Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 572 - Ultra Marathon Runner Zach Bitter

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Zach Bitter is an endurance athlete and coach. He has been competing in marathons since 2008 and ultramarathons since 2010. He is a World and American Record Holder, a 3X National Champion, and was sent to the World 100k championships as a member of the US Team. He is driven to find his limitations in a variety of environments and help others find theirs. Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off the Power Project Panel! ➢Eat Rite Foods: http://eatritefoods.com/ Use ode "POWERPROJECT25" for 25% off your first order, then code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off every order after! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ FOLLOW Nsima Inyang ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en ➢Nsima's Coaching: https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Oh, is that your phone? That's what's my phone. Oh, my bad. Who are you calling? Calling from the... Ghostbusters! Oh. No, I was worried that I had a video playing in the background or something.

Oh, it was his phone? Yeah. But no, we're good. And we're live. Yeah. Awesome to have you here today, Zach. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate you taking the time to come out.

Oh, absolutely. I was talking to Nsema before this, and I think the last time I was on, it was kind of funny because I lived in Sacramento for a few years before I knew you. Then I moved away, and then I came on the podcast. And here you are back again. Yeah, yeah. No, it's fun to come on for sure. A low-carb ultra-marathoner is kind of how you're known, I guess, right?

Yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, I definitely get identified for the nutritional approach for sure. And then people oftentimes get interested with the freakish number of miles I run. It must be really important for you to keep hydrated during these massive runs. Did you have to kind of learn that the hard way when you switched over to a lower-carb diet? uh did you have to kind of learn that the hard way like when you switched over to a lower carb diet was because i know for me and for encema like with fasting and with uh kind of a low carb style lifestyle um you don't get to like hydrate the same way you know it doesn't hold on to water the same way so do you have to kind of learn that the hard way or do you know that ahead of time

yeah luckily for me i was introduced to uh dr Volick and Dr. Finney pretty early on. So some of the mistakes I definitely would have made, I kind of avoided or at least knew they would potentially be an issue if I didn't keep an eye on them. So hydration and electrolytes is one of the things I picked up on pretty quick. So thankfully, I upped that. My sodium intake, salted more of my food, started adding more electrolytes to fluids and things like that and staved off some of that. Usually I find that if I'm doing about 500 to 700 milligrams of electrolytes to every liter of water I consume, I'm kind of in the right spot.

So if I'm going to go out for like a really long run and it's kind of cool in the beginning, then maybe I'm only going through a liter of water, so then I maybe need like, say half a pack of element. And then, uh, is it warms up? Maybe I'm going through two, three, then I just up the electrolyte quantity per fluid. So you kind of just drink to thirst, but make sure you tether that amount of electrolytes to it. And that's worked really well for me. Is it true that you don't even sweat anymore when you run? Not in Phoenix, or at least I don't feel like i am it's leaving me for sure but yeah no it's uh you get efficient for sure especially when uh you train through the summer and then go somewhere a little cooler it does feel like oh wow i'm my body's so

good at cooling i barely notice i'm sweating at all and my my most uh kind of polarizing experience with that was in 2019, I trained for a hundred miler through the summer, did a hundred mile race in the Olympic training facility in Milwaukee, which they keep at 60 degrees. Cause they've got a, they've got a speed skating rink in there, so they can't let it get any warmer than that. So I was thinking about that during that race. I was like, man, it was almost twice as hot on some of my long runs for this. Whereas in here, you know, it's nice and chilly. And I think I, I was kind of surprised how little water I went through that day, but I wonder, does that have any impact on your speed?

Does that somehow make you run faster or make you move slower in some, any sort of way? Or you have training in the heat is going to have some like physiological effects. So they kind of, they call it the poor man's altitude. And I, from what I gather, it's because your body's just going to probably keep a little higher amount of blood volume along, along for the ride. So you can, you know, do the things that are going to be required, like cooling, uh, muscle function, sweating, and all that stuff. So, uh, chances are my body probably retains maybe a pound or two extra water or something during the heat of the summer, as long as I'm given it that. And then, yeah, then jump into a cool climate and you kind of have a little bit of extra resources on board. Similar to altitude training, I guess, in the sense that

you go up high and your body is going to, you know, just develop more red blood cells in order to accommodate the lower oxygen level. And then if you go down to do workouts or races, you kind of have that extra, extra little push. You mentioned that you like the element chocolate in your coffee. I think it's a great hack. I was so excited when they made the chocolate one because in the morning, I mean, I'll drink a cup of coffee or tea or something basically every morning before I go out. And sometimes I'll just dilute it. So I'm getting in like, you know, a good like 500 milliliters of water or maybe more. And then it's like, do I really want to have a bottle of water on top of that?

And then I'm like peeing three times in the first two miles. So they had their original stuff and i was like okay how do i get around uh using this with my coffee without making it taste horrible and all of a sudden they came out the cocoa and like perfect there we go now i can just have my diluted 32 ounces of coffee with the packet of the chocolate element in there and be off to the races yeah we love it too and we appreciate their sponsorship of this podcast and you want to tell them how to get hooked up with it? Absolutely.

So drinklmnt.com, links to them, or sorry, drinklmnt.com slash powerproject, link to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I believe they still have the free element recharge pack, so you just pay five bucks, and then you get an eight sample pack, and I believe it should include that chocolate salt,

but if not, you can do what we do, which is get a value bundle. That's getting four boxes for the price of three. It's really the best way to go about it. And no code needed. Just head over to drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Can't recommend it enough. I mean, shit, if it's good enough for Zach Bitter, it's definitely good enough for us and you. So, yeah.

You mentioned altitude training briefly. What does that do for somebody? You mentioned blood cell count. Like, yeah, how does that positively impact somebody that wants to increase their endurance? Yeah, so the easy way to maybe understand it is the higher you go up, the less oxygen you have available to you. So your body takes steps to try to, to like improve its ability to utilize it. So then, uh, the idea there is like, if you live or train at say like seven, 8,000 feet, then you go down to sea level to race your body's equipped to do a certain workload with a certain amount of oxygen in the air. And then you come down and you just have like

a big bolus of that every breath you take more or less so it almost feels like you have like an extra lung then when you kind of come down i've lived at sea level my whole life so i probably haven't really like ever experienced it to its fullest the way that the folks who kind of live up in the mountain towns do and then come down but really the there's trade-offs as with everything almost so you likely will not be able to work out quite as hard because you have that limiting factor even when your body does more or less adapt to it and you also will likely recover a little bit slower if you're especially as you get up like really high like the 10 000 feet so a lot of times what some of the pro athletes um maybe you just saw the olympics right so there

was a ton of olympians that live in flagaff, which is two hours North of where I'm living and they will live up there. But if they have like a big workout that they want to do, they'll come down to Phoenix or down closer to sea level and do that hard workout. So they can really maximize the, just like all the adaptations from the output of that workout, hit the splits. They're going to want to hit on race day and that sort of thing.

Yeah. It might not be able to run as fast when you have thin air basically. Right. Right. Yeah. So it can compromise your, uh, your workout quality, so to speak. So if you can swing it being in a mountain town where you can hop down to sea level and do some of those speedier sessions a couple of times a week, then that's kind of a sweet

spot, I think. And that's where we're seeing a lot of those Olympians kind of like try to hack that lifestyle a bit. This makes me wonder, are there any like mythical mountain runners? Because like, I imagine if you're someone who grew up in the mountains or you grew up in like somewhere with really high altitude and that was just your normal. And then you came down to where like,

you know, whatever you're like, Ooh, I can run. Like, are there, are there athletes that are well known like that? Yeah.

I wonder if like you grow up, you, your, your lungs and your capacity would adapt to that. Making living among us normies easier and running among us normies easier. Are there any runners like that or not really? Yeah. The big name in the sport is killing journey.

And he's, uh, probably barely unarguably one of the best, if not the best ultra runner of all time, certainly on the mountain side of things. So, uh, he grew up in the mountains. I think his dad was like a mountaineer more or less uh and he was out there playing

around at altitude up and down mountains at age three so he was like historically kind of like out there in that and you know you watch some of the videos of him running like on what they call like the spine of some of these peaks where i mean you're gonna die if you fall either way and he's just like just dancing around up there just like there's nothing to it and he'll run down stuff where you wouldn't even recognize it as something runnable you'd be like okay if i'm gonna get down from that it's gonna be backwards very slowly and he's just like just like hopping down it and uh yeah i mean i'm sure like he's also got like i think his vo2 max is like in the low 90s or something that was just freakishly high you're gonna see those numbers occasionally in folks that are like ski mountaineers maybe

like cyclists and things like that you might see some high numbers like that but it's pretty rare so his engine so to speak has such a big uh big potential where to to the point where like you know you could be racing him and he may be operating at a gear below you just because at the same pace just because he's got that that big engine available to him and uh yeah some of that has to be just from his upbringing in that in that environment what's uh what's your body weight? About 140 pounds. All right. So when SEMA and I got you by 100 pounds, you want to know a real easy way to take us out is to have us run downhill with you. How the fuck do you run downhill? Is there some sort of technique to it? I mean, being lighter obviously must help a lot, but how much does technique play into, because you're running

such long distances, it must be a huge factor. Yeah that's that's a tough one too because i think when you get in these mountain ultra marathons or these really hilly ones people will they'll blow their quads up or the next day they'll be waddling around their quads will be super sore and that's kind of the reality of almost any ultra marathon but even more so on the downhill courses and a lot of times new folks to sport they think oh i'm you know all that climbing just destroyed my quads when reality is that eccentric load they're taking just essentially breaking on the way down so you want to try to run downhill as efficiently as you can so you're not breaking as hard are you allowed to go backwards you can it just might be a little slower or you could just slide down if it's deep enough, but yeah, so you want to eat. There's,

there's technique to downhill running. Obviously the technical trail can add another variable to like, if you're not very comfortable, and this is one of my weaknesses is like technical downhill running is something I haven't really mastered. Uh, but then you get the guys like Killian who have, and they can just like flow right through that stuff without even breaking for me. I'm inefficient on that stuff. So I have to really work at it to get to a point where i can efficiently move down and if i don't i'll pay for it on race day because i'll be running breaking the whole way and just loading up my quads that entire descent where someone like killing will just be floating down it and barely doing any damage so if you can fight that breaking that's what you kind of almost have to lean into it a

little bit which takes a little bit of confidence which just takes practice to get used to and then you almost want to think of like when your foot strikes almost like this kind of like pawing maneuver almost so you're kind of like you know putting yourself in a position where you're not hitting the ground and leaning back and creating that big load into your quads. And that's almost leaning forward a bit. Yeah. Damn. To a degree. Dude, I'm so curious about like what your feet look like just because no, no,

no, not in the, not because, okay. Because as you're talking about this, right. In my mind, I'm just like,

that probably requires, like you mentioned the pawing motion, right. Probably requires so much like foot dexterity and strength. And how does one i guess build that because you know i feel like that if you have good strong feet that can transfer amazing to strength sports and a lot of strength athletes probably don't pay much attention to their feet so how would you help well how would you tell an athlete to fix their feet what would you be

what would your advice be to an athlete? If they're like, I want to build stronger feet is obviously you might've, you might've had to work on that running hundreds of miles, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think the first part is,

uh, if I'm working with a strength athlete, it's almost easier for them to understand this because they've already got the mindset of, you know, how to progress in a gym, right? They know that like there's a process there and patience is going to be your friend. So the way

I like to describe it is like, if I decided today, I want to be able to bench 350 pounds. Obviously just looking at me, I'm not doing that right today. So if I decided to go into the gym though and say, I'm going to just do this all at once by the end of the week, I'm going to be benching 350 pounds. I'm going to start by loading up that bar, and say, I'm going to just do this all at once. By the end of the week, I'm going to be benching 350 pounds. I'm going to start by loading up that bar, 350 pounds. I'm going to get underneath it and I'm going to just, you know,

go for it. That would end badly for me, um, in, in a variety of ways, but you kind of want to think of the same way with your feet. So you're working with like foot muscles and you're trying to strengthen that area.

So if you decide, let's take someone who is doing like maybe three to four hours of cardio per week and they decide i want to get make my feet stronger so i'm going to take off these big built-up bulky shoes that probably have a heel lift in it really soft really cushiony i'm going to go down into a real minimalist shoe or run barefoot go out and beach run barefoot they may be kind of flirting with like me getting under that bench press bar of 350 pounds by doing it that way what they want to do is they want to say okay my feet are weak i've been wearing these casts around my whole life essentially so i want to be able to get them stronger but i have to do that in a

progression i want to micro stress it to the point where i'm doing a little more than they're used to so they get that stress stimulus but then get stronger and just repeat that over time. So that might be something as simple as walking barefoot for a while for a week. And then that might be something as simple as now one day per week during cardio, I'm going to wear a lower profile, firmer shoe so that I'm activating those lower leg muscles a little more. Uh, you know, for me, I like wearing ultra footwear cause they make foot shape toe box, which is also going to allow their toes to splay out a little more, splay that toes out. You're going to activate those muscles a little bit better than if they're kind of restricted, less cast, I guess is the way to maybe understand it.

Think of it that way. And, uh, yeah. And then you just want to kind of gradually, you want to be listening to your body though. So like if I wake up in the morning and I'm trying to make my feet stronger and my feet are sore, my calves are sore from whatever i did the day before i might not go back to the barefoot or the low profile like minimalist footwear for that next day's workout that day i might you know wear some little more cushion and let that area catch up think of it as a rest day for your feet and then once i feel that that soreness and that tightness may be moved out

i'm gonna go back and do that again and progressively over time you can work your way into be able to do it exclusively if you want to uh i did that once um i think it was 2011 maybe i spent probably about six months you can make you maybe even make an argument up towards a year basically transitioning to where i was running all my stuff in really minimalist low profile shoes uh. Uh, I got really, really strong lower legs from that. Nice. So, uh, the, which is good, you know, I want that, but then I think there's a point at which you want to start looking at these shoes as tools. Uh, and I like to call it a shoe quiver. That's so sick, man. Where it's like, okay, what's the purpose of today's workout and feeder quiver. And just thinking about it. Who's that elf from Lord of the Rings?

That's what I'm thinking about right now. Yeah, just remember? Yeah. Shit. Never seen it. Yeah. Never seen it. We're going to have to have a marathon.

Lord of the Rings marathon. Have you seen Lord of the Rings? I have. Oh, thank you. I was about to say, do I have to hurt two people? Just one. Okay. But yeah, so I knew that would get you fired up

you probably haven't seen star wars either he hasn't that i definitely have oh okay but the real star wars not the like yeah the new ones yeah not disney star wars yeah no not that shit okay that's fine that's good yeah so like when i think of like shoes i think of like different tools for different purposes so once i kind of got my lower legs really strong. I wanted to think of it as like Uh, how do I use shoes to get me where I want to be from a performance standpoint? And then it might be more of uh, my body can take me this far kind of naturally But if i'm going to run 100 miles or put in a big training week where I may be running 150 miles a week, I may be pushing past where my body would be able to really respond naturally.

And then since we've accepted that equipment is usable in these sports, you want to adapt to what you're going to have to do on race day and what your competitors are going to do. So part of that is footwear. So if a pair of shoes allows me to go from doing this 120 mile training week to 130 miles and get that extra stimulus that may move me a percentage or two further on race day, then I want to be able to do that. So that might mean I do a hard workout in low profile shoes, wake up the next day, little sore ankles, little sore calves. Then I might put on a pair of more cushioned shoes for that easy run the next day so i can keep that volume up uh but let that area kind of heal so when people ask about kind

of cushion and shoes a lot of times i want to dig a little deeper and find out what's the purpose or what's going on so if someone comes to me a lot of times they'll think like okay my knees and my hips are hurting i need more cushion because they're thinking soft relieves hurt relieves pain and they're kind of right with that you are going to relieve some of the pain and some of the impact with a cushioned shoe but the part that you're going to relieve it from is where a lot of times people make a mistake so if they're hurting in their knees or hips chances are the impact forces from their running are ending up higher in the kinetic chain in their knees and hips. So if they put on a soft shoe, cushion shoe, a built up shoe, their foot is going to feel really relaxed because every step is like stepping on nice, soft, pillowy stuff. So it kind of like relaxes their sense of wanting to find that real precise spot to strike the ground.

And that might allow their foot to hit the ground in a variety of different spots. It might allow it to take a bigger shock to that area that normally your body would cringe at. And what that does is those impact forces are going to be there regardless. So they're just going to send them up into your knees and hips. So that person may benefit from a little more of a firm shoe. It doesn't necessarily have to be minimalist or low profile,

but a shoe that has a more dense midsole foam so that when they step down, it feels more firm or less squishy, less kind of like manipulable from how far you push that foam into the ground. And what that's going to do is it's going to create their body's sense to find that real precise striking point on their foot, which is kind of your first point. And those nerves are really sensitive there, so you can really trust them to kind of find that real precise striking point on their foot, which is kind of your first point.

