That Triathlon Life Podcast - Moments before Eric heads into hip labral repair surgery

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

This week Eric tells us all about his hip labral repair surgery, recorded the very morning he heads into the operating room. He’s been dealing with this chronic injury throughout his triathlon career for nearly a decade and is finally getting it fixed. In addition to talking through the surgery, we also dove into some broader triathlon questions. This week we discussed:The consequences of crashing on the bikeNavigating the pressure of body image in sportHow to use your arms while runningStrava streaksA big thank you to our podcast supporters who keep the podcast alive! To submit a question for the podcast and to become a podcast supporter, head over to ThatTriathlonLife.com/podcast

Hey everyone, welcome to that triathlon life podcast. I'm Eric Lagerstrom. I'm Paula Finland. I'm Nick Goldstone. And where you're coming to you, Elise Paul and I are from my parents' house, just outside of Portland, Oregon. We spent the last three days driving home from Tucson, where we had an awesome camp with Heather Jackson, John Watkins, and also Paige Onweller, the gravel athlete that was staying with Heather and Wadi, the usual, like great vibes, fun time in the sun, and a lot of a bike volume. So this episode is going to be a little bit different. Got a significant life thing going on. But if you are new here, listening for the first time, Paul and I are both professional athletes, Nick's professional musician, lover of endurance sport. Amateur. Some might say. And we like talking

about triathlon primarily. So welcome to the show. I think Eric, you're talking a little bit like it's the morning. You might need to increase the volume of your voice. Well, he sounds very, he sounds very epic. He could do a movie trailer. It is the morning. Yeah, it's the morning, but you can talk a little louder for the sake of the audio. Well, he's also, he hasn't had any calories in a long time. Eric, how long has it been now?

Let's see, it's been seven hours, 48 minutes. Wow, right. But who's counting? Fasting. Yeah. No, Eric's getting surgery on his labrum. Today, the check-in is in. three hours. So he's been fasting since midnight, but he did wake up at like 1130 to pound

some Ensure, like the high calorie drinks, just to have like, you know, a little bit of something in his stomach because we're such creatures of habit that we wake up hungry every day. Ensure is high calorie? They have high calorie options. I'm confused. I thought he wasn't. So you can have, you can have calorie liquids. You just can't have calorie solids. Is that right? No, no. So that was 12 hours before my surgery. So I like literally woke up at midnight to have a final meal. I'm sorry. Got it. Yeah, midnight was the cut off of eating. I see. So you're really milking it till the last drop. Right. Because I don't stay up till midnight. Yes, right, of course. Specifically wake up for this. I see. I see. But yeah, we've kind of talked about

or I've talked about and tried not to complain as much as possible over the last few years about my labrum in my left hip. It does cause me pain pretty much every single minute of the day. I go through sometimes when it's not bothering me as much. It is the primary reason why I stopped racing 70.3 on a TT bike and started trying to Xtera, something more upright, and then trying trail running. These are things that I wanted to do anyway, but facilitated by the fact that it's very uncomfortable to be bent over on TT bike. Yeah. And I've known about this. I first had a diagnosed in 2018. And it really was the thing that hurt in 2016 when I was trying to go to the Olympic trials. So it's like a crazy, crazy mix of emotions for me right now to have dealt with this for so long and not know what it feels like to be, quote, normal. And theoretically, be going in to have it fixed and like have a new lease on life. running, swimming, biking. It impacts everything. So it's crazy. Can you tell us about how you

actually heard it originally? Because I actually don't even really remember the story myself. Yeah, I don't know exactly what was going on, but I was in a very high volume phase. I was ranked, I was like right in second place, second third place to go to the Olympics in, it would have in Rio. And so I was running whatever, like 75 miles a week, training a ton of volume on the bike, doing everything I could to get ready for the final race, which was Yokohama, WTS. And halfway through like a 90-minute run, just boom. My left hip like went out and it was so painful that I had to walk back to the car. At the time, I just assumed it was like IT band or something. I didn't really know what it was, but it was like,

three months of being able to run uphill for like 20 seconds was about all I could do leading into this final WTS Olympic trials race. I think laboral tears are interesting though because it's not always an acute event. I think they can develop over time and a lot of us might even have a labor tear that's not symptomatic. It's kind of dependent on where it is, how big it is, if the flap is catching on the bone or etc. So if we all had MRIs to look for a label tear, I think many of us as athletes would have one. But I think over time, also years has gotten worse and there's periods where it gets better if you do some PT and have a little more control over everything around it, but then it gets bad again. So it's actually a very common surgery. We know probably four or five

professional triathletes who've had this surgery in the last five years and I've reached out to give Eric advice and everything, but it's not a totally foreign crazy thing. It's a pretty successful surgery despite the long recovery. And I think hopefully, I mean, not hopefully, but there could be a lot of listeners that have also gone through this or potentially will go through this. So, yeah, kind of an interesting. Yeah. The more unusual thing is that I've lived with it for as long as I have. I'm like right in the middle between someone who may not know that they have it and somebody who like can't walk. I go through these periods where it's so incredibly painful. Like it, I don't finish a race or like my entire left side of my body goes numb. Can't put out power on the bike.

