Mark Bell's Power Project - Anthony Kunkel || MBPP Ep. 904

Starting point is 00:00:00 I want to ask you, why are you copying my mustache this morning? Because you look handsome. David Weck said it himself. He said, God smiled when he made you. So I was like, well, I'm just going to copy and see me. Wait till you see my skin color coming up. I'm going to be working on that shit. It's going to take me a while.

Starting point is 00:00:18 Dude, jacked and tanner than ever. You're very tan. It wouldn't take you very long. You too. You are a very brown man. Dude, I'm- Orange brown. I'm the blackest ginger.

Starting point is 00:00:26 Or the gingerest brown person. I don't know. Gingerest. What is the deal with being a ginger? Because your hair looks pretty blonde, but your hair can be blonde and reddish and brownish, right? Well, it's the same genotype. It's the same genes that do blonde hair and do red hair, as far as I understand. And then when the beard comes in, it gets really red.

Starting point is 00:00:47 And everyone's like, oh, yeah, you're ginger. And I'm like, since when? For all the redheaded individuals in our audience, I'm sorry for the insensitivity of these two gentlemen. I know it hurts to hear that. Oh, yeah, you can. It's the same genes. I'm allowed to. So get mad at him.

Starting point is 00:01:03 Like Brock Lesnar, out like his beard and stuff it's just like crazy it was like so red and then it turned uh it turned blonde and he just has those crazy blue eyes like he looks insane well so so here's a guess smash everybody curious oh you want to see it yeah let me pull it up my beard when it grows long it turns red and red yeah really i don't know where that came from but yeah yeah. Dude, it came from a bunch of Vikings rolling into your great-great-grandmother's village and having their way or something. I mean, do with that what you will. They really did that shit.

Starting point is 00:01:33 I'm not saying it's right or wrong. Yeah. They really did that shit. So here's a guess while he's pulling that up. You get your mitochondria from your mother. So you don't get, you know, I think you get your hematocrit from your mother. You get a lot of blood work from your mother. So like a lot of your aerobic talent isria from your mother. So you don't get, you know, I think you get your hematocrit from your mother. You get a lot of blood work from your mother. So like a lot of your aerobic talent

Starting point is 00:01:48 is directly from your mother. You get none of it from your father. So like there's that idea that your mitochondria, you know, the powerhouse of the cell. Yeah, that's an intimidating looking man right there. Yeah, that's Viking-y right there. Looks ready to defend this country. That's what he thinks.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Sure does. Yeah, so there's an idea. I i think i think people buy into it i certainly do that when we were like single cell organisms are really small at some point we kind of like we got parasitized basically or we brought them in mitochondria as a separate thing like they were they were not your original genome so you're the the genes for your mitochondria kind of do their own thing and just happen to live in your cells in exchange for, you know, turning glucose into energy, for example, because they don't need the ATP. You need the ATP and they need the glucose. So you have this kind of like symbiosis where your mitochondria are a different lineage than your

Starting point is 00:02:37 mother or your father. They're totally separate. And so here's, I'm going to bring it back to the, like the ginger beard and like why you see people like me, at least in America, or, you know, me casting a net and being like, hey, anybody that wants to, just come train in my house for free. We get a lot of people that are on the kind of redhead-ish spectrum, and there's two things in here. One is like the fair lady, right? Like lighter skinned, lighter of complexion women are seen as as like more attractive right yeah and and you know tall dark and handsome right and it's like i mean i'm all the right traits i'm just like for a woman right it's like it's like i'm just a little too pretty here like i'd be so pretty if i could just be a woman oh man but yeah so like i think i think the reason that you see that is because you can

Starting point is 00:03:26 be a woman yeah you can if you really wanted it i like being a man okay i have a lot of people that are like you're pretty you should go win that non-binary money and i'm like yeah but the karma man like i i just i love being a man i'd be like impotent or something within within six hours like my my male parts wouldn't work or something i don don't know. It's just not for me. It's for the people that want it. I'm glad it's there. I want that non-binary money, man. They're like, you live on nothing, man. I bet you could go win

Starting point is 00:03:54 that $12,000. They only ran like $235,000. You could live on that for two years. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. But don't women tend to be like, they handle high, high endurance stuff better? Like 50, 100 milers. Like they tend to, I mean, I don't know if their times are actually pacing men's, but they're very good at it.

Starting point is 00:04:10 I've heard the theoretical line being like 200K, so like 120 some miles. That probably checks out. That's when women's times could surpass men's times? Yeah, there's something to there. It's always hard to know if women are just catching up because they're getting more opportunities or if they're catching up because ultimately there'd be a,

Starting point is 00:04:24 I don't know, I think it's just opportunist or opportunities placed before them. But certainly when you're dealing with like sleep deprivation and logistics and all these things, these are very egalitarian things. Like it's like, and women do probably handle stress deprivation and like, you know, 48 hours of stress. No way. I mean, I'm a pansy. Like I like getting it done quick, like a bandaid, you know, six, seven hours in time for brunch. Right. But yeah, bring it back to mitochondria. So like this means that if you had your haplotype, which is your mitochondrial DNA, that's, that's your mitochondrial lineage, the powerhouse of the cell is from your mother. Are these all things you've had tested and stuff like that before? Yeah. So like I'm H haplotype. That's associated with the highest performance in white people that we've measured.

Starting point is 00:05:09 So it's like when you start dealing with like the Kalanjin tribe in Northeast Africa, I don't actually know what their haplotype is, but I would imagine it's a different lineage entirely. What did you get to test this? Because I know 23andMe mentioned certain things with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm still looking it up right now. If you go into your 23andMe and look up your haplotype um that that'll get you your your maternal lineage

Starting point is 00:05:29 through your your mitochondria and so my guess is because most people are getting their aerobic talent from their mothers and beauty standards are the way they are for men and women if you see somebody that's slightly gingery it's probably because their mother is slightly gingery that's going out on a limb a little bit not their father being slightly gingery and you can somebody that's slightly gingery, it's probably because their mother is slightly gingery. That's going out on a limb a little bit, not their father being slightly gingery. And you can say, that's probably why this person is talented. They got mitochondria from that cool H haplotype that also happens to have a bit of red hair in it. That's just a guess. What about your muscle fiber types?

Starting point is 00:05:56 Have you ever had those checked out? Yeah, I was a participant in that FASTER study, that same one that— I'm not aware of it. Yeah, it's the Fat Adaptation Substrate Utilization in Trained Elite Runners. I was a participant in that faster study, that same one that, um, I'm not aware of it. Yeah. It's the fat adaptation, substrate utilization and trained elite runners. And it was Volick way back in the day. Um, before art and science of performance, I think came out. How old are you?

Starting point is 00:06:15 I'm 30. Okay. Okay. I was just a very, very early adopter. You were in this. Like I started playing with like high fat, low carb stuff in 2009, 2010. And. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. I'm'm just you were an early adopter what's the what's the verdict the verdict is that we were monsters i mean low carb worked pretty good for endurance yeah what what we found is they wanted to replicate or they wanted to redo

Starting point is 00:06:38 the study with the same participants and gather more data and they couldn't because a lot of the high carbers had go had gone to low carb after they saw the data so you know endurance athletes they like data like they're nerds and you have a lot of time to think like maybe i screwed this up and what we saw is there was there was zero overlap between the high fat group and the the high carb group in peak fat oxidation and so what that says to me is even the freaks and you know everybody's doing fasted workouts everybody's doing you know any number of things's doing six-hour days or whatever in the mountains. And so to have the freaks in the high-carb group still not able to meet the non-responders, air quotes, non-responders, in the high-fat group for fat oxidation tells you that this diet is trumping talent or training or any number of interventions. And it was pretty cool. I mean, it's been a lot

Starting point is 00:07:27 of fun to have that data since, I mean, whenever that was done, 2012, 2013, whatever it was. And so it's been really cool to be like, oh yeah, I'm one of those blips because it's one of the things that a lot of people reference. It changed the tide of, well, you know, fat's only good if you're going real slow or you can't do this. You know, a guy like me, I can run, I can run a mile on like 80 calories or 85 calories as far as like measured output. Whereas I think the standard rule of thumb is like a hundred or 115, you know, bigger guy like yourself. I mean, I don't know if you know, you know how many calories it takes you to run a mile. It's probably 200. Probably a couple thousand.

Starting point is 00:08:07 It feels like it. Yeah, so like somewhere around 200-ish or whatever. And then to see that I can burn a gram and a half or a gram and a third of fat per minute, that's 1.3 grams per minute. That's 12 plus calories ish you know just from fat i posted some stuff about like what i ate going into like a run and for me i had for me it's a long run i know for you you you know long run means something different but it's like my first time running like 10 miles or 12 miles or something like that and i talked about kind of what i ate the the night before and i was thinking about it like a little bit days in advance, because I didn't want to necessarily eat a bunch of food before I ran. Right. So I wanted to have

Starting point is 00:08:50 the fuel in my body. And I talked about how I just upped my fat a little bit. I ate something called a keto brick, which has quite a bit of fat in it. And people were like, the fat's not going to do it. It's not going to, you know, you need the carbs. And it was just so interesting, like all the people trying to chime in. And I was like, I think, you know, I'm i'm fairly positive i dip below five percent when i'm really competition ready but even that it's like if we call that two percent of 130 pounds that's still a lot of calories you know 3 500 calories a pound when it takes me less than i mean that's that's talking about 100 miler with zero calories which has now been done at least two or three times and that that all checks out i mean thermodynamics wise

Starting point is 00:09:45 but the other thing with something like certain certain fats i tend to think that you know if you're burning it from endogenous fat then you don't need to worry about fueling with fat unless it's like a little like a biohacky kind of like nootropic effect or something like that so something like a keto brick i mean i've had the best performances of my life eating a brick a day. I was doing those chocolate malt ones until they were horrible. I mean, I did whatever it was, like 90 in so many days. You'd eat a whole brick a day. Oh, yeah. Those are like 1,000 calories.

Starting point is 00:10:16 They're 1,000 calories. And it's primarily stearic acid. That's what I was getting at. For whatever that's worth. Do you know much about it? I don't know a ton about stearic acid. 90 grams of fat. It's a different type of fat.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Yeah, it's directly mitochondrial stimulating. I don't really know the mechanism behind that, but it is mitochondrial stimulating and it's very hard to get that in any other food. I mean, it's like whatever it is, 50 plus percent stearic acid where the next closest thing is like, I don't even know, but it's substantially less. And so having something in there, I wonder if that's not, if that's not part of the magic. Could be. Let me ask you this. So you did that study in 2009. What was your diet prior? Like, how are you handling your nutrition and for these long runs and through now 11 years, what have you come to as being like the optimal type of way to eat for these?

Starting point is 00:11:06 I'm guessing you're still doing 50 plus mile races and runs. Yeah, I'm trying to get fast right now, which is kind of ironic that I think I'm slower than ever trying to get fast because I've been broken. It's just like it's hard getting fast. My body likes going forever and ever and ever. What was that study, Andrew? Did you see that on there? Was it 2013? That's where I started playing with low carb was like 2009 2010 okay the one that i pulled up said it was from i

Starting point is 00:11:31 think 2016 but it could be that was published date right yeah that's what i'm yeah yeah i mean i i was i had first just said okay well i can at least do as much fat as i want and then that kind of just squeezed out carb calories, whereas before I was a very conventional runner. As a teenager, it was just carbs for everything, carbs all the time. And I had the experience before I was even 18 or 19 of I'm going to eat some skim milk and cereal an hour before I go for this run, so I'm topped off and glycogen and everything. And I had the experience of an hour later I'm supposed to be I go for this run. So I'm like topped off and like glycogen and everything. And I had the experience of an hour later, I'm supposed to be taken off for this run. And instead I'm eating again because I'm starving. And it's like my, my headspace didn't feel great,

Starting point is 00:12:13 but part of that's just being like a young kid. Right. That's, that's, that's the crux of life being a teenager, I think. And yeah, so just playing, playing with that and thinking there's gotta be, there's gotta be something better than being kind of a contrarian and having an instructor through vocational school for nutritional counseling, being like, man, you endurance athletes are dumb. Like this whole high carb thing is just idiotic. I'm like, tell me more. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, I'm intrigued.

