep going You know, I'd be curious to know how people feel after these races. You know, okay, so Ken wins the gobi race. You won this ultra, you know. Courtney wins a race. How do you feel two days later when the adrenaline has subsided?

Yeah, I mean, for me, the pain feels good. Because it's like that you're rewarded. Yeah, you went through the fire. It hurt. It was terrible. But you won, is rewarded. But yeah, I get what you're saying. Like, in the moment, you can push through a ton.

And I'm wondering, too, like in an ultramarathon, you know, with boxing people have died. UFC people haven't died. But in running, people haven't died. But why is that? Why? That's what I worry about with Courtney sometime. Because I think she will run until she dies. So how has nobody ever died?

Push up cells. Is it just like self-preservation? She was pushing so hard that at 309 miles, she was like a nose is bleeding. She's peeing blood. She was coughing because the trail was so dry and then the dust. And it like turned into almost like bronchitis. She'd be going for four days at this time.

So she went to the ER and the doctor said her oxygen level in her brain was down in the 80s. And they said, well, you know, if she gets an IV and rehydrates, can she go out on the trail again? And he said, you know, they said, well, what would happen? He said she'd die on the trail. So you wonder if she's on her own and didn't have like, you know, I was running with her.

Her husband was there at the aid station. Like, I mean, she would have. have died, I think, or coulda, potentially. Yeah. So, I mean, she could die. Yeah. You know, how is that? God willing, she doesn't.

No, is that possible? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, with the boxing thing, people are getting hit in the head. Yeah. And there's often dehydration combined with that if they were, you know, cutting weight. And then bleeding because of the damage. Yeah. Yeah.

Not good. I mean, you know, it's an ugly picture there. Brain rattling against the skull. You know, was schemic. You know, strokes. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can happen during the fight in the period immediately after the fight. And then over time, you know, the Muhammad Ali thing, destruction of the dopamine neurons, which leads to Parkinson. Right.

You know, that sort of thing. And there seems to be a lot of genetic variability there in terms of situational variability. I didn't realize that no one's died from MMA, even though they used those like, your gloves, you know, shorter, shorter fights, right? Well, let's see. I think there's more. Five-five-madge. Yeah. Because it's the four-ounce gloves instead of like a 12-ounce gloves.

So you can you take, you can only take less, or you take less head shots before you're knocked out or before the fight stop. Whereas in boxing, they could take hundreds of head shots and it's still going. And the hockey guys and gals suffer a lot of head injuries. Is that repeated, right? You know, getting hit a blockboard guy and not again. And yeah, there are even theories that the heading of the ball in soccer repeated. Right. For some people, perhaps, who are more susceptible.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So in running, I mean, fortunately, it sounds like, you know, fewer deaths. Presumably, just from my understanding of distance runners, they're paying more attention to hydration and fueling. And they can, you know, drink water along the way, get electrolytes along the way, take in fuel along the way. That's no doubt playing a positive role in these, like, long.

long, long endurance events. But also, you know, as you said, there's an off switch at some point. And that's sleep, a person is just gonna collapse into sleep. And hopefully that happens before the person dies. And hopefully that happens in a way that doesn't send them off a ridge or something like that. You know, there's that kind of a storybook myth

about the dog that would just go until it dies. I had a bulldog mastiff. I mean, Costello would dig If I said, get the rabbit, get the rabbit There was never a rabbit I just like to see him digging He loved to dig He would dig and put his head in that hole

Until I literally had to physically Take him away And he was He wanted back to And if I let him go He'd go right back there And he's a lazy animal He was, he's dead now

But he's a He's a bulldog The laziest creatures on the planet Unless they're fixated on a goal And then it's all go Yeah. That's one of the beauties of the bulldog breed. Right.

And he probably would dig until he forgot to eat, sleep, drink, whatever, and then done. I mean, you like to think. How can animals do that in humans? Don't. Is it? It's that damn prefrontal cortex. Yeah, that's it. That we keep pushing.

It's just smaller in animals? Yeah, they have a smaller prefrontal cortex for sure. Yeah. They still plan. You know, they stash things, you know, so, you know, like, Crows and other birds cashing stuff. They remember, they have a land map in their mind, and there's beautiful studies on this,

you know, so they can make plans for the future, get through tough seasons and things like that. Animals are smart. They have that prefrontal squirrels. They have a hippocampus for memory. They have a prefrontal cortex. They've got strategies, and, you know, so we don't want to take away from the intelligence of the animal kingdom.