And then I'll go through some periods where like, man, it might be getting better and I get encouraged so I don't get the surgery and I continue on. And yeah, when I first had it diagnosed actually in 2018, the surgeon told me that it was going to be like a year and a half to get back to full strength of being a professional athlete. And that was just too terrifying of an undertaking at the time. So ever since then, I've tried to work through it with physical therapy. And I've done the best I could. But when I went into the see the surgeon back in January, that was her closing statement was, you know, I asked her, so do you suggest that I do this? Because it's such a a big deal. And she just kind of like, her eyes went huge. She's like, yes, this will change your

life. I cannot believe you've gone this long without doing it. Do it. You deserve it. It's time. So, yeah, that was encouraging to hear. And I'm sorry. Yeah, it was also like quite a process with insurance and everything. I'm sure everyone who has had surgery understands this. But getting the imaging and getting in see the doctor, who's the best one in Portland and in the Northwest. for this specific surgery. She's done a lot of the Nike pro runners and has a really good reputation. So we feel good about the doctor that's doing it too,

which is really important when you're going in for a thing like this. Yeah, I don't think it's a problem for me to say her name. Her name is Dr. Andrea Hertzca. So that, you know, if you're wondering and have the same issue, that's what I'm going to see. Yeah. And I guess just to cap off the,

medical mess of it, if you're not aware of what a labrum is, it's actually like a little pad. It's not quite a pad. It's almost like a jellyfish or something that goes between your cartilage and your actual hip bone, you know, the head of the hip. And it actually gives a little bit of suction. So the cartilage is there as like an actual pad. And then the labrum gives a little bit of padding, but also helps keep the socket in place. So my hip on the left is actually hypermobile and clicks and pops and is all over the place. And once you repair those tears, that actually gives the suction cup,

essentially more integrity, and it can keep the hip in place more. So the basis of all the PT that I've done has been to stabilize the hip to try to keep, you know, do what the labor was supposed to do by using some of the muscles around it. That's the actual anatomy that we're dealing with. And if you think back to when you originally heard it,

do you think there's something you could have done, once you actually had that experience in Yokohama when you felt it go. Do you think there's something you could have done in the days, weeks, months following that that would have put you in a better position now? Or do you think once it went, it was just about managing and dealing with it? Yeah, I think it was just about managing and dealing with it. It's hard to know because that was 2016. and then I didn't actually go in for this until 2018

when I just kind of continually started having all these like phantom pains in that hip and numbness in the leg and just super uncomfortable on my bike that I actually went in to get it looked at. Prior to that, like I said, I thought it was just IT band pain or some sort of acute thing.

And in hindsight, I think they only regret that I have or with this whole process is that I didn't magically know that COVID was going to take an entire year and get surgery done in COVID. And I do kind of wish maybe I'd gotten it done earlier,

but I really didn't feel like at any point in time, between 2016 to 2024, even, that I could just take a year off and be okay, not lose sponsors. Well, also, you didn't know

if it would get better, like you said. Right. I mean, I still don't. know. That's like the big question mark or like the insecurity that's in my mind right now is I've lived with this for so long that it's actually impossible for me to imagine what it's like to walk and not have this weirdness that I'm kind of protecting it all the time. And when I go upstairs, like I just feel lopsided and I don't trust myself to like jump off of a large object onto one leg and like just things that are important in trail running. But then like the entire night in bed last

night. Like it's just aching and feels uncomfortable and I'm rolling over constantly. So not having that there is like, I trust this surgeon, but it's so hard to imagine that she's just going to go in there and I'm going to come home in two hours and it's going to be like better. It's like this. Well, it definitely has a long recovery. Yeah. So what does the year look like? I guess we could go down that rabbit hole. Yeah. So I'm going to be on crutches for a couple weeks. I can inside of that couple weeks, probably like after four days, I can sit on the stationary bike with a flat pedal. And this is, I'm not biking. Like, I'm pedaling with my right leg and just letting my left leg move through the range of motion

of a pedal stroke purely to have blood flow enhanced. And then sometime, it's like eight weeks or so that I can put out any sort of power. And then I think after three months, I can do a little bit of a walk jog. And theoretically, sometime around like six, nine months is like a return to training, which will be, you know, gradual. But I'm calling it the year of the bike, year of the swim bike. There's an open water swim event that's important that I've always wanted to do. I'm kind of trying to put on some things that, you know, get me excited enough to

get in the pool and train and be really diligent with the PT and get on the bike to just a longer bike ride that I've always wanted to do. doing this swim event and things to give me some purpose because the first time that I could do a triathlon or do a 50K or something is so far away, you know, November, end of November, early December, if everything goes great. Yeah, we've heard stories of people having the surgery. This seems like there's a really wide range of recovery times for this. Yeah, I mean, I'm going based off of what the surgeon says. And this is not like a pain-guided thing at all.