And those nerves are really sensitive there. So you can really trust them to kind of find that spot. Could you maybe find some of that just by like maybe running like in a field or something, just running on some grass with no shoes or something like that? Yeah. Yeah. And if you do that, that's going to be like as minimalist as you can get, right? So if you're running completely barefoot on like a field your body is going to be hypersensitive to where you step because it's going to be sensing for things like sharp rocks you know it's going to want to pull back if it steps on something that's going to do damage um you'd be better off probably building up the calluses on the bottom of your feet before doing that but uh uh you know those nerves on your feet are very sensitive so they will feel that

and you'll respond really quickly so as you you're planting down, if your body feels like, okay, this is going to hurt as I bear weight, it's going to shift to the spot where it won't, which is going to typically kind of be the balls of your feet, more mid to forefoot area of your foot. It's also going to make your cadence likely speed up and your plant to land underneath your bent knee versus out in front of it. If your foot's versus out in front of it uh if your foot's way out in front of your knee that means you're probably on your heel which is not a very comfortable spot to strike if you don't have cushion there so that level of precision is going to create a situation where your legs are basically three foot shock absorbers and those

impact forces are still going to be the same they're just going to end up in the spots your body intends them to. So they're going to do less damage to you long-term and short-term in some cases by having that. So that person, just like the person who's got sore feet, sore ankles, sore calves, may want that cushion, especially if they can pay attention to their form and keep their form nice and uniform from what it would normally be. The person with a sore knees, sore hips, sore quads and that sort of stuff, they may want a more firm,

sometimes lower profile shoe to make sure that their foot is landing very precisely. And I think when you're kind of using both those tools, you're allowing yourself to kind of push the needle maybe a little further in training, get away a little more than you would have been able to otherwise, but also build up that lower leg strength,

that ankle strength, that foot strength and keep strong feet versus atrophied feet. Do people in general, in your experience, do they usually run like shit? Do they usually not have decent running form? Because our experience, a lot of times when someone says, oh, yeah, yeah, I know how to deadlift. I know how to squat. I know how to bench. A lot of times they might be able to do the the exercise but they maybe haven't learned how to do it uh you know with the best possible form or the most optimal way yeah yeah and i think this is sort of uh uh kind of a problem with the sense that like

we just assume people know how to run right so like when kids go to like cross-country camp or track and field or something like that a lot lot of times, especially with smaller schools, I love the egg beater run, you know, where the feet are going, you know, like, yeah, like,

like, you're like, yeah, how's that? When we were talking about this a little bit before, where when you have a smaller person, like a, you know,

someone who's like eight years old, uh, footwear is even more pronounced on them. So if we just take an adult shoe and shrink it down and put it on a, on a child, it's like almost two to three times that of what is on an adult's foot. So they're going to have even more of a restriction in there. And as their feet are developing, you know, that's going to be even bigger problem down the road because they're trying,

they're, they're at that point where their body's really plastic. So they can put a big load on it in order to be more resilient later on. But if you're restricting that from being able to occur, then, you know, that you have adults with messed up feet, you know, weak atrophied muscles in their feet and things like that. So that's where I think a big problem can be fixed right out the gate is finding footwear for, um, for the youth that are going to allow their feet to really grow and flex and get strong so that when they're adults,

they're not trying to correct like years and years of bad development, more or less. The other thing is just, it's not like some of the more contact sports where we kind of got to teach you some technique before we send you out to play tackle football, or you're going to end up in a lot of trouble. So we're going to teach you like how to properly position your body to, you know,

make a tackle or we're going to teach you, we're going to put you in a strength, on a strength routine before we start. So you don't to you know make a tackle or we're gonna teach you we're gonna put you in a strength on a strength routine before we start so you don't you know have imbalances that are going to create issues out on the field and things like that whereas with running sometimes it's a little more of okay well just go run for 30 minutes then come back and then what your body's doing in that isn't really paid attention to as closely drills aren't as common uh you know form mechanics aren't as common so i think that's another thing too where uh you're working on form and there's like a kind of there's like a four point check system that i like to use where you're kind of focusing from the head down which is a

kind of a forward lean where you're thinking of running as this this practice of kind of falling forward and catching yourself so you're working with gravity. You're not working against it. So you should feel like your upper body is kind of tipping forward and then your feet are kind of catching yourself. And that forward lean is just going to be much more conducive for your foot to come down underneath that bent knee versus out in front of you.

Because if you're over striding, your foot's coming out in front of you, chances are you're leaning back. Then you're fighting the direction you're trying to go. He's going to try it. Oh, no. You got to get in a visual. There you go. He's going to try it. Okay. Get in a visual.

There you go. Nope. Sorry. I like what you're saying there. That makes a lot of sense because I think for myself, I'm like, okay, try to be more upright. And then I run like a robot. And then I'm like pitching my legs out far and then because of my mobility is not great when my foot strikes uh my knee is in a more locked out position than what my body likes and that's how i kind of go texting you back and

forth i'm like i only ran for like two weeks and i kind of tweaked something so i've been back to running since that time but um so that that'll be really valuable for me to try to, uh, lean into it a little bit more forward. That probably help a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And there's some stuff you can do too, that I like to do. Like as, as I'm kind of getting used to that positioning, I'll almost position myself where I'll stand upright and it kind of feels a little uncomfortable at first, but you want to push your chest out like tall and proud, that kind of like, you know, the stature and then just like kind of rock back and forth not so that you feel like you're gonna tip forward or backwards but rocking back and forth comfortably once you get comfortable there roll forward to the point where you start to notice okay i'm gonna fall forward and once you start feeling that then let your foot

kind of step out and catch yourself a great way to yeah it's a little trick way to learn it yeah yeah you can just practice that and then once you kind of get used to it, your body almost kind of goes with the muscle memory thing where it kind of gravitates towards that. Then you kind of just keep moving down. Right now you have like your arms. So like people think of like arms being swung when you're running. And that's kind of true. If you go to a cross country track meet,

you'll probably hear coaches and parents at that finish line, like yelling at the kids, like, Swing your arms. Yeah, pump your arms. And that's kind of half true. So you do want your arms to be working for you, but you also don't want them to be working against you. So if you think of it as when I push my arm back, that's pushing my chest forward.

That's pushing me forward. That's the direction I want to go. If I'm swinging my arm forward, that's pushing me back in the other direction, the opposite way I want to go. I love this kind of stuff. It's way more complex than you think. my arm forward, that's pushing me back in the other direction, the opposite way I want to go. I love this kind of stuff. It's way more complex than you think. It just looks like someone's just taken off running down the street.

Yeah. Yeah. And so the way I like to hang is think of your arms as high and tight. You want kind of like that compact arm. So you don't want it to be inefficient either. Like if your arms are all flailing out, let me think of it this way. If I take my arm and I just hold it like this and swing it back and forth, I'm very inefficient. I can only get it moving so fast. Now I take my arm and I kind of crunch in like this.

I can just like really, really get it moving fast. So that's what you want. You want that efficiency, that nice, tight kind of arm carriage. But then once you have it there, you want to pop it back. So you're pushing forward and then just let it fall forward. You don't want to swing it forward. A lot of times people will swing it forward and then you're pushing yourself against where you're trying to go.

And it's forward and not really across your body, right? Exactly, yeah. And that's the other thing. If you swing your arm forward, you're more likely to go like this. And that's the other kind of rule of thumb you want to watch for. You don't want your palm to cross your sternum.

This is so great. I do all these. I do all the things he's mentioning wrong. I do all of them. You've got good company. There's a lot of people who do. I'm excited though because these are things i could work on yeah and these things all feed into one of them when you get the forward lean and you pay attention to that it promotes

the proper arm carriage and it promotes pop back fall forward and if you think about the pop back fall forward tight arm carriage it promotes the forward lean so these kind of things work with one another um next thing if you move down is uh what we kind of talked before is where is your foot hitting the ground in relation to your bent knee so a lot of times what people can do is they can take their phone put it on video mode and watch themselves run past it from the side a lot of times i'll see people they'll be like i want to get my form checked and there's value in a 360 degree form analysis that's like a very like uh detailed version but most of the a lot of times what i'll see and i cringe at a little bit is if someone goes on a treadmill and record

themselves from behind to look for these tiny little millimeters of like pronating or supinating and try to make adjustments from there when in reality like it's a lot easier to make a correction we're dealing with a much bigger area or a much bigger thing to notice and recognize if there's actually something going on wrong there. And that can be better seen from the side. So from the side, I can see where my foot is landing in relation to my knee collapsing in. And if I notice someone's like foot is reaching out in front of their knee, then that's a problem that we want to fix because that's going to cause. Their toe is reaching out further than their knee, then that's a problem that we want to fix because that's going to cause problems. Their toe is reaching out further than their knee. Their toe is pointing up, their heel is clamping down on the ground, and it's out in front.

Now, a lot of times people will look at this maybe a little too absolute as well, and they'll say, like, heel striking is bad, forefoot mid-strike is good. In reality, they're all fine as long as they're underneath bent knee. I've seen people kind of strike in the back part of their foot, but when I look at their video from the side, their foot is underneath their knee and it's coming down and it's not going to create a problem with their impact forces necessarily. And they may just be working with their body's unique structure

because you might have someone whose one leg is longer than the other, one foot is bigger than the other that sort of stuff which is going to create a very uh you know unique form for them so you don't want to necessarily try to make everyone look picture perfect because some people that's just not they're going to be their reality you want to make sure they're not doing damage though so making sure that their foot's not out in front of that knee is a good way to check for that. You can see that from the side video. And if they are, then this is maybe the one that's harder to like do from that particular thing. Cause they're like, okay, I'm doing it wrong, but now what? So it's easy to say, well, bring your foot back, but there'll be like, well, how do I do that? And the next one is what can

really help with that is, well, first of all, they'll probably have a harder time doing it. If they do the first two things, right? Like the forward lean, compact arms, pump back, fall forward. But cadence is going to be the one that maybe is best at correcting all of these things and gets you closer to doing all of them. Certainly the overstriding thing. Uh, cadence is a moving target. A lot of times people will identify as like 180 steps from it is like this sweet spot. And that's kind of right. Like if your cadence is 180 steps per minute chances are you're not over striding by a lot because you'd have to be moving your legs very quickly to get 180 strikes in a minute with a really elongated stride uh chances are you're going to tighten your stride

it's going to bring your foot back under bent knee just by getting up to that so i'll check someone's cadence. And the way I like to do this, an easy way to do it is if I just decide to go for a run, try not to do anything different than you normally would, but just count how many times your right foot strikes the ground in 20 seconds. If you take that number and multiply it by six, that's going to give you your cadence for both feet per minute.

So if it's, if let's say I've got someone in theirs is 30, multiply that by six, that's 180. They're probably in the right spot. And I'll say someone, I get someone who is like, uh, 25, uh, they're only 150. So they're getting pretty low. Usually like in, if the, I mean, everyone's gonna be a little different, but usually when someone's dipping under 160 or even down in the low one sixties, I'm starting to kind of pay attention to whether they're over striding or not uh and we're going to want to incrementally work them up i don't necessarily want to take them from say 155 up to 180 because they're going to be changing a lot of mechanical variances then and they can hurt themselves by just that level of change but we are going to

want to incrementally bring them up most people kind of a sweet spot to be about 160 to 180 you might see some folks going 190 plus is that they're really short um it can just depend on kind of how fast their their their feet are moving or the legs are moving so i guess if you're short you're probably going to likely have a higher cadence i would imagine uh but it's pretty specific to the individual and it is a moving target so like if you're running slower you know you might be lower like closer to 170 if you're like doing a speed workout like doing short intervals like two minutes as hard as you can or something like that you might see it pushing up in order to that ceiling so everyone's going to kind of arrange versus a specific exact number uh and then once you kind of find out where your range is and where that is optimal you can start kind of using that

as a tool to gauge if your form's falling apart and things like that. And a lot of times people now, like my watch will count that for me now. Oh, wow. At the end of a run, I can look at it and say, oh, as I started feeling tired at say like mile 18 of a 20 mile long run, I noticed my cadence slowed way down. So these are things I can pay attention to do to both gauge where my kind of breaking point is or where my development is at and what I need. Then I can start making moves to try to build upon or prove upon that. Or I can just take note of that and say, okay, when I get to that point in

a race or in a run, I need to start paying attention to form a little closer because if I don't, I'm going to start gravitating to something that's less efficient. So getting that cadence up is a great way to kind of improve where that foot's landing. It's also something that can be improved quite a bit by sprinting. So a lot of times when I'm working with someone who's got a strength background, they're probably going to rather sprint anyway. So like form, like it's really hard to have bad form when you're sprinting all out because you're pushing your all out because you're, you, you,

you're, you're pushing your body so hard. It's going to kind of almost naturally try to find more efficient spots. So some sprinting techniques can not only help develop your body to be able to sustain that proper form over a longer period of time. It can also kind of help you get into that position of that good form. So sometimes, you know, sprints, strides and things like that at the end of runs can be useful tools to kind of help your body kind of learn that stuff and adapt to it as well.

It's also might be important to note that we're talking about, we're talking about like jogging, right? We're talking about going out for a jog and trying to be efficient with jogging, but sprinting would be different, right? We would want to do different things with our arms. And we probably wouldn't want the arms as close in. And some of what I've heard from ultra athletes before is like they're really trying not to move their arms a whole lot because they don't want to waste energy.

Yeah, I don't want to waste energy. So it's just kind of an important thing to note. So for me, you know, I got into walking probably close to 10 years ago. I used to weigh 330 pounds and with walking and some more recently, some walk jogging really is what it is. Uh, I made a distinction between jogging and running and sprinting. Uh, sprinting is something that it would be cool if I could get myself to that point, but I'm not there yet. I'll have to condition myself for a while to be able to get up to that. I don't want to just go out and just hit up a sprint out of nowhere

and blow a hamstring or a calf or Achilles tendon or have some crazy setback that sets me back for a year or something like that. So this is a shot of me doing kind of more of like a run because I've been working on taking the jog a little bit faster here and there. And I did like eight of these the other day. And see what you think. I can show you a closer version of it over here. I know how this looks.

Forrest Gump. There you go. You can see it there. Yeah, we can pull some stuff from that. So here's what I think. So you were saying, like, if you look here, you know, I'm leaning back a lot, which is what you talked about. And I'm leaning back because I'm thinking, like, I need to have my body upright. So I'm leaning back rather than, like, leaning forward.

It's like Robocop. Yeah. I think the first things I would. So the two things that would maybe and SEMA loves it so we gotta let him watch it ten times over put in slow-mo

this is legit Robocop right here man but what's interesting not interesting but like I've filmed him like running towards the camera and stuff

and I've been there and I'm just like fuck dude it would suck seeing him on the football field because here's this massive dude is fucking charging because whatever that video looks like it's it doesn't do it justice more it's fast okay and this is on this on the sand so that's one thing but i just remember i was i'm trying to find the video but i can't but it was back at the old st when we would do like uh pizza for breakfast we'd have like circuits I can't. But it was back at the old ST when we would do pizza for breakfast. We'd have circuits in the back of the gym.

And he was just sprinting back and forth. And I was just like, dude, that would suck so bad. That would hurt. Yeah. But anyways. People also wondering, what's that guy doing? Why is he videotaping himself? A lot of the people on the beach were like they're just kind of like

dispersing you know he's over exaggerating he's probably being funny but i mean there's a lot of good stuff in there too i think the two things you'd probably want to start with would be it looks like you're swinging your arms forward right which is going to be a little more of a sprinting move so if you are sprinting you will likely have a higher arm carriage and you'll i mean you see that just watching the olympic sprinters versus the olympic distance runners the distance runners are kind of like compact the sprinters are you know everything is just more exaggerated with them um they do come across their body a bit especially at the start and then they straighten up yeah yeah and then maybe work a little bit on that forward lean so one thing you can do to kind of help with that as

well is a little bit of weight in your hands can make it a lot less likely for your arms to want to go to an at least efficient spot like a pound or two yeah something really much you don't need much at all and the bigger you are the more you want so like you might be fine with like two pounds versus one pound um there i mean you can the funny thing is you when i first started recognizing this was looking at trail runners versus road runners. So you get a trail, actually even trail runners versus trail runners. You see a trail runner carrying like their handheld water bottles and their form looks tighter, more efficient. And then you see them running with a pack or no water balls, especially at the end of

a race. And they're like maybe a little more sloppy. It's just like your body is gonna try to seek comfort and if you're holding something that's gonna make it less efficient to get out of your proper form your body's gonna just cue that a little more readily so a little bit goes a long ways you don't want to add so much weight where you're gonna create too much stress on the body have you ever seen those like boxing egg weight things that you can like loop around your hands do people use those yeah yeah so egg weights that company started out if with like the the boxing mixed martial arts company for like shadow boxing and stuff like that and then they started doing some research with uh university of

california as to like how does improve form and arm drive and they actually got some positive results from a study so they were actually making running specific ones now where they're kind of ergonomic and they fit in your hand a lot more like like seamlessly so you can run with them so i'll use those for i love i love them for like if i'm doing if i'm in full-blown training and i'll do like a two-day training session i'll do like my workout in the morning in the afternoon i might do like an easy kind of recovery room where i'm focusing on things like form technique and all that stuff and i'll use them for that and and that really helps help not, first of all,

not swing forward. Cause you got to have stuff is really weird. Cause I almost wonder, I would imagine that some people, uh, could probably run faster with a tiny amount of weight in their hands than they could without. Yeah,

probably just because more force into their arms, right? Well, it would just probably make them more efficient. So like they're more likely to be in the right form and, and, and get that proper mechanic and that proper uh you know so it's just it's always variables right do the two pounds that would be figured into your power weight ratio does that variable eclipse the efficiency improvement or vice versa so because if it's the

efficiency that overshadows it then you're going to go faster even with them. Ideally, you get to a point where you use those enough where now on race day, you set them aside, and now you have best of both worlds. You have the no extra weight plus the efficiency. Anyone, I'm sure everyone's messed around with every possible scenario you could think of. Is anybody really toyed around with having a shoe that's heavier? What about going for a run in some big-ass boots or something go run in some tailings or something yeah i would think that if anything that would create problems just because uh your legs are gonna be come on man you never tried it i i haven't ran with like well I guess I've run with heavier shoes than others, but my, my fear for that would just be the level of like pull that that would have. And I'm not sure, like, cause your, your legs with your arms, you can kind of manipulate how tight that is. I guess you can with your legs too, but I'd be a little worried that that is just going to create extra impact at like a point that is really, really far. Don't be worried, be different let's go

yeah so okay maybe i'll throw some egg weights on my shoes and see what happens figure it out what about like maybe if you're running on a flat marathon or whatever running uphill for the whole duration of your training and then all of a sudden you're on flat ground you're just like oh shit this is almost feels downhill yeah and you know you're gonna see some of that especially like marathon training plans you'll have folks in the early kind of base building phase they'll be doing like the hill bounds and stuff like that they'll be programmed in a lot of that stuff during kind of base training and it's going to be helpful for building strength and mechanics

and things like that uh in that in that area, really though, for like a flat marathon, once you start, the way I look at it is everything is a lot of these things have value. The question is just, where are you going to place them in the training? So if I'm training for a flat marathon, I'm going to want some hill work. Uh, but I'm probably going to want it earlier in the plan because it's not specific to the race environment that I'm going to do. It's possibly addressing a weakness. Um, it's gonna help me longterm, but it, since it's not specific, putting it earlier in the plan is going to get you the benefits from that without sacrificing the specificity that you're going to want to do the things you need to do on race day, which would be kind of getting really ready for the mechanics and the stressors that are in come from a flat, probably paved

course in most cases. Can you tell us a little bit more about the technology pieces and how they've played into it? You mentioned your watch. Is there anything with like shoes in terms of like, is there any shoes that track how you're striking the ground and stuff like that? Like what are some of the technology advances that you've seen? Yeah, so this had a lot more promise. I think earlier there was some technology where they were making shoes and things you could put on shoes that would help uh kind of help you gauge that

stuff um there's there's still stuff that you can use i think they're they're they're the the industry has moved more towards like something that's separate from issues like a pod that you put on like there's a company called stride that makes one there's a different like form of mechanic things uh you said it's a pod like yeah is it something you put inside like an insole or you just like tether in with your laces oh okay yeah so then it'll count like your your stride length it'll count like your cadence it will also tell you whether you're putting more weight on one foot versus the other so you get some of that stuff too that'll is can be interesting info um i think most people actually use it because you can hook it up to uh zwift which is this like kind of like online uh

um running and cycling uh program where you can go on this like virtual track or virtual course and run or train or compete with other people. Oh, that's sick. You can compete with other people? Yeah, it got super popular during COVID because everyone's like, all races are cancelled so people are looking for ways to challenge themselves and they do these virtual competitions. So they throw these things on you.