But humans, goodness, that prefrontal cortex, you know, it's what it's been said. I don't know by who first, me, but I like this. You know, we're the only species that can think ourselves into trouble. Most animals are using that prefrontal cortex to think themselves out of pain and trouble to the best of their abilities. We can think ourselves into it by doing things like 200-mile races.

Yeah. And, you know, I, so what is the longest race anyone's ever done without sleep? Without sleep? Well, they do this Biggs backyard ultra and they have to run them four miles every hour. So Courtney's won this race a few times And they'll get back after the four miles and say 50 minutes So they might have 10 minutes to eat Fuel up and maybe a minute or two asleep

So I don't know if you're counting that as no sleep But they've done that for four days Wow You could never get more in four days Never get more than five minutes of sleep Popper Is it Chad Wright? Yeah Chad Wright

I follow him on Instagram and he's a endurance runner. Yeah, I can see. Yeah, former team guy, yeah. And I saw him, he did a last man standing race. Pretty sure he won it. Yep. So that's intense.

Just keep going until. Did you see the film on it? Was he on the polls at the end? He may have been, but what he used a tactic, I don't know if you, I think you alluded to it, where he said they had the time going up there. And he said, you better get some more batteries for that clock. Because I'm not quitting. Amazing.

And he was going to get, and then there's kind of like a little sabotaging the other guy's mental, right? And he was just acting up, never said anything. His fee were corn up, never said anything about it. You know, I've had some interactions with other people from other branches of the military special operations. And, you know, they have a different mode of it too. You know, it's so interesting that people go into a profession where they're selected for this go switch. Yeah. And the no stop switch.

and you know if that's you know the first two lines of entry criteria you know you're going to end up with some pretty intense people um i think that yeah the last man standing race notion is interesting but that that has more to do with okay who also who taps out yeah right and and how it's how you win that's how you win in the last you just cause people to tap um but here's what's crazy so cordony would never have that approach like Chad, she would say, let's keep going. She's encouraging her competitor because she knows she can't go further if they quit. All she wants to find is her limit. She can't do it if somebody quits.

So she's encouraging like we're a team. He's wanting to kill everyone and be the last man standing. She wants to just see how far they can go. Wow, it's almost like to really figure out how far she can go. and I'm not making the suggestion because I don't want to cause anyone to self-inflict any harm. You'd almost want to bring in fresh runners. Yeah. That would be the larger test, right?

So she's 125 miles in and they start bringing in fresh runners. Yeah. That would no doubt drive the- Push her, yeah. Drive the mechanisms in her further. Yeah. I don't know that that would be healthy. No, that would be, and that wouldn't be a last man standing.

It would just be like, that's kind of what she does. with the Colorado Trail record, because I came in on day three and ran with her for 26 hours. And Maggie had been there before. So other guy, Stan, had been there. So that's what she's doing to try to help her get to 500 miles. So it's essentially that. But, yeah, she doesn't look as competitors like competitor. Yeah, it's interesting.

I've heard of fighters in training camp doing 30-minute rounds where they bring in. fresh opponents every three minutes. Khabibib's done that. Just to condition. He's wrestled bears too. Not this bear, but that's a wild video. I see him as a kid wrestling and bear. It's just unbelievable.

I don't know that much about MMA or boxing for that matter. I know enough of it to have seen some of the more popular videos out there. And that kid wrestling at bear thing is amazing. It's incredible. Oh, I was going to, I want to hit. on this for sure. It's been my belief, and I don't know, but women seem like, I feel like they're built to be tougher, and I don't know if it's from childbearing.

I want to, this is what I want to hear you say, then men, if you're just dealing with pain management, I think a man's going to be faster, a man's going to be stronger, but dealing with pain, I think a woman has an advantage. What would you say to that? I mean, certainly the childbearing and delivery aspects of female physiology and psychology would lend well to that argument. When we had Sean Mackie, expert in pain research and pain clinician on the podcast, talked about differences in pain threshold, men and women.

And the important thing to understand is they're overlapping distribution. So there can be some subtle differences, but you're going to find people in both groups that are going to have higher or lower pain thresholds. So pain threshold is going to differ from individuals in a major way. And, you know, ultimately, it's also what kind of pain. So in a laboratory, they often will do cold water pain or some thermal stress. You know, how long do you keep your hand on the hot plate before you remove your hand? that's a tricky one because you also can get tissue damage. Whereas with cold, it's like how long in the ice bucket before you move.