This is a, we know that it takes this part of the body this long to recover. Like we can't go in there and look at it. It might not even hurt, but we know that it's not fully repaired until this date and time because it just doesn't get enough blood flow. And I'm certainly in the mind of like there is no reason to push this. It's not like I have to be ready for world championships in October. It's not, you know, like I'm dictating the timeline here and the worst thing. would be to mess it up on the way back.

My biggest motivation for doing this is to have a healthy hip, be able to continue on and do the sports that I love for the rest of my life, have a couple more years of competitiveness in them. And if I mess up this timeline, it's all for not. And is this supposed to be something that once you do this, your hip ideally is healed forever? Or is it something that needs to be redone every 10, 20 years? I mean, theoretically, this is it.

The surgeon will go in and do a little bit of shaving of the joint to make sure that it's perfectly round and any sort of thing that could have caused impingement in the first place is gone. So I theoretically have a better than new hip joint. But no, it doesn't increase risk for arthritis or anything like that. There's always the chance that you re-injure it, but not as a result of having had the surgery just, if that was the thing that was going to happen anyway.

which again like the insecurity in my mind is like well that sounds way too good to be true I hope it's true yeah but yeah I have a lot of faith in the surgeon she is like the foremost expert like one of if not the expert on the west coast for this and definitely in Oregon so feeling good about that but also pretty nervous won't lie yeah I was going to ask what where where is your heart at right now are you are you looking forward to being able to sleep without pain, you know, soon? Or are you just kind of, you can't see past the actual surgery itself? Yeah, I am looking forward to that. But like, I think my biggest insecurity or fear with the whole thing is that through the course of this, you know, the long

timeline, it feels like me being me and pushing my body into new places feel so far away that it's like, and I've never been out for this long, that it feels, yeah, it's, it's, it is uncharted territory. It's like in my mind, I think I'm going to be psyched to do the PT and do the strength training and get all the way back and better than I was, but it's so long. And I don't want to say it's like a hard journey, but it's going to require a lot of patience. And, you know, between now and running a 50K or 100K, just, you know, just watched like the 100K that I did last year, the Black Canyon on TV. And that just, seems like a different life, you know, time ago and a different lifetime into the future that I'll

be back there and racing against people who are the best at what they do. So that's like, that's the insecurity in my mind of like, I think I have the willpower and the ability to do that, but it's really daunting. I think that that's the same with everyone that's injured, though. It's like when you're in the thick of it, you feel like it's impossible that you'll ever get back. And I felt like this with my knee injury that was two months ago. Like, how could I ever run again? But it starts to get better and it comes back really quickly. I think the years of training and endurance and aerobic building never goes away. And it's really easier to get back into shape when you have that foundation of basically your entire life of training. So yes, it's scary in the moment. And I think a lot of

people can relate to this, but also you're going to be able to get back. And as progress happens, it becomes more realistic. Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to, you know, the first things that I can do, right? Like, oh, I walked without crutches. Like, that'll be, that'll feel like a milestone. And, but right now it's just, it's like a crushing amount of thing. Just like think about all at once.

So literally baby steps. You know, we were, before we started recording the podcast, we were talking about a question that we'll address in a second. But it's your Strava streak. And Eric, this might be a reset for you. You might get back to zero because the street goes by weeks, not by days. Dude. No, I think he's going to be recruiting like crutch walk.

I'm going to crotch walk around the block to keep it alive. Good, good. Yeah, so what I've been thinking is when you think about the future where this is healed, what is the thing that excites you the most? Is it the thing we're all thinking of, which is, oh, you get to swim, bike, and run in no pain? Or is there a specific image you have in your head of like running a, certain trail or riding a certain ride or is it even just like going about your daily life without the pain? What is the thing that is like your North Star right now?

Going out and like pushing myself on the bike and on the run and having like my aerobic system be the only thing that I'm thinking about. Right. Because every hard run and every hard bike that I've done in, you know, at least the last five years, like I've been thinking about every pedal stroke, every footstep, this, and like trying to like kind of do little weird tweaks with my gate to feel like I'm getting all the power out of my left leg and to be able to go out and like all I'm thinking about or the only thing that's limiting me is is my heart and lungs. It just sounds like really incredible and it's in it sounds like I can't help but feel like man like how fast am I at trail running or how fast am I at mountain biking with like without this big asterisk or this

limiter that that's that's super exciting and then of course there's events that I want to do with that you know theoretical new body that I have I want to I really want to go do UTMB the 50k of the 100k and I want to I want to do another triathlon just you know to like see what it feels like and maybe it's next era. But I think as that happens, like I'll get increasingly excited and the events will become more obvious. But the main one that I deferred my UTMB entry

from this year until next year, and that's kind of like the big, interesting, far enough out goal that I feel like it could be truly ready for. Oh, you were able to just defer it. That's great news. Yeah, I'd make that decision a month ago. That's great.