Yeah, so it's kind of cool that technology has been getting better and better every year so you do have access to more of that type of information. and you know it can be useful too as a coach where i can see whether it's me or someone else where they're breaking down where things are changing and that can be like a stress point or a point where like okay this is where our development is at versus where we want to be or where we've been historically so that stuff can be interesting um technology in general with footwear has been the biggest point of topic and

running recently. I think people are familiar with this type of stuff through cycling and swimming. And you probably remember when bikes switched from like steel frames to carbon frames. And obviously people are going faster with that better technology. Swimming with the opposite direction of cycling where cycling is basically as long as you're not strapping a motor to your bike,

you're all good. Whereas with swimming, they made those speed suits i don't remember the olympics maybe in 2008 or 2012 where they were breaking all these world records because these suits kind of gave them like a buoyancy effect so they were as a swimmer if you can keep yourself kind of like above or on the plane of water you're going to be faster and more efficient it's when you start sinking under where you're you're pushing up against more water and not getting as as efficient those suits help them stay upright a little bit which is why those records are getting broke so they they said no more speed suits uh so then they had to kind of go back to the old technology running hit a similar kind of technological advance in like well probably would have been closer to 2014 when it started

getting developed it wasn't actually put into any of the, they call prototypes essentially as like a shoe that isn't at market yet, but a company has versions that they're still tweaking. Maybe it's a final product, but they just haven't got, you know, got it out on the shelves yet. Nike came up with this new foam technology. When you think of foam and running shoes, what happens is you're going to push down in that foam. And then the next question is, well, how does that foam respond back? So the more responsive that foam is, the more energy return you get from it, or the least amount of energy you're losing into the shoe. This is why historically like a real low profile firm or almost like barefoot type shoe was going to yield a better performance output because you're not losing nearly as much energy in a solid surface as you are a soft surface. Kind of like running on the beach, pushing down

into that sand that's going to slow you down versus on concrete, very little push down on that. So you're going to pop right forward off of that. If I was on the track, I would have looked like Carl Lewis. Definitely. Yeah. They could have put you on that four by 100 team and they probably would have done better than sixth place, right? So the foam in this new technology has gotten so much better where it just gives back much more of a return, essentially, is the way to understand it. So now when you press down on the shoe, you're losing less energy. It's more efficient. And the studies have indicated like a two to eight percent advantage to that or improvement. So we're talking about Olympic athletes,

we're talking about minutes and seconds in the marathon and, you know, a 2% advantage can put you from third place to first place from sixth place to third place and stuff like that. So where it got kind of where the transition has been kind of goofy is Nike had this technology. So their athletes had prototypes as early as the olympic trials for the 2016 games so when you look at like the athletes that

qualified for those olympics versus the ones who didn't you can make an argument that some athletes maybe would have made the team that year had they been uh equipment equivalency because at that point only nike sponsored athletes even had access to that shoe uh they brought it to market then shortly thereafter so now anyone can buy it uh which is a you know you're you're closing that that gap between the haves and have-nots at that point um there's obviously other things to consider these are very expensive pair of shoes i mean i think they were like somewhere in the neighborhood of like 300 at first so you know you have it's like, you know, it's already fairly expensive to get a race entry, travel to the race. Now, all of a

sudden you're buying a $300 pair of shoes that might only last a hundred miles and you're going to use it for 26.2 of those and on race day, and you're probably going to want to do some workouts in them just to make sure they're not going to screw your mechanics up enough to hurt you. And, uh, but you know, that's, we're getting getting i'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here so you have that and uh then once it came to market now you have other brands trying to play catch up right they're like okay there's this new technology it's not getting regulated we need to have an option for our athletes and for our customers too so now they're trying to play catch up well in that interim between nike having those prototypes available to their athletes unregulated um to the point where they brought it to market uh now the governing bodies start getting involved okay this shoes on the shelves this is making a difference records

are getting broken people are getting beat by people who they otherwise would have normally been beating and stuff like that and uh we need to we need to make sure this is something that our sport can tolerate. So the governing bodies came in and started putting some regulation on it because essentially there's no, I mean, there's a ceiling on how much of that foam you can stack into your shoe before it just becomes, you know, you're stacked up so high that you can't even run in it. But I mean, that ceiling was quite high. We were seeing some prototypes that were like 60

millimeters an average shoe is 25 millimeters of cushion midsole cushion for those curious so an over doubling of that you know 2.5 essentially uh and you're seeing these huge performance advantage with that so the governing bodies kind of came in and said we're going to put a ceiling on it at 40 millimeters and you can't build up past that so whatever improvements you're going to get has to fit within that 40 millimeter and we're also going to make it illegal for a company or someone to run in a prototype so it has to be to market so now these other brands are all trying to catch up but they also can't just say okay here's your prototype for their athletes in the intern because it takes about 18 months to sometimes two years from inception to on the shelf for a pair of shoes.

So now you have this situation where these companies are trying to play catch up, not only to have a prototype available for their athletes, but get it to market so they can actually use it in competition. They've softened on that a little bit where you can send your shoe in and get it verified. They basically just want to make sure you're not doing anything too goofy, like sending out a prototype that's got 50 millimeters, but it's not documented anywhere. So now you have this like, because you're not going to really notice if you're just looking at an athlete and say, oh, they've got a 45 millimeter shoe versus a 38 millimeter

shoe or something like that. So now like a company once they have a prototype made they have to send it into world athletics have them analyze and make sure it fits all the criteria that they put in place and uh then the athletes can use it um i think there's still a rule where you can't break a world record or win a world championship or an olympic medal if i'm not mistaken unless it's on market so it has to be sold to the public which is also a little goofy because i think being sold to the public just means like there's 12 available pairs so in theory you could have a prototype and say

all right we're gonna put 12 12 pairs up on the website and now our athletes can use it but i mean long story short is like we've had this transition period from like the mid-2000 teens till today where there was kind of like this product advantage for some athletes, not for others. And you'd have these weird situations where you'd have like, say, an Adidas athlete asking their sponsor, can I wear this Nike shoe so that I can actually compete and try to win this race? And it's like, what do you do as a as a company at that point and i mean you see things like people spray painting these shoes black so there was no logo on there taking the logo off putting their logo on it all sorts of weird stuff that's great um yeah so i mean it's it's interesting it's uh it's definitely changed the sport in the sense that a lot of records got broken that probably would have uh they probably would

have gotten broken eventually but maybe not by the margin maybe not as quickly and you can make arguments that's good for the sport bad for the sport for one thing it's like a lot of some of these records uh especially the ones that were set kind of before the 2000s were probably tainted in some shape or form from performance enhancing drugs so you have a situation where uh okay we've taken a leap forward with technology so these records are get broken but good they were just doped up records anyway that we didn't have the testing for to to stop so and in running's been always weird where it gets more attention when records get broken so there's always this incentive i think by the sport as a whole to not have unreachable

records because that makes it less entertaining when when you can have an event where you're like i mean we saw it with the nike two-hour project where elu kipchigi uh went to try to break that two-hour marathon with all that is an exhibition but uh um everyone wanted to watch that because we're this huge attention this big barrier of two hours and that sort of stuff if you can that that's what sells that's what markets well so uh more companies i think more or less are encouraged to see that sort of situation happen where now all of a sudden these unreachable records are reachable again uh so there's some pros to that as well but the hard part is always you know you have an athlete who's in the prime of their career have to kind of like wait out this

like multi-year process of getting a shoe they can actually wear if they're not a nike athlete and some people are get upset with like well nike was able to spend a couple years with prototypes unregulated whereas now when we can finally use this technology ours are regulated so it kind of pushes that timeline back further yet. So it's a, and I mean, you know, Nike is a huge contributor to the sport in terms of like financing things. So, um, which is good to some degree. It's like, there's money in the sport helps like events get off big, more high production,

more eyeballs on sports, more eyeballs on athletes, which ultimately is what gets a contract is like, how many eyeballs do you get on you? And, uh, um, but you know, then you also have the argument of well i wonder what happened if uh like new balance had come out with that technology would the the governing bodies just like completely kicked it out and said nope we're not doing that because there's so much nike dollars in the sport or you know so there's always that kind of a conversation and debate as well as like what drove the regulations was it the nike dollars or was it just the welcoming of the new innovation and that sort of stuff? So it's an interesting time to be a runner.

It makes me wonder sometimes I saw this video of, okay, Carl Lewis was like, he was the hundred meter when, like during the Germany Olympics, right? Yeah. A hundred meter. I think he did like long jump a couple of their events. Yeah. Probably not for 100 meter. And I saw this video where it was talking about

when you look at the shoes that Carl Lewis had to wear and also the track that he had to run on. If you were to take Carl Lewis and like put him into what we had now because we think that like

and not like we assume that the athletes training now and all of those factors like would be like oh these athletes would break those records back then but in carl lewis's case if you were to put him in what we had right now he would still be the guy at the forefront like he would still be breaking records or he'd actually he'd he'd be very close to like the top two in terms of the 100 meter or whatever right um and i wonder if like the technology now if it's really if like the athletes are actually better now or if like the technology has just made everything so much better and the athletes are still high level but are they so much better than athletes that were doing ultras or 1500s

30 40 50 years ago? Yeah. Yeah. It's really an interesting topic. And there's a lot of moving parts with that one too, because when you look at, especially sprinting, there was such an incentive for performance enhancing in the eighties and the nineties. And there just was very little to no regulation.

The regulation that was there was fairly easy to sidestep in the sense that you know you might just make up an excuse and they might say okay fine you're off and then it would never become a topic of conversation so i mean you can make an argument that well then everyone was probably doing it therefore it's at least more level but then you have this situation of like do you how do you how do you square that with a much tighter regulated sport now um i think there's i mean i'm sure there are still people getting away with stuff but uh um to the degree that they were in the 80s it's a lot more difficult so you may see a relative step back from the biological potential but with the introduction of new technology better nutrition better

recovery techniques better training techniques even may close that gap between say a less technologically advanced less nutritional training methodology advanced person from the 80s but with some performance enhancing drugs to someone without the performance engine drugs but but the new technology, the, um, better nutrition, better recovery protocols, all this other stuff that comes along with it. And like, how do all those variables stack up against one another is, is a really interesting point. But I mean, I would love to see Carl Lewis at his prime today.

Let me correct that name. Jesse Owens. Oh, Jesse Owens. Yeah. That was, that was the video. Like if you guys search up Jesse Owens comparison to today, I yeah someone wrote a whole book on this right isn't it uh it might be a book but i always saw a video i forget what the name of the yeah there was a recent book i think wasn't there yeah they talked about the track technology and stuff is there a huge difference

with the track technology as well other than just the shoes yeah so especially depending how far back you go i mean they used to run essentially on like cinder outliers yeah hit me that's what it's called outliers yeah yeah yeah okay yeah so it wasn't outliers exactly okay yeah so you get like like a cinder track uh you know essentially just like crushed dirt i mean right here look at that like like jeez i i did a race and he's powerful and he's cruising too i mean he's not oh my god who the fuck was that and he's mad so much for that superiority narrative oh my god but yeah the whole premise was if jesse owens had like because you see the track that they were running on was like crappy their shoes were crappy but with the speed he had then and

the track he had then the video was saying that if he had the shoes and the track we had now he'd still be the top guy yeah or right there you know an interesting thing is i i wonder if these athletes um maybe like so the modern day athlete is more aware of overtraining the modern athlete is aware of uh doing other sports and doing other things could be really beneficial to even, you know, something like an ultra-marathoner or marathon runner could get a lot of great benefit from even potentially playing another sport or lifting weights or having other activities, maybe swimming, things like that. weights or having other activities, maybe swimming, things like that. Maybe back then it wasn't such a sport that these people, um, did other stuff and maybe they didn't fall into the trap of, uh, trying to spend the entire day every single day for four years straight trying to end

up with a particular result. Well, and they likely were doing other stuff. It was just a nine to five. I think they had a real job that they had to do in order to pay the bills because they weren't making a lot of money doing it and and you're gonna go back early enough and you had like the amateur regulations with olympic sport too where you couldn't be a professional so you couldn't take a contract from a sponsor or something like that if you wanted to compete in the game so they were definitely uh they were definitely tied down by those regulations too in terms of how much they could invest from their own time of day, their own ability to be able

to do some of this stuff. And then the information as to what it's going to do for you. I'm sure if Jesse Owens had access to the technology today, the training methodology today, and basically could build his entire life around this one race, or in his case a handful of events,

who knows what he would have been able to do. You see it, like, what is it, his entire life around this one race, or in his case, a handful of events. Uh, Amy, who knows what he would have been able to do. And I mean, you see it like, what is it? LeBron James was estimated spending a one and a half million dollars per year just on like health and recovery type stuff.

So, uh, imagine giving that sort of a resource to Jesse Owens, what he would have been able to do, or how much longer his career could have been too. What did the numbers do for you? Like being able to track through your watch and see some of the results of potentially your training

and some of the watches and some of the technology will kind of tell you your like battery level or like how fit you are to do a certain type of workout. How do you utilize this stuff and how beneficial has some of it been? Yeah, so I think what the big thing it does for me is it eliminates a lot of the trial and error that I would have had to use before. So, for example, I'm always trying to micro stress in the sense that I have to start from where I'm at. I have to kind of forget where I have gotten to in the past because if I try to jump into that spot right away, I'm going to do too much and then it's going to require more recovery.

Please repeat that again. That's awesome. I'm going to have to start where I'm at versus where I have been in the past. It's a little easier, I think, the first time around because you don't have that precedent of where you've gotten to. So everything's kind of new and like, cool, I'm making these gains. But you can't peak year-round. If you're peaked, you know, you can't peak year round. If you're peaked year round, you're going to burn out. So at some point you have to say,

okay, I'm going to let go of this fitness and then I'm going to build back up again. So if when you start building back up again, you jump right back to where you ended, you're going to put yourself in a position where maybe you do a killer workout or can do a killer workout, but now you needed an extra two days to recover from

that. And that took another workout off the table that would have given you a bigger load of volume or bigger training load overall, when you look at it from a longer timeline than what you got from just killing that one workout. Uh, so what these technology will do for me is we'll let me better understand where I'm at so I can better pinpoint where that micro stress is going to occur. So for an example, one of my foundational components is like, where's my pace at my aerobic threshold? So if I, if I'm like peaked for a hundred mile race and I'm just ready to go, I'm tapering fresh. I can get my pace at aerobic thresholds right around a six minute mile. So if I start a training block and I can do a,

say a six 30 mile at my aerobic threshold, I know that I've got some work to do to get back down to that, but I want to take it like one step at a time versus trying to force that six minute mile, go above my aerobic threshold and enter kind of a gray area or a moderate intensity of training and end up not actually hitting the system I'm trying to adapt. The other thing too is, you know, things like what is my resting heart rate when I wake up in the morning? So knowing when I've kind of hit that stress stimulus where, okay,

I've been waking up consistently with a resting heart rate of say 50 beats per minute. Now all of a sudden I wake up one morning and I'm kind of on the fence as to whether I should do a workout or not. My resting heart rate is 62. You know, maybe I want to let that come back down for a bit and take a rest day and then do the workout the next day. And it just gives you a lot less kind of guesswork. And when you eliminate some of that guesswork, you're more precise. When you're more precise, you get a larger workload in a timeframe that you're looking

at. So it cleans a lot of mess up. load in a time frame that you're looking at so it cleans a lot of mess up um and there's still a lot of messiness in running because there is there's still like uh it's really hard to kind of some of these like some of these terms like even your aerobic threshold is somewhat nebulous to the average runner in the sense that you know if you go into a lab and get it tested you can kind of find a precise heart rate a precise pace but it's going to be a moving target in the sense that even if i know my heart rate at my aerobic threshold my pace is going to change within that as i get more efficient so i can use that if i say my aerobic threshold is probably about 155 beats per minute i know if i'm pushing you know a 630 pace at that on week one but by

week four i'm down to 610 i'm heading in the right direction. So I can confirm progress has been made. I'm not guessing, am I getting better or am I not? And so there's a lot that you can use with it as well. What I love when talking to athletes in different sports is just realizing how similar concepts from training are because like when Mark had to, uh, uh, repeat the, the idea of like knowing where you've been and not rushing towards there or not trying to train there. It's, it the idea of like knowing where you've been and not rushing towards there or not trying to train there. It's, it reminds me of like a power lifter who peaks for me.

Let's say they didn't hit the PR they wanted, but they had a decent meet. Then a week later they're like, I'm a fucking hit that in the gym and their body's too wide. And then they, maybe they have an injury or they're just, they're smoked for a while because they're trying to lift those weights that they hit when they were peaked.

And then their next training cycle was like a little bit too aggressive because they're like, I want to get back here super quick. Yeah. Rather than like backing off for a bit. Or even trying something fancy because you gained a little bit of weight, you're on vacation, and then now you're trying not to eat hardly anything for the next week or something.

Overcompensate, yeah. Yeah, and I think like I see it, the one I have to pay attention to for myself because I tend to be, and it's probably why I'm an ultra runner, I bounce back quick from low intensity, high volume stuff. Like I can, I can block that where you do back to back days without a whole lot of risk.

In most cases where I have to be mindful is the sprints, the short, the higher intensity stuff. So for me, like a short interval, I'll put anywhere between 30 seconds to four minutes is kind of the range I'm working within on that. interval, I'll put anywhere between 30 seconds to four minutes is kind of the range I'm working within on that. Then I'm looking at how much volume can I get in, say, a week at that intensity,

whether I'm breaking up those intervals into four minute sections or 30 second sections. And then like, you know, the question I need to ask myself is like, let's say I'm focusing primarily on that. So I might do two of those sessions per week. Well, if I go on that first session and say, I'm going to try to get, um, 30 minutes at that intensity, uh, in that one workout. And I do it, let's say I do 10 by three minutes. I get that 30 minutes of work, but those last two are slower than the other eight because I really should have done closer to seven or eight. So now all of a sudden I got the volume in, but not at the quality I'm looking for. And then when that next workout comes up, I'm still recovering from the first one. So I ended up skipping that workout. Now I left training and training load on the table versus had I gone out and done say

six or seven by three minutes and only got 18 to 21 minutes at that volume. They were all high quality. Now, two days later, I come back and I'm able to do five of them again. Now I'm looking at 15 plus 21. I'm looking at more like 36 minutes of total workload at that intensity with no extra stress on the body because I let myself recover from that first one. So a lot of times with that sort of, especially the short intervals for me i always had to ask myself could i do one or two more and if the answer is uh no i probably should have stopped earlier if the answer is yes then okay stop there let your body recover from that stimulus now and uh let's get back out in a day or two or if i'm going to block them because there is a small performance boost it's pretty small so you have to be mindful of injury history

injury risk, the quality of said sessions, where if I go, say, Monday, Tuesday, and do short intervals Monday, short intervals Tuesday, I might be able to catch a window where by blocking it, I might see a small improvement in the adaptations from that. But if, kind of like in that first example, the last two intervals on that second day are compromised because I tried to block it and I shouldn't have been, then maybe I shouldn't have done that. Or I hurt myself by blocking it because you're going to increase your injury risk with that. Then maybe I shouldn't have done it too.