Those are the kind of standard ones. Those are decent measures of pain threshold for the lab. But, you know, the kind of pain that we're talking about here is the kind of pain that can be that low-level gnawing pain mixed with exhaustion, mixed with acute pain. You know, and you can start to think of a number of ways in which that probably maps on to. child delivery. You can also think of ways in which it maps on to life, you know. And so I think the current research is a little mixed in that area, but I think, you know, human history. And from what we know, I think I'm in agreement with you that some people can probably endure more pain than others. That's clear. And so what you're saying is that female endurance runners typically

go further than the men can, the men tempo. I mean, I'm not saying further. I mean, Courtney has one race as outright, but I'm saying it's the gap is closer. Like if you do a sprint, it's men are much faster. If you do like middle distance much faster. But the longer the race goes, the smaller that gap is and wishes are right there. And like Cad who's coming here, she's another one. And it's like what's fascinating to me about these women, Sally McCrae is another one,

is they're so like ultra-unas are kind of free spirits a little bit and they seem so nice and are killers are so, it's like they can just crush men out there but it's men just like Chad

wants to remind you why they're the baddest right and I'm going to crush, I'm going to beat you I'm going to beat you down. Women but they do but they're just different how they approach it and how you feel about them because you look at him, you're like, oh, in the skinny, nice, free spirit who loves her into the mountains, and she just will not stop.

Kicks your butt. Kicks your butt. It's just, I love that. That's awesome. Of their ability and their demeanor. Yeah. I mean, here, it's interesting just to think about human demeanor generally. You know, I think that, you know, we had talked about Ken Rydout earlier.

You know, he's a great guy talking of guy. friendly eye big person big personality yeah some people are like that yeah other people say very little yeah um other people including ken they know when to zip it up and just move and then potently Lisa statement you know that was cycle what we described there was it was like a form of psychological warfare but so is being stoic and not saying anything right right and uh again I'm not an endurance athlete you know that brief one season of cross country and school my senior year. I actually tried to run my freshman year of college, but to walk on where I went, it was division two school. You had to do a sub 10-2 mile and I just couldn't do it. Pretty fast.

Couldn't do it. And there you go, right? I suppose if I was running for my life or to save someone else's life, maybe I could have back then, but probably not. Whereas with endurance, if you had said, listen, you got to go 100 miles to save your life or the life of someone you love, probably do it. it would be incredibly painful. You know, I see people, because with the rock, you carry the rock up the hill. I've seen people, you did what you said. You said, I'm not setting it down and getting it at the top. So I believe when you say you could do it.

But I've also seen people say the same thing that I'm carrying the rock. But they said they would never set it down. They said, we'll get it up there. I'll never quit. They quit. Yeah, well, The rock was carrying that 72-pound rock. Yeah.

Is it a thousand feet of elevation? Yeah. Definitely the hardest workout I've done in five years easily. Yeah. Without question. The decision to not set it down was to also ensure that I finished. So when you set something like that and you say it on camera, you know. I'm just saying people have done exactly the same thing.

but didn't follow through like you. Yeah, well, there was, you were there and Rob Moore was there. Yeah, with the, in those situations, too. Well, it's people, it's crazy. People can say these things, but it's like, the difference is following through. Yeah. Well, I have an ability to just bite down. Yeah.

And it probably stems from a bunch of things. It's interesting. You know, whenever I think that life's not going to test me with that again and something comes along intestant with you know my ability to persist to endure is is decent um i think you also learn that doing degrees that take a lot of years you give ups and downs and you know we could talk about it in science it's a very slow iterative process with grants and papers and slow so you get used to long distance milestones but yeah carrying the rock it was also um it was also fun yeah and beautiful and uh yeah and at one point when we were going up the muddy part

I had kind of a hamstring pull from a heavy leg curl set. That went for a second. I was like, oh, goodness. You know, thinking this is, you know. But then you just kind of watch it. You know, you pay attention to your gate a little bit more. Yeah, there's, I think. But what said something?

You said it was beautiful. And I don't, do you say fun? But anyway, so you had those. Those are your anchors. Yeah, those are the rewards like that. It felt like a gift. I'm out there with you and with Rob and your crew. It's like, this is a gift.

Like, how cool is this? How cool is this? And that rock is asymmetrically shaped. And then the fun and funny part of it is the moment you think you're comfortable with it. Like, oh, yeah, you can just kind of sit this way. And then all of a sudden that your shoulder starts cramping so bad that you have to move. So I think that's actually, I think, part of the solution, which is to constantly have to iterate. There isn't one strategy, right?

