Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 712 - Nick Bare: The Bodybuilding Ultramarathon Runner That Runners Love To Hate

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Nick Bare is an American fitness instructor, nutritionist, entrepreneur, Ultramarathon Runner and U.S. Army veteran who is now the CEO of Bare Performance Nutrition, Embrace ‘s founder The Suck Training, host of The Bare Performance Podcast and published author of “25 Hours A Day” Follow Nick on IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ Subscribe to Nick's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/barelifenutrition Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% off your first order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ 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 ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #NickBare #MarathonRunner #BPN #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Power Project family, how's it going? Now, we partnered with an amazing brand, Bubz Naturals. We actually have some of the products on the table. They're MCT oil powder, they're collagen protein, and this f***er. Yeah, this f***er. They're apple cider vinegar gummies, okay? One thing I want to let you guys know real quick

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as well as the podcast show notes. God damn. You went, you went how far with 30 to 50 pounds, a hundred miles from, from Austin to Houston. Why? Well, Damn, you went how far with 30 to 50 pounds? 100 miles. From Austin to Houston. Why? Well, we raised money for Hurricane Harvey.

Oh, okay. Well, that's a damn good reason. There you go. There's a good reason. And that was coming like right off of my time in the military. So it was something that was familiar, like just throwing a ruck on and just logging some miles and that quickly transitioned to dropping the ruck and then running faster yeah we have uh some of the guys in here they follow some programming from a guy named josh bryant and josh bryant is a fan of powerlifting he he works with a lot of people in powerlifting in the

strength community but he also is a big fan of conditioning. He's got like some kind of different ways, unconventional ways to condition people. But one of the things he'll have lifters do is just like, you know, walk with a weight vest or sometimes just walk with some weight. And some of our crew is following his programming and they went out the other day and they just were walking with like 30 pounds.

And it's just, the instruction is like, just to pick up 30 pounds of anything. It could be, you know, it could be, it doesn't have to be up 30 pounds of anything it could be you know it could be it doesn't have to be 30 pounds anywhere between 35 and like 45 pounds so it could be a plate it could be a dumbbell um you could put in a backpack you could just carry it whatever way you want and there was probably five or six guys that went on this walk and they walked about a mile they came back and they were shot i mean they're not used to any sort of like conditioning stuff but it's an interesting thing when you propose something to somebody and say hey you know kind of do this whatever way you'd like the point thing the point is it's probably going to

start to suck but i can't imagine going could you could you imagine that 100 miles with like 30 30 pounds on your back that's insane it made me think because we just took a walk around the building the other day, and it was a suggestion from Ryan, but he put a weight vest on and some chains. Okay? So I was just like, let me just put a chain on. We just took a walk around the building, came back. My traps were like, oof, this is nice. 20 pounds. Yeah.

And I mean, it forced me to keep upright, but I imagined doing that for 100 fucking miles. Well, it's all about your setup. hundred fucking miles like well it's all about your setup like if you have something that's pretty much attached to your back and tight those go ruck backpacks that uh like go ruck makes i mean those are those are clutch they're not moving they're not jumbled around it's like in the military when people would get in trouble for the way they pack their ruck so say for example you're told hey we're going on a 20 mile ruck tomorrow morning. If that 50 pounds in your, in your ruck packet, the way you want to pack it. And if you throw just a bunch of bricks or books and stuff in there and you're, you're getting a little shuffle,

that stuff's moving around and it's bouncing up and down. But if you pack it real tight and close to your, to your back, that's high up on your shoulders, it's going to feel comfortable. You're going to move smooth. I would say pack it whatever way you want. Then I'd make each person take someone else's ruck. Did you ever hear the term soup sandwich? I have not. Yeah, so we used to like – our instructors or my boss, my commander, he'd pick up someone's ruck and he'd see socks falling out of it.

He'd see books just flopping all over the place and say, your ruck's a soup sandwich. I love that phrase because it's like if you imagine two pieces of bread trying to hold a can of soup together, it's not going to work out. Bro, there's nothing worse than a soggy sandwich. Yeah, I don't even want to think about it. Gross.

It's gross. I was sitting on the plane getting ready to come over here today and I got this craving for like this artisan bread deli sandwich. So I was searching for like the best bread, artisan bread that you could find for a deli sandwich.

It's a craving I've had recently. How recently? Past two weeks. Have you thought about why? Does this have to do with the baby? You know what? It might. Because you guys are pregnant?

Oh, yeah. I've heard about the woman's cravings transferring over to the male. Yeah, like sympathy pains or sympathy weight, sympathy cravings. Yeah, all that stuff. I mean, he had that. No, I didn't have any.

Well, did I? Didn't you say you had sympathy pain? You pain you did no I have sympathy pains yeah that I experienced once a month yeah that's that fuck that's yeah I'm embarrassed by that thanks for bringing that one back you just care about her a lot that's yeah anytime my wife's period comes around like five to ten days ahead of time I'll start getting headaches I'll start feeling weird and like dude I don't know what's going on. My head's killing me. I can't fucking see.

And she'd just be like, she'll look at her tracker and be like, yeah, well about to start my period in like six days. Yeah. We got to hear it. Andrew's like, I feel bloated.

I don't know if I get through this podcast. My boobs are all sensitive. I don't know what the fuck's going on, guys. I need a might all in a Snickers. My wife's been, uh, she's had aversions to meat.

It's like whenever I'm prepping like ground beef or like making a been, she's had aversions to meat. So whenever I'm prepping ground beef or making a steak, she feels sick. That's been the hardest thing to get through. The meat aversions. That's bad. Bad news. How are you able to keep all this weight on? Because you are still jacked and you're running really far.

You said you ran 100 miles maybe just a couple weeks back? Early February, so it was about eight weeks ago. Are you holding on to all those muscles, mainly just steroids? No. In SEMA? Dog. Hey.

Yeah, is it steroids? I think part of it is it's one genetics. Like if I look at – so if you ever saw my dad, I'll show you a picture of my dad then. My dad has the worst diet in the world uh when we go to dinner he eats pretty much off the kids menu it's like chicken fingers french fries or uh like a burger no vegetables no fruit no nothing and uh he doesn't really lift weights anymore but he does body pump he's really in a body pump is that like a beach body thing it's like instructional fitness and uh

it's you're not using heavy weights or anything my dad is ripped still ripped uh me and my brother just have always been bigger dudes i want to so like funny story last year i did a marathon and uh it was during an iron man prep i was Ironman prep, did a marathon in between there. And I stopped lifting weights for about six months in preparation for this. And I've done about 192 pounds because I wanted to lose size and strength. That's still massive, by the way. And I lost a significant amount of muscle and size.

And I finished the marathon, I ran sub three. But what I found through that journey and that process is when I eliminated strength training, I ran sub three. But what I found through that journey and that process is when I eliminated strength training, I felt like absolute crap when I was just doing endurance training. And it wasn't until I started introducing and incorporating strength training again back into my routine that I started feeling better. So some of the things I started noticing, I talked to Sal DiStefano from Mind Pump about this when he was at BPN.

But I noticed after like four to five months of no strength training and just a lot of zone two aerobic cardiovascular training is that my metabolism started slowing down. So I started gaining some weight. I noticed I started holding weight around like my hips and my stomach. I was talking to my videographer. I was like, do you guys think I'm looking different? I thought I would get really lean and skinny, but I feel like I'm getting just like bottom heavy a little bit. So I could tell my metabolism started changing. I started feeling very tired and fatigued and weak.

And then when I started slowly incorporating strength training again, I started feeling better. How about your joints, by the way? I'm curious. Were you feeling any weird joint pains too when you stopped strength training or no? No. Okay. No, no, no. Nothing with my joints.

I never really had any joint issue. Okay. This is like a, like, why do you think that happened? With, I don't know. Did your videographer say you're nuts or where they were like yeah you look a little softer there they were like yeah you look a little softer i think it was just eliminating strength training i mean before endurance training i was 230 pounds powerlifting and bodybuilding right like you came down almost 40 pounds i lost a lot of weight and i wasn't

incorporating back then i hated cardio cardio for me was like the last thing I wanted to do me and my brother would crush two workouts a day after that last workout we go to in and out we crush two double doubles animal style two orders of fries animal style and then we go to sleep and do the same thing the next day this protocol sounds pretty good and it was familiar it was just building size and strength. And then when I transitioned to endurance training, obviously I cleaned some things up and started losing some weight. But I've always been able to hold on to more size and strength even through this endurance training.

Now one thing I do notice is that when I start incorporating some more speed workouts, like if it's just zone two, easy running for an ultra marathon, it doesn't really affect my weight. But when I start incorporating some speed workouts, some tempo workouts, go to the track and do some, some faster pace stuff, that's when I start losing some more weight. And then for me to go into this next marathon, like right now I'm sitting 200 pounds pretty even in the morning. I'd like to ideally get down to 194, 195 in the next eight weeks. For me to lose that last five pounds, it's actually a pretty big push for me because my body just wants to sit at this weight.

Does the track – you mentioned the track taking off some weight. Does that take off good weight or is that still just chipping away at muscle? A little bit of both. Yeah, a little bit of both. Like I will pull back. I'm doing strength training right now three times a week and I'm not doing anything crazy. That last month before the marathon, I'll probably pull out all strength training just to, cause I'm going for, I'm not going for this marathon just for completion, right? I'm going for a time. I want to run a sub-250 marathon. So my last marathon was 2.56.27, two hours, 56 minutes, 27 seconds.

And now I'm going for a sub-250. It's Buffalo, New York, end of May, which we're going to have to hold about a 6.20 minute per mile pace. And for somebody – so people can have perspective, because a lot of people listening might not be like avid runners. For a guy that's in your weight class or your weight, what are good times? I mean, they say endurance is invisible, right? Like you can look at someone and you can't tell what kind of endurance they have. For my weight, I mean, it can range.

Like my first marathon ever was three hours, 57 minutes. And that was about 225 pounds. My second marathon, four hours, 15 minutes. I got worse. I got 18 minutes worse. And then I slowly started incorporating some actual principles of endurance training. Lost some weight, but I went from 415 to 324 and then 324 to 256. And now I'm trying to go from 256 to 248, 249.

But two minutes when you get down to that low, two minutes is a big jump. And that pacing per mile is like what for that goal you have right now about a six minute 20 second minute per mile pace wouldn't you say like just in general like uh regardless of how far someone's running obviously it matter how um their history of running but somebody that's maybe newer if you're getting you know under even just under like a 10 minute mile you're getting, you know, under, even just under like a 10 minute mile, you're not doing so bad. No, no, I agree.

I mean, I look back at my first marathon and it was a struggle bus. I remember stopping at mile 17, full body cramp up. And this cop walked up to me and he put his hand on my shoulder. He said, son, why are you doing this? Cause I had trapped, my traps were huge. And I was like, I wanted to run a marathon marathon and he just looked at me and shook his head he's like you're not you're not cut for this get out of here he said you're not cut for this pretty much yeah and uh i'd say it's i mean a marathon back then for me was impossible i thought it was the biggest

thing in the world and then i saw some people that were finishing marathons and I said, hold on, that guy ran a marathon? I can do that. I want to challenge myself. And since that moment, it's been, what's the next challenge? What's the next challenge? What's the next challenge? And it's how far can I push it?

And that's what it is. It's one, a personal goal that I'm trying to accomplish. But two, we have this online community that's what it is. It's one, a personal goal that I'm trying to accomplish. But two, we have this online community that's following the journey. And they're learning through the process as we're learning through the process. So it's been very rewarding, not so that we just get to accomplish our goals, but we get to watch people and guide people through their goals as well. That's cool and all. But the only reason why you're on the show today is because you had Matthew McConaughey on your show, and we think that he's handsome, and so that's why we brought

you on here. I knew that would give me wonders. What was the experience like, and how did that whole thing happen? With Matthew McConaughey? Mm-hmm. So my executive assistant at the time, Wyatt, I messaged him one day. I slacked him, and I said, what do we have to do to get Matthew McConaughey on the podcast? And he said,

I'll email him. And I was like, okay, whatever. I just, I, I, I thought he just bullshitting me.