That's great news. Yeah, isn't it funny that it's obviously when you're in the thick of it and you're working really hard, running, swimming, biking. It's so difficult. It feels so hard. A big part of your brain is telling you stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And yet the ultimate goal for all of us, and certainly for you,

and you too, Paula, especially recently, is that that is the thing. That's the main thing you're feeling. You know, you don't want it to be a cramp or a GI issue or an injury. You just want the main thing that's stopping you is your willpower to push, past that aerobic difficulty. Yeah, exactly. So that's what I'm up against. I do have a lot of plans and hopes for documenting it with,

we'll talk about it here on the podcast, but then also on YouTube. I think it's going to be really interesting. It's going to be really fun, and it'll, like always, sharing the journey has given it a little bit of extra meaning for me. And I hope some people enjoy falling along, maybe get some stuff out of it if they're going through a similar thing. So, yeah, stay tuned for that once I'm not on drugs. So we'll begin that process.

Yeah, wonderful. Well, Eric, thanks. We're very excited for you, obviously, and hoping the surgery goes well, very confident with the quality of this surgeon. Do we want to answer some questions? We do have a few questions that we could get to as well, not to diminish this at all.

Heck, yeah. Great. First question here, and these are not necessarily. I'm necessarily injury-related, but this one is. This is from Julie. Hello, tripod, first time and long time. My husband and I spoke with Eric in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during a T-100 race and enjoyed your approachability, openness, and willingness to talk with us.

It was one of the coolest experiences we've ever had as triathletes. We love following you both. On August 3rd, 2024, I was on a training ride crashed and sustained a severe brain injury. The trauma center told my husband, to call family as it didn't look good. I sustained skull fractures and bleeding. I survived. Well, certainly you survived.

I'm grateful. What is it? The Pirates thing? Dead man, tell no tales. I'm grateful I survived as I had a miraculous recovery. That's amazing, Julie. If you knew one more crash could end your life, would you put an end to triathlons

and give up the dream of becoming an Iron Man, Julie? I don't think either of you necessarily have the dream of becoming an Iron Man. But if that was your dream for both of you, how would that affect your participation, your training? Yeah. That's, wow. I mean, we all know that that's a huge risk of training. Yet we train anyway.

But increasingly, as you hear more stories about people being hit by vehicles or crashing on their bicycles and busier roads that are, you know, it's hard to find anywhere quiet and safe to ride. ride now. It definitely crosses my mind. And I feel like it's one of the reasons to be like Tucson so much is you can ride on the bike path. It's pretty, you know, there's no cars on it and you can get up to speed and still ride pretty well. So I like the trainer for that reason. And yeah, it's, it's almost like a relief that we only have like years left in this sport. And I think that when I retire, I won't really ride on the road much because it really does scare me unless the roads are quiet. I mean, when we did that ride the other day and we were on the highway section, I absolutely hated it. All I could think about was like fear. But once you get onto a quiet road and you have your radar light that

beeps at you when a car is coming, then I can enjoy it a little more and feel less, you know, super at risk. But it's, yeah, you never really know. And it's one of, there's a Canadian young athlete that was recently killed on her bike in Phoenix. And I think about that every day now. It's so horrible and sad and yeah I hate stories like this it just it does make me question why we do it if if any any crash like toppling over could be the end of your life I think I would I think I would stop yeah what you mean are we we're talking about if he crashes it's a it's a hypothetical it's a hypothetical yeah oh because if this person crashes again yeah that's bad there's like Even if I're not inviting by myself and I smack into a tree, my brain is done.

Right. And I leave you widowed. Yeah, I guess like if you have a higher risk of complications after you've already had a really bad crash once, then you have to reassess. But we're all riding around with the same risk theoretically of anything bad happening, right? Totally. But yeah, it's just, I don't love it enough that if a crash led to my death, I would keep doing it. And I know some people are like that. I hear this all the time, like motorcycle riders.

They'll get a crash to like just, you know, really like maybe they'll have to have a foot amputated. And they get back on the motorcycle because it's so important to how they see themselves and how they live. Yeah. It's a bit like free soloing. It's like Alex Honnold, one crashed could be deadly. And that's way more risky than riding a bicycle. But he loves it so much. She does it anyway.

Yeah, the difference for me is like Paula said, we obviously assume the risk when we go out that we could get hit and killed. But it's like it's a very low risk. But if toppling over, like I said, on your mountain bike and hitting your head on a rock or just like things that are very much completely in your control and not another driver, if the risk is that high, I think that would probably do it for me. Yeah. And this is going to completely destroy my enjoyment.