Starting point is 00:12:41 And so started playing with that. I don't think I have it figured out, but I do think that everybody should start, every athlete should start like post-season, potentially pre-season with a nice base of like ketosis, of fat adaptation to get that metabolic flexibility. And then depending on the needs of your sport, you do have to practice fueling with carbs, both GI wise and like day in day out you know if

Starting point is 00:13:08 you're constantly training it was one of the things in the faster study that didn't really get enough i don't know lip service to it was we were hitting vo2 max and we still weren't hitting 100 energy from carbs even at vo2 max so even at where you're like you want to fall off the back of the treadmill your body is still it's like reluctant to burn those carbs. That's, that's a decrease in performance for sure. Now, if you're doing a 200 mile race or, you know, even a hundred mile race, it probably doesn't matter who cares what your 15 minute or 10 minute or five minute top end is. It doesn't matter if you can burn more, more fat than you should. So I think it's kind of a tight rope walk between how much carb

Starting point is 00:13:46 you know are you gonna have to use on race day versus so you know training for the marathon right like like right now um i'm eyeing that olympic trial standard in the marathon and so that's that's going to involve running 515 a mile for 26.2 miles so that's that's motoring i mean if you go to your to your local gym and put the treadmill at 12 miles an hour that's that's motoring. I mean, if you go to your local gym and put the treadmill at 12 miles an hour, that's about what you're looking at. And that's fast. Like it's objectively fast, which is cool because like I didn't run D1 or anything, so I don't have a background running fast.

Starting point is 00:14:16 So I think I'm in a really cool spot where I've built this aerobic base and I've built the metabolic base from years and years of doing like the ultra world and fat adapting that I can bring these carbs back in and be sitting at 200 grams a day, still be torching a lot of fat just for health and wellness and recovery, that sort of thing. And so I don't have to fuel on long runs because then it's just easier to not carry things and manage logistics. But I can bring all these in and just kind of rage. And the cool part about not having a background in speed is that it feels fast for me.

Starting point is 00:14:48 Whereas a lot of these guys that I'm competing with, they've gone 355 in a mile. Or one of my acquaintances back in Durango, I've traded with him quite a few times, he's like 130 something in the 5K. So it's like running 515s or 525s, I'm like, this is great, man. We're hauling, man, look at us. We're young and fast, let's rage. And he's like, 515s or 525s i'm like this is great man we're hauling man look at us we're young and fast let's rage yeah and he's like this is tempo effort even if at the end i can jog out

Starting point is 00:15:11 of it he's hands on his knees it's like it doesn't feel fast subjectively to him yeah and so i think that's kind of like that's a really cool angle that i have that's that's a cool you know card to play with right now when you say it feels fast it feels fast but does it feel difficult for you yes and no i think it feels it's more of like a coordination thing i think it feels more like doing double unders right than it than it does or maybe i just suck a double under but it's like it's like i think it feels more like you know you know what i mean it's more of like a coordination like central nervous system thing of like keeping it all coordinated and snappy and sharp and and relaxed because that's i feel like my system could put out that wattage for for you know the two hours required but my

Starting point is 00:15:56 just like coordination i mean you know how it is and and yeah i don't know how it is but i get what you're saying i think you of all people know how it is, but I get what you're saying. I think you of all people know how it is. When you're doing something that you're efficient at, it takes a lot less mental effort. Outside of running. Yeah, totally. Power Project family, your normal shoes are making you weak. This is why I partner with Vivo Barefoot Shoes because they have a wide toe box, they're flat, and they're flexible. So with every single step you're taking, if you're taking a 10-minute walk outside or when you're working out in the gym, your feet are able to do what they're supposed to do in this shoe. They have tons of options for hiking, running, training in the gym, chilling and relaxing, casual shoes.

Starting point is 00:16:35 If you're out on a date, you need to check them out. And, Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject, and you guys will receive 15% off your order automatically. vivobarefoot.com slash power project and you guys will receive 15 off your order automatically again vivobarefoot.com slash power project links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes okay you know i think uh a lot of these uh runs you know especially like 100 mile runs and things like that i mean maybe there was some sick bastards out there that had the idea of like these are going to be like races like we're going to race 100 miles but for the most part people are probably just like this is just a kind of a cool test to see

Starting point is 00:17:11 if someone can run 50 miles and now we're in a spot where almost anybody that signs up even just for like a marathon they're thinking about their time they're not thinking about like finishing and then people are wanting to run seven minute miles and six minute miles and five minute miles and so on. And so now we're in a space where, yeah, people are really pushing the envelope. We're seeing the times get, the records getting broken quite frequently. And now there's a sub two hour marathon. That's not, that's an unofficial time, I but it's just interesting i don't know how well designed the human body is for obviously we can run for a long time uh but to sprint for a really long time is an interesting thing to try to figure out yeah yeah definitely

Starting point is 00:17:57 i think i think my concern with that is you're starting to see this move you know super shoes are one thing right like i think i think if you did everything barefoot, you'd run a lot slower, but you would last a lot longer. I mean, I think mechanically you can only run so hard when you're bare feet on bare ground, right? And I think that would save you a lot of pressure, whereas using— You would act as a governor maybe a little bit? Yeah, yeah. And I think maybe it's comparable to using, to using proper gear, um, lifting weights and, and, you know, let me know how, how that strikes you. But it's like the, yeah, it's, it's non, it's mechanical

Starting point is 00:18:35 doping, right? I mean, that's, that really is what it is. And whenever you're playing with something like that, you have to realize that there's, there are side effects of, of doing these things. And so I think you think you saw a lot of people get injured when they started just throwing on the super shoes and doing all their training in it just because it's less abuse to your body or you're training a little faster every day. And so I have my concerns about that with some of these faster times.

Starting point is 00:18:59 Have you had any of those types of – do you use super shoes first? And have you had any of those type of experiences for yourself? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've definitely, I've been more injured than ever since like the super shoe era started, but I had, I had one race where I was the first person to cross the finish line in like 10th place or something. And you know, prize money was five deep or whatever it was. And it was not a super big separation. And I was the first person that wasn't in super shoes. And I was like, all right, um, we're, you have to put an asterisk next to these things like this is this is the times that we're in and you know if they're if they are going to double your likelihood of getting injured it doesn't matter and I think that's what you're seeing with with carb consumption

Starting point is 00:19:39 too where you're seeing like 400 calories an hour or 500 calories an hour being consumed and you see the glucose data on some of these guys and they're doing, there's a guy in the OCR world that I think he's the one that posted his data. Somebody posted their data and they were doing a 10K and like they took a Morton gel, like one of the hydrogels. They took that in the middle of the 10K. And they're like, what are you diabetic? Like, what are you doing here?

Starting point is 00:20:02 But it almost is like, it's like glucose doping. You're supraphysiological levels of glucose, of all things, and now that we have figured it out on how to really cram more of it into your system, we're kind of entering this era now where- You've got to be talented to be able to eat one of those while you're running that fast, too. Yeah, I mean, I think it helps-

Starting point is 00:20:22 I was just thinking about a 5K. He must have been flying, and he's trying to squeeze down this packet packet that one i think it helps having obstacles right like throwing it at the end of an obstacle or at the beginning of an obstacle because then you can kind of like let the heart rate recover but you're seeing these guys that are they're they're rolling around with 200 plus 250 glucose levels which your body doesn't like being that high right like your your central nervous system really doesn't like that. I think that's why you had like eye issues, right? It's like your, your central nervous system's really, it doesn't like elevated glucose levels. So if a guy like me is cruising

Starting point is 00:20:53 around at like nice, healthy longevity, glucose levels, and fueling just the minimum for the exercise, and I'm getting trashed by guys that are like crushing 400 calories an hour, that's a tough spot to find yourself in, right? You're like're like well how bad do i really want to win like is this a science project should i do what they're doing yeah exactly and it's it really is it's the same question with like any kind of performance enhancing intervention of of any kind where it's like how much of my mechanical stability do i want to potentially trade for for four minutes off my marathon time, you know, where I am. Yeah. Cause I think some people don't know what, like, what are some races that you've done, um, recently? Like what are, what are some of like mileages and races that you've done?

Starting point is 00:21:36 Some people can understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think a lot of people know me from the JFK 50 miler and I have a supreme love affair with that race. Um, I've started it six times. So it's like, you know, you, you finish one year, you pretty much immediately start training for the next year. I mean, there's other races in between obviously, but I have such a thing for that race. It's just, it's, it's like theatrical, right? You, you have the, you start off and you're on the Appalachian trail and it's rugged. I mean, it's an earnest trail race, but at mile 16, you're off of that trail and you don't touch trail again for the rest of the race and so you have to have chops to be able to get you know 2 000 feet of gain or whatever it is

Starting point is 00:22:13 1800 feet of gain over the first you know half marathon of the first 16 miles yeah and you might want trail shoes maybe you don't you know it's one more thing in the super shoe era now everyone's changing shoes because it's worth it. Or they're just struggling through to avoid changing shoes and losing the time. And then it's like, I mean, you talk about injury rates when you're in a carbon fiber shoe on rugged Appalachian Trail. But then you get onto the towpath in the middle and it's just over a marathon, 26 point something miles, and it's pancake flat gravel.

Starting point is 00:22:43 And then you turn off of that and you don't see gravel again your pavement rolling through this beautiful americana kind of farmland for the last eight miles so it's a 50 miler i think a lot of people know me from that um just because i was i was second to jim walmsley's ultra marathon performance of the year the first year i did it and i was so sick i mean i was the sickest that I've ever been outside of a bed. I mean, I could like barely stand on the start line. When you finished it? Or when you started it? Before. Yeah. I mean, the day before I just sat in bed and, but I was, I was, I mean, to this day, it was one of the best like peaks I've ever had where, you know, if you get everything just right,

Starting point is 00:23:19 you get the right last 20 days or so before the race day, you're just limitless. Was it maybe a little helpful that you were sick? Did it limit some training? I don't, I don't think it was that it was helpful physically. I think it was helpful mentally because I said, okay, you know, this is, this is a, it's a day long retreat. I had gotten really into mindfulness going into that. And I had spent a lot of hours on the cushion, just formal meditation stuff. And I said, this is a day long retreat. You know, I'm, I'm going to harvest any information that I can from this for myself and for anybody else. And, and there were a few things that came up in my head and this was, this was quite a few years ago now. And one of them was like, you know, I'm just like dedicating the merit of this. Like

Starting point is 00:23:59 I'm, I'm going to learn something out here so that anybody else that doesn't want to run 50 miles sick as shit never has to run 50 miles. It's like, I was dedicating the, like the merit, like the value of the lessons that I was learning on the day as I was going. And, you know, I, I, a lot of people know me with this, like these like prayer hands at finish lines and that sort of thing. And I think I picked that up that year at JFK where every mile marker on the canal, most people get crushed by the canal because you start and you're only 50 miles or you're only 16 miles in and you get off and you're 42 miles in. But in between is a whole lot of miles. This looks terrible. People are moving like that the entire time. Jesus Christ.