30 minutes later, I get a calendar invite pop up in the right corner of my desktop. It says podcast with Matthew McConaughey and I just yelled over to Wyatt because his office was like right next to mine I said hey you sent a calendar invite for the wrong person I just assumed he made a mistake yeah he goes no that's that's for Matthew McConaughey I said what do you mean it's for Matthew McConaughey he said well I was previously going to work for Matthew McConaughey, so I have his contact. So I emailed him and connected it. That was one of the most nervous times of my life.

Yeah, because now you've got to fucking interview him. I had to pump myself up. I was in the business park of BPN doing circles around the business park just trying to bring my heart rate down because I was so nervous for this conversation. Oh, that's sick. That's awesome. That's a hell of a coincidence, though, that that guy was about to work for him, though. That's crazy. Yeah, I couldn't believe it.

What's his history with fitness? Do you have any idea? Do you get a chance to ask him whether he lifts a lot or whether he runs or he looks jacked he stays in great shape yeah so have you guys read his book no i'm not so in his book he talks about uh he was over in australia uh it was like a exchange program over there and when he was there he was running like six miles a day, and he was on this extreme diet where he was eating essentially like zero calories, like some lettuce, and he was running, and he lost all this weight. And I don't know what he does now in terms of fitness.

Like he's in Austin. I'm right outside of Austin. You don't really ever see him around, but I'm sure he's staying active. He looks pretty fit. He is very involved with Austin FC, which is the soccer team in Austin now that's sponsored by Yeti, which is an epic stadium in Austin. That's awesome. You brought that up, actually. That made me wonder.

You doing all of these miles every single day getting ready for this ultra. What do your calories look like, dude, because, I mean, one would assume you're burning a lot of calories. You're probably eating a lot. But are you eating that much each day to try to maintain your body weight? So we just recorded a video this past week. We posted on YouTube was a full day of eating. And that was about thirty six hundred calories. One thing that I think is misunderstood in terms of endurance training, like we were talking about earlier, about 80% of my training is aerobic.

It's these very easy, slow miles. And then 20% of my training is the speed workout. So every Wednesday I either have a threshold workout, a tempo workout, or a track workout. They rotate. And on these days where I'm just running slow and easy, I'm really not burning that many calories. And the misconception is that we all, as runners, wear these Garmin watches that tell us how many calories we burn from these events. And they're fairly inaccurate. I'm not burning 2,000 calories from a nice easy run. As well as after talking with Sal,

the body tries to become more efficient in terms of training. It is going to slow your metabolism down with cardiovascular training. And I can tell when I was just strength training as opposed to now doing a lot of running, my metabolism was a lot healthier when I was strength training a lot as opposed to where it is now. I could eat a lot more food then as opposed to right now. Let me ask you a question though. When you say your metabolism was healthier, yeah, your metabolism is slower now. But does a fast metabolism, do you think that means it's healthier? Because there could be an argument for if you're fit and your metabolism isn't as fast and you don't need to eat as much food overall to maintain your body, that might actually be a healthier thing than having

to have such a fast metabolism that you have to scarf down a lot of food to maintain that physique. Especially from an evolutionary standpoint. That makes a ton of sense. From that too. But like, you know, like everyone's like, especially within fitness, within the physique and bodybuilding community, everyone's aiming for a faster metabolism, faster metabolism. But having to scarf down so much food, what do you think about that?

Well, I think there's a difference between maybe saying faster and flexible metabolism. So if your metabolism, regardless if it's fast or slow, if it's flexible, is it adaptive to what you're consuming and how you're training? Yeah. And does it change with flexibility with that stimulus that you're providing to it? Mm-hmm. If not, I would say that is an unhealthy metabolism. If it is, I would say that is a fairly accurate healthy metabolism.

Yeah. Actually, okay, I'm curious about this too on the metabolism. Yeah. Actually. Okay. I'm curious about this too, on the metabolism, but do you think that, because there's different ways that people look at like metabolic flexibility, like for you, because you've done so many different types of training, I'd assume that like you, you tracked your calories that day and it was 3,600, but I'd assume that if you were eating like 4,000 or a little bit more in terms of calories, But I'd assume that if you were eating like 4,000 or a little bit more in terms of calories, your body would – you'd have more movement during the day. Like you would adapt to that. Like have you ever tried that to see what happens if you eat more calories? Because I doubt you just gain a bunch of weight.

What do you think about that from your experience? So I really don't track calories at all. I mean I literally for that video just tracked so I could show what we were eating. Um, I have found that with more endurance training, I'm actually not hungrier. I rarely, I rarely ever am hungry when I eat. I eat meals because I know I need nutrition and fuel. Did it start that way? Like when you first started running more, did you notice that you were hungrier or has it been the same the whole time? When I first started running, I mean it's been a while now, but I do remember being hungrier. I would go into meals like starving, ready to eat.

Because that's one of the warning things that people – like I really hate when people deter people from any exercise because any exercise is like that's – to me it's a positive. Like it's great. exercise is like that's to me it's a positive like it's great however what they'll point out with running is that like in the beginning you may not be able to match the amount of running that you're going to be able to do with how much exponentially hungrier you're going to be so if you're running to try to lose weight uh it just it's just probably something just to think about just to know just be conscious of yeah i mean one way I get a lot of calories in is through fat. I love higher fat diets. I was going to ask that.

So eggs, nut butters, lots of red meat. Cholesterol question? Are we going to have to ask a cholesterol question? Do you ever get any blood work done? Yeah, I get blood work done. Cholesterol is fine. Everything looks good. Yeah.

You were about to say something about not better. Yeah, so in Leadville, Colorado, we were at Leadville in August for that 100 mile ultra rail trace. My wife, I came in at

mile 62 and the crew was there at every checkpoint and they asked like what do you want what do you need and i came in we had these little packs of nut butter and uh with the crew kits but i also had this chafe cream called squirrels squirrels nut butter so i came in chafe cream so you have to put that on the inside of your thighs? Exactly. All right, all right.

So two different kinds of nut butter. So I came in at mile 62, and they said, what do you need? I said, nut butter. And in my head, I'm thinking squirrels nut butter for chafing. So my wife hands me this packet of almond butter. And it's in the video. It's in the Leadville doc we produced. I said, no, no, no.

Like other nut butter. So I just take this big scoop of squirrels nut butter and I just throw it down my pants. Wait, you really, you, you did use that and throw it down your pants. Wait, the squirrels nut butter. Squirrels nut butter is made for chafing. So that one's for chafing. It's for chafing. Okay.

Okay. The other is made for consumption. All right. So you, okay, good. I, for a second, I thought you actually, you got the right one in the right spot. I got the right one in the right spot. This brings us, I think this is a great quick, uh, story time for, for, for you to talk to us about your short incident.

Yeah. The incident with your shorts because, um, yeah, you, what are the, what's the brand Silkies? Silkies. So Silkies gave you an issue once, right? Yeah, so I've always been running short shorts are just like

there's nothing better than going out for a run wearing nothing but short shorts. Yeah. No shirt, got like a hat on and you feel light and free. You get whistled at at all? Oh yeah. I figured. Good looking guy. Those legs I figured. Oh, yeah.

Good looking guy. Those legs are unbelievable. They're shaved. They're clean and shaved. Aerodynamic. But I used to always wear silkies, especially coming out of the Army. Like you wear silkies in the Army for a morning PT. And I would sleep in silkies and I would run in silkies.

And this is when I was running like three, four, five miles a day. And there's one day I went down to, it's called Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas. It goes around the Colorado River downtown. It's beautiful. It's a 10-mile loop. So it was a summer day. It might have been like July. And I went for this 10-mile loop.

And towards the end of that 10 mile loop i felt like this uncomfortable sensation in my pants and uh i finished the run and i could just feel like something just was wrong so i pulled like the the waistband of my pants out to look down and you could tell something was, like, dry there and, like, pulled apart. There was a pool of blood. Oh. There was a pool of blood in my pants. And the silkies did me wrong.

Something was wrong with – they weren't silky. And I had to wear a Band-Aid. Where? Where did you wear the Band-Aid, Nick? On the tip of, you know what? Of your penis. I did. God damn it.

For weeks. And that was the last day I wore sulky's on a run. Were you just running too fast? Honestly, I had no clue what happened. I don't know what happened. The thing is, I've never talked to anyone else that has ever experienced this. It might have just been like a flu. Were you running with a boner?

I was going to say. I think I'm like, yeah. What did you have? He's running with some full wood out there. I wonder why he's getting honked at. That makes more sense. Not that I recall. He's got like blood dripping down his leg.

God. God, that's a real run as high though. Just to be running like, hmm, this is kind of uncomfortable. But your dick's bleeding. Did it stick to the silkies? Yes. Yeah. And so when you pulled it down, is that what caused like the, oh God.

Oh, I can't put it nicely. There's already blood. Okay. There's a lot of blood in. I mean, that's the thing with running. There is, there's lots of blood. There's blood, sweat, and tears. I mean, we did see your feet.

Your feet are gnarly right now, brother. This is probably one of the—I actually felt bad because this is one of the worst times my feet have ever looked this way. And, of course, within an hour of being here, my sock's off and it's being filmed. But last night before— Graham is very forward. He won't even like buy you dinner or anything he just gets his hands right in there he was he was squeezing the puss out of my toe i was surprised like is he really gonna do that like is he gonna continue and he just kept

squeezing it it was very uncomfortable he was probably into it that's graham is very interesting yeah well last last night before going to bed, this toenail has been hanging on forever. And so I just held it down and tried to rip it off and it wouldn't come off. So then I went and cut it off with scissors. So part of the toenail was still in there. Part was off. And I mean, I'll even admit, it's disgusting. My toes have been gross, but that's like the worst it's ever been.

Yeah. I feel like such a pussy because I feel like if that happened to me, I wouldn't be running. You'd be like, I'm out. Yeah. We have this really cool – He's got 11 miles to run later today. We have this really cool scene in the dock for Leadville where the guys had it on camera. I come in to a checkpoint, and I take my shoe off, and toenail was hanging off. I just counted to three, one, two, three.

I just held it, and I ripped it off. And I threw the toenail on the ground, put my shoe back on and I kept going. There's some Goggins type shit right here. What's this documentary you're talking about? It's called Leadville 100, More Than the Miles. So it's the 100-mile race we did in Leadville, Colorado this August. And it was, I mean, it was epic. It's 100 miles in the Rocky Mountains it starts

at about 10,000 feet of elevation gets to I want to say like close to 14,000 feet of elevation we had the BPN team out there and it was it was wild the scenery was just insane I'd be down with eating those burgers. I don't know about the running part. So I felt. Is this the toe? Oh, no. That was the one request I had for my brother.

I said, when I come into mile 62, because it's after climbing what's called Hope Pass, which is a big uphill climb and a downhill climb. So I just have a burger ready. So they said he was struggling to get the burgers made while I was gone and get the charcoal lit. So when I came in to grab my burger, it tasted like pure charcoal. So I was afraid. I was like, holy shit, I'm poisoned. My brother poisoned this burger with charcoal. But that was an epic experience. Is it safe to assume that, or maybe I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that you're probably the biggest guy out there doing this, this hundred miler,

or did you see other guys that were like you? No, I was, I was told by multiple people on there that my biceps don't belong on a course like that. Okay. So dude, what,

um, cause you started, I mean, I'm guessing you're running in the military and you ran as an athlete. Then when people, when I started seeing you on YouTube, it was you in the middle at the time you were in the military and you were doing a lot of lifting, you were fucking yoked. Then you switched to running. What made you want to do ultras? Because it's like, cool. All right. You want to do some marathons, some 13, some 26 is dope. You want to run hundreds. Why?

want to do some marathons, some 13s, some 26s, dope. You want to run hundreds. Why? It was like this evolution where it was my first marathon, got a little itch, and I wasn't very happy with that first marathon time. So I wanted to challenge myself again. I did worse because I didn't know how to train. And then I actually trained and did decent. And I said, okay, what's next? Let's sign up for an iron man so i signed up and trained for an iron man and then after that it was another marathon and another triathlon and then what happened was the last couple years i've been putting my name in the lottery system for leadville colorado so the way Leadville, Colorado ultra works is that you can put your name in the lottery and if your lottery ticket is pulled, you get to run it that year.