So there's a lot of interesting considerations, but that's what makes the sport exciting. You just ended up with an injury, I think, to your ankle, right? Yeah. So when you're not where you want to be and you get frustrated, what do you do about it? Because we know a lot of people that really struggle with their nutrition and struggle with, you know, finding consistency. And then also we know a lot of people that have like a lot of anxiety and things like this. And I kind of think that if more people would adopt a flexible mindset to just take a deep breath and just kind of recognize, hey, this is where I'm at. And you mentioned earlier, you need to start where you're at and you have to start where you're at no matter

what. No one gives a fuck that you're Zach Bitter in that moment, right? Like you don't get to be Zach Bitter, the ass kicker on, on the day, uh, of your best race, uh, all the time, just because you've done it previously, you still have to work for it. So what do you do when you get kind of frustrated? Like, man, the numbers are off. I'm starting to get injured. I'm starting to get banged up. How do you talk yourself through that process? Yeah, there's kind of two, I think I probably approach it fairly similar, but there's, it's kind of two different situations where if it's like, okay, I peaked for a race, I nailed it, I redefined what I'm capable of. Now it's time to take an off season, deprogram a little bit, set myself back from where I was at that race and then build back up. up for me what i've done over the years is i actually kind of look at that as an exciting time because it's uh it's here's an opportunity for me to go from a position where i have to work my ass off to get a tiny little gain so like that improvement is hard to recognize it's hard to

know if it's actually an improvement or for the variables were just more conducive for it did i actually take a step forward or did i just get lucky versus i let myself deprogram a little bit now i'm starting from the beginning i'm going to see big improvements i'm going to see my pace drop at a specific heart rate i'm going to see my my distance covered in say a three minute short interval from one workout to the next so i get those kind of short-term immediate reinforcements of improvement as i'm working back up to where i was before so i think when you look at it as like look at it kind of as a positive versus a negative that's a huge step the injury one is a little more difficult because it's more like i didn't choose to get this this happened to me well i mean i

essentially i did it to myself but but i didn't anticipate that so i try to still look at it kind of from the same avenue where when i'm in, like, I try to reflect back because there's ultimately a time when I'm peaking for a race where training loads high, I'm stressing my body as hard as I'm going to at any point, because I've gotten myself to a point where I'm able to do it. And ultimately that takes a lot of time. Like a training week might be 20 hours of running strength, birth,

mobility, work, that sort of stuff. Um, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for other things to do when you're invested, especially physical things. So like, mobility, work, that sort of stuff. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time for other things to do when you're invested, especially physical things. So like, because you want to recover from that. So that might mean like, yeah, I better not go in, you know,

play ultimate Frisbee or something like that. Or, or, or I don't have time to read that article about fat adaptation or whatever it is I'm interested in at the moment um because i'm spending all this time focusing on this particular race or this training block so when something like that like an injury happens to me i kind of rewind and think well what can i do physically that's not going to postpone my return to running that i have been passing on but i would like to do um so sometimes that might be like i'm going to work on some mechanics and strength stuff in the gym. That's not going to negatively impact the area that I injured or possibly even improve it

or start asking questions like, well, how did I get this injury? What was going wrong with my body other than me, maybe just doing too much that I can work on or focus on that will put me in a position where when I do that process again, it doesn't cause me to get injured. So for me specifically with this last one, I hurt my right ankle. And one thing I've kind of recognized through just the process of getting it looked at,

working on it, rehabbing and all that stuff is that like my calves are super, super tight. So like, what can I do better at and in the interim to kind of get that? So that's going to be less of an issue. So like, what can I do better at and in the interim to kind of get that? So that's going to be less of an issue. So there, that tight cap isn't pulling on my Achilles tendon, isn't pulling on the ligaments in my ankle, uh, to the point where if I do too much, it becomes an issue and

swells up the next day. Uh, so I like to look at it through that, like where, where are the kind of fun little, uh, explorations. And I mean, I've been really fortunate. This is the only, the second injury I've got since starting ultra running in 2010 that has really removed any meaningful event for me that's crazy yeah so like in the last time i i stress fractured my right sacral ala which is essentially your tailbone and i had to take i think it was about seven weeks more or less off that had to be painful sounds it sounds painful it was really weird so i likely fractured it on a run in that or it kind

of like officially like got to the point where it was noticeable so then when i went out for a run the next day it was just like sharp pain kind of i actually thought it was uh sciatica at first i was like oh man have i been sitting in a car seat too long or something and so i went and got like some like uh or i did uh like active release therapy and stuff like some like, uh, or I did, uh, like active release therapy and stuff like that to try to get it to go. And it just wasn't letting go. I, it was really weird. I'd wake up and I feel fine.

Like after a couple of days, it doesn't hurt walking. Maybe I'll try a jog. I'd get like a couple of blocks on the road. A sharp pain would be right back. So then I knew like, okay, there's something weird going on here. So I got an MRI and that showed the, the stress fracture there. Um, but during that time you know i was like well what was the cause of this like why did that because i had never broken a

bone or fractured a bone to that date so i was like well what was different this time what am i doing that was inviting that sort of thing to happen and one thing i recognized was i kind of changed my training environment a bit i had switched from doing like a flatter runnable hundred mile training plan to training for a more mountain hundred miler. So I was doing a lot of up and downhill stuff. I was adding a lot more vert to my training and I probably just got a little too aggressive and the downhill running on hard surfaces, um,

in combination with like a poor ankle mobility probably drove those impact forces up into my, my sacral and then eventually gave so. Ran so much, you broke your back. Yeah. Sounds crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's, so I mean, it's just, I think you can, if you look at these things as learning opportunities or ways to improve yourself in the longterm, you can,

you, you, you don't beat yourself up quite as much about it. So, and there's the other side of it too, where when you can, you, you, you don't beat yourself up quite as much about it. So, and there's the other side of it too, where when you have the situation I do where I'm rarely ever injured, you have to build in your downtime. You have to build in your off seasons. So you're probably, as long as you're staying motivated, you're probably going to take as little of that as you can get away with. And it's very easy from what i've been able to kind of learn to

normalize suboptimal uh to the point where you're like okay yeah this isn't really bothering me this is fine this is just part of it but then when you give yourself a chance to like okay now i can't run for four weeks everything kind of catches up and you start noticing like oh you know what i probably need to pay closer attention to how I'm recovering, how this area of my body is recovering, where some weaknesses here that I can address. You're out of your bubble for a moment and now you can have a better perspective and you'd say, man, I'm kind of doing shitty with my hydration. I'm kind of doing shitty with my food. Yeah.

And it just all starts to hit you at once, right? Yeah. And for me me i'm a curious person especially around the nutrition side of things and you know it gives me an opportunity to maybe play around with some things where i wouldn't be as convinced they would be ideal for performance given you know the training stuff so like um you know playing around with things like some of the time restricted eating type stuff or like maybe even lower carbohydrate than I would normally go. You know, how does electrolytes differ when I'm not training and sweating as much versus when I am and stuff like that, or just kind of interesting things that you can kind of think

about and focus on and maybe do a little more research on and, and learn more about too, when you have that extra time and energy for it. That makes me so curious, man. There's, there's so many things I hope that we get to to because I'm really curious what goes on up here when you're running because that just sounds chaotic. But since you brought up nutrition, let's talk a bit about that because first off, with the nature of what you do, a lot of people are like, oh, you probably eat a crazy amount of carbohydrates, but you don't. And then I'm also curious, you said you started ultramarathon running in 2010. First quick question within the realm of ultramarathon running in 2010. First quick question within the realm of ultramarathon running is the prevailing diet protocol, higher carbohydrate.

Yeah. Right now the position paper for single day ultramarathons, which is what most people in ultramarathons do is going to recommend a moderate carbohydrate diet. So there's not a ton of research in the world of ultramarathon. As you can imagine, there's just not a lot of money that would be pumped into that arm at this point and the stuff that is is very difficult to do because it's like how do we really know what the body's doing at mile 80 of 100 mile race unless we can like actually take samples during an event and so there's a lot of uh a lot of guesswork a lot of anecdotes kind of in this um but one thing they recognize that when you're running the intensities that you're going to do for like an all day run, it's quite low.

Like you're probably averaging like what you'd call zone two or below your over aerobic threshold pretty much the entire time. You might flex out of it on a climb or something like that, or get a little excited and run a little faster than you should at points and branch out of that. But for the most part, you're going to be doing very low intensity movements. branch out of that but for the most part you're going to be doing very low intensity movements so being a good fat burner is generally accepted in the community like no one is going to argue that you should be a poor fat burner and expect that to work well for you on race day so then it just becomes this question of how do you improve your fat oxidation rates to the point where you

can fuel enough during the race that you're one, not causing a stomach issue because you're, you're eating these engineered products all day long. You know, the digestion is going to be an issue. I mean, it's a engineered products. So just any sports product, I guess it's like anything you'd see like gels, sports drinks. Um, and I mean, ultra running gets a little more diverse because you're going slower. So you can eat like full whole food products. Like in a marathon, you're probably not going to bust out a sandwich or something like that but in an ultra marathon you might you might have like a glucose uh those little gel packets and things like that and then there's um what's the other one they use uh glycerin or whatever right glycerol yeah still use that yeah they're usually they're trying to blend like a couple different carbohydrate sources so that one thing the research has pointed to and we've more or less extrapolated this forward

from like low like olympic distance sport is that from your body's ability to process carbohydrates from a like a per hour standpoint you can if you go from like a single source carbohydrate you can get up to maybe 60 grams whereas when you kind of do a two to one ratio you can get up to maybe 60 grams. Whereas when you kind of do a two to one ratio, you can get up closer to 90 grams or even a hundred in some cases. So maybe a combo of like dextrose and like sucrose or something like that. Or is that right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

So you get folks who are trying to kind of really push that needle and this is going to be more of the high carb folks where they're like, okay, well I guess if I do this right, I can get 90 to a hundred grams of carbohydrate in, you know, that's going to be four or 500 calories per hour. So if I can get 500 calories of pure carbohydrate in my system per hour, chances are the intensity is low enough where, you know, I'm going to defend muscle glycogen. And when I get to the end of the race,

I'm going to be able to come screaming home because I'm not pushing those glycogen stores so low that my body's kind of pulling back my intensity output. The other way to look at it is improve your fat oxidation rates. So like the ratio of fats to carbohydrates that you're going to be metabolizing out of any given intensity through dietary manipulation. So that's the route I've taken. So for me, I'm more looking at it as I need at most probably about 40 grams of carbohydrate based on my fat oxidation tests in the past per hour in order to defend muscle glycogen when I'm following a relatively low carbohydrate diet. So for me, the advantage there is I don't have to fuel as much. I can feel about half as much as that person who's going,

you know, 80 to 100 grams of carbohydrate uh which is just a logistical advantage in the sense i don't have to worry about that much fueling it's also a digestive advantage in the sense that assuming i didn't down really regulate my body's ability to digest the carbohydrate by going too low carb uh i will probably have a less likely chance of having my, you know, puking up my nutrition or shitting up my nutrition somewhere out on the course, which is that like, I think they estimate like 50 to 60% of single day ultra marathon runners had some sort of like gastrointestinal issue during the course of the day.

So their recommendations are going to be 50 to 70 grams of carbohydrate within the context of a moderate carbohydrate diet. So then the, really the question to me and the question I ask my clients when they're curious about this is, well, we need to find out what you can actually tolerate. So if we find out you can barely tolerate 40 grams of carbohydrate per hour, we need to either get you able to tolerate more or we need to get your body to a position where it doesn't need to tolerate more. And then it's kind of up to the person more or less. And sometimes their,

you know, their body is going to make that decision for them. I mean, you've had Michaela Peterson on the podcast. Obviously her body's made a decision for her about what she can and cannot eat. And it's a very fine, narrow channel of options. And there's going to be a wide range.

Obviously she's an extreme example, but there's going to be folks who have iron guts, guts so to speak and can mainline that stuff and for them great you know they can get away with it if it's working well for them i'm not gonna fight against that uh um others are gonna have a lot harder time doing it uh and uh we can talk about whether they could and they just haven't done the right things to do it and what that maybe looks like for the average person versus the professional athlete. But for me, I find it much more tolerable. I prefer it. I like it from a standpoint in my day-to-day life.

I feel like for me at the individual level, I tend to bounce back from my training faster. I get better sleep quality through the dietary process i take so these are all things i think add up to make the variables for me to stay lower carb uh the positives outweigh the negatives to the point where i'm going to find my best race taking that approach other people might have that opposite effect depending on kind of what their individual variables are going to stack up against one another uh but to kind of answer your question like you can improve your fat oxidation rates by simply eating less carbohydrates you force your body to burn more fat that can come at a trade-off if it doesn't allow you to do the higher intensity workouts that are

going to be very oxygen dependent so you start looking at events that take around two hours or less those are going to be ones that are very oxygen dependent. So your body's going to get more oxygen by metabolizing, or it's going to be less steps for your body to pull muscle glycogen and burn carbohydrate than it's going to be in terms of the steps it's going to require to burn fat. So at those intensities, you're going to want to have that fuel source on board. It's why you probably won't see an Olympic marathon, gold medalist or world record holder following a ketogenic diet anytime soon.

Cause they're just in this goofy intensity spectrum where, uh, it's like, it's, it's slow enough that they can do it for a long period of time, but it's fast enough that they're going to dive into their glycogen stores. Even if they improve their fat oxidation rates by a good margin. Um, I'm running a hundred mile races though. So it's oxidation rates by a good margin um i'm running 100 mile races though so it's there'll be no time where i'm running them in two hours so

uh it opens up a door i think for that type of an approach uh so then it becomes kind of both preference both what are you seeing in your own training uh what can you get away with from race day fueling without having a digestive issue because i have to stop to use the bathroom 10 times in the last 30 miles it might not matter if i'm running faster or not because you know non-moving times non-moving time uh and when i look at my mostly fit i've run i ran 100 mile of this last april i did not stop like i did not stop to use the bathroom once how long is that by the way because i think um i don't know like what a hundred mile race how long that takes what the barrier for a hundred mile race is.

So like, how long does that take to finish? Yeah. So this is where the environment's going to draw the, it's going to dictate a little bit. So ultra running is so goofy where you can find yourself on a 400 meter track. Like I have, that's going to be a little faster because you've removed all the variables to

challenge you for the most part of the, then like your own forward movement. Whereas you have these mountain courses that you're going up and down canyons through creeks over rocky terrain and all sorts of stuff that's gonna take a lot longer so for me you know i've run a hundred miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes so that's kind of the fast end of the spectrum you get out on a course like they just had a race called the hard Rock 100, where if you're breaking 24 hours, you're like world class at that event. So we can almost double depending on the terrain. Oh, my God.

So that's another thing to consider, too, because, you know, like I see 100 miles isn't always 100 miles from a time standpoint. And when you think about it, like if I'm managing my energies for 24 hours versus 11 hours, it doesn't matter if those are both 100 miles. for 24 hours versus 11 hours it doesn't matter if those are both 100 miles i need to peel back a little bit on intensity to do 24 hours versus 11 hours regardless of what the distance is so that's kind of like where it gets goofy with ultra running is there's such a wide range of different things you can do within the sport that you get some specialization as a sport's grown because you kind of have to specialize in a particular event almost to be as good as you can or someone else is going to and then they're gonna essentially out specialize or outwork you in that so you kind of have to be a little more uh cognizant of that if you want to be a professional i think at this point in time you do get some guys like jim walmsley um is probably

the i would say he's the best most well-rounded ultra runner that some people would argue with me, but I think he's the best in the sense that he's been able to nail things as short as 50 miles or even 50K for that matter on flat terrain up to want to pick like a specific discipline a train that at least their kind of preferred one where they're going to spend the majority of their time and energy peaking for and really fine-tune that if they want to kind of find their their max potential um but then yeah so like with uh i think we were talking about nutrition at one point there uh but yeah so you know for me it's uh uh i can improve my fat oxidation rates drastically through reducing carbohydrate it's on a spectrum though so or a sliding scale so like i think sometimes people look at this as black and white where they're like you're either burning all carbs or all fats when in reality you're you're burning a ratio of those and it's just going to depend on where those ratios are at various intensities based on your training what you're eating when you're eating it um the way i like to describe

it is carbohydrate restriction is going to move the needle the most you can move the needle uh as well by not necessarily reducing your carbohydrate but positioning it where you're maybe doing a fasted long run and abstaining from carbohydrates or even doing an intermittent fasting protocol so that you're forcing your body to burn more fat because of the absence of an exogenous carbohydrates source even though you're going to hyper replenish at some point so then it really just depends on where you want that spot to be like where do you want your fat oxidation rates does it benefit you to have that slit all the way to the burning as much fat as possible at every intensity in which case you're probably going to go close to zero carb quick question like uh-huh when you mentioned the intermittent fast does that like does it work in a way that you will do a workout or workouts

fasting burning more fat during those workouts and then when you introduce carbohydrates will you be able to utilize them better during the runs or is that not how i'm just curious how that works so if you do like an intermittent fasting or like a fasted long run you're just basically what's going to happen in a lot of cases is regardless of what your diet is like if you eat dinner go to bed wake up in the morning your body is going to be encouraged to burn higher fat in the morning just because it hasn't had the introduction of a carbohydrate source in some time. So if I was a moderate high carb diet athlete and I want to improve fat oxidation rates without giving up any carbs, I would wake up in that morning, I would leverage that

overnight fast. I would go out for maybe an easy zone two like aerobic threshold or below type of run you know 60 90 minutes or something like that without introducing any carbohydrates so then i'm encouraging my body to burn fat even more and it's just kind of teaching my body to do that without a dietary manipulation just a dietary timing manipulation so you're going to see you see like their numbers improve likely through that the question then becomes is did it move it enough to get them where they need to be uh and some people it's yeah you know i've talked to folks who are moderate high carb diet athletes who they got in the lab they

got the metabolic heart test and it turned out my fat oxidation rate isn't where i want it to be in order to nail this iron man triathlon that i know this is my fueling limit for. So rather than going ketogenic or low carb, they just did what I described where they kind of manipulated when they're in their carbohydrates, retested. Now they're in that target zone for them where they're like, okay, if I can eat this much on race day,