Like Paula's enjoyment of riding on the road is fully compromised. And I would try to find something else to do that allowed me to push myself and feel some progress in life that didn't involve any risk of falling over often. What are things people can do to minimize that feeling? I think having the radar light is a super big thing. Whether it's a radar light or even just a bike light in general, just being really visible on the roads. And I actually noticed in Tucson a lot of the older people wear like neon yellow kits and they're ugly, but it really helped. to see someone when they're wearing that color. The high-vis. So, you know, we all go out in like, Army green and black kits all the time.

But I think there is something to being a little bit more visible on the road with, like, brighter kits. Riding in groups helps a lot. If I'm riding with, like, four or five other people, I feel a lot less vulnerable. And just like the roads you select to train on. So those are things that we can control that we try to do as much as we can. This Wadi and I tested this while on our Patagonia Loop adventure that we did. If you see on your radar that there's a car coming up behind you and you look over your shoulder and look that driver in the eyes, 100% of the time they're going to give you more space than if you're just like a faceless ant speed bump in their way. And we tested it like the entire way that we actually had to ride on the road.

Yeah, it's hard to see them though because you're. like the radar senses the car so far back. Yeah, I guess you can see as it approaches. The act of them seeing that you have a face, I think, is so humanizing and they'll give you more room versus if you're, you don't even, that's all I'm saying. Them seeing that like you're a person with a face somehow like flicks a switch from annoying thing to, oh, human. This is true for so many different aspects of people.

Like once you actually talk to the human or see the human, you're like, oh, yeah. I could be right. Like, do people in cars just think that all cyclists are a different species or something? You know, don't you realize driver that if you rode bikes, you would have a lot of the same habits as cyclists? Can you not see yourself as that person? And I think when you make eye contact, generally not. Yeah. It's so interesting.

Okay, well, we have a few more, yeah, a few more questions. This one, I'm going to go a little out of order here because I want to keep this one a little lighter because we've been pretty heavy so far. Hi, tripod, how do you use your arms when running, both trail and road? This is by Edeal. How do you use your arm? Well, let's ask this. How much do you think about it? Yeah, right.

For trail running, you can actually literally use your arms to propel yourself forward. Yeah, I think in trail running, you use the poles and then you also can, it's maybe a little bit less symmetrical and you're using your arms a little bit more for balancing, right? Like, you're flying off a rock and you've got a line this way, so your arms are kind of for counterbalance. It's much more dynamic than if you're just trying to be as efficient and rhythmical as you can on a road. But they're definitely very important. If you didn't have arms, running would be impossible. Do you guys think about your arm carriage when you're running? How often does that come into your perception?

I think about it more than I should, but I do think about it. Well, yeah, Paula and I actually had this chat on our drive home because I took a reel of her running next to the Hoover Dam. and like her ankle was doing like a little bit of a flick, and then her opposite arm was doing like a little bit of a squirly thing. And I think like you can see a lot of Kenyan runners. Like they'll have just like the most ridiculous upper body carriage, but their legs are just beautiful and they're running, you know, 26 minutes for the 10K.

So I think my theory for sure is that like your arms tend to counterbalance any sort of issues that are going on with your legs and just thinking to yourself like have a better arm carriage and like don't let my left elbow flick out is a lot of the time impossible because it's counterbalancing something that's going on because your your knee is unstable or your ankle is weird or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I also think your arm drive can influence what you're doing with your legs. So if you really increase your arm cadence, your legs will follow. And if you focus on driving your elbow back, that's a good thing for

propelling yourself forward. So there's a lot of, even like not even consciously, what you're doing with your arms impacts what you're doing with your legs, which is propelling you forward. So having a clean arm carriage, having your hands not too low, not too high, having your elbows not like spray out, fly out like a chicken. All these things can really improve your efficiency. If you can get your arm carriage correct, then your legs will follow. That's totally true. That's probably the number one thing that I think about with the arms is like increasing cans with the arms is a way to just make your legs go faster. Yeah. Because you're not going to have independent.

dependent cadences from your arms and your and your legs, of course. And for some reason, like, moving your arms faster is like an easier thing to focus on that makes your legs move faster than literally just thinking, spin my legs faster, like when you're on the bike. Yeah, it's much easier to increase your cadence using your arms. And if you're doing hill strides or something, using your arms to drive yourself forward is also helpful. I don't know.

When we're doing hill strides, Paula was like only yelling at me about my arm carriage, not about my turnover on my heat. It kind of reminds me of a shoulder-driven stroke or like a hip-driven stroke. You can kind of think of it in a similar way. In swimming. Yeah, in swimming, yeah. Yeah, totally. It's so connected.