Starting point is 00:24:38 Wait, are people moving at that speed through this race? Yeah. I mean, you're dealing with like, if you want a podium, if you want to be in contention to do well, you need to be under six hours. So that's, that's moving. And you said you got second in this race. Yeah. Yeah. I was second. I was second to Jim the year I did it. And, and he went on to be ultra runner of the year for like the next four years after that. And this was his big performance of the year. And, and it was, it's a pretty monstrous thing. Yeah. The guy that won, whatever that was two years ago was it's a pretty monstrous thing yeah the guy that won whatever that was two years ago is it's pretty cool we were talking at the finish line i'm like man my ankles just don't handle this like i just roll ankles and he goes check this out and his

Starting point is 00:25:13 his the medial side of his feet is he has two bones in there i forget which ones that are fused together and they've been like that since birth so he literally cannot invert his ankle jesus that's talent that's that's like what a mad world where something like that since birth so he literally cannot invert his ankle jesus that's talent that's that's like what a mad world where something like that matters you know i think it's interesting watching uh some of these athletes run downhill uh and traverse the trail that they're on there there's rocks and so forth and what they do with their hands you know it's like you put your hands up when you're going down something steep to kind of help mitigate that impact, that landing.

Starting point is 00:25:49 Like you see like each guy's doing like little things with their arms or their hands or their shoulders. Yeah, like that was kind of a drop there where you'll see everything from the like marathoner thing of you just keep the rhythm with your arms to keep the glute activation to stop your quads from taking all the abuse all the way down to the like totally

Starting point is 00:26:05 dead hang arms that like arms way up high even yeah yeah just just there for balance and yeah i mean that's something i picked up running running trails with dakota jones who's like one of the few people who's beaten killian jornet on the day who's like you know on a decent day who's like one of the best mountain runners ever debatably the best and that was one of the things that i picked up running around with dakota Yeah, this is the towpath now. It was just like the drop in the arms are just like this little bit just for balance because you can just nuke down hills and just let your feet do what they're going to do. It's fun, man.

Starting point is 00:26:34 I mean, there are skills involved with this. But once you get on the towpath, you need to be able to run 550, 555 to 615 pace for the entire time to kind of like stay in the game. I think that's part of the appeal to me. You really do have to have it all coming into there. And we're entering the era now

Starting point is 00:26:56 where every year it seems like somebody's running some unbelievably fast time out there. So it's America's most prestigious 50 miler. It's a big freaking deal would you have better results if you mainly just concentrated just on like marathon half marathon something like that and and if if that is the case uh you know do you just not want to do that because you don't really care what's optimal you want to do also what's fun like would i would i

Starting point is 00:27:21 be better at a 50 mile race like this or would I be more competitive over the half? Just choose either one. You either choose the strict regular marathon so you can get to the Olympic trials, as you're mentioning, or you stick to being well-known in this. I think I'm really good at running five hours. I think on my day when everything's right, there's very few people on the planet that can compete with me over like about a five hour time period. That's kind of the sweet spot where my level of neglect on myself and my level of like mental flow is optimized

Starting point is 00:27:54 where you don't really have to fuel, but you should. When you say neglect on yourself, what do you mean specifically? I don't like eating. I don't like drinking. I like to just get out there and get weird and just be free.

Starting point is 00:28:04 And there's, I feel like my like my i mean even standing here like i feel like my cells are almost like vibrating at like call it 10 miles an hour and when i'm running that fast i just i feel like aligned with myself on this weird thing where it's it's fast enough that mentally boom boom boom boom boom the miles seem to to go fast because it is a short amount of time but it's fast enough that mentally, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, the miles seem to go fast because it is a short amount of time. But it's slow enough that the effort is very low for me. And so I can do that 100% nasal breathing. And there's something optimal about that just for my body and my gait and my rigidity and all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:28:40 And when I can get perfectly into that place, there's some kind of mental magic that happens out there. One of my years at JFK, a few years afterwards, where I ran a little bit faster and didn't place as well, I put it in my log, and I log everything. I have like 12 running logs, 12 years of running. Just everything. Interventions that I'm trying and shoes that I'm wearing and all of it. It's not super lengthy, but it's all the big things that I'm testing out and then, and then takeaways from

Starting point is 00:29:09 it. And I logged it with whatever, five words or something. And it was just a prayer in a world without God. That's, that's how I put it into my running log. And it's like a race like that. That's what I'm after, you know? And so I think I could, I like to think I could get that with, with a half marathon or a marathon or, or, or a hundred miler, but there's something magic about, about like the 50 miler where, you know, I need two to 300 calories and I need a liter of fluid and that's about it. And so you are getting out there. It is slow enough. It is long enough to have the time with yourself, but I'm not talented enough to to compete with those guys over like a half or a full but as the race gets longer your your intellect and your

Starting point is 00:29:52 logistics and your ability to train and your ability to stay healthy matter as much as as your raw talent and you know there's always those guys that are just like freaks and they're going to come out and they're going to run 10 minutes faster than you and hurt my feelings because it's like they just they make it look easy because it is you know it's like i'm over here like counting counting carbs and and perfectly tapering and peaking and figuring out everything with 12 years running logs and this dude rolls in with like a cup of coffee and a pop tart and just like beats me at something and it's like well it's cool that i get a front row seat to watching this freakish human talent but man it's like that that definitely hurts feelings and so i'm i'm just not that talented with running but i am willing to give up everything

Starting point is 00:30:35 to just like put everything on the altar of running yeah you're all in right you have you uh live in colorado and you're at altitude uh You have a trailer that has a sauna in it. Yeah, yeah. Nice sauna space, pocket sauna, Faraday cage. Oh, dude. It's so nice. I'd love to have you guys there. Do you have any video of it where we can pull it up?

Starting point is 00:30:57 Yeah, probably. I know somewhere a few months back maybe on my Instagram, I have a video of the Red Mill, which is a creation of my own design. And there's like, I don't know, a dozen of them around the world now. One of them's a bike trainer and the rest of them are treadmills as far as I know. And pretty much everyone's consulted me for it. And it's basically just a cotton drop cloth so that when you heat it up, it doesn't off gas anything, you know, shout out to Brian with sauna space who put that on my radar of like, if you're heating up this unit unit you should worry about what kind of glue you're putting in there and what kind of wood just treat it because it's like you're heating it up and you're just putting your body in there

Starting point is 00:31:32 and so a plain cotton drop cloth over an inclined trainer so treadmill and then a single bulb big big bulb sauna space bulbs on the front and then a four bulb they call it the tungsten it's like four four big infrared bulbs on the back and you just hang those in there and then you have an inclined trainer in there yeah there we go so you actually train when you're in there oh that was just the pocket sauna um right there that's just that's just our pockets on and you can see it's kind of like rigged up in there so we can clip that out it was a previous post for uh for the red mill and then you clip that into the red mill and you can get in there and do whatever pace work um it was probably a while ago it was probably before that yeah and

Starting point is 00:32:13 what's the uh what's the injury that you have right now you mentioned that you're like a little banged up it's just some kind of like mystery maybe it's soleus maybe it's popliteus it's some kind of quirky lower leg on the on the right side that's giving me inhibition through the knee and you know we did a pretty good session just like mashing it out together and shooting the breeze and it just doesn't seem to respond to anything the the good news about like me and my body and my running history is that i don't get running injuries and the bad news is that i don't get running injuries because like, it would be great if I could just have IT band syndrome or a stress fracture or something where it's like, that's what's wrong with it. Here's what it is. Here's the outlook. Here's some

Starting point is 00:32:52 things you can do. Whereas I, almost every injury I've had, one exception was an avulsion fracture is, is just like a mystery where as much as I like my words and I like my anatomy and physiology, I go into the expert and they say, what's bothering you? And I say, I don't even know. I just like look at my leg and I'm like, uh. So it didn't happen after something. It just like you woke up one day and you were feeling it. Yeah. It was like slowly creeped in. We're walking down the steps. I'll get up in the morning, get my morning sunlight, lay in the snow and just walking down the steps in my porch off my front porch, just that right knee stepping down, kind of a knees over toes, VMO dip kind of movement. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:32 Was giving me pain weeks before it was limiting any running. And part of it is, you know, usually, historically, I can just kind of like slow down and run more and everything will fix itself out. And I don't know maybe i'm getting old or something like it just it doesn't seem to be the case right now but i think it's really just magnified by running running there we go by running faster i think is really the issue oh there's a treadmill in there huh yeah just like rocking the skinners super minimal little sock shoes and and the skivvies you got to maximize the skin so that the light can get as deep into your tissues as it can. Yeah, you have those shoe socks on right now, right?

Starting point is 00:34:11 Yeah. Yeah, man. Brand new pair. Shipped them out just for the rest of this trip. Can you figure out how to get your foot up on the – I don't know if you can get – the table is probably too high, but there you go. Yeah, just a little like – it's just like a – I tell people it's a sock with like a track surface straight onto it yeah and then they i dig that they mold it they mold it right into there they just like dip them into there and i had i got 800 kilometers out of a pair and so like 500 miles ish and then i had another pair that i was i was logging miles for

Starting point is 00:34:39 um for a buddy at the company and i was like i'll let you know how long these last and i was i was i used them for a trip into the himalayas and i was like i'll let you know how long these last and i was i was i used them for a trip into the himalayas and i'm like running up in the himalayas and i just like flowered the bottom of these things like just just blew the things out running running trails and yeah man they're they're a really cool toy but it's it's cool to have something so stable like that to be able to so then you know you're minimal and that like forward incline when you really crank it up there that's something you can do with almost any running injury and then because of the heat man the the pull on your like your blood on your plasma volume is is i think

Starting point is 00:35:16 magic like i think there's something to that and so i'm i'm a big advocate for heat training i've been doing it really seriously since like 2008 2009 i just had a mentor that say that back in um aurora illinois that said like oh this is this is the poor man's altitude training and you know little did i know that a decade later or whatever it was i would find out yeah actually you get you get an increase in plasma volume so the watery part of your blood but then you get a compensatory because your body likes having your hematocrit the percentage of your blood that's red blood cells to water basically it likes a certain set point in there so if you increase the amount of plasma volume you will get a compensatory increase in red blood cells and it's not as much as like

Starting point is 00:35:57 performance dancing drugs or like being up at really high altitude or these other things that people do to get the same bump but but it is something. It's something. And that's, that's fascinating. Plus it just makes everything feel good. How long do you train in there for? When I'm hurt, I'll do 45 minutes a day on,

Starting point is 00:36:14 on the, on the red mill. Yeah. And that'll be, you know, 90 plus percent of my volume. And that's like pretty much volitional failure. I mean,

Starting point is 00:36:21 if I'm, if I'm really going in there, um, yeah, I mean, even slowing it down and slowing it down and slowing it down, my, my heart rate will be I mean, if I'm, if I'm really going in there, um, yeah, I mean, even slowing it down and slowing it down and slowing it down, my heart rate will be getting one, one sixties, one seventies. And for me, that's really, really working. And when you're getting it through heat, you know, you might feel okay. And then you get out of there and just beat yourself and just lay on the floor for an hour because you're so cooked. Yeah. It's, I think

Starting point is 00:36:42 ambient, it's only like mid to high 80s okay but since that that infrared heat is heating you you know two to three to five plus inches into your body you know a skinny guy like me like that's my entire body like with enough angles on bulbs that's that's that's 100 of my tissue is getting that and so that's that's pretty serious in there and yeah i do have a for like the sake of heat shock proteins and academic curiosity i do have a rectal thermometer in there and so wait while you're on it i can do it while i'm moving and i have a few times but i don't know that i need to it's just the second i stop i'll just i'll key through the thing the second you

Starting point is 00:37:21 stop okay i was like walk up walk us through this you get off and then you're just like check it out okay because yeah i mean you know you i can get i can get core temps you know true core temps you can't do sublingual or temple or anything like that that doesn't really mean anything and you guys get all the data i love it man i love it let's go i love it yeah and yeah i can get 102 103 degrees fahrenheit so that's So that's a lot of heat shock proteins. I think the last time we talked about this was with Ben Greenfield. I think so, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Useful.