I'll be fine in terms of defending my muscle glycogen. And what do those percentages kind of look like in terms of fat oxidation? If you're like 60, 40, something like, what does that look like? In terms of like what their grams per minute are going to be like yeah grams per minute or you know we we all got this like dexa scan thing done and when you're at rest it'll tell you like the percentage of fats versus carbohydrates that you're burning per hour right yeah so it'll tell you if you're predominantly burning a high ratio of fats versus

you know sugars or that so is do they look at it in that or do they look at it in terms of a different measurement they're going to look at it like that but they're going to also look at it through different intensities because ultimately they're going to know when they get to race day what intensity am i going to be averaging during this event and then they can look at that test and say when i'm at this intensity i'm like a 60 40 split fat carbs or i'm an 80 20 event and then they can look at that test and say when i'm at this intensity i'm like a 60 40 split fat carbs or i'm an 80 20 split and then they can start planning their nutrition or what they're going to require so uh the where where i think it gets interesting is if i would remove carbohydrate altogether from my diet not only would i likely probably compromise some of

that last year So those short intervals might not be as good as they would have been in the past. You can make an argument that who cares, you're running a hundred miles. You're never going to touch that on race day. So maybe you don't need to leverage that as much. Uh, I would argue that that approach is going to limit the amount of carbohydrate you can tolerate just by simply removing it from your diet. I mean, you're some things as simple as your, your body's ability to digest something you haven't been eating frequently enough is going to potentially be an issue so at that point it's like if i'm going all the way to that end spectrum i have to be comfortable with doing little to no fueling during a race which i don't see as a

performance advantage uh i think i want to be doing as minimal feeling as i can get away with to preserve digestion but high enough where I'm not sacrificing performance. So like, if you look at like my fat oxidation rates, um, I had like 1.58 grams per minute, um, was my peak fat oxidation rate. And that was kind of at around 150 beats per minute heart rate. So like, if I use those numbers, I can start kind of calculating, like, for example, my hundred mile intensity is going to be somewhere between like 80 to 90% fat, 10 to 20% carbohydrate. So when I look at it through that lens, if I'm running my fastest hundred mile, I was

averaging about nine miles per hour. So I'm probably burning 800 to a thousand calories per hour during that event. It let's, let's, let's be, uh, play it safe and say 20% of that is coming from carbohydrate. Uh, every hour,

uh, I'm going to be, you know, burning 150 to maybe 200 calories of carbohydrate with those ratios. So then, you know, if I get up to 40 grams of carbohydrate, I'm replacing that. So then I get to mile 90 instead of having really low muscle glycogen levels and having

to work like really hard for the same pace or just my body saying, no, you're not going any faster than this. I can still sprint in or well, sprint is a very relative term in that case, but I can still speed up or run a negative split, feel good at the end versus feel like I'm fading, at least from a nutritional standpoint, because I was able to defend that expense. Now, you take that same fueling strategy, but with someone who's a 50-50 split at that heart rate,

they're going to get to a point where their body is going to down, or they're going to tap into their muscle glycogen to the point where they're getting down to like, I think the research at this point is fairly limited, but I want to say it's like 40% of muscle because people sometimes think, oh, I just ran out of muscle glycogen. I bonked. It's like, you didn't run out of muscle glycogen. If you had done that, you would have died. So it's, it's usually, I think about 40% is when your body starts saying, okay, we're dipping into this in a meaningful enough way,

time to start raising the perceived effort at a given intensity so that this person slows down. We can raise the fat oxidation and lower the carbohydrate oxidation so that we preserve what's left for things that are more important to life versus you trying to run faster on this arbitrary event you decided to sign up for is that kind of what you meant by defending muscle glycogen like you're just uh preventing it from getting all scavenged up and uh preventing your body from having to do uh a bunch of weird circus tricks in order for you to have yeah glycogen like a protein gluconeogenesis and things like that right yeah and i think this is where i end up i've probably gotten better at describing it or maybe just done it on more long form things.

But a lot of times I think people get confused because someone will say, oh, Zach's a low carb ketogenic runner. You know, he eats a lot of fat and protein, very little carbs. And then someone will be like, well, I looked at what he was eating on a race day and it was almost all carbohydrate. It was like a little bit of fat, a little bit of protein of protein but you know 40 grams of carbohydrate an hour over the course of you know 10 12 hours is a lot of carbohydrate um and and they're right it is uh i mean i'm also burning upwards of 12 000 calories that day so from a percentage standpoint you could make an

argument that i'm still almost like ketogenic or low carbohydrate from a percentage standpoint but um either way you know it's confusing to people. So like, well, he's eating fat and protein mostly during the day during his training. Why would he be bringing in that much more carbohydrate relative to fat and protein on race day? And the answer is you take the leanest endurance athlete on the planet and that person is going to have plenty of body fat to get through a single day event. They're not going to exhaust that. They're not going to get to a point where their body says, oh, you've burned too much fat. We're going to slow you down so you don't get any leaner. It's going to let you tap into that

and you can easily replace that the day after. In fact, after a hundred mile race, you know, the last thing I want is something sweet tasting. I want something salty and savory and it's, I'm going to want it in mass quantity. So I'll have no problem overeating the next two, three days to make up any body fat I lost during the event itself. But it doesn't really do me a whole lot of good to be eating high levels of fat during that event because I'm not going to exhaust that fuels tank. That's the big unexhaustible one for me. The one I can exhaust even at low intensities,

given enough time is my muscle glycogen. So that's the one I need to defend on race day, if that makes sense. That's like, that was an interesting thing that I wanted to ask you just because like you are so lean. So, you know, I was, I was wondering, okay, you are in taking a lot of carbohydrates, so you actually have enough. It's interesting just to imagine that through a hundred mile race, you have enough body fat, even though you're so lean, it's going to get you through that. It makes me wonder, have you ever like um, like measured like how much body fat you lose through a race? Because the fact that you legitimately a few days later, you're like,

I'm going to eat, I need to gain some body fat back. Right. What does that, like, how much do you lose? That's 11 hours of running, right? That's a really good question. Like, I don't know, like, I'm not aware of anything that's been done. That'd be cool if you get a precise enough test where you could go in before and after i mean i guess you could just x a scam before the fat oxidation wouldn't give you enough information well it probably would it would just be a question of like i mean this is this is also i mean these even with the muscle glycogen defense stuff we're looking at like approximations here because there's variables that are introduced on a race day that can change your race that might be different than when you went into the lab and got on that metabolic metabolic heart so there is some guesswork there uh you i mean the

proof is in the pudding if you have a good strong finish to a race chances are you didn't deplete your muscle glycogen enough to be um to have that you've been off enough to have to worry about it. So like my, when I ran 1119, I was running my fastest miles at the end. So it's safe to say I was running like a six 15 pace for some of those final miles safe to say I was had enough muscle glycogen on board to be able to do that. Otherwise I would have gone the other direction. Um, uh, but with the fat, you could probably run those numbers too and get an approximation though. So like if I'm doing 80% fat, um, you know, now we're looking at, you know, probably seven, probably about 700 calories per hour or so, somewhere around there. Um, and then you, you just look at how much that, so then we're looking at, was that about

five hours would be about a pound of fat then at that. So maybe two, two and a half pounds of fat would be a guesstimate. So it would be interesting to do that, like the DEXA scan before and see, okay, here's the fat and actually where it's coming from too. And then do the DEXA scan post race and then say, oh, well, look at that. I wonder if, you know, for whatever reason, the fat was coming off this section or in this quantity and all that stuff would be interesting to look at it. I'd be curious, you guys probably know more about dexascans than I do. Cause I know like, it doesn't like fluid balance skew those results to a degree. So the hard part would be hydration and fluid balances are probably so whacked out after that. You'd want to renormalize those before, or at least getting, getting your

body in that same balance as it was at the start when you got that DEXA scan before you test it again. So can you do that fast enough before you start eating, you know, pounds and pounds of fatty rib and put on so much more or put that, that fat back on more or less. How much weight do you lose, uh, when you do a race? Um, so that's another thing that's kind of hard to know because if I weigh myself after, I might have like a hyper-rehydration effect where like my body's retaining more water. So you've weighed more after a race?

I have, yeah. I'll get on a scale after a race sometimes and be a couple pounds heavy, but then the funny thing is once everything renormalizes, if I weigh like a week later, then I'm usually a pound or two later. I think that is attributed partially to your conditioning too because i would imagine someone who's not in shape for that even if they were trying to hydrate might not be able to hydrate fast enough yeah they might be just

like falling apart they might be just uh profusely sweating so much right and you can this is one thing that they did look at i think the position paper is like the hydration approach for single day ultra marathons and i think what they came up with was that there's no way you can stay on top of it Like you're going to take a step back. So There I think this is this is stuff that they're looking at still so they could easily turn the other way but like there's no real sense in trying to say like As hydrated as you started with it's like inevitable that you're going to be maybe like a percentage or two like fluid loss over the course of an ultra marathon,

no matter what you're doing from a fluid intake standpoint. So it's not a, it's not a fight you want. You want to stay hydrated enough so you don't get a huge performance dip, but you can get away with more because the lower intensity doesn't require you. The performance dip happens at a lower percentage law or a higher percentage loss than would say for like a marathon or something that's a little higher intensity. I've been working on getting a, like 20,000 steps in every day. And, uh, you know, when I think

about a hundred miles, it's like, man, I, how many, like, what is your, does your watch explode? You know, when you have that many steps, you know, cause they make little pings and little noises and celebrations when you get to like 10,000 steps. Any idea how many steps that is? Well, 20,000, you're probably a tenth of the way to 100 miles at that, right? So you're getting there. Yeah, it is 10 miles. Yeah. It just takes you 10 days to do 100 miles.

Yeah, right. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. I haven't ever looked to see like, no, I have. I just don't remember what it is. But it is interesting because then you get kind of used to seeing, if you just look at the data, like, oh, I took 30,000 or 40,000 steps today or whatever it is. And then you do a 100-mile race. How many steps did you take? taking a ton of tiny steps going uphill, how much more steps you actually take in those environments or even a longer race. That's just so much slower that you're maybe you have a little bit shorter of a stride

length. So you're taking more overall steps too. It's interesting. So you said during a marathon, you're burning anywhere from 800 to 900 calories per hour. Is that right? So for a hundred miles. And I'm just getting that number from, uh, if I average nine miles per hour is that right so for 100 miles yeah i'm just getting that number from uh if i average nine miles per hour for my fastest 100 mile so at nine miles per hour i'm probably burning around eight

800 to a thousand calories in that hour's time so what does that look like in the the training block leading up to that and then with that how many calories are you having to eat per day and if that's low carb it seems like it would be a shit ton of calories and you're probably getting it a lot from, you know, more fattier foods. So what does like a typical day of eating look like during a training period? Yeah. So since my training is periodized, my nutrition is somewhat periodized as well. So as I'm early on, I'm just building base, a lot of like kind of aerobic conditioning

stuff. I'll be pretty low carb. I'll be probably around 10%, maybe a little under during that phase of training, depending on what the volume is looking like. There will kind of dictate the grams there. structure for endurance like myself to be closer to like 100 to 150 grams of carbohydrate as like baseline versus like a strict ketogenic diet where they maybe look at it as like 50 grams or less and some of that's just you're kind of putting fast forward on your metabolism so you're going to need a little more of everything to normalize um but you're also uh you know even if i'm pushing up to zone two kind of like that's pretty similar to my hundred mile pace. So I am going to be tapping into my muscle glycogen a little more.

And what I find when I go too close to like strict ketogenic or zero carb is I can feel fine for a while, but it's kind of like a downward staircase where once I get to the bottom of that, it's like now all of a sudden I woke up and I felt like I put a 20 pound backpack on and it's like, then I know like, okay,

I need to, I'm getting a little too low on carbohydrate to stay on top of, uh, you know, my muscle glycogen and that, that replenishment. So, uh, that might be, that'll look a little different than say, like when I'm in peak training and I'm doing like 20 hours a week of activity and things like that, where, you know, during that, it's just going to be a little more, it's going to be less consistent from one day to the next. So during base training and things that are more consistent, I'm doing the same things every day for the most part, I might have like a very more structured, like say 125 grams of carbohydrate per day. Uh, whereas when I get into peak training, I might have a day where I go below 50 grams cause I'm not doing anything. I'm resting, but then I might have a couple of days where I'm going 200 plus grams. Uh, cause doing like back-to-back 30 mile runs or something like that uh but in terms of what i'm eating a lot of times uh my carb sources that i tend to gravitate to usually i'm working people i tell them like pick pick three carb sources that you really like uh maybe not so much that

you can't put them down so maybe don't pick like snickers skittles and uh sour patch kids or something like that but uh um pick something where when you first decided, I want to try a low-carbohydrate diet, you're like, well, these are gonna be hard foods to give up. I don't know if I can do that the rest of my life. So, you know, for me, like I try to think, well, what are some foods that I think are solid whole food options that are going to be good, healthy foods that are going to probably help with both the carbohydrates that I'm going to want in there, as well as some of the micronutrients. So for me, it's a lot of like kind of tubers, like sweet potatoes, potatoes, squashes, that sort of stuff. Um, berries,

melons, maybe some honey, uh, some sourdough bread from time to time. Those are kind of like the carb sources I'll, I'll draw from. from uh and then like fats and proteins usually come in package together for the most part i'm eating mostly like animal products for those sort of things a lot of eggs yogurt cheeses full fat dairies um fattier cuts of meats and things like that are going to make up a lot of the fats and protein side of things what about um sorry uh what about like some of those wearable like glucose monitor things i don't know if there would be any benefit to that but like we had um people from nutrisense i think that's what it was called it was just like the dot things that you wear yeah would that be beneficial to kind of

get more information on those long runs to where you can be like oh at mile jesus i can't i can say this but like mile 68 my glucose dipped or you know whatever it may be i don't know would that would something like that be beneficial or have you tried that yeah i've worn those for a while actually have a couple packs that i haven't put back on i want to i'm trying to think of like a good like like uh n of one study to where i can draw something from it before i put it back on again but i think i've worn them for maybe about six weeks or so total at the end of last year uh and it is really interesting because you're right you could find a spot where like oh when i dip below this number uh that's when i typically could use a little more carbohydrate and then

use that as more of a an objective measure versus oh i feel like i could use some carbohydrate now you could actually look like oh i dipped below 60 on that glucose monitor. I can get away with, you know, 20 grams of carbohydrate and it'll just bump me up to like where I feel most optimal. I talked to Dominic D'Agostino about this and he said, he thinks the, what you want to do first is establish like a baseline for you with your lifestyle. So, you know, everyone's going to be a little different and kind of what is like where their flat line would be. Uh, and once you kind of have that, that data available, you can start kind of having like a channel that you operate more optimally within. So like once you kind of have your channels, uh, upper limit and under or lower limit, you can say, Oh wow, I popped up above that upper limit.

I could, I should probably keep carbs a little lower in these next couple meals or maybe i need to space my meals out a little further uh or i'm dipping under this channel this is maybe i'm dipping a little too low on carbohydrate or a little bit of carbohydrate will actually improve my my uh you know the way i feel and how i'm performing and things like that so that i that i think is where that stuff would get interesting they did did, uh, there's a book by Dr. Mark Bubbs called Peak. Um, and he and Dr. Paul Larson, I believe looked at, uh, um, some, they looked at like a hundred kilometer racers, both like, uh, professional, they consider, they consider like one was professional and one was kind of like

hobbyist and just like the difference in their glucose monitors and their fueling strategies and stuff and what they noticed was when they strapped these glucose monitors these athletes they thought that it was going to be this thing where they're always watching for them to dip below that that bottom channel uh and they were going to need more carbohydrates. Whereas what they ended up finding out was, especially with the recreational athletes, it was more about how often they were going above the channel. So it was kind of like the reverse of what they expected, which kind of throws a big wrench into the whole,

like you need 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour narrative. It's like you might need that if you're a professional if you're kipchiki running a two-hour marathon you might need that to stay in that channel uh but if you're a recreational athlete who's you know trying to run a three and a half hour marathon you also have a nine to five job family and all these other variables in life you might not have the lifestyle that is going to promote the need to be doing that. And you might actually be wanting to watch how often you're going above that top channel. Now I'm curious about this Zach, and this, this opinion

of mine that I'm about to mention, I think has a little bit of personal bias in it. Not everyone's going to agree with this, but I think that when I look at sprinters and runners, like when I'm just looking at you stand and walk, when I look at the way your feet are pointed forwards and the way your body's moving, I can tell that like, that is the way a body should be able to walk and move. Because when you look at a lot of lifters and like bodybuilders, their feet are splayed out. Maybe they're kind of here and they're kind of walking around like this. In a partial squat.

In a partial squat. And I mean, like you asked me to run a mile and be like, fuck you. I won't do it. You know what I mean? Because it's hard. But one of the things is I think that I should be able to run a mile. If someone were saying, see, I'm gonna go run a mile. I think that I should be able to confidently be not like not like a five minute mile or whatever, but be able to run a mile with decent form. And I think that that skill in and of itself to finish running a mile, not be in absolute pain afterwards, not feeling like you were tortured. I think that that kind of skill and body movement could be something that can massively help a lifter in terms of their movement, which would then help them in the gym when they're doing things like squatting, et cetera, because their body's going to be in a good shape to do different types of movements. Well, you know what I i mean so my question to you is i know you talked about your four-point running form earlier in the podcast but if a lifter does

want to introduce some running just so they can build the skill of running a mile or two what are things that they need to what what what are some things that they could easily try and fix in terms of their body because i would assume one thing is their hips maybe mobility within their hips so that they're not super duck-footed because you can't run like that but what other things should they try to pay attention to that could be some quick fixes for that yeah so if we're looking at just kind of like from the mechanical side of things versus like what they should be doing from a training standpoint i think uh yeah loosening up those hip flexors is going to be a big one i I think that's pretty much everybody. And a lot of times runners are dealing with tight hip flexors as well.

Cause I mean, most people are sitting there and you guys have a nice setup here. So maybe your hip flexors are a little better than the average person. Uh, but, uh, that's going to be something that is gonna work against you. Probably when you think about it, like when we talked about that forward lean and what that does to your hips, you're almost like bowing the opposite direction of a sitting when you're in a good running form because your upper body is kind of forward leaning you know you have that tail that you got that like the whip of your foot it kind of bows you slightly the opposite direction of when you're crunched down like in a car seat or a chair so if you're crunched down like that all the time you know when you do

put yourself in position where you're going past that vertical line, uh, it's going to be even more tight because you're used to being crunched way behind it. So doing anything that's going to loosen up that area, that hip area, I know you can do like different, I'll do things where I'll get down on like kind of one knee and I'll, I'll push forward. So I'm bowing that area. Yeah. They've got some machines.

Couch stretch type thing or like a lunge stretch yep exactly yeah so getting that loosened up can be very useful uh i think to kind of help make it easier to get into the right form um then i think it's just about like some of it's just like kind of starting at the right point too and we've kind of talked about this before where uh i think a lot of times people are willing to do stuff to to get better at these type of things but uh it can be very self-defeating if you don't start at the right point oh yeah so like being comfortable with you know maybe being able to run one to two miles comfortably is the goal but uh i'm in the gym doing a lot of high intensity stuff often. So my weakness is kind of my aerobic foundation.