There's not three strategies. and there's so much learning in something like that rock, Kerry. Yeah, I feel very blessed to have had that opportunity. And I also think that, you know, one wonder is like if it had been 2,000 feet of elevation, I've done it. So reflectively, I want to say no, because I was like at my limit. I felt when I got there. But when we have a task in front of us, we segment for that task. You know, recently I was down at Jocko's place

and after we did a podcast, went back to his house and his kids wanted to do a sauna, hot sauna. 30 minutes. That's a long sauna. Yeah. There were a bunch of people in there and they were doing the steam. Yeah.

And I'll be honest, like I was the guy, you know, crouching lowest, you know, the men who were in the sauna where they were all up there. And Jocco and his and his daughter stuff were like cruising through it. And I was hurting and I remember I didn't have a watcher on and I kept asking the guy next to me, you know, how long? And he was like 15 minutes. I agree. I think he's like 15 minutes. That helps. Because when you're, when you're ticking off time. Yeah. But I'll tell you, getting out of that thing felt so great. And then a cold plunge right

afterwards, you know, you have to be careful with heat because you can die. I mean, that's the one place where in theory and in practice, someone could die in one of these long distance running. Yeah. Events. I mean, heat can kill you. Right. Right. You can tolerate a lot more cold than you can heat. So that that could unfortunately take someone out at some point. But that was another example where I thought, goodness, I would never be in here for 30 minutes by yourself, by myself. I would have gotten out. And you just have to not think about getting out. And then, and not succumb to the ribbing from people like, oh, it's going to feel so good when we get out or let's put some more steam on. You know, they were torture me a little bit. It was like

torture the professor day. But it was great fun. And yeah, I think those things can be, if done safely can be really good for us. And no doubt that's a buildup of anterior mid-singulate cortex circuitry and other circuitries. And when I say that, I don't want people get the impression. It's just like this one brain area. It's connected to a bunch of other things, but perhaps the most critical of them is that prefrontal cortex part that's involved in strategy updating. Update your strategy. I might do this out of love, out of hate, out of the reward. You go, you go, right. Yeah. Are you going for something bigger and outside? yourself, are you turning off

all thought? You know, the ability to turn that dial as needed to get through, that's really at the heart of endurance. And so when we say it's mostly mental, it's mostly mental. Here's what we'll wrap up with this

is this was fascinating to me. Because you talked about if you were by yourself, or I kind of mentioned it, but if you were by yourself in that sauna, maybe you wouldn't have went 30 minutes. I most certainly would not have. And I'd say that's most people. Most people get strength from sharing the suffering, right?

Or not wanting to embarrass oneself. Right. Right. So it's a, yeah, there's a little ego part in there. But what I, this part fascinates me. And Courtney, nobody really knew Courtney. We did the Moab 240, which was it was 238.3 miles in the Moab Desert. And nobody really knew her.

So we're taking off. And I was like, going to be conservative. So I was like running slower I normally would. My brother was with me. And I kept checking in on the lead group because I'm like, I usually go too fast. And I'm like, but you don't want to lose contact, right? Even though it's a three-day race. So I kept checking like, where's the leader?

Where's the leader? And they're saying, oh, it's Courtney DeWalter. I was like, I don't even know who that is. And I said, where's she at? And then she was like miles ahead. And I'm like, get further on the race. So now she's 10 hours ahead of a. anybody and I said she went she went off course there's no way there's no way she's 10 hours ahead

so here's what's incredible she was she she you know she's the best to ever do it but nobody knew that at this time but the point what I was going to make is she knew where second place was so she was still pushing even though she's winning my 10 hours pushing herself she could have won by two hours still won still two hours is a huge win but still pushing After, so she finished in, I think it was 60 hours maybe, and still pushing with the win. Why? How? What makes somebody like that?

Gosh, I mean, without her sitting here, it's hard to know. I mean, she's got trophies in her mind and no doubt. And we don't know what those are. And it might be besting her last performance. It might be, it seems like she loves the camaraderie. of running. Yeah. Maybe it's...

But not really, because she's by herself and doesn't want to run it with anybody. Right. Right. So she loves the camaraderie of running. Has a great spirit about that, but her desire to push in a win clearly supersedes that. She can keep going while she's alone. And actually, there are people who don't want to win things because they like the pack. You know, and people feel bad.