Starting point is 00:37:52 You got to check everything. Yeah. Ben, crew me at World's Toughest Mudder. It came up in some media outlet. They're like, watch this guy come into the pit, which is where you get all your aid, your water and food and everything. And he's going to have like Ben Greenfield pointing a red light at him and stuff because like everybody

Starting point is 00:38:07 knows me from the red lights and i'm just like a nerd and ben was also in that same faster study yeah and so we have a lot of like overlapping things and somebody was like watch him just have like he'll just be taking whatever whatever on this on the sidelines and biohacking his way into this into this win and uh yeah i think that'd be a blast so ben if you're listening let's do it how has uh lifting been beneficial for you with running like and how much lifting do you do or yeah yeah i mean i had i would i would pit the training block that i did last fall against anybody's training block for any sport ever at under any circumstances altitude or not um clean or not like like any sport ever i mean i was doing 125 miles a week of running

Starting point is 00:38:52 i was doing a few honest workouts snuck in there i was i was doing lifting for basically my whole body i was doing a lot of obstacle work so you know dangling on stuff and grip work and that sort of thing you're getting ready for an obstacle race okay i did a 24 hour obstacle race or attempted to i did whatever 12 hours of it or something like that and it went so wrong and uh i was prepping for that just because you know two of my training buddies and best friends in the world were we're doing it and i kind of had this realization that i'll just like hop in here and we'll bro out it'll be great and so i was prepping for that and being able to lift that much because you know going into the marathon like in june i need to weigh 127 pounds there's

Starting point is 00:39:33 just no way around it and it's like my my set point as i perceive it is probably about 140 my body would like to weigh that more than it would you know if i was just if i was just yeah that's post red mill just beached if i was just hanging out and and like doing gym bro stuff or like just just exercising to be generally fit i would probably weigh 145 pounds or so and i don't know where that would stop like if i tried to back on muscle i've wondered about that yeah because it seems to be more of my proclivity there. But being able to lift that much and being able to be okay if I weigh 137 on the start line, which is about what I weighed, I was able to recover and feel great

Starting point is 00:40:14 and have fewer pains than I've ever had ever. And that tells me something in there. And in the past, I've done like build up to basically like two or three working sets of low reps like three to five don't really look at the weight although it's disproportionate that means laughably heavy for a skinny runner and do one push one pull one lower body and i would do that on mondays and that's all i would do yeah and that's something that i'm looking at again now we're like okay i was never hurt i was never even uncomfortable and since I've got rid of that trying to like wither away a little bit it's been like one thing after the next and so for the

Starting point is 00:40:50 average person they don't care if they pack on five more pounds of muscle that's that's a good thing whereas me I mean I'm yeah I would like to be I think I need to be if I'm going to trials qualify 127 ish pounds between the first of Juneune and like the fifth of july and then after that i'll just start getting jacked again for for obstacle course racing in the fall but it's it's played more of a role than i would have credited with credited with as far as resistance training and when i'm when i'm training heavy in a perfect world i don't. I mean, the solution to too many miles is just running more miles, or the solution to running too many fast miles is just run more slow miles, and that's kind of been, I don't know, part of my charm to myself

Starting point is 00:41:34 is that I can just put in training volume, and even something like a couple of hex bar deadlifts where I'll use bands to make it running specific, and I'll use whatever that is, like the higher grip pattern on a hex bands to make it running specific and I'll use, um, whatever that is like the higher grip pattern on, on a hex bar to make it as running specific as I can. Even that, you know, when I, when I wasn't doing that and I added it in, in the last three to five months, I was boom. I mean, I immediately went from 130 to like 133 and my body's just like, it, it wants to be, it wants to pack on muscle mass yeah and

Starting point is 00:42:06 i don't know but all my all my like real runner friends that are talented it doesn't matter what they do they'll never pack on muscle mass they can't even deadlift body weight and that's why they're faster than me it's like their body just doesn't they can just put in the work and so it's interesting because a lot of elite athletes say oh yeah, yeah, lifting is the best thing ever. It's like, yeah, because if you're already, you know, 13 some in the 5K, you're the genetic diversity within that group of humans is so small and none of them can put on muscle mass or basically none of them can. Right. statement and where you have guys like me trying to pull off this like quick slight of hand where how strong do i need to be you know if i can if i could go next door into the gym and deadlift two times body weight having not deadlifted in six months and having never deadlifted to get strong it's like i'm probably strong enough i don't know if i'm going to benefit from doing that but i know that doing that with any regularity i'll just pack on muscle mass so i don't i don't really know what

Starting point is 00:43:04 to do with that it's just such a fun science experiment. Right. And then being able to, you know, I'm 30, being able to, to put this aerobic development that I've spent more than a decade doing religiously to work with like obstacle course racing or, or any number of things, you know, if it lasts longer than four minutes, I would bet on me. It doesn't matter what it is. Like I, and if it lasts hours and hours and hours, it's like, I'll get it eventually. You know, like, like if, if you and me and Asima were going to roll, you'd have me for the first hour, but you would have to break something of mine if we just like kept going at it and going at it and going at it. Because for whatever reason, I've kind of always had had that and then i've spent a lot of time like refining and refining and refining until uh it's just

Starting point is 00:43:49 inexhaustible i mean the the amount of work that i can do at just the right effort is it's like shocking even just subjectively to experience it it's it's really cool and you know i'm the best i can hope for is like a mediocre elite marathoner. And so I would like to go ahead and check that box for mediocre elite marathon or get my Olympic trial standard and then, and then set that aside and chase any number of things. So like the obstacle course racing world is definitely appealing to me. It's just, it's hard to fund. It's like a very country club sport. Like the people at the top end have a lot of money and everybody said, Oh, well, yeah, you said oh well yeah you know i didn't i didn't wear a wetsuit the whole time for world's toughest like even once the sun set and i probably

Starting point is 00:44:30 needed one and people said oh well you should have had a shorty like a like a swim run wetsuit or something and i'm like listen i had one wetsuit i wasn't gonna have three and they're like yeah well you really need like quite a few wetsuit options to have i'm like these things are 800 bucks a piece like you're you're throwing that off like ah just go ahead and buy another wetsuit options to have. I'm like, these things are 800 bucks a piece. Like you're, you're throwing that off. Like, ah, just go ahead and buy another wetsuit. It's like, I'm on a runner budget. You know, it's like I, you can only do so much. Yeah. Let me ask you this. So what, cause like you're at 5% body fat right now, right? Yeah. Around there. Yeah. Five and a half. And you said for Olympic trials need to be around 127. So what is the process of like

Starting point is 00:45:01 purposefully losing muscle? Like what do you have to do as far as nutrition is concerned? And like how do you handle that? Because in our heads, it's like you're already so lean. So at this point, you're going to be maybe losing a little bit of fat, but you're going to be losing some muscle too. So what do you do? Yeah, I think hopefully I can transiently lose a little bit of fat, right? Yeah. But I mean one thing that's

Starting point is 00:45:25 intriguing, you guys, let me know what you think of this. What about like, I've heard one of the arguments against like BCAAs is that you're giving your body the signal to not get catabolic, but you're not giving it the fuel to actually not catabolize things. And so you might be able to maintain the muscle mass that you're working while withering away muscle mass from elsewhere. If you're taking the aminos out of like, say my upper body, that's not doing a whole lot of work and just putting them onto my ass and my adductors, it's like, that would be ideal.

Starting point is 00:45:49 So you're maintaining training volume with, in your lower body and you're taking away training volume from your upper bodies, which partially what you're going to be doing. Yeah. I mean, I won't, I won't pick up anything heavier than a grocery bag between now and like

Starting point is 00:46:02 July. Yeah, probably maybe I'll try to sneak some deadlifts into there, but like real low rep, just strength as a skill basically. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think you can get stronger without gaining weight,

Starting point is 00:46:13 but it's not always easy, especially if it's a new stimulus. Yeah. But if you do a low enough amount of volume and don't go too heavy, you can probably gain strength, especially like what you're talking about, maybe gaining some strength in like maybe some areas that count like the calves and the hamstrings, the glutes, maybe the, yeah, maybe the quads too. But without like really

Starting point is 00:46:38 working them with a ton of sets or a ton of reps, really trying to tap into the nervous system, you might find some value in that. But again, if it's like a new stimulus, you might have to take your time getting that new stimulus because in the beginning you might gain weight right away, even just from like the uptake of the nutrients that you're, because sometimes these things just make you eat more too. You know, and it's kind of hard to scale.

Starting point is 00:47:01 Because sometimes these things just make you eat more too. Yeah. And it's kind of hard. The scale – in the end, the scale should be able to be a net positive towards what you're looking for. But I also think what about – like what do the other guys weigh? That would be interesting. Like what are some of the top, top guys? What do they weigh? I know that the height can be a different factor as well.

Starting point is 00:47:24 But what do these guys usually weigh? I think the closest person to emulate would be the second fastest marathoner in the world right now. The dude's about my height and about my weight. Current weight or the weight you're aiming for? He's like 123. I think I'm like less than a full inch taller than him and he's 10 pounds lighter than me but it's like dude's got legs um and and we we look comparably and like if you looked at us under you know look at picture him picture me it's like it's

Starting point is 00:47:58 like the comparable enough stuff what's his name and uh but kele how do you spell it um phonetically b-k-e-l-e i would assume is it a b i don't know you know how does those northeast african names none of none of us are super confident because it's like there's like five or six names and you look at them and it's kind of like hearing a aga madoff in the ufc or something and you're like oh man, Chariot that guy sounds fast. Yeah, yeah. Kenanisa Bekele. So B-E-K-E-L-E. Slower. B-E-K-E-L-E. B-E-K-E-L-E. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:33 One of those generic Kalenjin names that sounds super fast. Are any of the guys like 160 pounds or no? No. I mean there's probably a tall person or two to look at. I mean especially like at the you know too umpteen marathon times. I'm sure there's probably a tall person or two to look at. I mean, especially like at the, you know, two umpteen marathon times, I'm sure there's some freaks out there that managed to do it.

Starting point is 00:48:50 I can't think of anybody off the top of my head, but I know historically we've had some dudes that are like a little huskier. And it's just, it's tough to know what you're looking at. Like, are they fast because of that? Are they the same type of person that I am? Oh man, that's like the skinniest shot ever. Get one it's like a cross-country course and you get one where he's on the ground everybody looks skinny when you're off the ground you're all relaxed and stuff

Starting point is 00:49:11 he's still pretty small he's lean yeah but i mean like muscle bellies you know the shoulders take my clothes off it's like yeah i I mean, he's got some legs. He's got, I would, it's always tough to know these guys, but it's like, I would bet our measurements aren't all that far off each other, or at least our proportions. Like if you took, you know, the thickest part of your thigh, that sort of thing. And he manages to do it.

Starting point is 00:49:36 I mean, he's very, very close to that world record, whatever, seconds away from Kipchoge's. What about potentially, this is getting into like some weird stuff but like what about um it's not that weird but what about just gaining a lot of weight what about weighing uh what about letting yourself get to 150 for a little while to what end then what keep running and then lose weight i mean that'd be awesome if i was confident i could lose the weight i think it would probably be really bulletproof if I could do it.

Starting point is 00:50:07 Go into a bulk, a running bulk. Yeah. Have extra weight on you, and as the competition comes, maybe over a period of time you can lose some weight, but you could maybe build up some more resilience that way, be a little bigger, be a little bit more jacked, go through a good training block. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:24 I mean, on paper it sounds like a few training blocks though like yeah yeah yeah it's gonna take time it's gonna i mean i did i went from that 137 something to like 130 even between mid-november and mid-january and that was going from obstacle course racing training for a 24-hour race to losing all that strength work and suddenly like i can't at least i'm not i'm not lifting i'm not throwing stuff around not throwing my body around and then lost the weight and so i did pretty a small version of what you're describing and i think it worked very well because then like houston i was i was gimpy i couldn't i mean my right leg was all was all upset with me and i couldn't do all the peaking workouts that i wanted to do but i had a pretty freaking smooth day out out there. Like I was definitely in two 22 to 21 marathon shape

Starting point is 00:51:10 without any kind of drama or doubts associated with that. And that was kind of what you're describing. And as I, as I, you know, age into being super durable, I'm, I'm eyeing more and more stuff like that of, you know, what if I train for a nice, long, rugged obstacle race every fall, you know, or every summer or whatever it is, and put on some muscle mass and get strong and have some fun doing that. And then just kind of slowly let the body do what it will to chase like a 50 miler in the spring or, you know, long snowshoe races even. It's like there's some potential in there. I think it's really cool. I think it's healthy to be seasonal, right? I think it's really healthy to kind of like let your body do its thing.