So what do I need to do to kind of stay at or below my aerobic threshold while I'm doing some of this non-strength training specific stuff so that I'm actually developing that spot that I'm not already doing in the gym? And that might mean a combination of running and walking at first. And a lot of times people think I want to be able to run a mile or two miles, and they think, well, I should be running that mile or two miles, or I'm not going to get better at said activity, when in reality, maybe a jog followed by a walk followed by a jog where it's kind of intermittent like that is going to put them at that right heart rate. And they're going to see the same gauge of improvement as I do when I'm targeting that,

where I might be trying to get down to a six- mile at that heart rate and I'm seeing that drop over the course of four six weeks it might be someone else who's just getting into it they may need to walk run or walk jog uh at first and then as they get to that like sixth week they might notice okay now I'm already now I can jog this whole thing and it's comfortable it doesn't feel any more difficult the interesting thing is like let's say you start at 150 beats per minute as a heart rate and to stay like within a couple beats of that you need to walk jog uh you're gonna have a there's gonna be a sensation of how difficult that is a perceived effort now all of a sudden six weeks later you're jogging the whole thing your perceived efforts can be identical you're just gonna be going faster at

that perceived effort and that's what you're looking for for the improvement so watching that move gradually can both be kind of like rewarding along the way to kind of keep you motivated to keep doing the stuff that's going to get you there um as well as kind of have you actually heading a positive direction versus a negative direction what do you think of this this has been effective for me but i don't i don't have any idea of whether or not it's correct. But when I first started, I would run pretty much as slow as you could possibly run. So not the beach run? So it's just like a little bit of a hop because, I mean, running is just like a bunch of single jumps, I guess. Right. So I would just, you know, run as slow as I could. I could figure out.

And I'd also keep really low to the ground because I'm like, if I if I'm striding and jumping far, I'm going to kill myself. And if I'm trying to do stuff explosively, my body's not conditioned to that. So I did that for several weeks. Um, my body's not conditioned to that. So I did that for several weeks. And to your point about the walking and running, I feel like I could go out and run five miles like right now. Like I feel really, really good. Wow. Um, I don't, I haven't tried it, so I don't really know, but it seems like stringing like

a long run together would be very simple. And I have strung together like a little bit of long runs for me, but, um, you know, I haven't attempted to go like five miles or anything. So for me, it's been, that's been working really well, just kind of starting out as slow as I could handle and, uh, staying kind of low to the ground. And then also picking like marks, uh, while I'm running, I'm just like, I'm just going to run to that. And then a lot of times I do that and I'm like, oh, I think I can go a little further and I can talk myself into a little bit more and more. What do you think of a strategy like that?

Yeah. I mean, I actually use that strategy during races, too, because I think like it can be overwhelming to think I'm going to run 100 miles or I'm going to run further than I ever have before, regardless of whether that's two miles, five miles or whatever it ends up being. So trying to wrap your head around something that is something you rarely or ever have done before is going to put you in a position where you're probably going to get in a spot where you're going to go negative and you want to avoid going negative. With running, it's interesting, especially slow running is the interesting about it is people describe it as painful, but it's not the same type of pain as something like kind of high intensity. Where you do something high intensity,'s not the same type of pain as something like kind of high intensity where you do something high intensity it's a different type of pain in the sense that it's sharp it's immediate there's like a ringing in your head almost where you can't think of

anything else like you can only think about that so you really don't even have an op you have very little opportunities to even really doubt what you're doing you're kind of just like almost acting impulsively whereas when you're running slow you can think about everything so like that seed of doubt creeps in your mind maybe you're two miles in that five mile run you're still thinking oh why am i doing this again i'm not even halfway yet blah blah and that spirals whereas when you pick like i'm just gonna go to that tree right now that's a very achievable thing it's similar to your walking stuff that you guys have been doing out here where it's like,

let's just get on and go for a walk around the block. We'll see how that goes. And maybe that's all we'll do today. Maybe we'll do it really slow. Maybe we'll add an extra block at the end. We'll see when we get there. But we're not going to think about more than just this one block. And then over the course of weeks and months, that turns into, oh, wow, we just walked for

an hour. It's kind of the same mindset where as you kind of hit new benchmarks or new milestones through kind of making those small incremental goals along the way, you start normalizing it. I mean, the story I always has my college cross country coach was telling me that the juniors and seniors were running 90, sometimes a hundred miles a week in the summer. And I'm like, I'm never going to run a 90 mile a week in my life. And it's like, now here I am running those in a day plus that in a day so it's like you know at

the time i just hadn't experienced that i hadn't worked through those paces i hadn't kind of normalized it worked on like the mindset the process involved with it uh to the point where i thought it was achievable whereas now i've done it enough i kind of know what to expect at least enough to know like what to look out for how strategize, how to visualize it and all that sort of, all that sort of stuff. What do you think it is that you love about running, um, with lifting? I actually think that, um, I don't know what else to compare lifting to. Cause it's just weird in the sense of like, there's a lot of like pressure on you like when you're trying like a heavy lift something specifically like power lifting but maybe it's similar like scuba diving or something where there's a lot of pressure on you and maybe even

like jiu-jitsu where there's pressure you know from another person's body on top of you or choking you or whatever do you think that there's something to like, maybe like oxygen debt in, in general or some, or is it maybe more like the effort or like gasping for air? Like, what do you think it is that those of us that really enjoy physical activity, what do you think it is that really draws us to it? Yeah, I think it's, you know, they call it type two fun, right? Where, where you, you may be loathing it during it at times but then afterwards i'm so glad i did that and i think it's just like i mean i just think it's kind of like this our bodies sending us a message where you know doing difficult things makes you stronger makes

you more resilient makes you better and even though it may not be enjoyable at the time that's what's required to do that so like your body body is like, I'm going to reward you when you finish this with like that, that feeling good, that accomplishment. And if they, if you can get that often enough, it's enough to incentivize you to keep doing it, to get up and do it when you, you don't want to, but you know, you should versus the time where like you wake up and you, I just need a rest day. Cause you know, that's always the balance you're trying to play, right? Where, um, you know, some days you wake up and you don't want to do it because you shouldn't,

cause you did so much the last three days or whatever happened to be, uh, versus I just woke up and now I'm just like, I remember how miserable I felt at 45 minutes yesterday. I don't know if I want to feel that again, but in the back of my, you know, if you do it, I mean, Joe Rogan talks about this all the time. He's like, I've never had a workout that didn't feel great afterwards. So, um, I always got to like convince myself I'm going to hate this, but afterwards I'm going to love it. So therefore let's, let's get in there and do it kind of a mentality. So I think there's, you're always balancing that with like your need to rest and recover, but finding that spot is just a great spot to be because then you're motivated to keep doing it. You're getting

that kind of type two fun, that release afterwards and that sense of accomplishment. And then it just becomes like, what draws that out of you? So when I started running, that might've been like a two mile run. Uh, whereas now, uh, you know, that might be a 15 mile run, a 20 mile run. It might be a speed workout that I haven't done in a while that I know I'm going to have to work hard to get done. And you just kind of continually evolve within the framework, I think. And if you can find a reason to do it a motivation to do it a why then it just doesn't kind of kind of kind of continue and i've had this conversation with myself and with other runners too where it's like if you're not getting that anymore at a certain point you need to ask yourself why are you doing it and is there something you can do that's different within this sport or a completely

different sport that's going to reignite that and i think you want to have that open mind to that because you know most people aren't doing any sport professionally they're doing sports to stay healthy to stay in shape to you know feel good about themselves and to participate in things with other people the community and you can do that through a variety of different stuff i mean we're sitting here on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what sports we picked, but we have a lot of common, you know,

dialogue to have about it. We have a similar kind of after effect of it in terms of what motivates us and how it makes us feel and things like that. So when you have those options, you may as well leverage them. You know, no, no sense in doing when you hate what is going through your mind during these

races. I think it's, he most bring that up a little earlier. Um, and like what I'm imagining, what is going through your mind during these races? I think it's, he was bringing that up a little earlier. And like what I'm imagining, cause I just think of my own training that I do. I have so much conversation with myself. It's like, it's ridiculous.

You know, it's like, it's nice to train with somebody else a lot of times for that reason. So I don't have to listen to myself trying to sometimes talk myself out of it or talk myself into doing something dangerous. You know, it's like, man, I wish I would just shut the fuck up for you. What's your mindset like, especially like, I guess, more in the training process than the actual game day?

Yeah, no, that's a great question, because I always do find like if I do a lot of like runs by myself for a while, it gets harder and harder to kind of keep motivating yourself to do that and then you you go and you run with a friend or a group and you're like wow that went by like three times as fast and it's like you just introduced a new like distraction more or less so i think you want to in training finding ways to distract yourself from just thinking about like what you're doing, how repetitive it is, how long you're going to be out there is definitely a key. So you find different ways to do it. For me, it's like some days I feel better thinking through something. So maybe like I had a really busy week and, you know, different, like a bunch of questions came up from coaching clients that

I didn't have a great answer for that. I need to learn more. I just need to think through and run the options. So like focusing on something like that. So I'm having this conversation with myself or I'm running through those options as I'm, as I'm running can be a great way to kind of spend some of that time. Or, uh, I love podcasts for this because they kind of introduced that variable for you where, okay, there's a topic I want to hear more about, or a person who I'm interested in their mindset about something. I'm going to listen to this while I'm running. So I'm more or less having that kind of conversation kind of vicariously through their conversation with whoever's hosting the podcast.

That works really well. If it's like a workout where I'm trying to kind of amp things up a little bit, maybe music is going to do that for me. It's going to put me in a position where that kind of like bit of an adrenaline spike from like an upbeat song is going to put my head into a spot where, okay, now I'm at mile 90 of a hundred mile race and I need to run faster this last 10 miles. And I did the other 90 average and you know, you start to do almost like a simulation and those can be helpful too.

And that's one thing I've really learned is using like my long runs in training because those are the most long and boring and monotonous. like how do I make that something that's both able to get through in the point of so I get the physiological adaptation but also work on the mental aspect that I'm going to have at that point in a race because the interesting thing is I can't experience 70 to 100 from the that I'll experience in a race in training unless i'm doing another race of that distance and by the way are you allowed to listen to things during races a hundred mile race can you guys listen to stuff or no it depends it's usually up to the race director most are allow you to do it some will say like one year but in one out or they make like these bone

conductor headphones now where your ears are open and you can i guess the vibrations are what you're hearing more or less okay um yeah usatf and world championship stuff is a little more like no go on that stuff unless they did make a exception i think for like the 24 hour race where you see how far you get 24 hours like i just be inhumane to say they can't listen to anything but yeah so like you it just really depends um yeah, so like a 30 mile long run, I might just visualize myself being starting at mile 70 and then start to think like, what am I thinking about? What am I doing to keep things moving?

How am I going to see this on race day? So then when I get there on race day, I hit mile 70. It's less about thinking, okay, when I raced this distance eight months ago what went well what didn't i'm thinking about the seven or eight times i simulated it in training and kind of where i want my mind to go how i want to focus so you kind of have a more of a script or a rehearsal in your head versus trying to impromptu it more or less dude that's what you said right there is like huge and i think every type of sport athlete can take that power lifters can easily can easily, you know, if they're getting ready for a meet, let's say they have access to keto plates.

First off, they can simulate what that feels like on the bar for their bench squat and deadlift. But then they can also simulate like what it's like going up to the specific attempts that they're going to be doing. And they can understand like their opening attempts. They can simulate exactly how that feels. And like they can legit put their second and third attempt on the bar even if they don't lift it they can just look at the weight and then visualize what it's going to be like to lift it on meat day so that there's less thinking on meat day and just more i've been here before yeah you know is that why like for

power or power lifters they'll if they say they're gonna squat they'll get under the weight but not actually rep it just so they can feel like, okay, this is what it's going to be like on my back. And then the day of, I'm going to actually get down and do it. Absolutely, yeah, walk the weight out. We sometimes will do something called a reverse band squat or reverse band deadlift, which is still simulating the actual lift, but it's giving you assistance or bench pressing with a slingshot. actual lift but it's giving you assistance or bench pressing with a slingshot you know somebody that isn't used to benching uh maybe three plates or something they they now throw a slingshot on and they feel themselves doing it and they're like holy shit you know they get more confident so over a period of time um they can get they can adapt to those uh those heavier weights and not have anxiety another thing we'll do too is we'll have other lifters in the gym sometimes judge us and,

you know, check your depth or make sure your butt's not coming off the bench, make sure you're not hitching your deadlifts, trying to make sure the form and technique is, you know, dead on. With your experience and, you know, just all these miles that you ran, um, and the level that you're at, have you ever just completely gotten your ass kicked? Have you gone and run with like some buddies and, or some people that you kind of looked up to and just, just got completely smoked.

And you're like, man, that like, I'm sure you're encouraged by it in some ways, but, uh, has that happened to you before? Yeah.

All the time. Sorry. No, it's all right. Part of it is kind of the fun part about the sport too, because like I was saying before, there is such variety. So I can easily throw myself in an event where I'm way less equipped to run well at it, and someone who maybe I would be able to beat by over an hour, if we were on a flat run of 100 miles,

is going to beat me by over an hour on this course and that sort of stuff so it gets interesting um yeah and it it is uh i think with with the right train and a lot of it's the specificity of training right so like if i decide i want to do really well at a mountain course i'm gonna have to probably spend a significant amount of time training in it getting used to the environment the types of running and sometimes i'll do that just to kind of take a break from the stuff I'm doing. So that doesn't feel quite as much as rinse and repeat one time after the other. I find that really frees up my mind. So when I go back to the stuff I'm more inclined to try to peak for, it's like, I'm just really motivated to get back to it because I don't feel like I just did it.

But I mean, I've gone, I've went early in my career, especially, you know, as I'm experiencing these events for the first time, it's like you go to a, like a, like I did the JFK 50 mile twice and just got destroyed by, by, by plenty of people. And, and, you know, just even just the time I expected to be able to run was like way off and it's just pretty defeating. But then you're like, okay, if you're honest with yourself, what you got to do there is like, look, where were the weaknesses? Why were they weaknesses? What would I need to do to improve those? Are any of these actionable for the next thing I'm going to do? Or is this something I need to just kind of put in the memory bank for if I do this event again? And ultimately those are kind of really fulfilling. So if you go back to that event, have a really good day and feel like you nailed it and you're

like, oh sweet, that all paid off. That happened for a reason and that sort of stuff. So, um, there's that. And there's also just, you know, races where you just don't do things right, or you expect things to go a certain way and then they don't. And then you pay for it, whether that be like heat or nutrition or electrolytes,

hydration, all sorts of stuff like that, or just pacing too. Um, you can kind of find yourself in a position where you were expecting to be here and you were way back there with uh for us with lifting like we're always preaching like people to to do resistance training and stuff because some of the other benefits that come along with it not necessarily just like looking good or you know trying to hit a pr in

the gym we're talking about like you know like, like the confidence you get, you get from lifting that can imply to your job and like, you know, just start performing better there. So I would imagine with running and I'm sure people who are already doing marathons can, they already kind of get it. But for just like general average population, that's not doing long distance running. What are some of the benefits that you've seen people that can take from long distance running and carries over to other aspects of life? I'm sure like patients, like I'd imagine if you're doing a hundred miles, you're, you're probably the most patient person I've ever met. So is there anything like that, that you can point to, to be like, yeah, because of this,

I can now do that so much better. Yeah. I think you're right. It with the patient side of things, you can learn a lot from that i think when you look at it that way it opens up the door for what i think is like the biggest value if you want to try to parallel it with other things in life and that is just like how do you structure your goals so i think a lot of times no one i don't think has a problem in most cases of like sitting down and thinking i I want to do this. Where people sometimes struggle is, well, what's next? So I think what I see a lot of times in running and in life in general, someone decides this

is what I want to do. I want this job or I want this promotion or I want to be able to lift this much weight or run this fast. And that's a great starting point. But if you leave it at that, you're going to hit parts where you're not nearly as motivated to do it as when you first kind of have that aha moment

of I want to do this and you decide you're going to pull the trigger on it. So this is something I've improved on a lot over the course of my career. And I've used it in the other areas of my life too is once you kind of have that long-term goal, now, how do you fill in the gap between the start to there? So you also have other goals or little rewards built in along the way that'll keep you motivated and keep that kind of excitement there that would normally kind of fade as you get further and further from the starting point.

So for running, it's just finding like, okay, where are these points where I can sense improvement or sense satisfaction and kind of keep motivated? Uh, you know, we talked about one, is it that type two fun where you feel good after a run, you start kind of like learning that and appreciating that and recognizing it for what it is. That's your day-to-day motivator maybe. And then, uh, what about just like a week or kind of multi-week you can look at like, okay, I'm working on this system of intensity where am i at when i start and where are my improvements along the way you see those improvements those are little incentives along the way and then you can even compare them to

previous attempts if you've done it that way and then you kind of have like a spot in training where you're going to shift the focus to something different that's going to help you get a little closer to being peaked for the race itself you get to that spot and kind of refresh when i'm going to build that up so you kind of have all these built up so by the time you get to the race itself you've had all these little rewards built in where you're really close to achieving that bigger goal that longer term goal but you filled in the gaps along the way enough so that you're still as excited as you were when you started uh and then looking at like that last piece of the puzzle the race as like the final 1% of the final piece of the puzzle versus this big overwhelming thing you still have to do. Uh, I think that's, I think you can put that with anything. Like if I picked, you know, a promotion at work or start find a new job or something like that. Well, where is, uh, you know, where are my, my benchmarks along the way? Where do I want to be in two weeks versus three months or something like that in terms of the development towards that?

And how do I create like the scaffolding around that? So I'm flexible enough to make changes when they need to be made in order to kind of get to that end goal, but not deterred so much that I feel like I don't have any type of structure there. That's going to kind of keep me on the straight, the straight path towards it. Can you guys imagine how many Pokemon's he'd be able to get?

Be the king of Pokemon Go. Did you ever play that while running? I didn't know. I know some runners who did though. Like if like, don't you have to like walk so many steps to like hatch a certain thing? My God. Yeah.

Yeah. Shit. I would run. You know what? That's going to be one of the things that I do when I start running. I can't wait to like get some running shoes and just go catch some pokemon while running yeah just be here you know spinning my balls when i was when i was still teaching uh they would do one of the districts i was teaching at they had this challenge over the summer as a step count thing and they're like oh we this is such a cool thing we've got prizes for the end of the so

everyone all the teachers come back we'll look at you know who did what and then we're gonna give these prizes away and the top prize is like an ipad or something like that and like they they had this they had this like this idea they're just like oh well this will be easy enough whoever gets the most steps gets the ipad and i'm sitting there like oh all right here we go and like as they're explaining it to the staff i could almost see like the person who is deciding they were thinking through it as they're explaining it to the staff i could almost see like the person who is deciding they were thinking through it as they were explaining it they're like oh wait a second we can't do it that way or we may as well just give zach the ipad right now so they're making it like if you hit a certain number you enter a raffle and then the person gets a raffle and so

so i didn't win the ipad but for a minute there i thought i was getting myself a free ipad you have any experience with uh messing around with nasal breathing? Yeah. I've been playing around with this a little bit more as some of the information has kind of gotten more, more popular, more out. I think when it comes to running,

it's interesting because it's always, you need to get in as much oxygen as possible when you're hitting certain intensities in order to optimize performance so there's a kind of a crossover point where some mouth breathing is going to be is just going to get you more liters of oxygen so to speak but that doesn't mean you have to be doing that all the time so kind of like the line more or less for me is like if I'm at the top end of zone two or like at my aerobic threshold. Can you explain the zones? Yeah.