The couple of years before this past year, my name was just never pulled. So midway during this triathlon prep we were in, I get this email that said you were selected to run Leadville, Colorado. And it's one of those races that if you're selected, you got to do it. It's like a once in a lifetime opportunity. Wow. So went to a training block for that.

Didn't really know what I was getting myself into. And I think the hardest part about Leadville was the elevation. Training in Texas is one thing, but then running 100 miles in the Rocky Mountains above 10,000 feet of elevation, completely different ballpark. Seems very, very dangerous if you're not used to it. I had a lot of trouble breathing. Once we got back

from Hope Pass the second second time which is a big effort it's a big climb it's about mile 62 i started wheezing so my breath sounded like and i just could not get a deep breath and the last 38 miles was like that wow and uh even like the two to three nights after that race was finished i still i couldn't sleep because i couldn't get a deep breath took some time really when we got back to texas is when i could breathe again wow but i had trouble breathing at that altitude it's scary because you're like under normal, like if you sprinted or something like that, you're like, I just need to wait. And then they'll be, you know, I'll be fine. But in that case, the error is like, for lack of a better term, it's thin.

And when you get compromised like that, you're like, am I going to be able to take another breath? Did you get to that point where you're like i you're like i'm not sure if i should keep running yeah we get to this one point because i had you could have pacers so after certain mile marker after after mile 62 someone could tag in and run alongside you on your team so adam clink who is our director of sponsorships and partnerships at BPN, he tagged in and paced me for about 25 miles. And then Michaela Utter tagged in and paced me for like the last 12. And I got to a point with Michaela in that last 12 where I had to take a seat on the ground, and I could not get a breath.

I mean, it was to the point where I felt like I was breathing through a straw. Yeah. And it was almost like I was on the verge of my lungs, just like seizing up and stopping. That was the hardest part about Leadville. But I mean, if you look at the scenery,

it was, I couldn't believe it when I was, when I was doing it. What is some of this for? Cause you are putting yourself in compromising positions you're somebody that's into fitness and you must recognize that uh a lot of these things that you have done and maybe may continue to do they're just not healthy like what you know what what uh possesses you to continue onward and continue to do them that's the thing is like you have to realize and identify that by no means is a 100 mile race building fitness building health if anything it's doing the opposite but for me it's i mean it's

it's why we've taglined go one more that's why it's tattooed my arm like go one more is constantly how far can we push it what are the limits and not necessarily from just a physical perspective but mentally like i interviewed courtney de wal, who is one of the most impressive ultra runners in the world. She's a female ultra runner. And she talks about this pain cave and why she does ultras. And she says with each race she does, her goal is just to dig out her pain cave a little deeper, a little bigger. Because every time you dig out that pain cave a little further, you learn something about yourself.

The amount of things I've learned about myself during a race like Leadville were absolutely amazing. But we titled the video More Than the Miles because what people see is me just in the mountains running 100 miles. But there were 17 members of BPN that were there for the course of that trip. And people don't see the crew that goes from checkpoint to checkpoint, the cameramen that are climbing the mountains with me. I mean, I got to the highest point, Hopass, and coming back over, and I saw Jordan Utter and Tyler McCain, who are two of our videographers, at the top.

I said, how did you guys get up here? They said, we climbed 3,000 feet and three miles to get to the top for this shot. So everyone had a role. And that brought our team together so much tighter. So, I mean, it was emotional. It was an emotional event for everyone. So, I mean, it was emotional. It was an emotional event for everyone.

But it is showing people, the people that follow the brand and our content and the mission of what is possible. Because nothing, like Matthew McConaughey says, nothing is unbelievable. I think it's really fucking cool because when, like, for squatted a thousand or you failed with 1081 right failed with 1085 fell to 1085 but you took power lifting to a certain spot and then you kind of transitioned into doing things more for health but i think that no matter the individual that's starting like if an individual's starting to run maybe them running five miles isn't healthy, but if they push themselves to get there and it was quite hard and maybe they had some little, little pains here and there, the journey to be able to get to being able to do that, they learned a lot about themselves doing that. The same with you with this, um, having the ability to run a 100 miles, you probably learned a lot that's going to stay with you for the rest of your life.

But I wonder, you're about to do this other 100-mile marathon or ultra marathon. And then you mentioned that you're going to transition out of that. Why specifically are you transitioning out? So I did out of ultra marathons. Yeah, because you said you're going to do one more, right? Yeah, so I had Leadville 100, which was this past August. So I did out of ultra marathons. Yeah. Cause you said you're going to do one more, right? Yeah. So I had, I had a Leadville 100, which was past August. I was a hundred miler.

And then I wanted some redemption from that one for a better time. Um, so I did, uh, I did a Rocky raccoon, which is in Texas. Yeah. This past February did that one in 19 hours 13 minutes and then i wanted i knew i knew the baby was coming in july so i sent my wife down i said can i train for one more marathon and we document this journey before this baby girl gets here in july because it's a it's a big undertaking It's not just a training, but we document the whole thing. We make a series out of it.

She said, yeah. So we found one. It was Buffalo-New York Marathon, end of May, which gives us about a five-week buffer before the baby's supposed to get here. Yeah. And for that one, it was I wanted to run sub 250. For that one, it was I wanted to run sub 250. Now, sub three, when I first started running marathons, was unbelievable. Like it was impossible to me.

And then I ran the sub three. So now it's, well, what's next? And I think you guys can relate to this where I don't want to hang my hat on things that I've done in the past and Jesse Itzler says this all the time he says he never talks about the companies he's sold or things he's done in the past the books he's written he talks about what he's doing this year and what he's doing in the future and I really related to that because I don't want to hang my hat on anything I've done in the past but only what I'm doing now and in the future. And in order for me to be proud of the things I'm doing now or in the future, it's got to be more challenging. And that's like Tim Grover, Tim Grover's book, Winning.

He talks about with each other win you go to accomplish, there's going to be more sacrifice involved, but it's going to be more sacrifice involved but it's going to provide more confidence so with each new challenge i select i know i have to sacrifice more but i also know that it provides this new level of confidence so when i finish it it's well fuck now what's next you do a pretty damn good job of like you know there's it's really easy to get trapped in like instant gratification you know of like eating this or doing that and developing some like shitty habits but what i'm recognizing from you all these different things that you say and all these different things that you're doing in building your own company and doing all these things that they're all things that and we were talking about it a lot outside.

We were talking about how long it takes to like build some of these capacities. You know, it may not take that long for somebody who was previously fit to start to run and to build like some level of endurance, but to build the kind of endurance that you're building, you know, I think that I wish people would gravitate and it's not, it's not an easy sell, but I wish they would gravitate more towards the things that take longer, you know, in strength training or in bodybuilding, it takes a long time to build muscle. And even with a training session, there's something called delayed onset muscle soreness. Most people are familiar with that. Well, that's the repair of

the body and that's where the quote unquote, the gains are happening. But most people don't want to take the time. They don't want to have, they don't want to have that time over the course of five years to build their shoulders, build their arms, build their chest. They want the instant gratification, but it seems like in your case, you're more on board with delayed onset gratification. 100%. Rather than just going for that instant. Yeah. I mean, this year marks our 10th year in business for BPN. And I remember when I started the brand in 2012 out of my college apartment, I told my dad, I said, I'm going to make a million dollars this year. And he said, if it were that easy, everyone would do it. I said, I'm going to make a million dollars this year. And he said, if it were that easy, everyone would do it.

I said, I'm going to prove you wrong. And that first year we did 20,000 in revenue. Year two, we did 20,000 in revenue. Year three, we did 20,000 in revenue. I said, shit, this is far from a million dollars. But everything I've applied to BPN is the same thing I apply to business and family. I'm in it for the long term, the long game. The other thing too about like when it comes to business,

people, they'll say things like that or they'll have a goal like that, and those are all always amazing. But what I would say is like especially to people that are newer to business, dude, what is wrong with following your dream and making 20,000, like $20,000 is a nice amount of money. Now, if you're trying to like live on, on just that and have supportive family, then you might have to have it increase year by year. But, um, I have, I have many friends that have these crazy successful businesses, but I have other friends that will come to me and

they're like man it's just not working you know i only make like 60 or 80k a year i'm like yeah but you're one of the happier dudes i know so like it seems like it's going great i do understand like you might want to have depending on where you live and depending on if there's any other income in the household but i don't see anything wrong with having a business or starting something or having an invention or getting a product out there. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with making an amount of money that wouldn't necessarily be associated with, I guess, this real stable career-like atmosphere, which it's cool. But when you're chasing something that you really love, you don't have the rest of that setup to deal with. You're doing things on your terms, your way.

Yeah. And when I said a million dollars, what I thought a million dollars was back then was what I wanted. It was my tag, my visualization of what I was really trying to build. tag my visualization of what I was really trying to build. And what I learned over those 10 years was I wanted to build an impactful business with people that I'm responsible for and building teams. And I think the military experience really refined that for me, being a platoon leader in the army and the infantry and being able to lead people and be responsible for people

and being part to lead people and be responsible for people and being part of their life i learned through that of okay this is what i want to get out of business but when i got started i didn't know what i wanted i knew i wanted to build something and the first attachment that i could identify was what sounds like an accomplishment seven figures million dollars so i've learned over the course of time of what's important, what's impactful, what's really meaningful. And just like anything else in your life that evolves and transitions over time as you grow. And what about someone working for you that is able to pull up in a new vehicle? You know, it's like those things feel amazing.

The actual amount of money that the company generates revenue-wise, that's all great and stuff, but what about the impact you're having? And then what about the impact that you have on your thousands upon thousands of fans? You have really like an amazing fan following. I see like there's – you make a post and there's so much interaction on those posts like people people love you when i tell you when i tell someone that you're coming they're all fired up like people are like can i run with him and stuff and i'm like oh if you can keep up maybe you can try to run with him i don't know we have a ton of discord questions actually too oh that's sick

yeah yeah your fans are fanatical it's pretty cool. You definitely are accomplishing what you set out to do. I had a conversation with my team a few weeks ago about this. It was building a marketing initiative to raise the top line and increase revenue. Talking to the brand director, it was talking back and forth and negotiating on which way to take the campaign and the marketing budget based off of what was going to be more profitable. And sometimes people on the team don't see what's affected from increasing revenue in a business. Because when I see increased in revenue, i see i can hire more employees i can

pay the employees who are working their ass off more we can give bonuses and i don't just look at an employees and employees you have a wife and three kids so as a business owner you might have 27 30 employees but you're responsible for 110 to 130 people. Responsible for their Thanksgiving, their Christmas. Yep. All that shit. So the way you grow that business, everyone thinks as a business owner, you're putting that money in your back pocket. Now, that's going to take care of the people who are working their ass off for you.

to take care of the people who are working their ass off for you. I was really curious because when you were, when you guys were talking about like transitioning, you going from lifting to running, I'm assuming that there were a lot of initial hurdles that you were dealing with, maybe as far as your body, your back. I don't know if you were dealing with any type of pain, but what allowed you to stay consistent with it? Because the constant through line with what we're talking about here with you being in business for

10 years, there are probably multiple times where you're like, fuck it. This is just, I could do something else. But you dealt with that hurdle at the time and you are where you are now. So with running specifically, because it's becoming a very popular thing, we're not very popular, but I'm seeing a lot of more people that are bodybuilders and bigger individuals that are wanting to take up running. What type of hurdles did you deal with at the beginning that people may not know that they may be coming across? And how did you deal with those pain, discomfort, whatever those are? Because those things make people stop trying to get better at running. Well, I remember when we used to run in the military, like we didn't have these fancy Garmin watches.