Starting point is 00:51:51 I'm curious because like that actually brings up something really interesting. Have you ever done that before? Because it seems like from what you're saying, you are fighting against what your body wants to do. Like you could gain muscle pretty easily, but you're trying to get down to a weight so you can hit this time, which I understand. But, you know, it sounds like it could be beneficial in terms of just your resilience, tendon strength, a bunch of other things to let your body just kind

Starting point is 00:52:15 of do what it wants and gain that muscle and maybe gain a bit of strength. And, but the question is, would you be willing to, I guess, step away from what you really want to do currently to allow your body to do that? I mean, I think I did in the fall. You did in the fall? Yeah. I mean, I was managing nutrient timing a bit to make sure that I didn't intentionally bulk up all that much. And I was keeping it very low reps. And your body weight was still like,

Starting point is 00:52:45 was your body weight still like, well, not body weight, body fat's like five, six, seven percent? Like, how high did your body fat get? I mean, visually. Yeah, I didn't test it, but I think I only got leaner. I think the stimulus of, like,

Starting point is 00:52:57 putting weight on things, I think I only got leaner. I mean, you see there's a, one of those recent, it's not like I was doing anything, but like, one of those start line shots at world's toughest mutter. It's like, I'm looking like I just got done lifting. Like I'm, I'm all vascular and stuff.

Starting point is 00:53:11 It's like, I didn't, the only thing that I imagined that I changed is I added a lot of strength and I managed to keep it like under 133 for basically the whole training block. And then the second I added in volume right at the end to like peak up for a race where I'm gonna have to do this for a really long time it was it packed on real quick but i think without a whole lot of change and in like absolute amount like poundage of body fat and so i was just a little bit leaner and like i mean you could see every little striation in my back doing pull-ups on on one of these videos that i captured just i think you can like uh science some of this you know if you listen to uh and Andrew Huberman and Andy Galpin, they did like a six-part series.

Starting point is 00:53:48 It's really interesting. But if you mix in like isometrics, plyometrics, sled work, the sled is only concentric work. Concentric work doesn't contribute as much as eccentric work to muscle hypertrophy, but it does contribute to strength gain. So there's probably a bunch of ways if you kind of were to write it out where you can probably figure out a way to hack some of this, feel stronger, probably feel faster without really a lot of weight gain. I think you could figure it out.

Starting point is 00:54:22 Yeah, I mean, I'll be right back to that drawing board in the summer. It's just going to be tricky, and then plus you're probably going to want to get you're like once you get into a workout you're probably going to want to do more reps and more sets and things like that for sure but you would have to uh sacrifice and not do too much of the bodybuilding stuff i think yeah i love lifting it really like it's easier to love than running right i think i think running is this kind of like gentle romantic love whereas like wait like throwing around weight is lusty man you can just get in there and just like it's the nice burn nice like single spot you know you get a you get a pump on like isolation yeah there's something to that that's it's just i don't know maybe it's easier

Starting point is 00:55:03 to love it's nice How can some of the listeners that maybe just want to get into running, what are some suggestions that you have for somebody that wants to try to get into running and just really don't have much proficiency with it? Yeah, I think running as a skill, like a lot of the stuff, this won't be news to your listeners, but it's like nasal breathing, minimal shoes shoes seeing running as something that you're inefficient at not something that you suck at because it's like you know uh looking at yourself as a runner it's like you might not be a very good you might not be very good at running but there's a lot that goes into that there is the aerobic development but i mean you guys know you're not going to develop

Starting point is 00:55:45 skill and aerobic capacity at the same time. It's just not a thing. Like if you're not skilled enough to crank out reps with it, you're not going to get aerobic capacity. And if you crank out reps with something that you're not skilled at, you're going to get hurt. And so something like running something like 30 seconds or a minute of, of jogging and keeping it gentle and then walking until you can recover yourself and doing that, I think that's a really, really good place to start to build proficiency at this activity, right? And I think people are very harsh because they think there's too many boxers that are like, I ran eight miles a day or whatever it is. And they're thinking in terms of calories or miles

Starting point is 00:56:21 or things like that and not in terms of developing proficiency at this new skill because once you develop the skill you can you can run forever and especially if you're coming into it out of the gates with i'm going to engage with my body mindfully and see how this new what is this like you know what's what's the what's the texture of my chest when i go run at this pace or this pace or whatever it It's always, it's funny to me as someone who's such an advocate and practitioner of very slow, mellow training to be coming down onto the river path in town and seeing the person who is running faster than I am when they're running. And then they're breaking it up with walking because they can't sustain that. Like,

Starting point is 00:57:03 you know, if you just, if you're willing to run 11-minute miles with me, we could probably just shoot the breeze and jog on this river path and talk about how pretty the snow is on the rocks with the water going by it and really just kind of get weird. I think there's something really cool to that. If you see running as a way to generate enough body heat this time of the year, in the winter, to generate enough body heat to appreciate being outdoors without bundling all up or feeling cold that's a pretty cool entry point right if you play with

Starting point is 00:57:29 the the game that you're playing instead of like force against force this kind of almost like you're just out on a walk and you're like fuck it's cold and you just run until you get a little bit warm yeah yeah and and where does that you know where does where does the heat start go outside feel that you're cold and then wait till you feel the heat changing and where does that, you know, where does, where does the heat start? Go outside, feel that you're cold and then wait till you feel the heat changing. And where does that start in your body? Where does that feel? What, what is this like? And going at this with this idea of curiosity, obviously all this like biohacky stuff, it's, it's curiosity to me. It's just, it's having something new to play with. And, you know, I'm, I'm the best client for myself because it's like, i'll get some crazy

Starting point is 00:58:05 harebrained idea and and i'll do it every day for six months and find out yeah and i think if the average person brought that kind of energy into whatever it is they're looking at for fitness i think it would i think they would adhere to it longer and i think they'd have more fun because we tend to think about this like very mean you you're defaulting to not loving yourself, right? You're defaulting to like, there's something wrong with me and I need to like burn these calories so that I can eat a few hundred calories extra and still lose weight or whatever it is.

Starting point is 00:58:35 Whereas if you think about it, you can't, you have a hard time stopping kids from running, right? I mean, I'm sure they're getting more docile as time goes by. I'm sure it's easier now. But if you could run giddily, if you could be giddy when you were running, you think about your older brother or somebody chasing you and scooping you up or the lifeguard looking away and you're sprinting across the pool deck to get over there.

Starting point is 00:59:00 If you could run like that and not get tired, I don't think you'd find time to do all that much else. It would be great. I think if you're coming at it with that from the get-go, how do I capture more of that? I think a lot of it is bare feet or minimal footwear is an awesome place to start because you feel the ground and it makes you feel more playful and it makes you feel more giddy and get out there and it puts you into that mind space of how do i interact with this surface what's it feel like to run on gravel

Starting point is 00:59:29 you know i like gravel something i love man i think that's have you always used like minimal footwear or was it a transition for you at some point because for many people it was a transition i think i started yeah i mean well well before I got out of high school, I started just using like track flats and being like, oh, this feels better. And then when Five Fingers came out in like 2008, 2009, when you could acquire them, I got a pair of Flows, which were like the siped like water ones that actually had an upper and everything. I was like, I want these. And yeah, so I think I had a perfect transition of I wasn't running all that many miles so I was able to do that but yeah I think I think that helps a ton and and yeah curiosity I mean whatever you're curious about if you don't have the curiosity or the wonder then it's probably not the right sport

Starting point is 01:00:17 do something else I mean there's there's you got to wonder at some point I mean I I wonder about all kinds of stuff I need more bodies to play with you know I need I need more to mean, I, I wonder about all kinds of stuff. I need more bodies to play with, you know, I need, I need more to do, but I think, I think mixing it up on surfaces is another good thing to do. Have a little bit of trail, have a little bit of mountains, have a little bit of road, have a little bit of everything. That's a really good way to build like nice balanced running form too. And just as a, as a digression, I love running gravel. You're talking about races that I'm known for. And I think we kind of got lost in like the JFK sphere, but digression, I love running gravel. You're talking about races that I'm known for, and I think we kind of got lost in the JFK sphere.

Starting point is 01:00:48 But I won the 50-mile national champs, and I won the 100K national champs. And those were, as a kid, as a 16-, 17-, 18-year-old kid, finding out that ultra running was a thing. And the International Olympic Committee does do an ultra. It's 100K. It's every other year. And there is a Team USA. You could represent your country and all you have to do is you know run 62 miles in in less than seven hours and you'll get onto the team and I was like I could do that I could

Starting point is 01:01:13 totally do that and so I looked at all these selector events and JFK was just one of them oh there we go running on Legos I'm also like a three-time Lego Lava Walk world champ in Durango, Colorado. Come at me. So let me ask you this. You did that 100 miler. Did you ever do anything Olympic-wise with ultras? So I did the 100 kilometer. 100 kilometer. Yeah, I did.

Starting point is 01:01:40 They have selector events for that. And it was Comrades in South Africa. It was JFK 50 in whatever it was in November. The 50 mile national champs the next October. And then the 100K national champs the following April. And so I literally did all three of those that are domestic. I was like, I want this spot. You know, I emailed the team selector coordinator or whatever and said like, how do i make sure i get on this team yeah and they're like well you know the standards are

Starting point is 01:02:08 there you know it's nice to hit the time standards but really like if you want to be on the team beat somebody that's already on the team yeah it's like all right well hopefully they'll show up to these events so i don't have to just chase them wherever they are because elites tend to kind of make the final call 10 days out or 20 days out when you know you're in shape for the event and so i did those events and i won the 50 mile national champs but it was it was gravel it was like 5 500 feet of gain 5 500 feet of loss one big loop um gravel it was unseasonably hot it was like 80 degrees 100 humidity um pennsylvania yeah and i i i still like imposter syndrome, right? It was like, well,

Starting point is 01:02:47 it was hot. I mean, I got there on race morning and I opened up the car door and I looked at my, at my crew and I said, I just won this race. Like, like I opened up that car door and I'm all bundled up Colorado style. Cause the sun isn't up and I opened up that car door and it's just wet, hot air comes in. I was like five to six hours up and down hills, but runnable hills, gravel, heat. Nope. Nobody can beat me today. It's like, this is, this is, this, this is my jam. You couldn't make this event better for me. Like you couldn't, you couldn't come up with all the creativity in the world. You would have a hard time making a better event for my body to thrive on. And so I won that event, but I didn't feel like i did all that much right did that allow you to make the team i don't know if it would have oh so i came back six months later

Starting point is 01:03:30 and won the 100k national champs yeah that is the only event in that lineup that has auto entry so whoever wins that event regardless of your time as long as you're under 719 or something you get auto entry onto the team and so like i felt like the 50 mile chance was a fluke but then it's like the 100k national champs like all right i did it again like i beat i beat the the previous year's 100k national champ the the current year's 50k national champ and i was the current year's 50 mile national champs like the three of us were in there and we had a proper race so like i split whatever it was like 5 18 through 50 miles so it's like you know six six flat miles would be five hours even through 50 miles so it's like we were we were moving and like there were moves being made it