So most zones kind of got more popular in the triathlon community where they were looking at just basically different intensities. Where like zone one is like a very easy intensity. Like I can do this all day. Zone two is this intensity where it's got a little bit more focus. You should still be able to carry a conversation more or less. That's where you hang out, right? A lot of,

a lot of zone two, like that's kind of my race intensity for a hundred miles in a lot of cases. And what's the heart rate range for that for zone two? It's going to be up to about 80% of your max heart rate. Okay. So, I mean,

there's different calculations for it. Like you could also just go and get your aerobic threshold tested in the laboratory. And that's going to kind of be where you get to the top of zone two and you start entering kind of zone three more or less uh uh some people this is where like nasal breathing i think can be useful for somebody's trying to learn like what does it feel like to run zone two if you're breathing in your nose and out your mouth you can probably get up to the top end of your zone two but once you start pushing out of that you're gonna your body

is gonna kind of force you to start breathing through your mouth for you to continue so you can use it kind of as a governor where i'm gonna breathe in my nose out my mouth and if i get to a point where that's not sustainable that means i need to not go any faster than that and that kind of dictates me staying in that easy pace because a lot of times the stuff with running is like you want to do the bulk your training kind of at that easy intensity or up to the end of your easy intensity spectrum. And then you go like moderate and hard. And the amount of time you spend in moderate and hard is very small relative to easy. Depending on who you ask, some people say like they'll say like there's a philosophy of 80-20 running where you spend 80 percent of your running kind of at that easy pace and anything moderate or hard is the next 20

percent that's like the sweet spot but you can use that nasal breathing to kind of check yourself to make sure like okay i'm not i'm within this range if i can still comfortably run by breathing in my nose and out my mouth and that sort of stuff but i've also used it a lot more just outside of running because like when i'm sitting there uh there's really no reason for me to be breathing through my mouth when I'm not moving at all. And, or if I'm getting like kind of stressed out about something, cause there's a lot going on. I'm trying to like think through something and there's like two or three other things going through my head. I find like, like deep slow breaths through your mouth or through your nose and out your mouth kind of brings that like that anxiety down a little bit so just recognizing those points in your day

and what triggers them and then what to do to kind of bring that back down it can be a very useful tool for my experience anyway i've been using a lot with uh with my running and it's it's a good good way for me to as you mentioned keep a governor on like the intensity that i'm choosing so most of the time i'm really just trying to go strictly just in and out of the It's a good way for me to, as you mentioned, keep a governor on the intensity that I'm choosing. So most of the time, I'm really just trying to go strictly just in and out of the nose the whole time. And I should answer the rest of your question with the zones, though, too. Most will go up to five, and then some will split five into multiple categories, like 5A, 5B, 5C. But it's basically an acceleration of intensity where one and two are going to be below your aerobic threshold.

Three is going to be kind of this entry to moderate intensity four is going to be kind of what they call your lactate threshold um and then like uh five is going to be like short interval sprints like vo2 max and then you can have like over speed training where you're going to get like that 5a 5b 5c type of stuff but it's just like a a gauge of intensity more or less i'm curious man with the who what was the runner that you mentioned that like lived in the mountains oh killing june killing june yeah because you mentioned like you know someone could be doing a run and they're going at the same pace but he's quite literally one gear underneath them while moving at the same pace or faster than they are um and it like makes me think like when i do jiu-jitsu sometimes right there'll be a person I'm rolling with and they're like,

so we're at, we're at the same pace, but I'm breathing through my nose. I'm able to stay calm. So like, it's like, let me ask you this. Do you know how athletes can,

or the, the conceptual way where athletes through sports can increase their battery within that zone too? Because I feel like I can do a lot within zone two and it takes a lot for me to have to go into a zone where i'm like having to do that you know yeah so you might just have really developed that so and that's what we see happen and the way to maybe understand it is like when i describe like my pace improving at that that's me getting more efficient and more adapted to that system or that intensity so like the the more you do it, the better you're going to get at it and the longer you're probably going to be able to sustain it or the faster you're going to be able or the more you're going to be able to do within that context.

So if you see that as a strength of yours, then you might want to lean on that. And that's good because that's like the foundation of your fitness is that that kind of zone to and below. Then it's like, well, what what do you need to do to be better prepared for whatever activity you're doing? And then what intensity is going to kind of really pinpoint that? So if in jujitsu you find like I'm sitting at this intensity, but I want to be here in order to optimally perform, at least in bursts. Then how do you kind of replicate that? Or for running running it's just like a little usually what dictates is the race so like if i'm gonna do like a 5k um i know

what intensity that's going to be so as i get closer to the event where i'm going to try to test my limits at 5k i want to be doing a lot of running or not a lot of running but i need to do more running or building my uh or improving my ability to run at that intensity. So that might just be like, instead of me doing short intervals earlier in my training, like I would for a hundred miles, since it's not very specific to the intensity I'm using on race day, it might be something I'm doing right up until the race. Cause I'm really trying to get my body used to that intensity. So usually goal event or goal race or whatever it is, looking at the intensity, intensity or intensities that you're going to use during that, that, that, uh, event are the intensity or intensities that you're going to use

during that event are going to be the things that you're going to be focusing on the most as you get closer to it. So for jujitsu, maybe you do a lot more zone two stuff early on as you're kind of working on technique, working on moves, and just getting in shape. Then let's say you want to enter a tournament, you know you're going to have like go high intensity at points then maybe you're introducing more of that as you get closer to that or uh you know rolling with people who are gonna push you up into that intensity more more frequently you might just be so much better than the people you're rolling with that you're in zone two and they're all even rolling with mark again or what's going on i have a question though some people maybe were trying to pick up running and they don't want to

run outside. I'm curious about treadmills because I wonder, you know, when you look at commercial gym treadmills and people run on those, could those build bad running mechanics? Like, is there a detriment to learning how to run on treadmills? Should you just try to run outside or can you use treadmills and actually improve and have a good running mechanics yeah yeah you can the difference between a treadmill and running outside is it's almost overly controlled in the sense that like it's not changing i mean you can manipulate it you can speed it up you can change the incline and things like that but you're stepping on like a perfectly level platform whereas when you go outside even if you're running on like a flat stretch of concrete there's tiny little like variances in there that is going to cause like your feet and your ankle to flex a little

differently so if someone's running on a treadmill all the time and then they jump outside they kind of earn like this more like one-dimensional development where they're very strong in the areas that are being required to be strong on that forward movement flat perfectly flat platform versus what they maybe need in order to be able to run on varied terrain so it's going to get more pronounced the more varied the terrain gets similar to me training for like a track 100 miler versus a mountainous one if i just do a bunch of the training for the track stuff and hop on a mountain one i'm going to have a lot of deficits on the climbing and descending that i wouldn't have necessarily had had i spent the time doing it so with running this is what we look at when we look at like kind of the

event so ideally you pick the event first and then you build the plan in front of the intensity that you're going to try to periodize ideally you can't always have this because then people want to do these beautiful mountain courses sometimes they live in the midwest it's like you can you you got to take what you can get um realistically but in a perfect world you'd have something similar to the course topography in order to practice doing the exact mechanics you're going to use on that and really fine-tuning the different uh muscle flexions and things that you're going to be using on race day and all that is is this what normal mountain running looks like or is this like overhyped because it's like a bit of a commercial but this shit looks insane this is uh that guy killing yeah so this is like a spine where he's

on like he's he's on like the top of a big mountain pass and that one's actually pretty wide relative to what i've seen him do but yeah I mean look at that yeah he's fearless that looks really fun though I mean it looks crazy where he's running at but like

I would be more inclined to want to do something like that yeah and that's what a lot of people get drawn to is they want to I mean he looks like a little kid like just splashing around in water and stuff yeah that's that's probably why he's still still doing the sport today is because he loves it still playground for him this fucking how old is he he is i want to say like 31 wow and that makes me wonder i'm curious man like okay in a lot of sports you'll see like you

know swimming or whatever you'll see like young guys the young cats that are coming in because they're so you know they're in their prime they're they're good right i might i'm probably wrong i don't know but my assumption would be that in a sport like ultra running that you actually reach your prime a little bit later am i incorrect or correct with that yes yeah that's historically that's been the case and i think there's probably a couple things going on there one is historically people didn't necessarily just jump into ultra marathons they would exhaust themselves in like kind of 5ks 10ks marathons and then they get quote-unquote too old to still peak in those shorter endurance events and they're like oh maybe i'll do 100 miler so you get a lot more like 40 40 plus year old folks like winning like the 100 mile stuff

the sport's grown a ton in the last decade so now you're seeing like you know d1 d2 d3 collegiate athletes getting right in ultra marathons after college and so we are seeing kind of that age come back um uh to the to the point where like now all of a sudden usually guys winning 100 mile races are in their 20s or 30s versus in their 40s yeah uh but with that said i think like that end point where like oh i'm gonna see a drop off here is probably pushed out a fair bit just due to the relative uh um lower intensity of the race and you can always build out the length of the race with ultra running and that's one thing people find out when they get into it is there's really no end to it i mean there's a

race over in new york where they're on a it's like just over a half mile loop and it's 3100 miles there's a forced eight hour time break every day but they're out there every day for like i think it ends up being like 40 some days usually where though for the winter where they're out there just running around this little loop and it's like you don't really got to be young to do that you got to be durable yeah i had to double take when i heard you say that because i was like did he mean like 300 no he meant 31 40 wow yeah it's interesting and you've done a 24 hour right yeah i haven't done one well yet i've blown up a few times how far how far have you gotten in 24 hours? So I got 125 miles, but I stopped at 16 and a half.

So I did a full 24 hours, but I blew up and basically walked the majority of it and ended up with 115 miles. So I've gone 104.88 in 12 hours. I've gone 104.88 in 12 hours. My hope is that if I can figure out the pacing, the training, and just everything that goes into moving for 24 hours at a relatively consistent pace, my ceiling would be quite a bit higher than that. But time will tell. You need to prove it. I think you said earlier that you ran one of the races just straight through like for like 11 hours. So in 24 hours, uh,

I mean, I imagine you stop a little bit, like just to use the bathroom and stuff like that. Yeah, I usually do my fastest hundred mile. I stopped three times for probably total of three or four minutes. Um, just to use the bathroom.

Uh, when you're doing them on a track, it's like, there's no reason to stop other than use the bathroom for the most part, because you know, you can just have someone hand you your food and your drink. And you if you don't want to stop you don't need to um this particular race actually i stopped twice for i think a total like 60 to 90 seconds uh both bathroom breaks uh but yeah at the usatf 100 mile road championships in april i ran in was it 12

hours and i think it was like 40 minutes or something like that uh it got a little warm they had to bump it back to late april and it's in vegas so it got to 94 degrees so i technically didn't stop um at all there was like since it was so hot there's a lot of topical cooling where you're like wringing ice and water on your head so there was parts where i'd go to the aid station and kind of like slow down to a walk to grab it um but yeah that was uh probably the most efficient i didn't have to stop use the bathroom at all that day what's some uh shit that happens to like your hands and your feet like your hands fall asleep like just from i don't know rocking back and forth like that the whole time and do your toes fall off and the weirdest thing i think sometimes if you get like an electrolyte imbalance,

you might notice like your fingers start getting puffy. And the weird thing is that can, I guess that can happen on either side of the spectrum, whether you're like diluting your electrolytes or you're overdoing your electrolytes, which can make it difficult if you're not paying attention at all, because then you have to ask yourself,

well, is what I'm going to do to correct this actually what's causing it? But that's how you kind of, for me, I got to a point where I figured out kind of the ranges of electrolytes per liter of water to kind of stave that sort of stuff off. So I've had a lot less issues with that. But in the past, I'd noticed that I'd have like my watch on, it'd be at like a certain tightness. And then all of a sudden I'd be like, why is my, why do I feel like this watch is getting tighter? And I looked down and my hand was like all swollen. So you got to watch for that stuff for sure.

Is there a 100 mile track barrier? Like, you know, like there's the five minute and people, is there a 100 mile track barrier? Yeah. So right now the world record, so I broke the world record in 11 or in 2019 of 11 hours, 19 minutes. It got rebroke in April. Guy guy ran 11 hours 14 minutes and 57 seconds so i think um 11 hours is gonna kind of the sweet spot i think to break and i'm i want to try it

because when i ran 11 19 uh i had the old shoe technology so just with the new shoe technology i might with the same race i might be able to get down there uh it's also kind of goofy where there is getting more popular now so more events are catering towards fast hundred on a track where in the past to date when i've done these i'm in a different event so i'm trying to run 100 miles fast but there's a group of maybe 40 to 60 other people out on the track that are trying to see if i can get 24 hours 48 hours six days sometimes so they're obviously going to be going slower because they're pacing themselves for over twice as long or in the six day case 12 times as long uh and track protocols you go on the outside so i'm running in lane two

and three a lot on those so really like a hundred mile race on a track in an event like that you're probably running more like 100, 102 miles. So there's a race over in the UK right now that you're still going to have some lane two time because there's other runners out there. And if you're going faster than everyone else, you're going to have to pass them on a turn eventually. But it's catered to 100 miles. So it's a little less of the folks out there for days that are going to be walking, running real slow, and making you go in lane two, three a little more often. real slow and making you go in lane two, three,

a little more often. So I think like, as we see that side of the sport, get a little more popular and have more events that are specifically for fast hundred miles. And that would be a competition too. Cause when I broke the world record and when Alex Sorkin, the guy who recently broke it, maybe we're racing against ourselves.

Cause there wasn't anyone else out there like running with us at the time. So you have the, the intrinsic motivation, especially when you're chasing a time or a record, because there wasn't anyone else out there like running with us at the time so you have the the intrinsic motivation especially when you're chasing a time or a record but you get two or three other guys on your tail or just in front of you you're gonna go a little faster so uh i think those are the things that are going to move us i think there's a handful of guys probably in this sport right now we can go under 11 hours i think in uh the next few years we'll see 11 hours get broke i think uh in in a decade we might see that get pushed down closer to 10 and a half 10 40 would be a

spot i think is doable given like the right person the right training everything going right on race day perfect environment uh i mean perfect scenario get like a one mile nascar loop where you can have like a slightly banked turn like who knows how fast some of these guys can probably go then who would be the goat in ultra running yeah it's probably most people are going to say killian or i would say it's between killian or jim walmsley got um those guys killian's a little more one-dimensional in that he's basically mountain now Now, he's mountain across a super wide spectrum. He'll win sub-ultra trail races that are super

technical, and he'll win 100-mile mountain courses. They call these FKTs, fastest known times of where it's not an event, but it's like, I want to see how fast I can get up to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro or whatever peak they're looking at.

And then he's got a ton of those too. And he's just been around for the last decade basically winning anything he puts his mind to. Jim's a little more new to the sport, but he's done it on a variety of different terrains. He's got the second fastest time ever in the world at the 100K distance. Just did that recently at this event right here. He ran 6.09 for 100K. So that's like just under a six-minute mile pace for 100 kilometers, 62.5 miles.

And he missed the world record by like, I think it was like 11 seconds. So he's coming down the finish like right on pace and just barely missed it. He's got the world best for 50 miles. on pace and just just barely missed it he's got the world best for 50 miles he's also got the two fastest times at the western states 100 which is uh historically one of the most competitive hunter miles in the world if not the most right now it's kind of can probably consider the second most in competitive in the world ultra trail mountain blanc is the most competitive from a depth standpoint but in terms of hunter mile courses that have been tested by basically all the great trail ultra mountain runners in the past western states up there in the top and he's got the two fastest times he's the only guy to go under 15

hours there three times uh he had the course record the jfk 50 mile up until last year where basically every north american ultra runner who's test themselves on 50 miles has been to the jfk so that's one stands out there's a race uh not too far from here called lake sonoma 50 mile he's got the two fastest times there uh one being 550 and the other being like six flat next fastest person is like 607 so he's like way ahead of everyone there and yeah so i mean he's done it he's done a lot of it's basically not a question of whether jim can break your record it's whether jim decides it's something he's going to focus on for the most part his biggest struggle so far to date has just been you know pushing that out a little further past say that like 14 15 hour time frame so like if he goes over to utmb that's a lot a little more difficult of a

course so the winning time is going to just barely crack 20 hours on a really fast year so he'll close that gap eventually um some of it's just like when you're gym you have every race wants you there and there's enough really exciting ones out there where he's kind of got to pick which one do i really want to train for and how does that positively or negatively impact the next thing i want to do so for someone like him who's been interested in like a variety of different terrains that's tough because if he peaks for a flat 50 mile course or flat 100k course like this how long is it going to take him to recalibrate his training and his body and his everything to get ready for like a mountainous 100 mile race which i think

is one of the reasons why he hasn't nailed utmb yet is because he's put so much focus in the western states he kind of wrings himself dry on that run and then utmb is a few months later so now he's got to recover reposition his training to peak for that course versus western states now that he's won western states three years in a row i think maybe he'll start skewing some of his his uh interest into utmv a little closer so it'll be i mean he's pretty young he's i think he's or he's in his or he's younger than i am by a couple years um maybe even three or four so i think he's he's in killing her about the same age he might be 30 31 or something like that all right how do you use some, uh, lifting? How do you utilize lifting to, uh, get better at this? Yeah. And I think, uh, lifting is something

that as I've kind of like, like learned the running sport as a community, we've gotten, we've gone from like thinking it's either a negative or not something that is going to really move you forward to like, you should definitely be doing this um and you know a lot of the the pro olympians have probably been the ones that move the needle on that because you know people see what they're doing and all of these folks are doing strength stuff and they're doing them routinely so i think where people maybe make a mistake with running is they think okay well i'm running i'm doing a lot of like like high repetition low weight type of activities they get in the gym and they do the same thing they get these tiny little

dumbbells and flailing them around and doing 100 sit-ups and that sort of stuff when in reality as an endurance athlete you don't want to be doing that you want to be doing more of the compound movements and relative to what you can tolerate heavier weights so some of the core moves like squats deadlifts, I think runners, the hex bar lift is great because it's a little lower barrier to entry from a form standpoint. But you want to be targeting mostly,

I want to say like five to 10 reps is a good kind of target range for a lot of runners. It is like the supplementary activity. So you want to be kind of careful about how crazy you get with it in terms of like maxing out or trying to get that last rep out of you uh you probably want to leave a couple in the tank um with that rate weight range that's going to get you five to ten reps uh yeah other things like uh i think there can be some value in some of the like uh the more

like single leg type stuff just so like you can sense and balance it's like take me for example i've been spending a little more time doing strength worth the last year or so and one thing i noticed is my left leg stronger than my right leg so if i just go and do like uh uh like squats or like a leg press or something like that i subconsciously am going to be using my left leg more than my right leg because it's stronger. And then it just kind of feeds into the problem. So I'll do more single leg stuff. Um, I'm still getting better at it. So sometimes I'll use the machines for that, but I can notice my left leg or my right leg catching up with my left leg when I do the single leg stuff and I can kind of focus on isolating that. Uh, so yeah, there's, um, I think the compound stuff is good. Weighted stuff is good within what you're capable of doing.