We wore G-Shock watches. I remember those. So I can't tell you at what pace we ran, how far we ran. We'd come back and our commander would say, how far are you running today? We'd say six miles. I don't know if it was six miles.

I was just throwing numbers out there. So then when I first started training for my first marathon I wore the same watch and to this day I don't know how many miles I logged for that first marathon prep or at what pace I'd go out and say I'm running five miles today but it was just like a number I threw out there I didn't really know

so in the beginning it was finding out that I had to have a plan first I didn to have a plan first. I didn't have a plan for my first marathon, which just led to what was a soup sandwich. It was all over the place. It was me at mile 17 where this cop is patting me on the shoulder saying, you fucked up. So building a plan.

You're like, yeah, you're right, bro. Building a plan was the first thing, but realizing that you got to go into it really slow. So if I look back at my endurance training over the last four or five years, it didn't go from five miles a week of running to 70 miles a week of running in that first year. It took four or five years to slowly ramp up that volume. It took four or five years to slowly ramp up that volume. So it's really easy to look at someone at where they're at in their running career or sport right now or anything in fitness. And like I said earlier, comparison is the thief of joy. You look at someone else who's taking a picture of their watch and posting it on Instagram, and they did 10 miles at 6 a.m. this morning at an 8-minute-per-mile pace.

And you're thinking, I suck. I can't even. this morning at an 8-minute-per-mile pace. And you're thinking, I suck. I can't even do two miles at an 11-minute pace. But everyone's at a different point in that journey. You have to run the mile you're in, right? So for me, it was realizing that you have to slowly build volume over time. And when I say time, I said four to five years at this point where now 70 miles a week is pretty comfortable for me that's manageable but if I would have done that year one 100 I would have been injured I would have been burnt out would have been over trained I probably would have stopped running altogether because I would have said, there's nothing here for me. I'm not enjoying it. Yeah, dude. We were just talking earlier today, um, about how like there, there's this video we watched, but this woman was continuing to say,

oh, 95% of diets fail, 95% of diets fail. She was using that as a, a reasoning for like why people shouldn't be going on diets or people shouldn't be doing that. But one of the reasons why so many diets fail is because people do exactly what you're talking about initially is they take this thing up and they try to lose this amount of weight in this amount of time, not doing something that's sustainable for them for any period of time. So they go too hard. Maybe let's say they do lose 30 pounds, but they did it in a way that was just very difficult. They can't maintain it. They gain all the weight back. They think the diet didn't work and they quit. It's the same idea with your running. If they try to take up a 50 or 30 or 20 mile per week volume and they haven't done that before, they might last a week. They might last two weeks. But by week three, their body's broken down. They're like, running isn't for me. running isn't for me. And with all this fitness stuff that we're talking about, there's so many people that are promoting, Oh, 12 week diets or, uh, 12 week transformations. And that's drilled into people's heads, but that's not how long those types of transformations take, especially

if somebody's starting out and they're overweight or obese, that shit could take multiple years, but you gotta be okay with it taking multiple years. Like when you mentioned this volume took five years for you to build up, somebody hears that're like what the fuck but that could be the same thing for the body and if we want to be able to accomplish what we want to do in the fitness space and helping people got to drill into them that this is something that's going to take years not weeks i think as an adult like you try something new you're probably going to get hurt i don't i don't i'm not trying to be negative and i'm not trying just to stick that in your head but um when you're a child and

you do something and you're doing it with your friends or your parents take you to soccer practice or something like that um you already have a basis of like playing like you're already running around like you're a little kid like when you're seven eight ten years old you a basis of like playing. Like you're already running around. Like you're a little kid. Like when you're 7, 8, 10 years old, a lot of kids, at least when I was growing up, we ran around a lot. So we had a lot of experience. Somebody who's about to go and try running, they may not have run for the last 20 years. Maybe they weren't in the military. Maybe they didn't play football or soccer or basketball. And maybe even when they were young, they didn't play football or soccer or basketball. And maybe even when they

were young, they didn't run much. And then now you're going out and you're expecting so much of yourself. And the way that I like to look at it is look, look, man, any amount of running that you started is, you know, double and triple the amount that you've done probably in your whole life. The amount of running that I've done just because, and I'm somebody that had some sports in the background, but like I never ran very far. I mean, I think I ran, I even ran track and did the 100 meter and stuff like that. And I mean, I recall, I think we ran like two miles would be like the most that I would be required to run.

When I was boxing, I had a coach. He was like, you should be able to run two miles pretty proficiently. So I'd go out and I would do a mile and a half, two miles here and there. But I don't really remember running very far. So as soon as I started running, that's when I hit you up with a message. Like you're most likely going to end up with a lot of lower body injuries, knees, hips, feet. The key is to keep them really minimal and just have low expectations of yourself. I saw you guys made a post the other day. It was recently about microdosing fitness. If you look at a diet or training, like endurance training that way, say I'm going to transition from what my diet is right now to a new healthier diet,

or I'm going to transition from no fitness being sedentary to incorporating fitness. You can microdose these activities into your life to make small changes, which over time compound to make this big impact. So like diet, for example, instead of going from your crappy diet now to full-blown, restricted, no-cheat meals, like hardcore, where your chances of lasting on that are very slim, just make some small changes.

Eliminate some things that aren't the healthiest options and incorporate some things that are healthier same thing for like endurance if you're going from the couch doing nothing to fitness start walking do some some of your 10 minute walks and then do some of the run jogs we talked about where it's okay maybe i'm gonna jog for 10 minutes then walk for five minutes then jog for 10, then walk for five minutes, then jog for 10 minutes, then walk for five minutes. You can even promote active recovery through cycling or swimming, like cross training. Cross training is one of those things that anyone can do. You don't have to.

Just to be a runner doesn't mean you have to run Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday off. It can be run Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It might be a mile or two, and then add some strength training in there, maybe some cycling to promote recovery, some swimming just to move around. Just make these small changes to your life where you slowly add it in and over time, increase the volume of that activity to get better at it. Let's switch gears for a second. And since we're kind of on this topic, I guess it's not really switching gears. Let's talk about the Mathetone method that you were mentioning.

Hopefully I'm saying that right. It was created by a doctor who has a lot of experience with running. He's written like, I think like 30 books on the topic of running. And he talks a lot about, I think you're training at like 80% most of the time, but I'm not really 100% sure. Maybe you can explain it better to us. Yeah, so Maffetone method, this is a formula that I had a coach that had me incorporate to get faster. And the goal is to build your aerobic foundation, your aerobic base, by running below your max aerobic heart rate.

So if you think of your max aerobic heart rate, it is a ceiling. And if you stay below that ceiling, you are building your aerobic systems. So the formula is you take, it's called MAF 180, M-A-F, 180 minus your age. AF, 180 minus your age. So example, if you're a 30 year old male, 180 minus 30 equals 150. That is 150 beats per minute. That 150 beats per minute is your max aerobic heart rate, not your max heart rate, your max aerobic heart rate. So that means when you go to your easy, slow base building miles, your heart rate should be below 150 beats per minute. And like we talked about earlier,

I really don't recommend monitoring your heart rate through your watch because it's fairly inaccurate. So the best way to do it is if you get a, and I wear all Garmin stuff, but if you get like a Garmin chest strap heart rate monitor, it goes around your chest and the sensor goes on the center of your chest and it syncs via Bluetooth to your watch. You can then watch your heart rate in an accurate way real time.

So about 80% of your runs should be aerobic, base building, below your max aerobic heart rate. And then about 20% of your training will be spent at a higher effort, higher heart rate, faster paces. Maybe you're doing some track intervals. You're doing some tempo workouts. That's like you're refining speed work, 80-20 principle. So if I'm out on my Monday morning easy run and the goal is for it to be easy and aerobic, what I would do is I'd sync my Bluetooth heart rate monitor to my watch.

I would put the setting and I'd have my route already preplanned. I put my watch on a setting where I don't see my pace. I don't see distance. And all I see is heart rate. And then I'm running and every two, three, four minutes, I'll just glance at my watch, make sure it's in that range. It's below my max aerobic heart rate.

And I'll finish that run strong. So what it does is you're running slower to actually get faster. But think of your aerobic base as this foundation. And if you apply it to like building a house, you don't want to build a house on top of just dirt. You want to build a house on top of foundation. That foundation is 80% of your training. It's this aerobic base building.

And the houses you put on top of the foundation or the tempo workouts, the track workouts, the speed workouts. That has been the biggest way I've improved my speed and my endurance because there's this gray area. There's this gray area between and it's what's considered a lot of people are messing this up where they're running in their easy runs too hard and they're running their hard runs too easy so if you find yourself in the middle there where you're in between those two thresholds where you're not running easy enough you're not running hard enough most people are doing endurance in that zone right there, which provides very little benefit to either.

It's a dangerous spot to find yourself. And I've been there for a year, and I got no faster, I'll tell you that much. That makes a lot of sense because if you're easy runs, if they're not easy enough, you're not actually getting recovery from those runs. Like those runs are building up volume, but they also have a secondary aspect of allowing you to recover from your hard runs, right? That and it's teaching your body how to use oxygen efficiently as a fuel source. Because what happens, we did this really cool testing in Austin a few weeks ago. It was at this facility called Run Lab and we were testing lactate threshold.

So if I'm going and doing an easy run at a run below my max aerobic heart rate, my body is utilizing oxygen very efficiently. That is the aerobic system. It's just what it's meant to do. And the more aerobic base building easy runs you do, the stronger that system gets, the more efficient it gets. Endurance is all efficiencies, right? Building efficiencies.

As you increase that effort and your paces get faster, what happens is your body isn't able to utilize oxygen as efficiently and it starts building lactate in the blood. So lactic acid starts increasing. There's this threshold that you want to find and we wanted to find for our next marathon where we wanted to find at what pace, what is the fastest pace I can run where my body is accumulating and building lactate in the blood, but it's clearing it efficiently. building lactate in the blood but it's clearing it efficiently once you cross that line where your body can't efficiently clear lactate out of the blood and it keeps building and building and building you're just gonna you get tired yeah you can't run as fast so you want to find that pace of what's the fastest i can run for a prolonged period of time where my body is efficiently clearing blood lactate what's that pace for you sorry i'm just curious uh like 615 620

which was really like really good information for us is because that's the pace we need to use for this next marathon and the reason the pace was there is because of all the slow easy runs i've done the last couple years you look at these two ultra marathons i just ran these 200 mile races all that training was all aerobic base building yeah there was like no speed work in there so it was like i had this engine i've built from just all the miles yeah you know we had chris henshaw here he was talking a lot about this he mentioned it just like he i think he likes apps and he likes the ability to track because it keeps you more honest but also you know he was just kind

of referring to look if you can talk while you're running and have you know speak full sentences um then you're probably in about the right zone does that sound correct yeah if you can if you can hold a conversation with paragraphs pretty comfortably, you're probably in your zone two training. Now, I personally don't wear my – and I get this question all the time. I don't wear my chest strap monitor anymore because I know what that feels like. I know what efforts feel like at this point. Yeah. So I don't have to wear it all the time anymore.

If I really wanted to, just check i could but uh i recommend in the beginning it's it's a good decision is it maybe a little bit like i don't know if you've experimented with nasal breathing but is it a little bit like that like if you can breathe in and out of the nose comfortably you're probably in the right spot or would it be just a little bit harder than that even it'd be a little bit harder than that okay? It'd be a little bit harder than that. Yeah, so I'd say breathing in your nose, out your mouth comfortably. But you don't want to go too slow. You don't want to go too fast. It's just finding that sweet spot.