Like, you've got, like, that's the importance of having the strong core so that everything is connected and working together. But, like, good luck, you know, just running down the street with using your right arm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not in conjunction with your left, you know, knee drive. if you're just going to trip and fall. I remember advice you guys gave me a long time ago, which is, it's echoing what you said, which is often what's happening in your upper body is a reflection of what's happening in your lower body.

And I think that's a good way to think of it for this person asking the question. Instead of isolating it, like you're saying all these things are so connected. Yeah, how can you deny that? But the last thing is the biggest thing about arm carriage is like being relaxed. And I think a lot of triathletes tend to really tend to. up, use their arms too much, and hunch their shoulders, me included. And I was, I think it was Colleen Quigley one time. She was, she said to me, that person runs like a triathlete. And I'm like, what does that mean? What is a triathlete? It's not good. And she's like really tight arm carriage

and really hunch, you know, like looks tense in their upper body. And I think the more you can actually relax your upper body and have your arm carriage be very fluid, the more efficient you'll be and the less energy you'll waste. It doesn't make you go faster to tense your shoulders up and bring your elbows up towards your ears. That's kind of just a natural tendency of triathletes, especially as they're getting off the bike, tense up in their upper body already. So the more you can relax

and almost not think about it, the better. The better you'll look too, which is important, right? Of course. Of course, we all agree. So just do it, but don't think about it, but think about it. Yeah, exactly.

And do it right. Get someone to video you. Get someone to video you. This is why I like running on the treadmill with the mirror, because that's like you can get into that feedback loop a little bit and like my primary thing is to relax and try to let it be fluid. Even if you're running fast. It reminds me of forgetting Sarah Marshall

where he's trying to teach him how to serve and he's like do less. Do less, no less. Yes, exactly. It just doesn't move. He's like, well, you got to do more than that. Okay, next question here. Magdalena, 18-year-old aspiring pro triathlete from Germany.

Nice. Question is, how do you navigate the pressure of body image and weight, since it is important to the sport to a certain extent, but also such a fine line to walk on. And do you ever struggle with your body image or do you ever feel pressure to look a certain way? And I think for you guys,

as pro athletes, we might think age groupers, we might think, well, that's an age grouper thing. We worry about the way we look, but pro athletes don't. They're so focused on performance, and plus they all look great anyway. do you think that's true or is there or is this something that comes into your minds as well? That's absolutely not true. And I think it's potentially even the inverse of this,

the people that you look at who are the most fit and the most cutting edge and you assume have no body issue, image issues whatsoever, potentially have the most body issue issues. That's just me from personal experience, what I've witnessed. Yeah, I think it stems from when a lot of professionals have been doing this. sports since they were teenagers, and it stems from that age. It's less like people to get into the sport a bit later, I think, tend to have a healthier perspective on body image. And the problem with doing sports when you're a teenager and running cross-country and being an ITU short-course triathlon is that you do become so self-conscious of changes in your body that you go through while

you're a teenager just because you're growing up and becoming an adult. And that gets really hard for athletes to go through puberty and, you know, maybe gain some weight and their body changes so much. And that you think that that's going to make you slower and you freak out and eat less and it really impacts like your self-confidence and your self-esteem and what you eat. And that carries with you forever, I think. Like, I can't shake that feeling. And I think about it less now than I used to, but it's definitely still a thing and not a healthy thing. But my peers who've been doing the sport for less long, it seems like they are a lot more healthy. But you don't really know until you know someone and see their in and out day to day, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I think if,

like Paula said, if you're going through it at that time in life, that's the time in life when you're making decisions or, you know, it's imprinting on your brain who you are and what does it mean to be you. And if that's part of it, like, I am fit and I look fit and I was fast when I looked like that or whatever. It's like, we're designed to like see patterns as humans. So it's really, really easy to just look in the mirror and make some sort of decision what you look like and how that's going to impact your performance. And like, I think for me anyway, what I have to focus on or like remind myself is like, how is the training going? This is hard data right here that's saying that whatever is going on in the mirror has nothing to do with how I'm going to race because my watts are this, my run speed is this.

And even though there's this thing in my brain going like, oh, well, so-and-so looks like this and you look like this or whatever, that is not hard data. And that's... No, I think triathons very... There's some really good role models in triathlon right now of people at the top of the sport who have a very healthy body image and who are really strong. wrong. And personally, I think triathlon is a sport where you can't get too lean because it'll compromise your swim in your bike too much. It's a little different in running or high school or university track where you get into this mindset where the light or the better. But in triathlon, it actually doesn't work that way. And if you do get too light, we've seen athletes get injured

and stress fractured and not able to push power on the bike and not able to sustain their career for very long. So I think that the women we see now that are at the top of the sport, in general, I think all of them have a really healthy body image. And yes, they're extremely fit and lean and you know, on the cutting edge of high performance. But at the same time, they don't look unhealthy. In my opinion, they're, you know, able to be resilient athletes. And they're clearly fueling enough. I think now you hear everyone's taking in so many carbs on the bike and recovering really well. and it's part of the reason why the sport's getting faster is because there's more importance on eating well and eating enough,

which is kind of a newer thing in sport, an endurance sport. And just because Paula said women, I just want to be incredibly upfront and very clear. This is, I had so many men struggle with this. I've struggled with this. I've talked to so many guys who do. Yeah, I just said women because I'm paying more attention to the women myself. It's universal.