Starting point is 01:04:10 was five degrees fahrenheit every time it was a 5k loop with 180 degree turn in it and so like the inside of my right foot so that's however many laps and so the inside of my right foot and the outside of my left foot were blistered from taking that 180 degree turn yeah so many times and just turned around the course and every time coming around the front straight on the course, my eyes would water and my nose would water because it was so cold. It was like just a hundred percent humidity or whatever it was headwind out there. And you're just like dribbling. And so it, again, it kind of just went to crap for my competitors. I didn't feel like I really did all that much, but I got my, I got my team spot. And then I went to Croatia and was a little off my game,

Starting point is 01:04:47 and we had a team plan. And so it's like once you fall to fourth place or whatever on the team, you don't really need to finish because only top three score. And so my representing Team USA was a huge letdown and a turning point in my life. That's a big deal, though. You represented Team USA. It was cool. Yeah, that's cool, dude. Yeah, yeah i mean i have a little bit of the gear left still and and i keep it around but it's kind of a they gave you steroids

Starting point is 01:05:12 no not that kind of gear okay okay they didn't even pay my travel man i put that travel on credit and then they said oh well we're fully funded end quote which is the quotes that are in usatf which i probably shouldn't even mention my name through our governing body and uh they said well we're fully funded end quote which is the quotes that are in usatf which i probably shouldn't even mention my name through our governing body and uh they said well you're fully funded this year you know the stipend last year for it was like 900 bucks and that wasn't fully funded two years ago whatever it was and now we're fully funded so you know don't don't worry about it like they're notoriously it'll take six months or whatever but but they'll get you to it and i get this check and i think it was february and the race was in september so it was it was months and months later and it was for 543 dollars if i remember that right which is probably a number i'm not supposed to quote but it's like it was not

Starting point is 01:05:54 you know that was a 1200 flight to get to croatia yeah it's against croatia and it's like they they hoard us all out to nike where you can't have sponsor logos you can't you can have your own shoes but you can't you can't have sponsor logos they we had instructions for like with an american flag to not cover up the nike logo and like all this stuff and i'm like i don't owe nike anything like and they certainly don't want me like being a vagrant like you know they don't like i i it's not that i like being a character but it's like i want to be genuine you know You know, I want to, I want to be me. And so I had all of this like baggage coming out of that. It was kind of,

Starting point is 01:06:29 it was disillusioning in the best sense. Right. It was like, well, this isn't funded. This was the dream. And I thought it was going to take me a while to get this dream. And not,

Starting point is 01:06:39 you know, I aimed at it in 2016 and was like the seventh man on a six man team. So I didn't get to go. And then that's, that's why two years later it was like I'm doing every freaking event. Like I'm going to make this happen and made it happen. And then it was a letdown. And you kind of think that something like that, like IOC and Team USA and all this stuff, it's like it was a turning point for my life

Starting point is 01:07:00 that I think I'm still kind of transitioning what that means now that that's not a draw. I kind of figured I would do the 100K team a few times and go to the world champs and try to compete there and maybe do Team USA for the 24 hour, which is another one they have. And it was disillusioning. It's something where I'm still transitioning to who I am

Starting point is 01:07:20 without that goal because it was my Olympic-esque dream. It was the the dream of a kid but I guess I'm just not a kid anymore seems like it messes with seem like it messes with some of the freedom that you enjoy with some of the other stuff that you do it seems like the events are fun and it seems like those are goals that you have but it seems like you just love the training too I do I just I don't think I would train that hard if there wasn't an event I don't think i could like the the having a proper periodization to aim at something lets you train unsustainably because you can just peak on the day and just be a monster on the day and do something that that that seems crazy to relative to your training and i don't i don't i think a lot of people would do these events and people do

Starting point is 01:08:04 now would do these events just on their own out on the roads or whatever i don't, I don't, I think a lot of people would do these events and people do now would do these events just on their own out on the roads or whatever. I don't think that would ever be me. I like the competition. I like, even if I'm an hour ahead of everyone or an hour behind everyone, I like being out there and feeling like it's a, like it's a social thing and feeling like the pressure of, of like, this is a race, you know, we have a defined finish line. You better freaking get there.

Starting point is 01:08:24 And there's some, there's some magic to that of like, you know, you know we have a defined finish line you better freaking get there yeah and there's some there's some magic to that of like you know you put on a bib and you put on a bib and i put on a bib and like you know race numbers and it's like until we cross the finish line like this shit's real you know like when that gun goes off it's like this this shit's real i kind of i think it's a low blow i don't i don't feel inspired when i see the people like helping somebody across the finish line it's like dude that person can take that bib off and catch a ride if they want to get to the finish line you know like you're you're you're hanging out around somebody who you know their pregnancy plan is to do this natural and you're like you sure you don't want the epidural you sure you don't want the epidural because it's

Starting point is 01:08:59 like you're 26 miles in something's shutting down like you're gonna take it and so like I think there's something sacred to my mind about like putting on a race number and being like, we're going to give it our best. And you know, for the elites, we're going to, we're going to put on this, this super scarcity mindset. You know, we're going to say there's one deer and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to catch it. And I'm going to feed my little res dog at home. And I'm going to feed the lady friend and I'm going to feed my training buddies, or you're going to do the same, and there's one deer, and it's like, I will kill you over that.

Starting point is 01:09:30 You know, it's like, you know, I might just be okay fasting, but it's like, the team's got to eat, you know, and I'm not playing around with that, and that's one of the reasons that I've felt the need for so many years to kind of like stay broke, because then you stay hungry. It's like kind of a real thing. I mean, when I won that 20-year team need for so many years to kind of like stay broke. Cause then you stay hungry. It's like kind of a real thing. I mean, when I, when I won that 20, are you doing

Starting point is 01:09:49 a good job of that? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, Andrew, Andrew here was so nice. He's like, here's, here's recommended restaurants and hotels near the, near the gym. And I'm like, dude, I'm sleeping in the Prius out front. Like until somebody kicks me out, like I'm decked out. It's great. And so I, i think that's good but even that that feels comfortable i mean i did quite a few years without a car yeah it feels comfortable i do an electric unicycle at home that's it's great and it's good queuing an electric unicycle yeah it's like it's like the one wheels but you're symmetrical so and you can put a bigger wheel into it so like it's an 18 inch wheel i can go 35 miles an hour damn you

Starting point is 01:10:24 look this up electric unicycle are you sounds crazy it like a it's it's like a segway but it's one wheel and then and you're facing forward and there's no handlebars oh so no handlebars do you know like what which brand do that you were um i have a i have a gotway um yeah i think i got it sounds crazy i just yeah the model i'm on is called it's called like a tesla v3 or something like that and it's a i have a unicycle i need to i need to bring it in here you do you would like it yeah jake messed around with it for a while he's like this fucking thing's impossible but he was able to do it i think a little bit i don't remember kinds of cool stuff here i know one video went super viral. Everyone was like, this dude's a superhero.

Starting point is 01:11:06 And he was just like zipping around, hopping off and on curbs. And that's what I zip around on Durango on. It's great, man. Wow. That's crazy. So yeah, just like living simple and kind of reverse engineering everything that I need. I mean, if I can feed myself quality food and feed my dog and occasionally afford some travel, which is, you know, it's easy to come by. Afford a cheesecake maybe.

Starting point is 01:11:29 Sponsor dollars. Yeah, cheesecake for dinner last night. Do they test for performance enhancing drugs with most of the competitions that you compete in? They like to say that it's clean sport or something. I've never even peed in a cup. I've never even peed in a cup I've literally all the stuff that I've done even races

Starting point is 01:11:47 accepting prize money and performance bonuses and all that and even the international stuff I've never been drug tested not once do competitors complain or have any concerns or they don't care I think a lot of people just they're under the impression that no one's doing this professionally

Starting point is 01:12:03 and there's a few people that are making buku dollars doing this right now. And then there's a lot of people that are like semi making it viable. And there's, I think it's just a, it's insisting on being a young enough sport, I think still, that people are, you know, the average person thinks that there's no motivation to do so. And the people at the top end are like, oh yeah, but i mean show me your blood work like you know i had a little bit of blood work done a little while ago and like published all of it i was like you know hey you

Starting point is 01:12:33 know do with this what you will it's just kind of like this is my step towards actually having clean sport because i think it's it's kind of a farce anyway i think think the stuff that you would be using for this would be like HGH or like small dose testosterone or just for recovery or something comparable. You know, there's a lot of peptides that I think would be like secretagogues. I think that would be fascinating for a runner. I'm not sure how much it would or wouldn't help, but think the the training that you're doing is extremely abusive and so why not thc mushrooms lsd like all that stuff there's one race there's one race i know that tests for thc they make they make sure that you took some yeah yeah they give it out at the start line they really test for thc yeah i mean the international standard no the international

Starting point is 01:13:21 standard is you they used to say you had 15 i think it's nanograms a deciliter, whatever the unit is, used to be able to do 15, and that's like international. So that was saying, you know, you don't want to be actively high, certainly. And then they recently tenfolded it, so now it's 150. So now the move is you could use it to help you sleep the night before and still be clean the next morning. You know, clean, whatever that means that they're defining what clean means. And so I think there's a whole lot of gray area. And I think it's less that I have issue with

Starting point is 01:13:54 performance dancing drugs outright and more that I don't ever want to take anything that's, that's really helping me. Cause I want to know if like what I'm doing is working better. And then I think there's so many cool things that are at our disposal that aren't, that aren't banned. And so like, and people don't even use that. I mean, it's like my, my system for sleeping is a performance enhancing intervention for sure. And it'll help me live longer. Maybe I'll be a little smarter. Um, maybe I'll be a little more articulate. What's the system? CBN's great. It's a cannabinoid, so it does come from cannabis. The first company I was working with was Sandland,

Starting point is 01:14:34 and they definitely did all right by me, and it's an awesome product. But it did have a little bit of melatonin in it, and I think they might have changed the formula by now. But it's CBN-based, and I think that's a really, really cool thing that seems to if anything increase rem sleep a little bit and it doesn't really affect anything else but boom i mean i took i took a little bit last night put on the eye shade put on this this is an awesome hack um

Starting point is 01:14:56 put on a like i'll do an audio book or a podcast or something it has to be the right thing like oh man what is it star talk with uh neil. Oh, man, that dude's voice, man. You have an excellent podcasting voice too, Encima. But, yeah, you guys, it's too much interesting stuff on here. I wouldn't want to fall asleep to it. But throw that on, put like a 45-minute sleep timer on, and then bring the speed to like eight-tenths. Or like on Audible, you can do seven-tenths even

Starting point is 01:15:20 and bring it slowed down a little bit. And, you know, I talk fast. Like people that do i like when i'm out on runs i'll do three times speed or three and a half times speed like i got you know i got stuff to learn and i'll slow it down at night and and kind of just lock into that story 99 times out of 100 it works so for you it's primarily that supplement from sandland sandland's been good um i think just getting the cannabinoid, I think it's legal in all 50 states or 48 of them

Starting point is 01:15:48 at least and you can just get it in bulk somewhere. Is it a specific cannabinoid? Yeah, CBN. CBN is what it's called. So like you'd have CBD, right? Everybody knows about that or THC obviously. And CBN's really interesting.

Starting point is 01:16:04 I've never heard of that. Yeah, you should play with it. And you guys measure sleep architecture, right? Is that an aura over there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like you'll see the data. Boom. And then we're – as a house, we're working on a product.

Starting point is 01:16:15 We're just going to like offer it to somebody. And I have no interest in being in the supplement industry, but if I could bring in an extra few thousand dollars a year, that would make sure that we can all keep traveling while talking about doing lsd in the mountains and stuff because like that's not sponsorable by a big company so this is you and a group of other people like yeah like the like the ultra house durango it's it's kind of just like my house right and and as soon as i built this up enough to where i had all of the toys that i wanted you know i had all of the contacts with all with the sponsors that I needed to just scoot by,

Starting point is 01:16:49 and I had my house stocked with all the products that you need to train heavy and recover well. As soon as I had that, I was like, all right, let's share this. Let's get other people in here. I'm dreaming of a cross-country team worth, so like five to seven of fully funded people where they could show up to my house on my porch with a dream and literally nothing else.