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and check out enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your entire order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Let's get back to this video. What does your breathing look like when you're running at a decent pace? Because like, are you, I'm assuming you're not exclusively nasal breathing no it's to be honest i have no rhyme or rhythm for the way i'm breathing i just let it happen on its own oh really

yeah okay the same way with your running too right you haven't really like you have i mean i'm sure you studied it a little bit but like you you aren't super meticulous with it you just happen to run a lot better now than you did in the beginning, probably a lot through trial and error. Yeah, I think there's definitely cues that you can look out for and keep in mind and be conscious of in terms of running or breathing. What I've kind of applied is that I think my body will become a more efficient machine the longer I do something. And it just finds its rhyme rhythm on its own. I've tried to self-correct certain things. And when I self-correct one thing, then I'm trying to address another thing.

And I found that if you look at my run form now compared to three years ago, it's night and day just because my body has become more efficient. And along with that, since we're kind of talking form here, as far as the way your feet strike the ground when you run, there's a lot of different parties when it comes – especially when it comes to different types of marathons. Ultra marathons, they seem to be more okay with a heel to – I don't know. What's the – Yeah, like a roll of the foot. A roll. And then other like 26s or 13s,

they're like more on the ball of your foot, depending on your pace. Do you fall on any end of that spectrum or did you just let your body fall into it? What do you think? Yeah, I just let my body fall into it. I think it's one of those things that everyone has a different opinion on.

And we had this really cool run coach come out to our facility about two years ago yeah her instagram is run rx and she has some really good instructional stuff for for run forms and efficiencies and she worked with us a lot in terms of of improving your run form but one of the things she she said that i'll never forget is you should never think of your running as a strike and you hear of heel strike uh forefront strike yeah and she said if you're striking something it's yeah it's it's a quick jab so she kind of

refers to it as she shows you how to run in place on the balls of your feet and to move forward you just lean into it and when you lean into it your body will naturally through gravity move a certain direction

so she said when she ran her first marathon at the end of it her legs weren't even tired because she wasn't striking. She was pulling. She pulls her leg up with almost her hamstring and her glute. She was pulling and falling. Doesn't Weck talk about that? Yeah, and you're just springy, right?

I mean the ankle and the foot of the human body is an amazing thing, and it's like a spring. And if you're running in the way that you're referencing, you get to take advantage of that. You're just trying to be kind of light on your feet, and you don't have to. I've noticed for myself personally, like, I don't have to concentrate on a whole lot. I mean, I could be in the middle of a run, and I could say, oh, you know, it'd probably be good if we just tilt forward a little bit. Like I can feel certain things now. I might notice, oh, you're not really moving your knees hardly at all. Like bring those up a bit. I can notice some of that stuff, but as I've been running more, it seems to just be naturally getting a little bit better. And keep in mind too, we're mainly talking about like uh jogging and running

sprinting is a completely different animal in my opinion i heard someone explain it the other day as if you want to run faster move quicker don't move harder so what happens when you try to run harder is you're going to overstride you're going to strike you're going to overstretch but if you want to move quicker just move your feet faster because i used to always say it's a lot more complicated than just telling someone to run faster but if you think about it you just move your feet a little quicker rather than trying to run harder. It makes sense. What you were pointing out about the style of training that you utilize where you're running slow to run faster. Again, when we had Chris Henshaw on the show, he talked about Jason Kalipa.

And Jason Kalipa is just an absolute monster athlete in just about anything that the guy does. And he just was able to run pretty fast but he just wasn't able to he couldn't figure out how to sustain that speed and chris henshaw asked him he's like well i don't know like how long does it take you to do like a 400 or something like that and jason's like i don't know like 40 uh yeah one lap around the track sorry um jason's like I don't know, like four, uh, yeah. One lap around the track. Sorry. Um, Jason's like, I don't know, like 45 seconds or something. And this whole point was like, speed was not an issue for Jason Kalipa. It was being able to hold onto it and maintain it. So you can think about anybody that possesses the ability to run. They could certainly run faster if it's in a shorter, it's a, if it's a shorter distance. So then trying to figure out how do I

run pretty fast, even half that speed for a long distance, well, we're going to have to have some, we're going to have to have something that we can progress over time that is not going to be devastating to recover from. And it ends up being a lot of the same things that we end up finding out in the gym. You know, you, you, if you want to, so many times people ask me about getting a stronger bench and when they're pretty vague about it, um, I can't really help them identify exactly what the issue may be, but more often than not, the answer is to reduce the weight. And what should I, what should I do to increase my squat? What should I do to increase my deadlift? The answer is the same for all three of those lifts.

Decrease the weight, get the repetitions, and do them correctly. Do five sets of five and do all five sets and all five reps. All 25 reps should look very similar. They really shouldn't be broken. They shouldn't look like crap. And if you think about your running, if you're trying to increase your running, well, if we run it a nice, good, smooth clip and there's no decline, you're not starting out at a six-minute mile pace and then all of a sudden tanking and just crumbling and turning

into a soup sandwich, then you're probably going about doing it the right way. into a soup sandwich, then you're probably going about doing it the right way. You're working two different systems there. You're working the aerobic system, cardiovascular system, and the muscular system. One's going to give out. Say, for example, you're doing a 400 and you're all out sprint and you can't hold that. Your cardiovascular system, your aerobic system isn't efficient enough to hold that. Same goes the other way possibly.

So it's finding that combination of building muscular endurance as well as aerobic cardiovascular endurance. What is this doing for your brain? A lot. Because there's a runner's high, right? That's what they say. Because there's a runner's high, right? That's what they say. It took me years to feel like this high.

Wow. I made a post on Instagram today, actually, talking about solitude. Because everyone that tries running after they see me talk about it says you're full of shit. What's that word mean? Solitude. It's having – to me, it's having these deep internal thoughts where there's no distractions. You can navigate issues in your life. You can reach depths of issues you're having or find solutions. And for me, it's like, you know, for solitude, for some people might be meditation. For me, it's, I wake up at

5am. I have my morning routine by 545 running shoes are on, I'm running out the door, and I'm logging miles. And it's dark. It is the same route every morning. I see maybe two people, one dog. I have that route dialed in. And by mile three, I forget I'm running anymore. And any issue that is occurring in my life, any problem, It's going to find me during that run. And I'm going to navigate it. To the depths of wherever I need to take it.

Like I talked about earlier with you guys. The book Deep Work. By Cal Newport. I love it. And when I was reading it. It made me realize the parallels. Between what deep work is intended to be and how running provides that for me. In the beginning, I didn't find that at all.

It was survival. It was a sufferfest. That's what running was. Sufferfest. The pure sufferfest. And then slowly, I started getting some mental clarity out of it. And I talked about – I started getting emotional on mental clarity out of it. And I talked about, I started getting emotional on some of these runs.

I'd be running. I'd be thinking about my life or my wife. And now the baby on the way, I think about the baby all the time. My morning runs and the father I want to be. And it's just this moment of clarity where there's no phone, there's no emails. It seems like the world is asleep still. It's dark and I can just navigate any issue I have in my life.

That's where I think of my best business ideas, marketing campaigns, what I'm going to do next, who I need to hire, who I need to fire. Anything in terms of business and life. For me now, my morning run is not a physical gain. It is a mental gain for sure. What happens when you are hit by one of those ideas? You record it on your phone or you stop for a second or how do you handle it? I repeat it in my head until I finish the run.

There's multiple ideas. You just go going back and forth between all of them now i want to let that one pop up so like say for example if there's something that pops up at mile two of a 10 mile run and if it's really important i will repeat it for the remainder of that run until i get home and i write it in my notes. But typically what happens is it pops in my head. If you think of it in terms of like my head is a cornfield. My head is a cornfield and during this run, what I'm doing is carving out this maze in this cornfield.

And at the end of that run, I might get half of that maze completed. And then I go inside, I make breakfast. I don't think about it again. I go to work. The next morning when I start running again, I don't try to do this. It just happens. I pick up where I left off

and I keep carving out that cornfield. And after a few days, maybe a few weeks, I build it the way I want to build it. And now I can navigate it and go find the solutions in that, that maze. And that's the only way to describe the way it feels on these morning runs. I've had dreams like that before that were like to be continued. And I started right where they,

they ended. And the thing is, if it's a big problem, it won't go away in my morning runs until I take care of it. Dude. And also, I don't think you've mentioned this, but you don't listen to music. I don't. So you're just out there. Yeah. there yeah what i found with music is that it will i mean it works really well if you choose a playlist or a set of songs that have the same beats per minute that you're trying to match when

you run so that's what i used to do is i go on spotify and they have running playlists on spotify like 145 to 150 beats per minute and i'd go go find that playlist and I'd play it so that you can run to the beat. But what also happens if you get a really jacked up song that you love and you're singing and you start moving faster, it throws your heart rate out. And I mean occasionally I'll listen to music. One of the most emotional runs I've had in a long time, we were in Michigan for the holidays. It's where my wife's family lives.

And we were up at their cottage house, which is on a lake. And it had a bunch of snow the days leading up. And I went for a 10 mile run in these back trails in the snow. It was epic. It was all like white. And it looked like it was out of a scene of a movie and i was listening to music during this it was just like acoustic emo music like old music from the 2000s whoa yeah and uh i'm just running through the woods listening to

music and just tears started just like flying down my my face and i finished that run thinking that was epic that was epic. That was one of the most epic runs I've had in a long, long time. Is there something in particular that you mind sharing that hit you or you just got emotional? Just got emotional. Just thinking about like life and then sometimes I think about my mom. On those runs, my mom passed away from cancer in 2019. And, uh, I was thinking about her and life and where life would be with her. And she always pops in my head during these runs.

So that's most of it. A lot of times for me, it's just things I'm, yeah. Things I'm grateful for. Probably grateful for the times you had with her, stuff like that. Right. Yeah. Curious with the both of you guys guys since you guys both run now and you get that time of solitude when you were lifting did you like when lifting was your focus five

years ago did you have time that you would carve out that like could be the same effect that you get from running nowadays or did you have anything like that same with you um or did you have to deliberately go and meditate or deliberately go somewhere and think or did you have to deliberately go and meditate or deliberately go somewhere and think or did you not really do that i did i really don't don't get it anymore and here's why i'd say that happens is i used to get that when i was lifting and bodybuilding when i was trying to achieve a certain goal and I think that's probably why now I choose these races to train for. Is if I would set aside 12 to 16 weeks to do a cut or did a bodybuilding show in college or, you know, I wanted to lose weight and reach a certain goal. I would always go all in on that goal.

I would always go all in on that goal. So there'd be evenings where I'd be doing cardio on the Stairmaster or hitting arms and be listening to music. And I'd get that same solitude where it was like the best feeling in the entire world. That was a very similar feeling then to what I get now in these preps because I like having some sort of goal to train for. I always have and I think I always will, but they are very similar feelings based off of what I was training for. Different styles of training, but very similar feelings. How about you?

Yeah, I think for me, I would get some degree of that with lifting, but that part started to go away when i started to like get more and more into power lifting because then it's like i don't know it's just uh it's a different spot you know when you become proficient at it and you you know get to a certain level um but when it came because sometimes some of it's just like i have these goals and now there's like these other things that I kind of have to do. And I've been lifting for so long that it was like – it was a little bit annoying after doing like a big squat like to have to do the glute ham raise and have to do – but it's like, no, you said that you want to be great at this. So you go fucking do it and shut up about it. But where I would get that was from walking ever since I started walking a long time ago. And even journaling to a certain extent. Journaling for me, like journaling or listening to some music, just personal development, just growing. Like

when, I don't know about you guys, but like sometimes when you hear something, like I listen to a lot of podcasts or I listen to a lot of YouTube videos, and when you hear something and it strikes a chord with you, you almost like feel your body growing from it. You're like, holy fuck, I never saw that perspective before. And it gets you so fired up. very similar to because the way that i'm feeling sometimes when i'm running especially when you get kind of into running and you get over the hump and you can kind of modulate how fast or slow you want to go you can calm yourself down you can gain a little bit more control of your breathing and things like that so yeah just even journaling and just like seeking out just trying to be better at stuff i think it's a one thing I've realized and learned this past year

is there are certain things, there are certain people who are going to fuel you with energy and there's people that are going to, people or things that are going to suck energy out of you. Okay. And there was like one dinner in particular that I had this past year.