Yeah, it's very, it's a cross-bose. And it's been such a huge part of just like the culture of the sport as well. Like if you read the book, once a runner, like the lean wolf leads the race. That's like in the first couple pages of the book. And it's hard to break away from that. But I think we are in a good space right now where people are, like Paula said, fueling for the task that they need to achieve. And we both very much believe that if you do that, your body will very slowly over a long period of time,

morph itself into the best form that it needs to be for the task you're asking it to do without you forcing it. Last thing on this, and we don't have to include this if you don't want to, but I just think this is interesting and can be beneficial to people who either are already experiencing this or who are raising kids and want to help them navigate this. I've heard that people who do struggle with this can almost always think back to the first time they were introduced to this idea and it's almost always by a coach. Do you guys remember, you don't have to talk about it specifically, but does that ring a bell? Do you remember when

someone mentioned your body or said something about your weight to you and that that was this kind of turning point of how you think about it? Yes. I can remember like three specific instances from different people, but the very first one from my coach. And it was when I It transitioned from swimming growing up to running cross-country in college. Yeah, I think when it's stemmed from the coach, it's super dangerous. But I would imagine now it's getting better just because people are more open about it. And I have said this many times on the pod, but Lauren Fleshman's book, Good for a Girl, is she talks about all these issues that were so taboo to talk about even 10 years ago.

and now it's much more healthy and open to talk about periods and, you know, body image and all these things. So I would hope that coaches are getting better at it. I've never had a coach that's said anything to me about my body image. But if anything, the coaches I've had have been encouraging me to eat more. So, yeah, I don't know. It is very toxic when it gets into that domain. For me, this was not a coach calling me out for being fat. this was a coach. You know, I just want to be like very fair to this coach. Like this was a coach saying, you know, have you thought about watching what you eat? Like you don't just kind of like, that is, you're eating a lot of junk food. And my obsessive personality took that way, way too far. And so I don't know what necessarily what the solution is, but I think education is the most important. And I think if every cross country runner and track runner and, you know, in any sport that has any sort of degree of this could be early on educated on.

exactly what we're talking about, like fueling adequately, giving them the tools to make the right decisions instead of you just can very easily end up on this slippery slope of lighter as better. Like, that's what we're trying to avoid. Yeah, I think it comes from a nutritionist, though, not necessarily from a coach. Like if this 18-year-old wants to work with a sports dietation or something, I do think that's a really good tool. Coaches are generally knowledgeable, but they're not experts in that. No. Yeah, but Eric, thanks for saying that because it's, I think it's easy to point at this and think of like the ballerina coach who's like, you're too fat and whatever. And no, this coach was maybe even trying to be subtle and help

you and it still implants this seed. And it can implant the seed in your brain depending on the athlete. Exactly. Cool. And then we'll end on a light note here. We teased this earlier. But this is a question about Strava. So last week, I started a new job, which was so. mentally draining, I didn't get out for a single run or swim. When I logged my first run back this morning, I realized I'd unknowingly broken a long streak in Strava. How long are each of your current Strava streaks? So for context here, we were just laughing about this earlier, but it's not a daily streak. It is a weekly streak. And I think that's, talk about in stealing negative mindsets, I think it's probably good that it's a weekly streak because I think otherwise people

would be even more enticed to not take a single day off, right? Yeah, or it would be so, you'd be like power walking around the block just to get an activity up on Strava. Here's the thing that is, I was just looking at mine and I'm at serious risk of losing my streak this week, but I don't log swims. So I need to go in and like log my swims from like yesterday and the day before. Right. That's true. Yeah, I don't log my swims either. activity streak is 420 weeks.

420 weeks. How many weeks are there in a year? 52. 52. Oh my gosh. Mine is 380, 689 activities. Paul's eight years of activities. So I have like eight years.

It's basically since I got Strava. I haven't done a week of no activity. Who is surprised? To be fair, an activity could include, I mean, I generally don't include walks ever, but seeing or, you know, there's weeks where I've done. just one run because it's an off season or whatever. And it also says your streak activities, right? Like it says it says your weeks and then your streak activities. Do you see that? Right next to it? Yeah, 4,463. Oh my God. That's so many. What's yours? So that's averaging over 10 activities a week.

Oh my gosh. And that's not counting swims, by the way. Min is 338 weeks and 2,889 activities. What streak activities then? That's just how many activities have done? In that 330. In that side of that 420 weeks. Yeah, exactly. Okay. What's your streak activities, Eric? It's, yeah, same ratio, basically, 368, 9 in 380 weeks.