They don't want to be part of the group. Yeah. People can be very affiliative, you know, and in a way that they want to be part of a group. It's why I do these live events, and I love my crew. My podcast team is the best. I love every single one of them, like family. And the only part of those live events I really dislike is going out on stage because there, I feel like I want to bring them out there with me. Yeah.

It's really wild. Like it's a weird thing. I go out there and I go, I want to do the live event, but I, and I, and I, I feel, and I, I, I just have to remember that they're there. They're part of the production crew and all that. So we need them backstage. But it feels a little lonely. Yeah.

Because my sister, I got an older sister, she always said that you're a pack animal. I've always been a pack animal. I grew up with a bunch of kids out the end of my cul-de-sack. Like some of us are just like that. And as much as I'm competitive with myself and I push and I push, I have an ambition for sure. You know, if ever that takes me further away from the communal aspect of, but what I'm doing, there's a pain to it for sure. I don't know if you experienced that.

I know what you're saying. But I've learned it's always, you know, with good friendships and families, you come back to the nest. It's still there. Yeah, it sounds to me like you have the ability and maybe even the pleasure in pushing yourself and getting into those pain and endurance places by yourself. You don't need anyone else for it. I'm wondering how social media has changed that for you or if it's changed it.

Like I love it. to see your post where you hop up on the monument. That's what people will say is like, like people say you do that for dopamine hit, right, because you want validation or you want the likes or this or that. But what I say to that, which I understand because a lot of people do that,

I've been doing this way before social media. So I don't, I do it just because I feel like I have to do it to have an edge. You could go over, you know, I look at everything on competition. So if I'm going to, I have to sacrifice and suffer more, so I have an edge over everybody else.

Whether that's posted or not, it doesn't matter. It's just because I know it. I know that I did. I ran in the middle of night. Nobody else did. Do you run last night in the middle of the night? No, I didn't. We got him pretty late.

So it's all right. You got nothing to prove. Yeah, I think we all vary in our, you know, competitiveness with ourselves and with others and certainly our ability to endure. I guess if there's one key theme is that we all harbor these brain areas and mechanisms. We can all tap into more endurance, psychological endurance, physical endurance in the different arenas of life. And if we do that in one arena and we think about the strategies that we use in that arena, without question we can export those to other arenas.

But it involves a little bit of thinking and reflection. And I think that, you know, the thinking and reflection after a win is just as important as the thinking of reflection that occurs during. You know, why did it go well? What did you do correctly? What did you perhaps do less well? But thinking about, yeah, like, where did I go? What did I do? Where was that pivot point?

And, you know, sometimes we're completely lost. We don't know how to get through. But it's kind of interesting. Even just in the wondering, like, what's the solution that I can't seem to arrive at? That buys you some time. Yeah. Right. It's yet another form of enduring.

Yeah. Is to be perplexed, baffled, overwhelmed, confused. Because if you're perplexed, you're not quitting. That's right. He's right. You've pushed quitting aside. Now you're like, turn to figure out what's going on. Well, you're just buying more time.

That's right. Yeah. I found myself in those places in life, you know, sometimes even recently where you kind of go like, how do you work through, how does one maneuver through this? And, you know, what do you do when what used to work doesn't work anymore? Well, you start searching for what works and time is ticking on. And to stay forward center of mass, you know, sometimes we're like, you know, tilt forward center of mass. Sometimes we're just, you know, flat footed with a little bit of forward tilt, so to speak.

But as long as you're moving forward, you're not quitting. And as long as you're not quitting, you're enduring. And as long as you're enduring, and especially if there's some discomfort of, involved, then you're getting better at enduring. Yeah, it's, I saw that personified. When Trouet broke the world record in pull-ups, there was times where, I mean, it wasn't going good. He never stopped, though. And it's like, what we would say is every time you grab that bar, you do a pull-up.

He never grabbed the bar and couldn't do a pull-up. So just get on the fucking bar. But that was a struggle. And then after this struggle, it didn't look like it was going to happen. is like we might not get it today is flip to switch, put on some suicide boys, got hyped up, put sunglasses on, and got in a groove and was fucking killing it. And broke the record. And broke the record after it was looking like not going to happen.

And then it happened. So it's like nothing changed. The bar was the bar. His hands were in the same condition. Well, certainly there's a time for sleep, time for rest, time for recovery. but there is something very powerful about continuing to iterate and move forward. Even in the small things, I think about this a lot. You know, I don't think I'm alone and occasionally waking up and just like not feeling right.