Christian Huff and Sadie Robertson were in town visiting us. And it was them two, me and my wife, and then Adam Klink, who works with us, and his wife. And we were at this dinner at this place called Lonesome Dove, downtown Austin. Amazing place to eat dinner if you're ever in Austin. And they were just like really amazing people who like filled this conversation was like you know you go to dinner and it's all surface level conversation you're talking about bullshit and anything that anyone can bring up you're like i just want to get out of here this was one of those conversations that we were all so engaged you didn't want it to end.

It was actually deep, meaningful, impactful conversations. And I left that dinner and I told my wife, I said, I only want to go to these type of dinners anymore. These are the people that I want to be around because I'm being filled and fueled and I leave with more energy rather than sometimes I go to a dinner and I'm just like sucked away and it makes you take inventory of your life and who you're surrounding yourself

with and what you're consuming or what you're creating and you have the choice you have the choice of are you consuming and surrounding yourself with things that fuel or suck away and that's been one of my big focuses this past year in terms of anything I decided to do in my life, in terms of training or business or people. We all have the choice. Growth is a choice. We have to continuously wake up and decide and choose to grow.

And if we don't, we sustain and die. How did you take action on that after that dinner? Like, because what you said, like, I, I, I don't know, I guess when it comes to, I'm very careful about the people I keep around me because I know how much they can influence me, even if I don't talk to them often. But after you came to that realization after that, what did you do? Did you literally take inventory on the people that were close in your circle that worked for you, et cetera? Like, did you take some action upon that or are you just more mindful of that? And now you pay attention to if these people take energy away from you or if they add to you. away from you or if they add to you?

I'd say more mindful of learning how to say no more often. Okay. And it's taken me a long time to learn how to say no and become better at saying no because I used to always say yes to – because everything was an opportunity. I was always saying yes to what I thought was everything was an opportunity. Because everything was an opportunity. I was always saying yes to what I thought was everything was an opportunity. And after getting burned multiple times or wasting time and realize, what am I doing? Is this really the right thing?

Am I surrounding myself with the right people? You learn how to say no a little bit better. But after that dinner, I was very conscious of if I'm going to spend my time doing something, my time, money time money energy resources with someone or on something i have to be all in on that thing and it's just being more conscious of that i've said a note a lot more things that have allowed me to focus on things that actually matter or things that i actually want to do now yeah and you say yes to certain things and then you blame those people and it's like well i just i just shouldn't spend that amount of time with them that's you know what i mean like it's you're right it's a choice and sometimes we make a choice to uh get involved in something that we're

like ah fuck i did it again i messed up again well i remember sitting in college and I think it was like economics class and hearing the term opportunity cost for the first time in my life. And I mean I'll never forget where I was sitting, what the instructor looked like, what the classroom looked like when I heard opportunity cost for the first time. And it just stuck. I was thinking it's just going to apply to economics. It applies to every part of your life. You only get to choose so many opportunities. And when you choose one, you sacrifice a whole lot of other ones. So you better choose wisely.

And I'm very conscious now of what opportunities I choose to do because of the sacrifices I'm possibly missing out on. I want to ask you something because I think you, you, you, I know you have, you'd have really good insight into this. I totally understand what you get by saying no to more things now. I just also think that there might be a difference because of where you are. 100%. You know where I'm going with this. Let's say a younger person trying to get opportunities and there's a lot of things that could be coming your way. How would you help them figure out the thought process in terms of knowing when to say no? Because there could be the thing that you say no to and that could have been the thing that really ended up being the thing that got you to where you want to go but you said no to it., what both of you guys actually, what would the thought process be for an individual in that type of situation? I mean, in the beginning I said yes to just about everything because I didn't want to miss an

opportunity. I was, I was trying to learn. I was trying to soak up as much as possible. Like when I got stationed in South Korea for nine months in 2016, my goal when I got there was I'm going to learn at least one new thing every day. I'm either going to teach myself or I'm going to learn from someone. And a lot of times when I was learning from someone is because I said yes to an opportunity that popped up. If I wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't have learned a lot of things. popped up. If I wanted to have done that, I wouldn't have learned a lot of things. And then slowly over time, I was able to say no to a few things, then more things and more things because where I spent my time had a bigger return or larger return. In the beginning, where I spent my time had maybe a very little return, if not a return at all. So you realize over time, where is that time best spent?

And in the beginning, how do you decide, well, does it fit my morals, my ethics? Do I think it's going to help me? And then, yeah, probably say yes. But you have to go through that experience to really find out what's a yes and what's a no. What do you think? Yeah, no, I agree with all that.

It gets to be really hard to navigate that, you know, because you don't want to, you know, you don't want to like, you don't want to just treat the people well that can advance you. You know, that's an ugly spot to be in. You don't want to end up kind of well that can advance you. That's an ugly spot to be in. You don't want to end up kind of being like a social climber in a way. But when someone has their shit together and they have a nice home and they got some nice cars and they have some – you're trying to advance your life. You're trying to advance your life. You're trying to continue to improve. And those kinds of people, a lot of times, those are the kind of people that you want to surround yourself with. So it can be hard though because you have friends.

You have family. You have some people that kind of – they don't have that same goal. And so sometimes it can be difficult. You don't want to just say no because it's not going to advance you. Like that gets to be a weird spot has been my experience. I guess put in not such a nice way, I just probably would choose not to hang out with anybody. If I was basing it only on that, you know what I mean? I would just probably just chill at my house.

I'm too rich for y'all. Something like that. How the fuck would you? I just mean I would have to go out of my way. Yeah. But that's what I love about the podcast is bringing in people like yourself. All of us are like-minded we all are working as we're it feels like as hard as we can uh every day to make improvements once i go outside of here i'm like hmm like i you know

what i mean like i'd i'd rather just not hang out with most people so and i didn't mean everybody i didn't mean everybody in this room we haven't hung out in a long time just snip that part of the podcast and make it a clip yeah and then just title it mark's too wealthy for all of you i'm fucking with you you know i thought you'd be all right you guys want to take some questions from discord what do you got andrew you got something brewing over there yeah Yeah, well, okay. You got to have a question yourself. Go for it. Before we get to Discord, though, in regards to because like what Mark was saying, you know, when you first start something, as you get a little bit older, you might get hurt, right? So if I wanted to take up running and I wanted to progress in it, how do I not progress too slow?

How do I not push myself enough? You know, like if I go out and like, all right, I'm going to run quarter of this lap and like, good job, Andrew, you crushed it today. And then I walk the 75% of it and I go home.

I mean, I don't know why I'm not getting any better. Like, how do you progress this fight for just a simple person trying to get in shape or maybe like myself just trying to pick up running? How do I know how, how fast to push and how hard to push in the very beginning you just gotta apply some common sense to it a little

bit where it's apply pressure apply a stimulus to where you don't feel like you're overdoing it but i mean if i was getting started I wouldn't want to go into a workout and think, man, I could have done that three more times. I'm going to go home and treat myself. It's kind of, okay, where do I feel like I've gotten a little bit better today and I've pushed, but to a point where I can still come back tomorrow

and push a little bit more where you're not destroying yourself. My current coach right now, Jeff Cunningham, he says this thing, it's better to be occasionally good. No, sorry. It's better to be consistently good rather than occasionally great so he says he has some athletes sometimes who will come out

and they want to impress everyone out on the track so they will go all out they will have blood squirting out of their eyeballs just to be number one on that track workout for the day but then they can't show up for the next seven days for the easy runs because then they can't show up for the next seven days

for the easy runs because they've destroyed themselves for that workout. You know what I'm thinking about right now. Well, I'm thinking about what Mark had said. I think he called them like practice squad MVPs or something like that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Practice all Americans.

Practice all Americans. Yeah, like dudes in football, they would line up, the defender would line up right in the spot that they knew you were running the ball because they know the whole offense. It's like, dude, get the fuck out of the way. You wouldn't start. You don't normally line up there. That's not your normal position.

And they're already halfway cheating it, and you're like, dude, come on. What are you doing? Get out of here. It's also reminiscent of just people in the gym, man. Oh, gotcha. What are you doing? Get out of here. It's also reminiscent of just like people in the gym, man. Oh, gotcha. Yeah. People that be doing like these crazy lifts in the gym for the gram, but then they're too fucked up or they injure themselves trying to do something they should have.

They should have been constantly testing their strength and not allowing themselves to grow too, right? It's like, fuck, you could be so much stronger if you stopped doing that bullshit. I mean, the truth is like consistency is not sexy and it never will be. It's like that's what's the issue with the stuff on Instagram with these like these massive like viral workout videos is that is the sexy stuff that people want to see. But no one wants to watch someone. I guess they watch me, but most people don't want to watch someone just go run 10 miles easy every morning because it's not sexy. But I think we're making our way to where people are finding consistency sexy again.

Why are you the most hated man in running? I think because – I won't say I'm the most hated guy in running. We had a conversation earlier, but for some reason runners don't like you. I think it's because you look like a skinny bitch. Oh! Take that. Oops. I think one, it's, I don't look like your typical runner.

I think I'm slowly starting to look more like your typical runner, but when I first started, I wasn't. Hell no. And I think another part is because I announced my goals publicly of what I'm going to train for, whether I achieve them or not, I make it publicly known that this is what I'm trying to do. And this is the journey I'm going to document. And that makes some people uncomfortable. So like when I announced that I was doing – I was going to train for this sub-three-hour marathon last year, there's like this forum called Let's Run. I never went on it because I didn't want to let myself go see it but apparently there were like all these threads on there and um i was

getting dms from people saying you will never you will never do this and these are people in the running community yeah okay so it's uh and there's people coming after it that one, I didn't look like the runner and two, I was announcing because sub three is a respectable time and people didn't want me to do it. So then when I did it, obviously everyone said he cheated. Look at the shoes he's wearing.

It's because of all those steroids he's using. There you go. It was all this cheating stuff. It was wild. But I think it's part of it. And I used to really let that stuff bother me. You know, because when you start creating content online, you want people to like you and respect you and trust you.

And I remember the first time I ever put content out online. It was 2012. It was in my college dorm room. And it was when the bodybuilding.com forums were popular. So I said, I'm going to help people. I had this pre-workout meal that I used to have every day in college before I work out. I was like, I'm going to share this with the world because it'll help people. So I went and I made this thread on bodybuilding.com forum. And I shared the best pre-workout meal that you need to try. my workout i was like i'm gonna share this for the world because it'll help people so i went i

made this thread on bodybuilding.com forum and i shared like best pre-workout meal that you need to try i listed all the ingredients the macros and i came back from class later that day thinking it was going to be like all these people praising me for it and it was all this shit everyone's telling me how stupid i was for this meal and how it was horrible. And that was my first exposure to, man, like people really didn't like that. And then when you start creating more content, you realize there's a lot of pushback. There's a lot of negativity where now I don't expose myself to it anymore. I don't, I don't read comments. Um, I just don't't i don't read it because it will whether i want to or not it will affect me you know and the way i create and the way i build my business what's some so if somebody

is following you for running like running is the sexy stuff what's the unsexy stuff about running that you have to do that people don't want to talk about or maybe don't want to share just the slow easy runs you're doing every single day i mean that's one of them is a lot of the workouts we showcase in the marathon prep are the track workouts the tempo workouts the big marathon prep workouts like the big 20 22 mile workouts those Those are fun. Those are hard, but it's not really cool to watch someone run 11 miles easy and slow. Right. Um, or just like people want to see diet all the time. My diet really doesn't change. Like it is very regimen and routine.

It's pretty much the same thing every single day. It doesn't change too much other than dinner based off my wife is craving that evening and pregnancy cravings um but it's just it's just that it's consistency i mean i can say in a humble way that i am a very consistent person in terms of training business showing up and doing the non-sexy stuff over and over again because that is where i see the return and i'm okay with that i personally have one more question and then if you guys have any others cool but the discord had quite a few good ones i personally have one more um i've gotten to a spot by tracking for years to be in a place for the past, like, I don't know, five or five years where I don't track anything anymore.