So I would say for most endurance athletes, working from higher rep ranges with 10 being the ceiling down to lower rep ranges as you move through the season or move through your training. So early on base phase, you might be going up to 10 reps. Get closer to races, especially if you're doing like 5Ks, 10Ksk's that sort of stuff maybe you're down to 3 or 5 reps or something like that is uh mostly what i've been kind of been told so yeah have you guys been educated on running strength training or can you guys give me some pointers or is that oh absolutely yeah we can

even show you some stuff today i think uh you know some your it sounds like you already know the basics and the basics are you know probably the most important thing what would be interesting would be to have you try some exercises that uh really just induce a lot of um tension and to see if you think that they provide value so uh almost like bodybuilding type stuff just to see if you you know what your thoughts on it would be because you know it's not not uh like not necessarily normal just you know go in there and like deadlift but for example you might do a trap bar deadlift but rather than just doing a regular trap bar deadlift uh you might do it with your heels uh elevated okay and in that way it's more quad

and it'd be interesting for you to try it and get it you would get out you'd get better ideas than us but if we had you under tension for 30 seconds or for a minute you might be like holy shit my legs are on fire and to your point i agree that yeah there's probably not a lot of reasons for you to uh train your endurance and your stamina but it'd be interesting to see how you could tolerate uh you know what's going on in particular, you know, bodybuilding style movements, those kinds of things. Yeah. The other thing I probably should have said that you reminded me of is when I was talking to a strength conditioning coach and he said, what do you want to think about is like, where is your body going to be positioned and bearing weight and impact when you're running? Because those are areas you might want to focus on strengthening. So like, rather than like

putting yourself in a position you're never going to be in. And I think this is probably carries over with just functional strength anyway, right? Like if you're, if your goal is just to be able to like move around the environment you're in, in a healthy, strong way,

you want to be moving your body with the weights in that same way. So you're stronger in those movements versus something that's maybe a little more arbitrary, uh, that like, maybe I'm really strong in this movement, but if I never use that movement, what's the kind of purpose of it. So if I'm thinking like running, the purpose is running with good form, running efficiently and fast in that form. I want to be targeting the ranges of motion that I'm going to be doing within the running mechanic, but within the weight room. I think where you can get maybe the most leverage would be to strengthen your upper body. Because that's probably where most people aren't looking and most people aren't thinking.

But, I mean, as you know, it takes your whole body to be able to run properly. Yeah, the core, if that breaks down, then you get inefficient and stuff too. And then in semen, I've been working on a lot of knees over toes stuff. Have you? We've all been practicing it here at the gym. But maybe working the tibialis might be something that would be effective. And just the ankles and knees and stuff. Yeah, I was actually thinking about that because I talked to Ben last year, I think, right before he came on your guys' podcast.

He was telling me about some of the movements. I started playing around with the KOT squats and stuff like that. That was fun just to watch the progression of that and feel that out. I know he does a lot of stuff with the tibialis angles. You see just the movements he does. I'm thinking to myself, if I can do that, then there's no way my ankle breaks on me. Yeah. And there's a guy that I worked with in the past.

He's definitely going to be listening to this show if he hasn't already. His name is Bill. He was a long distance runner. So he did a lot of like 30, 40 mile races. Bill, if you're somewhere, you can always text me or correct me if I'm wrong. But his main thing was like he, we started he um he wanted to improve his body composition so he wanted to like get leaner look more muscular while still being able to do that and by just building up his strength relative to like the volume of running he was

doing per week because he was doing like 40 50 60 miles per certain weeks all we did was just structure a lot of the big compounds slowly allowed ourselves to get stronger with it. There was no rush. If on a certain week it wasn't there, okay, we won't rush it. But by that, he actually got substantially more muscle. He got leaner, but his running, his runs improved and the feeling of fatigue on his runs also improved just because his body was stronger and he had a little bit more muscle tissue on his frame. So it's like the reason why I say this is because I love how I find that in all these different sports, initially, even jujitsu, it's like they look at strength training, you're like, no, that's going to, they think they're going to get big and bulky. And it's like, you don't realize you're doing this sport way too much to even have the ability to get big and bulky. And what you're going to be getting from strength training is just becoming overall stronger and then you're going to use that in your sport which will probably help your performance yeah the funny thing is like when runners think that weight lifting is to make them

big and bulky is like the reason you're probably a runner in the first place because you were incapable of getting big and bulky in high school otherwise you would have been playing football but uh yeah so like to think that they're gonna just somehow like you know get in the weight room and blow up when you know guys like you have spending decades trying to like add like a pound here and a pound there it's kind of comical uh and then you you know you compound on top of the training it's like when i'm training full steam ahead and 100 plus mile weeks like just my body's tolerance to adding a lot of extra weight is going to be so low. It's more about like getting strong within those areas. So, um, yeah,

no, I think I'm, I'm on board with that. I think some sled work would be great. Uh, pushing a sled, pulling a sled. I think, uh, that kind of stuff would be really valuable. What, uh, what projects are you working on? I know you were, you were gonna do a run here, I think. And then, uh, what projects are you working on? I know you were, you were going to do a run here, I think. And then, uh, your ankle got messed up. So what have you been working on? What are you trying to do? Yeah. So my, my original goal this half a year was I'm going to do a really big project, which kind of separated me from what I've done historically. I've done a lot of single day ultra marathons where you beat yourself up and then the next day you don't do anything. And this one was a little different

where I was going to run from San Francisco to New York. It's called the Transcontinental Route. It's about 3,000 miles. The record is by Pete Koselnik, he's run about 72.5 miles per day. So when you think about that, it's like you got to run an ultra marathon, like a lengthy one,

and then get up and do it again and again and again. So you got to manage everything to be able to kind of get up and repeat so you got to peel back enough so you don't exhaust yourself any too much on any one given day but you also got to be on top of uh you know staying healthy staying injured injury free which i was incapable of many days is that six days eight days so the the project the record was six weeks, six hours, and 30 minutes. 42 days total. So, yeah, it looks like it's, at minimum, probably a six-week project.

I'm going to do it eventually. I just got to get the neighborhood. 72 miles every day for six weeks? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that's the record. There's been plenty of people who have done it much slower. I think there's a whole team people have done it much slower uh i think um you know i i

there's a whole team involved when you get and get into that so when i injured my ankle a few weeks back it was kind of one of these things where if this was a race where it was like 50 miles or 100 miles i could probably rehab it or stay on top of it by doing some extra stuff every day just to like keep it moving and keep it like not swelling up too much and get through a race and then you know take some downtime afterwards but it's just not a possibility when you got to get up the next day and do it again and again again i'm going to end up in you know somewhere somewhere in colorado with like you know my ankle so swollen that i'm walking or not even doing that so with how big that project was and

how many people were involved when i talked to everyone they're like well let's get the angle go so swollen that I'm walking or not even doing that. So with how big that project was and how many people were involved, when I talked to everyone, they're like, well, let's get the angle to a hundred percent and let's target it at a different time. Cause there's really a really tight window for ideal. You know, when you're talking six plus weeks, you want to avoid winter, but you also want to avoid heat. So September is kind of the sweet spot where you can start in California when it's not blazing hot, get over the Sierras before winter comes in, get through the Midwest in a timeframe where it's not brutally humid, but also not winter. And then get to the East coast before full on winter sets in

there. So that gives you kind of like a September timeline, like early to mid September is kind of the sweet spot. So, uh, I'll get my ankle straightened out and then down the road a different year do that project so for now i'm working on getting the ankle back it's been progressing pretty well um as far as i can tell but it's going to probably take a little bit of a more of a gradual build back in so working on that i should be able to do some races by the end of the year uh you ever seen the run that's on it was on real sports and like no one's ever finished it you ever seen that place yeah yeah so any interest in doing weird shit like that um i don't mind weird the weird stuff but like where i haven't gotten excited about is you get these courses that

are like basically as much orienteering as they are running so like barclays is uh kind of like that where it's not necessarily that the course is so difficult that these guys and gals can't finish although it has been completed now um it's more about there's no markers it changes slightly from year to year so like you get lost you get wet a lot right yeah wet and cold and yeah that one's brutal enough where like they know basically at the start whether whether anyone's going to finish or not, or if anyone even has a chance, because if the weather gets bad,

it's over, like no one's going to probably finish if the weather gets bad and it can get really bad. I'm really curious, man. Um, I don't think we've really talked about like recovery because I feel like your body is going through.

I mean, you know, I compare the, the, what your body's going through versus other sports. And I'd imagine it's like there's a lot that might, you know, you might need to do. So, I mean, obviously there's sleep and there's having the right nutrition. But are there, is there anything that you think is essential? And then is there anything that's like kind of out there that you think maybe not a lot of people are doing? Like, I still do red light therapy every

day and i like i really dig it but some people are like as bs yeah i look at it as something beneficial for me though so what things do you do that people might not even know about or maybe think isn't relevant yeah it's a good question i think the you're right i think the way to maybe look at it is here's some big movers that you should start with that are kind of proven you know science is sound they're going to move the needle if you do them right and then once you've got those all in line in an order if you've got like the time and energy and interest and kind of adding some of these other ones that are a little more kind of like fringe or not yet proven or uh possibly good for some but not necessarily for everyone then start layering those in.

So sleep is the big one. Sleep and nutrition. Those are ones you got to dial in. Those are going to move the needle big time for you if you improve that from poor to high quality, especially. And then, yeah, things like ice baths, saunas, red light therapy. Do you utilize all that stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Less so the saunas in the middle of summer in Phoenix.

I kind of get that by default. Uh, but like, I think the, the ice pads are an interesting one to me because I think it's like, it's one, and maybe we'll learn more as more data comes out with that, or I think it's a great tool if you're going to block a workout or you have

like a, a big buildup where you're trying to get from one workout to the next and kind of keep that swelling and inflammation from setting in too quick. You can kind of push it off. But then eventually when you get, when recovery is the primary goal, maybe don't get in the ice bath because you actually want that swelling and that inflammation to come in and rebuild and get you stronger and ready for that next. So it's all with some of these more fringe ones.

I think it's less about do they work or not? More about how do you properly implement them? And I think it was Dr. Andy Gelpin was talking about this where he's like, you got to think about it as these things are stressors. So where's your stressors at now? Do you have room to introduce a new one? And if you do, which one is going to move the needle the most? So when I was listening to him talk about that,

he's like, yeah, if you're training out in the desert, maybe the stressor you shouldn't do is sauna. Maybe we save that one for the winter or something like that. Uh, but you might benefit from some, some ice baths or something like that when you're trying to do back to back

hard workouts and something to get from one to the next. Um, the red light therapy is one that I'm interested in. I haven't dove in probably deep enough to be more than dangerous about the topic, but I've got a red light thing, and I'll put it on while I'm working at the desk and stuff. Cool. Tell us about your own podcast. What inspired you to start that up?

Yeah, so my podcast is called Human Performance Outliers Podcast. I started out co-hosting it with Dr. Sean Baker who I think has been on this podcast at least once, right? He's in jail now, right? Yeah, Twitter jail.

Sean and I co-hosted for a couple of years then his stuff at MeetRx grew pretty fast so he was pretty dedicated to kind of keeping that stuff all in order so our schedules

just got kind of separated in the sense where his available time wasn't matching up with mine so I started solo hosting it about a year ago at this point but yeah so you can find that there on my website at ZachBitter.com is where I'll link to all that stuff forward slash HPO

if you want to go straight to that page but yeah I mean it's fun we've dove into it was the original all that stuff. Um, forward slash HPO. If you want to go straight to that page. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's fun. We've dove into, it was the original idea there was Sean is, uh, like you guys about twice as big as me.

So he was kind of explosive. Yeah. He's like explosive, high intensity stuff, like a minute or less. Whereas mine was the opposite of the spectrum. We both kind of, uh,

you know, he's, he's since kind of gone more strict with carnivore stuff At the time we were kind of both More kind of low carb Ketogenic in his case So I was like okay we got these guys Following a similar dietary approach But totally different ends of the spectrum

So that was like the outlier part of it Like the outsides of the spectrum of sport Or spectrum of performance And yeah I can't remember how many episodes we did, maybe 200 before, before I started doing it solo. Um, but yeah, I mean, we focus on a ton of different stuff, a lot of, uh, um, nutrition performance, both on the strength and endurance side of things. I mean, I've had folks from, uh, Stan Efferding on to,

uh, guys, uh, that are like race walkers and things like that. So it's a pretty wide spectrum. Regenerative agriculture folks you've had on. Mike Grace. Which is really crazy when you look into the details of it. Evan Dunphy's the guy I had on. It's like, how do you not cheat? Well, and I think that's a hot topic in that sport right now because they got some technology

that could actually analyze whether your foot was on the ground or not. It turns out they're all cheating. I love the way the hips move. It's crazy. These guys do a 5K race at a sub-6 minute mile. It's just mind-boggling. How do your hips do that?

They do a 50K at a 7 minute mile pace or something like that. It's nuts. The guy who got bronze this year at the Olympics forics for canada evan he's been on the podcast before so got a pretty wide range of of guests um usually i just think of something i'm curious about and then poop a video bring someone yeah right what's a good name to uh search for that uh evan dunphy is d-u-n-f-F-E-E. I'm just so curious how when they trained for this, how this looks in public. Imagine how you're jogging

and he just smokes you. Could you imagine? Think about it this way. Your hips would have to get really strong to swim like that. But the impact is so low, you can pull it up for us. Oh, this is great. I love Andrew's reaction. I mean, it's very disrespectful

why I'm laughing but it just the way they all take off it just and they're off oh god oh god it's a sport though they're walking faster than I run

listen listen listen everybody we can overlay some music on that yeah settle down i'll be the first one to say this is not a sport it's a competition this and bowling are sports okay yeah right wow it's like get the fuck away from me get in position this is not walking He's like, get the fuck away from me. This is not walking. It's like, what? You guys elbow each other in your ultra marathons here and there, bump each other here and there. It happens, but it's not usually intentional.

And it's a little more rare, I would say, because you spread out so much in ultras versus track events and things where you're kind of more congested. I'm sorry. Look at when he of more congested it's great it almost looks like he's like salsa dancing you remember the video i showed you on tiktok of the gay guy who was like talking about the walk okay i'm sorry a gay man said this not a straight man but he was like talking about how like there's a reason why and it's just seeing that i'm just like it reminded you that it reminded you yeah i'm sorry to all the competitive walkers don't cancel us i saw this video and oh my god and a homosexual man said this not me it was just funny

okay i'm done but yeah i mean they're they're it's a skill set obviously it takes a lot of time and energy to to-tune. Yeah, and I mean, a seven-minute pace. I was blown away when I saw the paces, too, because I'm just thinking, like, wow. Well, and I think the interesting thing is, like, you know, we talked about just staying interested in a sport. And, I mean, some people probably think about this with ultramarathoning, too, maybe a little less nowadays. But, I mean, staying excited about a sport that, I mean, the average person is going to have a reaction like you guys did. I mean, you're not out of the norm with that. So to stay motivated for a decade plus to get to the Olympics and that is pretty mind-boggling.

And, yeah, I mean, if you go out to, you could probably, you can make some people look foolish, go out to the local, like, running place and just blast by someone at a seven-minute mile walking and they're sitting there trying to keep up with you. It would be kind of a funny sight to see for sure. Who is a guest you've had on your show that we need to have on here? Oh, that's a good question. I know we've had

some crossover for sure. Have you guys had Mark Bubbs on? No. Mark Bubbs? Mark Bubbs, yeah, he'd be a good one to have on. Oh, is he the Bubbs guy, the collagen guy? Is that him? Oh, no, I don't think so. He's the guy who wrote that book, Peak, that I was talking about.

Oh, cool. Let's see, who would another be a good one? I'm thinking most of the strength guys you've probably already had on. Let me go back and look at the cattle and get back to you on that one, but I'm sure there's some other really good ones that would be a fun chat. I'm trying to think of a good strength guy, but specializes in running. John Jameson would be good for you. Have you ever had him on your show?

No. Yeah, he's like the heart rate variability guy. He's one of the people that made that popular. You mentioned someone earlier, and I was like, I can't remember who it is, but I'll think of it later. Sure. Anyway,

it'd be good to go over some exercises in the gym with you and you know, go over some of that shit and spend the rest of the day with you.

Thank you so much for coming out. We really, really appreciate it. Andrew, want to take us on out of here, buddy?

Absolutely. DrinkLMNT.com slash Power Project. Like I said, if it's, is he going to make it out of here, buddy? Absolutely. DrinkLMNT.com slash PowerProject. Like I said, is he going to make it? Did you make it? What? Did you make it? Oh, my God.

That was a layup, too. God. And that was a full. Just go to the place. I'm going. Okay. Again, if it's good enough for Zach Bitter, you know, it's good enough for you. We praise it all the time.

And it was really cool hearing you talk about it. So we feel like we're not losing our minds for... Just shilling it out there. Well, there's that. But also just like, because we take it and we're like, oh my God, I feel it. Like, is it placebo? Like, no, it's legit. Again, drinkelemente.com slash powerproject.

Links to them down in the description as well as podcast show notes. Please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram at mbpowerproject on TikTok and Twitter. Highly recommend TikTok. That shit's fun watching everybody go bananas over the content that we're putting out. It's a lot of fun. Thank you, Nsema, for hitting the comment section. That's really helpful.

My Instagram and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ. Nsema, where are you at? At NsemaYinYang on Instagram and YouTube. At NsemaYinYang on TikTok and Twitter. Zach, where can people find you? Instagram at Zach Bitter. Twitter at Z Bitter. Facebook at Zach.Bitter.

And I actually just signed up for TikTok this morning when Nseema told me I need to get on there. Let's go. I believe it's just Zach Bitter is the username. Perfect. If there are usernames on TikTok, I assume. I'm very ignorant with TikTok, but I'm going to take the move towards getting used to it. Because I guess it's the next big thing. I got you.

100 miles and running. NWA. Oh, shit. Okay. There you go. That's the name of your new book. I just decided to play it. Hey, thanks again for coming out.

Really appreciate it. Appreciate the shoes that you've been kicking over to us, too. I really enjoy them. They're freaking super comfortable. I got a chubby foot, so my foot fits in there just fine. Thank you so much. And strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength.

I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Catch you guys later.