You know, just not feeling right. It's not anything specific. Just, you know, life's, right. Life, you know, maybe it's neurochemical. Surely it's a neurochemical. Maybe it's psychological situational. And a colleague of mine at Stanford who's actually, she's been on the podcast, Dr. Anna Lemke, who runs the dual diagnosis addiction clinic.

She was talking at one point when she was a guest on the podcast, not about addiction per se, but about, you know, kids and goal seeking and, you know, goals in life and higher calling, you know, like vocation type calling. And she said so much of being successful in life is about looking around you in the physical space that you're in and saying, oh, you know, that dish meets cleaning. this needs organizing. I could take out the trash. I could help a neighbor.

I could write a card. I could call up my aunt. My aunt just had surgery. You know, like I call her up, you know, these kinds of things. And that there's many reasons to do that

just to be a good person to yourself and to others, be a good citizen. But also that you're using your nervous system as a way to get into these, what I call forward center of mass. Do something useful, however micro.

There's a teaching there. There's a learning there as opposed to languishing. Right. You know, a word that I've learned to respect and despise, languishing, which is what happens when we get up in the morning and we don't get outside and get sunlight and we're scrolling on our phone. We've all done it. Yeah. Right. And sometimes it's nice. You need a little rest, right? But you go a minute or two, too long, and it's as if you just start drifting out to sea mentally. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, so we've got enduring and pushing forward, forward center of mass on the one hand. And then we've got. languishing. Mm-hmm. Doing nothing. Yeah.

And I think that we would all do well to crush the part of us that wants to languish or can get pulled into languishing. And when I say crush, I don't mean once and for all. I mean, every day. Because, you know, we're not here that long. It can feel like a long time. Yeah. But I think Anna's example of, you know, the small things and continuing to create things that are useful to the world rather than languishing in kind of doing nada is really powerful.

I honestly think there's as much learning in that and neuroplasticity that can benefit us in that as there is in going out and running a hundred mile race. And I'm not saying they are equal in effort, but they are same in principle, no doubt same in underlying mechanism, and have vast carryover to other areas of blush. The way I see it is that we call it, there's a girl, another girl I run with Amanda Basham, who has tattooed on her lake, relentless forward part. Evict so RFP. And the way I look at it is when you're in control of what you're doing, so opposite of languishing, when you're walking somewhere with purpose, you're walking with purpose. You see a piece of trash, you pick it up. you that is intentional you're going somewhere doing something that carries over into everything to me yes

there's feedback i'm i'm so glad that you raise this there's no question in my mind that the physical informs the mental in ways that are powerful and here's what i mean when we engage in what you what you called relentless forward movement progress yeah relentless forward progress what i've um sometimes also heard it describe it as assiduous forward movement just you know when we do things whether or not it's cleaning cleaning up the dishes running moving pursuing goals and milestones that are healthy for us and good for the world and good for us that feeds back onto our understanding of ourselves in unconscious ways it's not just conscious like oh like got a clean kitchen i ran that race and you know maybe some trophies on the wall or something like that maybe there's some degrees on the wall money in the bank etc sure all that stuff

can be very helpful in life. But there's also the unconscious feedback of, okay, I'm an organism in this world for some period of time. I don't know how long that is exactly. And I'm going to impart my role here by doing things that are useful in building and creating as opposed to just consuming resources and languishing. Right. So I think that there's a, you know, the unconscious part,

the part that we're not aware of that we're not thinking of like, oh, I did that. I can do hard things. That's very important to have conscious awareness of the hard things that one has completed and carrying that forward into new pursuits. But there's also the unconscious awareness of like, oh, this nervous system, this body that I have, this being that I am is capable of doing things and creating things, even as small as, you know, tidying up. Yeah.

Or, you know, checking on a neighbor or doing something like that. I'm convinced that the conscious and the unconscious parts, run in parallel, and they have a lot to do with our perception of self, so that when hard things in life hit us square in the face, or even when life is easy, that we don't languish, that we push forward. Yeah. All right. I love it. Thank you. Now, thank you. Now, I feel like I got to at least run a marathon. I'm sure you will if you want. I haven't run that far. I used to do a long Sunday run when I was in graduate school of maybe eight, 10 miles, that felt long. Yeah, that's a good.

I'll try and get back to that. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It's kind of fun to see how the mind and also the body, but how the mind changes when you're doing. Yeah. It's interesting. You learn a lot about yourself.

That for sure. Yeah. Well, I look forward to it. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Cam. Appreciate you.