Starting point is 01:17:13 And, you know, maybe a few results would be nice and clothe them in casual clothing, clothe them in workout clothing, give them shoes and cover their travel and offer performance bonuses, just humble performance bonuses. And it's like, if you want health want health insurance if you want a car you might have to work but it's like if you if you just want to train and eat and sleep then you should be able to you should be able to do that right a kind of an olympic training facility yeah and i would like to offer that and

Starting point is 01:17:38 that's kind of the big motivating factor right now of you know i have a lot of thoughts i have a lot of things that i've found that worked and that didn't and putting that all into like a book i'll take a hundred percent of the money that i that i take from that and that'll go towards whatever yurts and an off-grid chunk of land somewhere at the perfect altitude hopefully in the durango area sounds like you're starting a cult oh yeah yeah if you go yeah yeah yeah we have our our front page i think i put that just imagine somebody on a treadmill they're on their red mill and they're he's like all right get ready no i'm just trying to get data there's nothing weird oh no by the time we make it to there we'll

Starting point is 01:18:16 do one of those where you swallow it and you just you just bluetooth the temperature in there dialed and then we'll reuse it obviously we'll clean it in between but oh god a little bit of hazing that's really sick though dude that's really awesome thanks man yeah i mean i i think that's one of the things that drew me to mark is like one i'm an abnormal person like i've never had mentorship for any of this stuff it's like i've kind of just had to invent this up as i'm going along so you know there there were a few hard years i i will say the biggest thing that team usa did for me is let me have a i feel like a an easier to love relationship with my family because instead of like what the hell is anthony doing like it was like oh yeah team usa you see

Starting point is 01:18:59 that picture it's like he did a thing and like it turns out i'm in debt from that trip or something but it's like outwardly it was like all right i see what you're doing now i don't really get how it works but i'm glad that it's where you know you don't ask me for money so it's like obviously you're you're feeding yourself somehow it's like all right so so we're getting somewhere but the the dream to offer it all in there and then ultimately to monetize some of this stuff like i do camps you know the next one is project mayhem, which is a Fight Club reference. So like, you know, don't ask questions, which is on brand. You know, trust Mr. Durbin, Mr. Kunkel in this case.

Starting point is 01:19:32 You know, trust me. Just trust me. You know, don't ask questions. Don't ask questions. Trust me. Yeah, exactly. So like ethical cult. Ethical cult.

Starting point is 01:19:41 And you just show up there. You know, it's May 10th to the 17th. If you've seen other camps that we've done, it'll be holotropic breath work where you're like tripping balls and getting tetany and it's all through your breath um obviously the house is stocked with everything you could ask for and and um that goes for for fungus of many different kinds you know dozens of kinds you know including like cordyceps and like the the ultimate mushroom complex is one of them that we use by fresh cap i don't know if you guys have played with them it's just it used to be thrive six and it was

Starting point is 01:20:09 just it's a six blend mix of mushrooms it's like cordyceps and cordyceps reishi lion's mane turkey tail um a bunch of stuff that you've heard of and that you just whatever and you just throw it into a cup of coffee it's like that's that's dialed and so being able to share all this stuff in real time and being able to you know i do consults but I don't want to do coaching. Like I don't want to wipe your nose and hold your hand. I'm okay giving you advice, but I would rather just do this. And then in a perfect world, just, just show up on my porch. Like I will, I will take you through days of my life and, and you can just, we can just do the thing together. Right. And you can just see it in real time. And then you can try out all these sponsor things. You can try out sleep sups or,

Starting point is 01:20:48 or you can try out the sauna or the Red Mill or whatever it is. And you can try all this stuff in real time and just stay with me. You know, my front room, I started getting a retainer from one of my sponsors. And so I didn't have to rent out that front room because like I was hustling, you know, and Durango's insanely expensive. So rentals are boom. It's the thing you want. And the second I started getting that retainer, I took the first month and took half of it to deck out that room, put in new flooring, um, gave it a nice paint job, put in a nice fixture on there and put two triple bunk beds in there and an Ottoman. So the Ottoman pulls out into a seventh bed. So like I could sleep seven people. I've never filled it. So I offer these a hostel it's a proper hostel it's there's actually

Starting point is 01:21:29 two of the beds are up on airbnb when we don't have when we don't have camps in there because then you know ski bumps and stuff can come through for 27 bucks a night in a town where you can't get in for 90 even in a gross motel and they can just stay with me and you know they that way the lights stay on and all of us athletes can just keep doing our thing and so that lets me not turn anybody down and so the next one's project mayhem and the there's there's constantly like different hazing ideas about like we'll just have them stand on the porch and we'll spew profanities at them until they eat a pound of raw liver and then they can walk in the front door because like you know i had a mentor say yeah dude do liver this was like 2010 yeah and then like the whole like rise and fall liver king stuff i'm like i never thought to monetize that

Starting point is 01:22:14 i just thought it was weird you know i just thought like i'm just gonna eat liver like maybe i'll talk about it once or twice and like i've i've gone viral once or twice softly like facebook era yeah i've just like eaten lobes of raw liver just, just before a race or something. Never put it together. I guess I'm not that entrepreneurial or something, but yeah. So, you know, Project Mayhem will have all that stuff and people can come in and train with me and the other super serious athletes that are, that are at the house and that are, that are training full time there and just kind of see it for themselves and do it all. Like I said, that's something that drew me to Mark and this whole super training thing of taking what was just your crazy passion that probably didn't make a lot of sense to pretty much anybody, although strength might be an easier sell inherently maybe. You're like, well, I want to get strong.

Starting point is 01:23:01 It's like that makes sense instead of me like I want to get weird. It's like, well, I want to get strong. It's like, that makes sense. Instead of me, like, I want to get weird. It's like, all right. But yeah, then having a gym that's free and that has your own branded stuff in it and doing a podcast like this, it's like, this is something that for maybe the first time in my life, I feel like I could emulate.

Starting point is 01:23:18 You know, I feel like this is something that I've known that this will lead into something at some point. I've compared it to connecting the dots. It's like I'm at dot number 40-some, and I know dot number 43 or something is the next dot to do. So I'm just going to go ahead and connect these dots. I don't know what the finished picture is going to look like,

Starting point is 01:23:35 and I'm okay with that. I like what I'm doing. I'm having a blast connecting dot 42 to 43. There's nothing profound about this. There's no divine intervention here I know without a doubt this is what I'm supposed to do and at some point we'll monetize it, like at some point I'll offer these camps

Starting point is 01:23:51 and we'll have proper yurts and everyone will have their own space, it won't be people laying bodies over each other and it'll be $5,000 for the week for the environment to have elite level coaching and all the amenities and just deck it the fuck out but until then, I'm just going to keep offering them for donation based, you know,

Starting point is 01:24:09 one, one person with a big boy job comes there and, you know, give you 500 bucks or a thousand bucks. And, you know, the reality is they couldn't afford a hotel in that town for a thousand bucks for the eight days or whatever it is. So they're making out, I'm making out. And then the whole house gets to do like breath work and trigger point and all the things that we do. And then, you know, I can keep my electricity on. Power Project family, quality sleep can make everything with your health and fitness easier, which is why we've partnered with Hostage Tape. Now we've been talking about mouth tape for years and nasal breathing for years. But one of the problems that we've had with tape is we all like to rock facial hair. And a lot of the mouth tapes we would use would fall off of our face at night hostage tape doesn't fall off your face if you have a beard

Starting point is 01:24:49 or if you're not a man and you don't i'm joking i'm joking you you don't need a beard right but either way hostage tape makes sense it'll stick to your face when you're asleep you'll have better quality sleep because you're breathing through your nose all night long it is a no-brainer and if you head to hostage tape.com slash power project, you'll be able to get the power project annual deal, which is a year's supply of hostage shape for 55 cents a day. You'll be saving $150 on the typical yearly deal. You're going to get two free tins and a blindfold. It's a no brainer. So head there right now and get yourself some hostage tape. Links in the description along with a podcast show notes. Shut your mouth when you sleep.

Starting point is 01:25:29 Enjoy the show. What happened in the race that you just did? It was a, it was a, it's kind of like proof that I don't have talent. I mean, it was a half marathon and I took off at, I was, like I said, I was perfectly in shape, you know, we're, we're into early March now and I was perfectly in shape mid January. You know, I was in the best marathon shape of my life conclusively. And I dropped down to the half marathon in Houston and just ran a smooth kind of, you know, started a little slower, got a little faster at the end, nice, smooth, like marathon effort, half marathon. And that's

Starting point is 01:26:05 what let me know that I was in, you know, no slower than 224 ish shape for the marathon on the day. So it's like, all right, this worked, you know, I can do this. And I've just been kind of like hanging on to fitness since then. I haven't had a proper, you know, deload and full block and like six weeks of training at sustained volume like I do for, for, you know, a races. And so I've just kind of been tacking on races at the end. Um, and just, just kind of having fun stacking, stacking some wins and running some faster times because my body is faster than it's ever been. It's just not, it's just a little rickety. And so I've been, you know, I dropped down to Phoenix and ran a marathon and did the first seven miles at Olympic trials pace and then just jogged it in or like death marched it in by the end. No,

Starting point is 01:26:51 no fluid, no calories, just, just like proper good training stimulus. And then came out the next weekend, did a 10 K at seven 30, did a five K at nine, did a 10 K trail race the next morning at like nine and just like stacked all these races and it's like it's been a big existential thing because okay i'm running fast you know i'm doing 520 average or whatever it is it's not as fast as i would like but it's fast it you know it feels fast it looks fast and i'm winning all these races like obviously it's fast enough to be to be crushing a given race on a given weekend it's's not going to win the Boston Marathon. It's like you'll win everything outside of like the top tier stuff

Starting point is 01:27:28 running paces like that. And it's like, well, what am I going for? What am I doing? It's like I want this transcendental thing. I want this craziness. I'm chasing the dragon here. I'm not chasing something. I'm not chasing a win.

Starting point is 01:27:41 So I've just been kind of racing and internalizing this and and feeling out my body and it the the lower leg didn't seem to respond to time off so i'm kind of teetering on like do i train do i not train and so kind of trying different days out there of like well maybe i'll just race and it'll just pop it back into place or something because that's happened to me plenty of times where like i have a little a little issue going into an ultra and then the systemic inflammation that you get of everything is like hot and you go to sleep and you feel like you have the flu or something because your legs are so batterized and uh battered and and uh and then that like systemic inflammation kind of hits the reset button and fixes it so it's kind of hopeful

Starting point is 01:28:21 maybe that would happen since i can train pain-free one or two days a week and it didn't seem to have happened so now it's two weeks of just pulling and pushing sleds and then that that last half marathon was was just a i figured man let's just get like trials pace for a half marathon that would give me a lot of confidence and if i can do that under sub optimal conditions then i'll know that it's in the bag so went out 5 11 through the first mile with 180 degree turn and like whatever getting getting your placement in there 5 14 for the second mile and then it was already like slowed down slowed down slowed down slowed down till it was just a death march at the end and i'm like all right and we had a blasting headwind too so you know the speed is there the

Starting point is 01:29:00 comfort is getting there you know that's what i was talking about like just the the coordination of running that fast and the shock factor of like this is so fast is kind of like wearing off in a good way and so I'm I'm ready to just I'm going to push and pull the sled around for a couple weeks hopefully that'll correct this um it's been awesome hanging out here because it seems like the perfect time to be here there's like all kinds of all kinds of the right experts in there to to play around with and engage with and kind of figure out what's going on here and so yeah i mean the it was it was a beautiful blow up for sure and there's there's a certain value in doing that i mean there's there's a certain did you have you had to stop in certain races before yeah i've dropped out of races plenty

Starting point is 01:29:39 of times you know what about in training have you had to stop in training or or you know you're eight miles in ten miles in do you ever have to stop in training or, or, you know, you're eight miles in, 10 miles in, do you ever have to stop or call an audible and do something totally different? Cause you're just fucked for the day. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I'm, I'm, I'm so gentle with myself with a lot of this that I don't know that it even registers as much to like lock in like, oh yeah, I quit that workout or whatever. But especially marathon training, there's, there's times where you're just not going to have it. I mean, training for an ultra

Starting point is 01:30:07 or training to finish a marathon, you should be able to finish every single session on the day of the session. And if you can't, then your sessions are too hard, I think, for at least like a beginner, right? Whereas training to get fast, I had sessions where it's five by a thousand meters or seven by a thousand meters.