I'm able to maintain my body composition. Mark also doesn't track anything either. So I'm curious for yourself. You did that one day where you tracked and you're at 3,600 calories, but you don't track. What do you think allowed you to get to a place where you can maintain your nutrition and power call, you can maintain your athletic ability outside without having to track your macros every single day? You're pretty much intuitive at this point. People are going to call it intuitive eating.

Yeah. How did you get here? Well, I had a severe eating disorder when I was younger. When I was 14 in middle school I was hospitalized for it so I went on for months and it got to the point where my parents saw me losing weight so they were pulling me out of school on a weekly basis to go get all these tests done in the hospital that's when we were in Pennsylvania still I knew what I was doing to myself. I knew I was starving myself.

And I don't know, to this day, I can't tell you why. It was more so I was attracted to the control that I had on my life at that moment. So doctors thought I had like a stomach bug, a worm at one point. They thought I had all these different diseases. I was going in and out of tests nonstop. And I finally got to a point where I was playing baseball that year. And one Saturday morning, I couldn't get out of bed to go to the game because I was so physically fatigued. I mean, hair was like straw. It was brittle. You could see all my bones, super thin, super weak and fatigued. And one of the last tests we did was I went in.

They were going to see how my stomach was performing. So they put a camera down my throat. And what they saw was the food from two days prior was still in my stomach. So all my organs were starting to shut down and it got pretty severe. So one day, and this is kind of how I came out of it. One day, my parents, my mom picked me up at school. She said, we're going for another appointment. I saw we pulled into the hospital, but instead of turning left, like we normally did, we

turned right into a new section and it was like these outpatient clinics and we pulled up and it said eating disorder clinic and I was like oh shit like they know so they took me upstairs and doctor confronted me and I started bawling crying just because I was I was caught found out. I remember coming back that day, back to the house, and I realized I had to start eating more because if I didn't, who knows what was going to happen to me.

Not just die, but I didn't want to get sent off to some medical school or anywhere. So I remember going to the cupboard and I pulled out a box of pop tarts and I remember looking at the box of pop tarts and it said 400 calories for two pop tarts. And I was like,

holy shit, this is probably more calories than I've been consuming on a daily basis. So I forced myself to eat these two pop tarts and felt extremely guilty. And it was just slowly months and months and months of recovery to find me it was probably over two years till i finally get to a point where i was healthy again i had a healthier relationship with food and then i went to college everything was good i was fine i was studying nutrition i wasn't tracking anything but then i decided to do a bodybuilding competition my junior year of college. And I started tracking macros then. This is when I first started tracking macros.

If It Fits Your Macros was really big, flexible dieting. And that triggered these unhealthy relationships with food again. Super controlling. Like if I had to eat 400 grams of carbs that day, it couldn't be 399, it couldn 401 had to be 400 so i realized how controlling that could be and for years after that like years i would track my macros every single day and had to be spot on super controlled and i realized what it was doing to me so i slowly stopped tracking macros and over time built these healthy relationships with food back into my life which now i have you know no issues with but there's also always that concern of if i go back to tracking will that come back you think it could i think it could because i mean

when i go in on something when i go go all in, I am all in. And if I tell myself I'm going to track my calories and I'm not going to miss a macro by a gram, I will get very controlling with it. I will get very consistent with it. So part of me doesn't track because I know the possibility of an unhealthy relationship with food. And I really like my relationship with food right now and another reason is just I like the same foods I don't want to take my phone out every time I want to eat something and track it and I'm very conscious now at the end of the day did I have enough of carbs I have enough of fat did I have enough of carbs? Did I have enough of fat? Did I have enough of protein? If my diet was not on routine like it normally is. Were you throwing food up? in school for lunch the progression of it where I decided I wanted to start losing weight so my lunch was a bottle of water an orange a bag of chips and a turkey sandwich and then I eliminated

the bag of chips and then I eliminated the orange and it was just a water in the turkey sandwich and then I would eat half the bread on the turkey sandwich and then get to the point where it was just water and the turkey that's one of the things I can remember sandwich. And then it got to the point where it was just water and the turkey. That's one of the things I can remember. And then I remember going back to class after lunch and I would always be checking my hip bones. If I could feel my hip bones and my stomach was flat, that was a good day for me. And if I went to bed starving, that was a good day for me.

But I always remember I would grab my hip bones. But what that taught me was I can quickly identify people with eating disorders now, very, very quickly, just in a social setting or things that they're doing or how they treat food. And I talked about this on my podcast and on social media and the responses has been amazing over the past couple years of how many people are actively going through an eating disorder or trying to recover from one i was mind blown by it do you think um that were you trying to get attention you think or something at that age? Or was it just purely like you just thought like this is a better way to have a better body? It wasn't even – it's hard to explain because I had no issues with my body.

I didn't want more attention. I just liked having control over something and I found that I could control it and I became obsessed with it. Go ahead. That's the only way obsessed with it. Go ahead. That's the only way to describe it. Well, I'm also curious because like I've seen this, especially within bodybuilding, physique, sports, bikini, et cetera. Because when people take on tracking, it can be very beneficial. Like I tracked for years when I was competing and even after that, because it did give me

control and gave me an understanding of how much to intake. But I never let it get so far that I would really be starving myself or having any type of disordered eating. But for individuals, number one, from the experiences that you have and the conversations you've had with people that have been talking to you and reporting to you, like for you to be able to tell who has an eating disorder just by some conversation, that in and of itself is something that I think a lot of individuals within fitness that are coaches, that's a good thing to understand. Especially because if they're going to coach these type of athletes, a lot of their athletes might have eating disorders and masking it by competing in bodybuilding or competing in these sports. it by competing in bodybuilding or competing in these sports. So I guess my first question is, if somebody is maybe, how can somebody tell if they actually have a disorder? Because they can make excuses for their actions. How can they tell? And then secondly, how did you,

well, I guess let's just start there. How can somebody tell if they have disordered eating, but they're masking it with tracking and being exact, all that type of stuff? Yeah, I mean I guess some of the things I've seen is one, avoiding social situations where there's food. So back when I was younger, if I knew there was a social situation where there was going to be food and I was going to be pressured to eat, I would avoid it at all costs. Or I'm a very observant person. Like in any room I'm in, I'm just like observant of what people are doing or moving. So if you're out to eat with someone, for example, and they're like moving their food like to spread it spread it on the plate to make it look like they ate it but they really didn't or um say for example

you're the group of friends and it's like team lunch and everyone knows it's team lunch that day everyone knows team lunch every wednesday and and every Wednesday they bring their own food and they refuse to eat the food that's there no matter what it is because they want to hit their calories which is nothing wrong with that but if it gets to a point where they're actively refusing to eat anything else other than what has been tracked and measured and scaled and accounted for in my fitness pal then it slowly becomes an issue like i remember this one time there's all these stories i have from back then where i prepped this meal and i weighed everything out and i input it into my fitness pal already and i I ate half the meal.

So as I'm walking with this plate, I tripped and I dropped the other half of it on the ground. And because I already tracked it, I made sure to pick up every little piece of food in the bowl and consume it because I didn't want to start over again. That's like an obsessive controlling controlling, disordered eating. So, I mean, it's hard like right now identify what to look out for. But I can just pick up on it with some people. Yeah. And it's, I think it's out there more than people think and especially in the fitness space. Absolutely in the fitness space.

Yeah. Oh, then I have this question too. Now that you don't track, we talk a lot on the show about just like habits that you can use just outside of tracking. Certain lifestyle habits that are just going to make it easier for you to lose body fat or maintain your body composition. for you to lose body fat or maintain your body composition. What lifestyle habits do you have now that make it easy for you to be able to maintain your fitness and your performance? Yeah, a lot of it's whole natural food sources. It's like very little processed foods.

This past year, we've eliminated seed oils out of our diet so like the oils we primarily cook with are either olive oil coconut oil beef tallow ghee um i do add oils to like a lot of my cooking it's an easy way for me to get calories in without being overly full. So I'll add it to like, if I have even ground beef, I have 80, 20 ground beef. I'm still adding some beef tallow in that. If you've ever had beef tallow, beef tallow is delicious. Um, instead of doing egg whites, I do whole eggs. I want to get the, the nutrients from the whole eggs and I'm getting more fat. Um, I do a lot of fruit. And depending on like what day it is, I'll try to get veggies in. But at the same time, like if I'm trying to get a lot of calories in, I'm not getting as many vegetables in because I don't want all this fiber. It's, you know, filling me up. But most of my

foods, like if I could name it on one hand of what I consume, a lot of avocados, fruit, eggs, red meat, potatoes, nutrition bars, peanut butters, protein powder. It's all like all of that, just more and more and more of it. And you don't eat much. Like in the morning, it doesn't look like – I've seen some of your videos and i'm like he kind of eats a little bit like me like you have like a little kind of pre-workout drink that i think is your own supplement brand and then when you come back from your run maybe you have like a protein shake and a coffee and then maybe maybe it's like past almost the afternoon when you start to, you're eating or how does it work? Right now, like I'll do some carbs and electrolytes before my run. And that's just in a shake, right?

Yep, just in a shake. And then after my run, I'll either do like eggs, toast, avocado, or I make this bowl where it's protein powder, raw cacao, flaxseed, and then milk. And I mix that up. Then I add in raw honey, peanut butter, coconut flakes, cacao nibs, and then fruit. And that bowl alone

gets me like 900 calories. That's a wild shake. It is. It's not a shake. It's a bowl. Oh, a bowl. You make the protein powder like a sludge and you layer it in there. And that has one of my my favorite things to consume lately the cacao butter is it like soft cacao nibs i think you said you mix the protein powder with cacao butter right uh with uh peanut butter and roll honey oh i guess i mix all that up and i that works really good and tastes amazing yeah and sprinkle on some

cacao nibs and unsweetened coconut flakes. I've been obsessed with coconut lately. It's delicious. The coconuts are, it makes me kind of nauseous the texture.

If you take, really? Like the chewiness? The texture of coconut just, I don't know. Oh, that's enjoyable. I don't dig it. I've never liked it.

If you take, yeah, protein powder and just dump it in peanut butter and start. I mean, it takes a lot of stirring. Sometimes you got to like add like water to it or something. It always seems like you never have enough liquid and then it's like, oh, that did work out. But it tastes fucking awesome. Yeah, I love those bowls.

I mean, I love cooking too. So especially with my wife being pregnant right now and she has like these, you know, food aversions to certain things. I'll take over all the cooking cooking i'll just experiment with anything it's like last night we made some chicken pad thai which was delicious yeah delicious but uh i love being in the kitchen just trying new things make a lot of homemade pasta chicken parms um ribs on the traeger yeah anything give it to us andrew what you got over there? All right.

So if you guys want, you guys got to hit the link down in the description below, because we're going to take some questions from the discord. And so we're just going to start right off the top with a stacker. He asked, how is, so how's Nick able to find or create a balance in life so well with owning a company,

being a hybrid athlete and now expecting a baby? I mean, it's tough. I not gonna lie um it is non-stop from the time i wake up at 5 a.m until you know 10 p.m at night and it kind of goes back to learning how to say no to certain things where I take inventory of what is priority in my life. It's like inventory for me right now, priority is my wife and our daughter on the way and then my business and then fitness goals. And having that list of priorities helps make decisions of, of what I need to do throughout the day so if something pops up like do i think i think how does it affect my wife and my daughter on the way how's the effect of my business how does it affect the goal of the sub 250 marathon i'm about to do

and saying no to a lot of other things has allowed me to focus on what's really important. It's really easy when you have so many things you're focused on, you go wide rather than deep. You're spreading yourself so thin. So many people are trying to focus on so many things. They're staying shallow in this wider range of tasks or goals. I choose a few goals at a moment and I go all in on it. Also, over the past couple of years, I've been able to build on a team where I've been able to delegate a lot of what used to be my

responsibilities. And, uh, I have a solid team behind me now that really helps me. How do you, um, you know, instead of going wide and going deep, how, how do you know, right? How do you compartmentalize those things that you are going to go deep on and not worry about the other things going on? Because my son, he's one and change. I don't know exactly how old he is now. So it's been an adjustment period and stuff. And thankfully, we are building an awesome team here with the podcast. But there are things that are going on where I'm just like, nope, I got to go over here. But then as I'm here, I'm thinking about the stuff that's going on on this side. So how have you been able to just focus on just the things that you're focusing on?