And I need to go back and find my broken week and I'm checking my training log and I'm adding to swim in. I don't know if it'll retroactively fill it in. I took a week off from Strava, I think. I didn't take a week off from activities. Yeah. Yeah. These metrics are so funny. And I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately because I did my first triathlon in 2006 and it's now 2026. So essentially I've been racing

professionally. Like I went to junior worlds my first year. So I guess I was sort of racing pro, even though I wasn't making money at the sport for 20 years, like taking this seriously for 20 years. And sometimes I think about that if I'm like, oh, I can't make it to the pool today because Eric has a surgery. And I think that's such a big deal. It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. I'm doing this for 20 years. And it's so much pressure to put on your brain for 20 years, thinking about your body image, your fitness, your time off. Like, literally I haven't switched off for two decades, really.

Even when you're on an off season, you're still thinking about it. Man. So it's actually crazy how long that's been. And then before 2006, I was swimming competitively. So, like, my lifetime in sport is probably more like 30 years. You know, it's just... Wow. Paula, that is...

I've never thought about it like that. That is really crazy. You have been on for 20 years. Yeah, like I was doing a, my streak is actually probably 20 years. Right. Oh, yeah. That's true. You're telling me that you took a week off and you've never taken an entire week off. There's no way. Never. Like even in 420 weeks, that's just since Strava existed. Yeah, yeah. That's when I got my strata account. It still goes back 12 years before that. It's like, we We need a BS before Strava, you know, like the year 20 before Strava. Yes, exactly. Yes. Exactly.

Yeah, mine goes back way, way, way too far. So give yourself a break. If your streak is looking a little high, don't be afraid of breaking it. Maybe I'll just turn my Strava off for a week so I can reset. So you start at zero? Yeah, to prove a point. Wow. Could you even.

I mean, part of me is a little jealous. that Eric's getting hip surgery. Right, because he has to. Because I want to take a week off. Right, right. We could all just take a week off. It's so toxic. We could.

That's the thing we could and no one would care. No one would know. And your body would be happy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you specifically, Paula. And Eric, of course, you too.

And I'm realizing now that this is probably a lot of pro athletes is, you know, we talk about parasympathetic nervous system kind of like, are you, to a certain degree, are you ever really letting go of the reins when you're a pro athlete for that long? Or is there always this thing in your head that's like, well, yeah, but I can't take too much time often. I can't really relax because everyone else is training. And I need to be. And especially with Strava and Instagram, you see them training. And so of course you can't get it out of your head. Yeah, it's super dangerous.

This is why in offseason, you got a freaking ghost. Like, don't open Strava, don't open Instagram. follow other pro athletes, like, come up with ski trips to go on. Like, that's why we love the ski trips so much. Like, that's as off as we could possibly get. Yeah, but even that whole week, I'm like, how many hours? What's my TSS of the skiing? Paul and I are varying abilities to turn off.

Of course. Well, you just can't. I mean, it's like my human nature now. And that's what's also scary about retirement is thinking about not being like that anymore, but you can't just flip a switch and it's gone because it's so ingrained. So it's a really crazy thing to think about. But fun question, though. Yeah, that's fine.

I feel like we could spiral on this. Yeah, we could spiral for sure. For sure. Eric, we are, I'm so excited to, I don't know, like, I don't know if it's empathy or just that we're friends and I love you. But this feels like I just, I'm so excited for you to be able to do these things and not being able to worry about it. to just push yourself and to feel healthy and not to have this asterisk behind every single thing that you do. And I know that a lot of the podcast listeners feel a similar connection with you. So we're all very excited for this to go really well and for you to heal quickly

and to do more awesome things. Yeah. Thanks, dude. We'll probably touch in on it. But, you know, just in case you're not into the hip talk, we could always at the beginning of the podcast say hip talk ends at 2 minutes, 45 seconds. Go free to skip the chapter three.

Yeah. No, you can do that on podcast now. You can like scrub through to what you want to hear. Yeah. I do that sometimes. Someone was thanking me for putting in like chapter markers

on the podcast and we don't do that. That's automatically generated. Yeah, it happens all on the sun. You can just say, you're welcome. Yeah. You know how to spend a lot of time on it, but I feel like it's worth it. You're welcome.

Yeah, just Venmo me. It's all good. Yeah, here's my vent. For tips. Awesome. Well, we'll hear from you guys soon, I hope. Yeah, we will. We didn't say it at the beginning, but thank you to everybody who writes in questions.

That's how we keep the podcast going. And thanks to everyone who's a podcast supporter, that is the actual real-life Venmo that we have set up to keep this thing going and add-free. So we do this for you guys, and we do like chatting, but we appreciate everybody listening, sending us stuff to talk about. We will see you next time and update on all the things. Bye, everyone. All right.

See you guys.