Starting point is 01:30:24 So those are about three minutes of pretty brisk running. There's days where you just don't have that. In Durango, there's days where there's ice and that's just that. I do a really, really good job of having some gentleness with myself and just saying, well, today wasn't the day. We got some of the stimulus in there, today, today wasn't the day we got, we got some of the stimulus in there or, or obviously it was enough for the day. And, and then making the call of like, do I make up this workout? Do I do it in three days? Do I do it in seven days? You know,

Starting point is 01:30:55 when, when do I make, do I tack it on to next week's workout? How do I, how do I figure this out? And kind of just calling stuff on the fly. But i think that intuition is informed from a lot of years of just like being a super nerd about it i don't like all that data i don't like crunching all these numbers i don't i don't actually i don't enjoy all that where a lot of a lot of endurance athletes like that they're like kind of engineered pencil pushing types you know they like all that they like spreadsheets and stuff i hate that shit like i I do it because then it liberates me to just get weird on race day. That's really what I like.

Starting point is 01:31:29 When I won the 100K National Champs, I had more than five hours where I had zero internal dialogue. I mean, literally zero. I'd hit a mile split and it would be 609 and i would

Starting point is 01:31:47 have a visceral response of like yeah that's right and i would just keep going i mean i had no i i had zero words for for more than five hours i mean i saw my shadow running and like did little form checks and like the activation everything but not once did i say okay stay relaxed okay you're gonna get this okay you're gonna win this race or this person's doing this, right? None of that, like literally no management, no hours, no laps. I had no idea how many laps it was 20 laps. I had no idea how many laps I was in by like three or four laps in. And I didn't know until lap 18 or something. I mean, I had nothing and that's kind of like, that's the white whale at this point. It's like, how long can I do that?

Starting point is 01:32:28 Can I do a 24 hour where I have no thoughts? Where I'm just, I get a crew member to just mix up the same bottle for me and manage that and say, hand me this every hour. Don't ask me if I want anything.

Starting point is 01:32:40 I'm never going to say yes. There's some runners where they put the pressure on your crew because it's like, you know, I've crewed, I've crewed buddies where, do you want, do you want potatoes? Do you want this? Do you want, do you want chips? Do you want Skittles? Do you want whatever you want coming into an aid station? And you know, you, he says he doesn't want anything. And then the seventh thing you suggest, he's, Oh yeah, potato chips. That sounds great. And you're like, now I'm on the hook to suggest everything that I can possibly ask for you so that you get extra calories. So you feel good in 10 miles or 20 miles or 50 miles. And it's like, man, the pressure.

Starting point is 01:33:12 I've never said yes. Not once. It's like, if, if I, if I'm dropping out of a race, I quit hours ago. Like by the time that you find out, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm done. Right. Whereas some people will get into an aid station. I'm thinking about dropping. I'm like, why are you even saying that? Like, get to the next aid station I'm thinking about dropping I'm like why are you even saying that like get to the next aid station then you can drop don't tell me you're thinking about it and I don't know I'm losing myself here where do we even start with that what do you got over there Andrew

Starting point is 01:33:36 this might sound weird but like are you hungry like I'm just I'm trying to I'm just thinking you know like trying to not gain weight but still work out but also still not gain weight like just like perpetually like do you constantly think about food or because again this is this is interesting i mean the weight thing is a recent thing for me like i've kind of just let my body he's losing it over there man

Starting point is 01:34:02 just the way you asked that question i don't know man are you hungry i was like right now do i know am i looking skinny i mean because i'm just thinking like you know power lifters listening and stuff they're just like man i'm kind of sick of eating because i have to keep putting down calories and then dude you know you know what i mean so that's why i'm like what's that what's that like props to force feeding. Force feeding is way harder than not eating. I mean, I think, I feel like the three of you can appreciate that. Eating when you're not hungry is so much. I mean, you do it once, whatever, but it's like day in, day out. Your hunger resets. I mean, I don't, this whole like intentionally trying to lose weight is super new for me. I've let my body

Starting point is 01:34:44 do its thing for most of my running career. for me i've let my body do its thing for most of my running career i just i just let it do its thing it's just been one more tool that like i'll track this occasionally but when i look at you know like a like a foot pod like power wattage like cyclists use you know oh 300 watts that's my ftp or whatever i can do x number of watts of output and we're in the era now where you can do running power meters and they're pretty accurate. And so I know I can only change so many variables, you know, you can only increase these things so much. And I found a lot of things that work, but there's no more low hanging fruit for me. And I look at the math of how fast I can run and all that. And it comes down to weight. But I do eat between 1 and 9 p.m.

Starting point is 01:35:29 I'm never giving up. I don't think that meal before bed, I'm not going to bed hungry. I hate that, man. That's not going to happen. But I'm totally fine going into the morning session and taking pre-workout instead of breakfast and keeping it in there.

Starting point is 01:35:42 I just won't have calories until 1. But I don't think so. I mean, I don't think I'm more or less hungry when I'm intentionally trying to lose weight because the foods that I'm eating are so nutritionally dense. Like I'm known for cracking open cans of sardines and like, I'll do, I call it sardine supreme, which is, which is one of the, one of the things that I, that I advocate for that's very non carnivore here is to have 30 to 40 plants a day. And really, if you can out shoot that, all the better. And I think that's a cool way to engage with the food that you're eating because there's

Starting point is 01:36:13 a little bit of evidence that like triage theory. Has anyone heard of that? That's like the idea. I forget. Rhonda Patrick had some dude on there, some awesome nerd on there talking about triage theory. And that's the idea that what we think a nutrient does does it only does if you're deficient in that nutrient and i'm kind of messing up his explanation i'm sure so like you know vitamin c has this certain function

Starting point is 01:36:34 but if you have enough vitamin e it'll put that vitamin c towards this because vitamin e can step in for vitamin c but it can't step in for this other use of it and put it in there and then there's all these things like, was it xanthan that's in bell peppers that like you do have in your eye and that, and whatever, if I'm getting these nutrients wrong, it's of no consequence, I don't think,

Starting point is 01:36:54 but like you do have it in your eye and it does degrade. So if you're not replacing it, then you're not going to have it. And something else will have to step in for that place. But the amount that you need is very small. And so I think having a wide range of things to like feed different gut bacteria just to have the diversity it's not about the volume it could be a very small i mean it could be a scoop of greens probably to my mind and call that then the question is do you call that 30 if it has like whatever a single

Starting point is 01:37:20 0.01 milligram of barley grass or something it's like does that count i don't know the jury's out but i will count like black pepper or like a good curry it's like that i i would count that as four or five or six or seven plants because you are exposing yourself to those things so it could be spices just as easily for the right person should just get some fucking athletic greens like hear about it so much dump it on top of all your food just sprinkle it take that i've never actually tried it it does have ashwagandha in it right i don't know dude i've never had it before yeah i just hear so many people mention athletic greens a little greens and brought it in here we could have talked it tastes like shit but like it must did huberman say it but huberman said yeah he he drinks his athletic greens also that's all we need to know then what else do you eat?

Starting point is 01:38:06 sardines? the sardine supreme, that's an awesome way I'll do nuts and nutritional yeast and a bunch of seasonings there might be pumpkin seeds nutritional yeast is like are you familiar with nooch? you guys familiar with nooch?

Starting point is 01:38:20 yeah, I've been around forever the first time I heard about it was from vegans and i'm like if i didn't have vegan friends i wouldn't know what nutritional yeast was like real talk it's like why would i yeast and all that stuff yeah yeah but it's got it's got a good range of b vitamins in there it's like cheesy and doughy and and good and i'll take i'll take nutritional yeast and all this other stuff and i'll throw it on top of sardines and kind of like chop them all up into little bits and then they're like kind of like powdered with this stuff it's kind of like a breading and i can eat them i can eat them like that or i can do sun-dried tomatoes in there or

Starting point is 01:38:54 i can take that and i'll make like a little sushirito with nori and wrap it up in there and yeah sardine supreme sardine sushirito sard Sardine supreme, man. That's how you do it because that's whatever it is, 15 plants or so, plus just it's a whole animal. I mean, I get the skin on, bones in, proper sardines, and that's a superfood. I mean, when I was going through an upper-level nutrition class through college, I was like, man, maybe I should supplement with that. Maybe I should supplement. It was like first-year med student phenomenon where you think every every health problem that you hear about you think you have

Starting point is 01:39:28 you're like i have that i have that and i was like going through all these nutrition things and i was like maybe i'd benefit from that maybe i should get more vitamin a maybe i should get more omega threes maybe i should and when i was looking into foods the top foods that have it sardines were always on that list it was like start eating sardines every day and just see what happens and started started racing better than I ever have. And so now it's just, when I'm training heavy,

Starting point is 01:39:49 it's, you know, 20 cans of sardines, 20 days of training, let's go. And that's like, that's a big base for me right there. And then I'll do

Starting point is 01:39:55 half a pound of raw liver a week. I'll do a lot of eggs, you know, especially when I'm manipulating body weight. Red meat actually ends up getting squeezed out just for the sake of eggs because i can do a lot of eggs for the same number of calories and i'll even toss the whites like i'll feed the whites to my my dog

Starting point is 01:40:12 and i'll just do egg yolks like confit eggs where you like shred up a nice a nice tuber you know half of a sweet potato or like a big yam from training real heavy in the cast iron with some some tallow or duck fat, duck fats ideal and just take so long. They just kind of flip those little patties of it and get it all into kind of a hash, throw some, throw some egg yolks on top,

Starting point is 01:40:33 pop them right once they're on the plate and get the egg yolk all over it. Dialed little cinnamon, tons of salt. So yeah, it's, it's a, it's a lot of animal products for my proper nutrition. And then it's,

Starting point is 01:40:43 I view plants as kind of like a supplement. Cool. Got it. Take us out of here, Andrew. All right. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Please drop those comments down below. Let us know what you guys think about today's podcast.

Starting point is 01:40:55 Hit that like button and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already. Follow the podcast at MBPowerProject all over the place. My Instagram is at IamAndrewZ. And Seema, where are you at? And Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube.'s me yin yang on TikTok and Twitter, Anthony, where people find you and everything you do. Yeah. People can find me Instagram primarily at Anthony Kunkel and that's phonetic. We'll put it in the show notes, but like, obviously you can find me at five three five County road 204. I mean,

Starting point is 01:41:19 you can show up at my house, man. You can't miss the prayer flags on the porch. So yeah, I would, I would say if I can have a call to action here for a second, I would say show up to Project Mayhem. That's, that's the May 10th to the 17th. And yeah, just don't ask questions. Show up. We'll treat you right. If you're serious about your craft, whatever it is. Um, I've had, I've had artists, I've had photographers, I've had, I've had all kinds of people show up and, and just kind of dive into it and find your own, you know, monk mode as we call it, of just doing the same thing every day and figure out what's ideal about around a bunch of people that think that you're totally reasonable for giving up your entire life to chase this thing so yeah show up at my house i'm at mark smelly bell strength is never a weakness weakness never

Starting point is 01:41:58 strength catch you guys later bye

Mark Bell's Power Project - Anthony Kunkel || MBPP Ep. 904

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