Well, I've hired some really stud people at our business, basketball months. And they all know that at any point in the future if there's something that can't get done through them they need to find someone and hire them to fill that role so i've completely kind of opened the floodgates of any role that needs hired we will hire so that we can focus on what we are experts in um that's been one thing in terms of business read this article recently it was called giving up your legos we had our whole team we are experts in. That's been one thing in terms of business. Read this article recently. It was called Giving Up Your Legos.

We had our whole team read this article. And it was all about the startup space and how the hard part and difficult part and challenging part of startups is that in the beginning, there's a few key founding members and you hold all of the Legos. And then as you grow and scale, you have to be willing to give up some of your Legos. And that's really hard because you know what built those Legos. You know what those Legos look like. You know how they perform, where they fit.

And when you give them up, whoever has those next might not know exactly where they put them but in order to scale and grow you have to be ready and willing to give up your legos so right now within my business we're giving up legos to scale and grow um so that's that's one thing that i've been focusing on to go deep on the things that really matter and that i can provide value and impact and then delegate those other things got it yeah got it that's another one or yeah yeah if you want to keep going in on that go ahead i just want to just add like your priorities can change and switch a lot you know like just because like of course, you know, things like that. Of course, those things are a major priority.

But if things are cool with your wife and your wife understands what your day-to-day looks like and you communicate well and you ask, hey, what are you doing tomorrow? And you both talk about it. It's like, well, there's one thing that is like it's still priority, number one, if anything happens. But it doesn't need tending at the moment. The stuff that needs to be tending is you've got to get your ass out for a run. If there's an emergency of some kind, somebody's sick or something happened, then, of course, you can course correct in accordance to your kind of priority list. But I think that people think that things need to be like this priority list

and nothing can ever shift or move around. And each one of those things you mentioned, they're all important, you know? And so sometimes they got to be kind of shuffled around a little bit. Yeah. I mean, they're constantly being shuffled in my life. Yeah. Yeah. There's, B, as you actually mentioned quite a few on this podcast,

so this question from the Discord is pretty, it's pretty spot on. Uh, what books, and this is from Zemanji, what books help guide, inspire, and motivate? You've mentioned quite a few already, but what, what great books come to mind that you think some of our listeners should absolutely grab? The hard things, the hard thing about hard things is a really good one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a really good one. I'm currently reading Traction and The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. It's a really good one so far.

Business Made Simple or anything else by Donald Miller. Donald Miller is really good. Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey. Was a solid, fun read. Shoe Dog. By. Yeah. The Nike book.

Phil Knight. Was a solid read. And then. Deep Work. I recently finished up. Deep Work was really read. And then Deep Work, I recently finished up. Deep Work was really good. And then another one I'm reading right now is The Molecule of More. I've heard of that one. That one is amazing. It's all about dopamine and how dopamine essentially controls everything we do in our life.

I mean I'm enjoying that book more than most books I've read recently. Dude, how long have you been just in the rabbit hole of like reading a bunch of like these types of books? Like how many years? Not long, to be honest. Really? Maybe two and a half years. What spurred it for you? Iron Man preps.

Being on the bike for six hours thinking, I'm just going to, I mean, I would kill a book sitting on the bike for six hours. So that's really what spurred it. And some of those books that I listened to, because I listened to them on audio book, Audible. Some of those books I listened to helped me make really big business decisions that I really needed help with at the time so certain books found me at the right place in the right time to help me get through certain

situations sick all right let's get to these last two uh one that i just wanted to highlight by brian runs this he just asked you about your diet which we covered a lot about tracking and so much to consume blah blah but the next one i wanted to get to was from brady um how can someone seamlessly integrate running and lifting together i.e programming sprint workouts and heavy squats in the same program i'd say first you have to ask yourself is where you're coming from. Are you starting from an endurance background or are you starting from a strength training background? And if you're not starting from any background at all,

slowly incorporate both. But say, for example, I'm an endurance athlete and I'm wanting to incorporate strength programming. What I'm going to do is I'm going to lower my volume of endurance training and slowly increase the volume of strength training and then vice versa for, for a strength athlete with endurance. I think a lot of that is going to be facilitated by what days you place, what workouts in.

It's like me personally, I like to do my, my Wednesdays are always my, by what days you place what workouts in. So like me personally, I like to do my, my Wednesdays are always my, my tempo workouts and my track workouts. Those are also the same days as my lower body strength days because I kind of like just beat my legs up on the same day so I can get it over with

so that Thursday, Friday, I can recover with some easy runs and Saturday I can get it over with so that Thursday, Friday, I can recover with some easy runs. And then Saturday, I can get my big running workout. So a lot of it is placement of these workouts. But also, you have to be honest with yourself and realize that if you want to be decent at endurance and you want to be decent at strength, you're not going to be the best you possibly could at either or of those, or both of those at the same time.

I know that I love endurance, and if I stopped a lot of my strength training, I'd probably get faster, but I'm willing to sacrifice speed to keep strength in because I love strength training. And it goes both ways with that. So as one increases, volume of one increases, you have to be ready and willing to decrease the volume of the other and balance that out.

I want to add on real quick. I'm so happy with your explanation of that because it's the same exact thing when people ask the question about, I think, any hybrid athlete, but I get the question about jujitsu and lifting often. And it's the same fucking concept where if you're coming from a lifting background and you want to start Brazilian jujitsu, you need to lower the intensity and potentially the volume of which you're lifting so that you can add in this jujitsu volume and not get wrecked. Slowly, as you become more accustomed to jujitsu, you're going to slowly be able to increase your lifting volume a little bit

and your jujitsu volume is going to come up because this doesn't fatigue you as much as it used to in the beginning. Same thing, if you start jujitsu and you want to start lifting, you may need to limit your jujitsu training sessions or the intensity at which you train and then bring in lifting slowly

and then slowly increase lifting over time. For any type of dual sport athlete that's in different realms, strength training and something else. It's the same thing. You can apply what you just said to almost anything and reap good, good results. You just need to give yourself consistency and time to get good at it. And if you have good discipline at one thing,

then don't be scared to leave it. You know, don't be scared to just, if you want to run and you want to work on some stuff, go run. at one thing, then don't be scared to leave it. You know, don't be scared to just, if you want to run and you want to work on some stuff, go run. Don't worry about the lifting. Like get, get away from the lifting for a little bit. If you don't have the discipline and you're just starting lifting and you, you, you're going three days a week, uh, by all means, don't stop because you need to have that discipline there. But if you're a lifter and you've always been lifting, don't worry about missing a little bit. I know it's hard, but you're trying to do something new.

You're trying to do something different. And you don't have to be like overly anxious or worried that you're not going to ever gain your strength or muscle back again. Yeah, I used to be afraid to when I started running to miss strength workouts. when I started running to miss strength workouts. And now I'll go a week sometimes with no strength workout based on my schedule or my running. And what used to bother me just doesn't bother me anymore. And I know it'll come back at some point. It'll be a massive emphasis on my life again.

But for the goal that I'm training for, that is where the focus and priority is. Dope. So yeah, we got those questions from our Discord. So if you guys have any questions for, we have like a whole, I don't know how Discord still works. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me,

but you guys know exactly how it works. Is this the internet? Yeah, yeah. I think you can, it's like a BitTorrent thing. I'm not sure. It's something like that. But yeah, you guys can go into this Discord,

which I think is on the online thing. How many tokens need for that right so that's the thing and then seem was disgusted but i did want to ask about bpn and uh working with will tennyson because i love that guy's youtube channel and i seen that you guys linked up so what's it like with uh working with him will's great will uh i kind of explained to you earlier, he's just naturally funny. Like, Will came down and spent some time at BPN. We took him shooting at a range, which he was unfamiliar with coming from Canada. And then we took him to get some Texas barbecue. And then we took him to, there's this steakhouse in Austin called Steiner Ranch Steakhouse.

It's the best steak I've ever had. I haven't had anything that's beat it yet. It was a 22-ounce cowboy ribeye that overlooked Lake Travis. So Will went there with us. But no, Will's great. We love having him on the team. He's a great person. He's hilarious.

And he loves food just as much as I do. I'm hungry. What's your favorite product or which one do you use the most from your own company? I'd say either – I mean I use just about all of it. Right now I'm using a lot of G1M Sport, which is our endurance formula. It's 20 grams of carbohydrates from Cluster dextrin and 350 milligrams of sodium per serving. So like, for example, before my big workouts on, uh, on Saturdays now I'll do three scoops of that and then two scoops of electrolytes to get over 2000 milligrams of sodium 90 minutes

prior to training to boost blood volume. Um, so So either that or we just launched a sleep formula called Peak Sleep that I'm currently in love with. That product is in a clinical study right now. It's four weeks into a clinical study. So that one is really cool. What you said about the blood volume, that's also something that you grabbed from research that somebody else did, right? Yeah. It's also something that you grabbed from research that somebody else did, right? Yeah. Dr. James D. Nicolantonio, he's put out some really cool stuff on Instagram.

He'd be a great guy for the show. Yeah. But he has a book called The Salt Fix and then Win. And Win is all about boosting athletic performance through nutrition and training. and win is all about boosting athletic performance through nutrition and training and one of the things he talked about is 90 minutes prior to training doing a salt solution that is as salty as sweat and it's been shown to boost blood volume and boost endurance, boost performance. Because what happens when we train as a whole, but really in endurance, you know, sweating a lot, is that as we become dehydrated, our blood volume decreases, performance decreases.

And if we can boost blood volume prior to a competition or a race, it can increase athletic performance uh eight to ten percent that's a lot yeah you were mentioning you went on the run a couple days ago and lost like a tremendous amount of weight and i was just saying like imagine how weak you would feel like trying to bench press after that yeah i went for a run i left i left uh 200 pounds and it was a 20 mile run and i came back at 192 i'm waiting for the day i see 189 on the scale that's like i haven't seen 189 on a scale for a long time wow you're gonna be like bro gotta pull your shit together yeah that cop was correct that's right well it's you got andrew

that's it yeah we're all good all right take us on out of here then sure thing i was waiting for you sorry thank you everybody for checking out today's episode please make sure you guys like this video on YouTube and drop us a comment down below and if you want to become a part of the show make sure you check the links down below to follow us on discord so you guys can ask your questions there I don't know it seems pretty dope I don't know what the hell I'm doing in there but we're all interacting we're're having fun. So join us over there. Follow the podcast at Mark Bell's at MB Power Project on TikTok, Twitter,

and what's TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, all of them. Sorry, we just changed them up. And my Instagram, TikTok,

and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ. And Seema, where are you at? Join the Discord. Join the Reddit. And if you're here, go to the Clips channel and subscribe to that because we've got a lot of smaller clips coming out there. But

you can see me on Instagram and YouTube. You can see me on TikTok and Twitter. Nick, where can people find you? I'm on Instagram at NickBearFitness. YouTube, if you search NickBear, a bunch of running videos should pop up. Podcast is the Bear Performance Podcast.

It's a great podcast, too. And your supplement company? Supplement company is bpnsups.com. It's Bear Performance Nutrition. Where'd you get that amazing shirt? I do run through it. I don't know what this material is,

but it is silky and it is comfortable. I like it. Yeah, we were not allowed to tell you about what that is, that material. I like it. Top secret. Yeah, we just threw together a run through it shirt. I figured, you know, he's out there

running pretty fucking far, so I don't know. Anyway, I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye!