148. Hunter Allen and the future of training and racing

0:00I reckon a while ago the bike computer market looked all sewn up. There were two big players, end of. Kind of like how once upon a time group sets meant either Shimano or Campagnolo. So there's a wonderful synergy in the fact SRAM busted open the group set market back in 2006 and now SRAM's computer arm, Hammerhead, is blowing the doors off in the same way with the Hammerhead Karoo. My favourite thing about the Karoo is how much it's like a smartphone. So the touchscreen is really crisp and punchy, so data and mapping, which is way more like a phone's mapping than a classic by GPS, by the way.

0:34Those things are super clear. But unlike a phone, battery life is a huge 35 hours with GPS on and your ride recording, plus it's also way smaller. It's up there with the smallest head units, given what it does, and it does loads, from predicting gradients in real time to making routes on the fly to running apps like Spotify, and it will even tell you how fast you're going. There's a whole lot more that we'll get into in other episodes, but for anyone who just needs things now, now, now, head over to cyclist.co.uk and search Hammerhead Crew 3 to read our in-depth review and find out why we gave it our cyclist recommended badge of honour.

1:10Then head to hammerhead.io and use the promo code cyclist to get a free heart rate monitor with every purchase of a crew. Just make sure we put everything in the basket first before applying that promo code cyclist, promo code hammerhead.io is where you can find all the gear.

1:34Welcome back to the Cyclist Magazine podcast, no too emphatic. I'm going to go with something a little bit more low key because welcome back to the Cyclist Magazine podcast. I'm your host, James Spender, and it's the beginning of the year. It's 2026. We've turned over the pages on our, Are we Gregorian? I don't know, whatever calendar it is we use. And Will is still with me, still with us. So I'd like to say hello to you, Will. I'd like to ask you how you feel at the beginning of a whole new year. Hello. It's a bit of a weird one because it's quite exciting to be, you know, starting fresh and things to look forward to.

2:08But at the same time, you know, you finish Christmas and it's like, that's just it now for a while, isn't it? I mean, it's true. Although we are recording this on the 12th day of Christmas and that means something to some people. So I say let's talk about some New Year's resolutions later because why not? It is that time of year. So we'll do that after our guest today, which is Hunter Allen, who I will introduce in a moment. But now I've said that, get your little gears turning in your brain. You're like, who is Hunter Allen? It's a great name. It's a strong name. You've heard it before. But we'll come to do a little intro on Hunter in a sec.

2:41But I would just like to revisit Christmas because it has been several weeks before or since I've seen you and I'd like to know how it went for you because I'm sure our listeners would too because let's face it, as you just alluded to, that's the best part of this kind of period. Let's kind of sit in it. Let's dwell in it for a little bit longer. Yeah, we've got another day before the tree has to come down. Well, ours is already down, but that's just the way that the week lines up. Had a very nice Christmas. Went about as well as, mostly as well as it could have done. Had a nice time. I went to the beach post-Christmas, not on Christmas Day, but on days after Christmas.

3:16Spent time with family. Spent time with my wife's family. Very nice. Very nice. Did you receive anything particularly good? Particularly psych... Let's try and find something psych-related in it just to root this in this podcast. I didn't have any psych-related gifts. But for my parents, I got a gardening knife, like a Japanese gardening knife. Nice. Which is obviously very useful for deterring criminals. And doing some Japanese gardening. And yeah, specifically, no other type. So basically building like real, like, nice sand sculptures in the garden. I feel like that's... Bridges that go over dry riverbeds.

3:48Yeah, so I'm going to put a little stream through the garden as well. Nice. It's going to be a really nice garden. And yeah, some other game stuff, nothing cycling. It's one of those things when you work in cycling and you get a cycling-related gift, it's like I wanted something that wasn't cycling. Yeah, well, I mean, I used to be a chef many moons ago and it took about five years after giving up chefing to stop getting things that were chef-related. and I even still get something chef related every Christmas but it's funny how you know the job you do defines you or at least it does in terms of sort of relatively estranged relations so I say one of the greatest gifts I received this Christmas was listening to The Rest is Entertainment with Richard Osmond and Marina Hyde.

4:32I don't know if you listened to that but anyway Richard Osmond hearteningly said that it had been a bad year for AI created music and the reason being people were just turned off despite the fact they've been an AI number one people were just like nah do you know what it's not for us we don't like it it's not very good but also we just don't like AI and he thinks that actually AI is kind of driving people back towards real people if you see what I mean which is lovely to hear because for a while it felt like we might be out of a job but Richard Osmond says don't worry it's fine put that down payment on your next Soyuz holiday you can go away this year Will it's all right you'll have a job in six months time yeah it's one of those things for us it kind of affects us especially working on the website quite heavily all the ai stuff but i feel like i ended 2025 sort of thinking about it in the positive way in that print magazine got pretty good magazine that's put together most months yeah i think it bodes pretty well that people are liking physical things and humans indeed and do you know what i did with AI to kick off 2026?

5:39Asked it for some New Year's resolutions. Nope, I asked it to make a picture of Rafa Nadal painting Warhammer with his one massive arm and it looked really good. I won't put that in the show notes and I won't send that out anywhere but it was a really good use of AI I felt. Anyway, on with the show. Our guest today is Hunter Allen. Hunter, as I said earlier on, is a name that I'm sure you've heard before. Hunter's is a name I'm sure you've heard before. He founded Peaks Coaching Group and is also the co-founder of TrainingPeaks, which is like a much more elaborate data-driven coaching tool, a bit like Strava in a way, although TrainingPeaks people might be like, how dare you compare us?

6:20I'm not comparing you, but just to get kind of like grounding for people. It's an online tool and you can upload your data and then it crunches numbers and gives you all kinds of metrics to be able basically just to race better, train better, ride harder, all those sorts of things, and is wildly successful and still used by loads of coaches and athletes from, you know, amateurs through to top elites. In that time, Hunter also co-authored the legendary book, and I don't say that lightly because it sold over 300 ,000 copies, which I think possibly might make it the kind of greatest training manual ever produced for cycling, Training and Racing with a Power Meter, which is a very prosaic title, tells you exactly all you need to know, but tells you a lot more about Hunter because this was a guy who was at the forefront of working with a tool that we now take for granted, which is the power meter.

7:08It's everywhere in the Pro Peloton. It's everywhere on your Sunday morning ride. Everyone seems to have a power meter these days. Most group sets even come with one now. Once upon a time, people had one, probably an SRM. Nothing else really existed. Didn't really know what to do with it. And Hunter literally wrote the manual on how to use it to become a better rider. And that's exactly what people did. And sort of fast forward to today, Hans has been training, coaching, riding all that time too. He has an incredibly long career, including lots of stints with US national teams, even did a bit of BMX and mountain bike coaching as well.

7:43But fast forward to today, and he's just written training and competing with a continuous glucose monitor or CGM, you might sometimes see them referred to. Now that's basically a kind of patch that goes in your skin and then it syncs to an app. It's got a tiny little kind of pinprick needle and it samples something to do with the, I don't know, salinity or something in your tissue, your top layer of skin, which can be linked to how much glucose you've got in your blood. So it's not actually stuck into your vein, but it can give you a very, very accurate reading on how much glucose is going around your system, it's now being used by lots of athletes out on the road because previously continuous glucose monitors could only really be used in labs.

8:31And he sees it, Hunter sees it as, you know, the new power meter, right? Because power meters gave you this unassailable objective metric. And now this new thing tells you basically how you're feeling, how well you're feeling. it can give you a kind of an appraisal of what your body does and when and therefore you can tailor how you eat both during you know before during and after exercise to be able to ride harder and faster and I think a lot of people will actually point to you know records being broken in the pro peloton today as being intrinsically linked to the way that athletes feel it or riders feel it is just different how it used to be and actually just realized just remembered we've got a lovely article in Cyclist Magazine just about to drop, Cyclist Issue 171 by one of our illustrious freelancers, James Witt, all about how glucose and eating on the bike has sort of changed from a sports science perspective.

9:29Anyway, I digress. That's where Hunter's at at the moment. He's saying this is the next best thing or next new thing rather. And we really dig into that. It's quite a numbers heavy podcast. So get your pen and paper out or I don't know, just talk to somebody else in the room with those bits where you're just completely lost and come back in where something's a bit more relevant. That's kind of how I listen to most podcasts. It's probably higher listening to this one, if you're even listening to me right now at all. So without further ado, Hunter Allen.

10:01Hunter, I felt like a good place to start would be for you, because I know that you're incredibly busy, and I can't imagine you have that many people that you actually manage to coach one-on-one these days. But because I've got this slot with you, I'm going to drill you to be my personal coach for the next 10 minutes. And I've just come back from a ride. And I wondered if you could help me go through some of my data. And I ask this not just for me, because I do have this conversation with a lot of other riders. What does it mean? You know, I went out, I'm wearing a Garmin watch, sometimes a ride with a Wahoo, you look through those apps afterwards, it goes into Strava, and my goodness, the amount of data is impenetrable.

10:41So just as a kind of starter for 10, we're obsessed with power, okay? That's just the nature of cycling at the moment. What's my better power number? What should I be looking at? Because I've got things like average weighted power, but then I've got normalized power, and then I've got peak power, and then I've got pedaling efficiency. Do I even care about pedaling efficiency, really? Surely I just want to see the highest number and I'll just take that in any given field. What's the most useful thing to come back from a ride and sort of look to be able to track progress if you like? Yeah, so I can't narrow it down to one thing because there are multiple things and it also depends on what your goal was for the actual session itself.

11:26So let's just kind of talk about a hypothetical session. Let's say you went out and you did three times 10 minutes at your FTP, then you did three sprints, 15 seconds long, and then you finished up with two hills that were around a minute or two where you're just like, I'm just going to exhaust myself and crush it up these hills and see what happens. So in that kind of a workout scenario, then I would first off look at the intervals themselves, parse out just that sliver of data to understand, okay, did you hit the numbers that I wanted you to hit? So, you know, what is, James, what is your FTP?

12:08Well, according, again, so another question, according to this ride, according to Garmin, and this is just basically sampling me mostly on the road, my FTP is 246. If I jump on a Watt bike, I can happily, I would say, ride at 280. And there's been times where I've trained a bit and got just over 300. So to me, 246 already seems pretty low. But again, I want to believe the higher number. And actually, maybe 246 is a more useful number and is a more realistic number. Yeah. So let's just address that because that's a really interesting discrepancy. and I would imagine have you put your power do you have power meter pedals and have you put them on your watt bike to see if like the pedals are measuring the same as the watt bike these because I'm doing lots of test bikes there's a variety of different things so no to the pedals this is a 4i system but as I say I was wondering is the big discrepancy that I am testing hard doing an FTP type test on a watt bike static just concentrating on that, whereas this is just sampling me on any given road ride and saying, hey, this is what you're doing at the moment when you're on the road.

13:22Right, absolutely. And, you know, James, the other thing, too, that's very interesting is that a lot of riders indoors on a fixed bicycle that doesn't move can actually produce more power than they can outside. And so it's highly likely that you are, your FTP is better, is higher, that out indoors than it is outdoors. There's a lot of other things happening, you know, outdoors that happens. But let's say, okay, back to our hypothetical scenario, four times 10 or three times 10 minutes, you go out and you crush the first one, you do 255, you do 252, then you do 250. And so to me, you nailed those.

14:03So I'm looking to see if you nailed those intervals. And if, you know, maybe gosh, you should have done more. If you did 255, 255, 255, and it was like, well, gosh, you could have done maybe a fourth or a fifth one if that, in fact, was the case to do it. So looking at the average power for that is really important. Then afterwards, okay, now you're going to go do some 15-second sprints. Now I'm going to look at two numbers on that one. I'm going to look at your peak number, what your maximum wattage was when you sprinted. So let's say that's 1 ,200 watts. You hit that, all three of those sprints.

14:36And then what was the average power just for that entire sprint? So what did you do? did you average 700 watts for the sprint, 800 watts for the sprint, 600 watts? How many watts did we actually measure for that as well? And in the sprint, I'll also look at your cadence numbers, right? Because I want to see in cadence, did you start the sprint with your cadence at an appropriate cadence, you know, which is, okay, gosh, if I'm working on explosiveness, then your cadence is going to be lower. Maybe it's only at 50 RPM and you're a very slow speed, you know, 10 or 12 KPH. But if you're, you're trying to simulate kind of a race ending sprint, then I want your cadence to be 90 RPM when you start the sprint.

15:21So then I would start to look at that cadence piece. Finally, you know, now you're going to blast two hills on the way home. And these are going to be between one and two minutes. They're kind of random hills that you just have on your route. So they're going to be, you know, around what we call your anaerobic ability, your anaerobic capacity. Now, some of that's going to be reduced because you've already ridden. And so you've gotten some fatigue in your legs. So I wouldn't suspect that you're going to hit a peak number on that time. But at the same time, did you in fact, you know, hit, you know, the areas where you should be in?

15:55So for example, maybe that's 500 watts and you nail 500 watts in the first one, it's a little shorter. It's about a minute and 10 seconds. The second one is about a minute and 45 seconds. Then that one you're hitting, you know, a little bit lower 480. And then I'm just looking to see, okay, how many watts does he do on this? And oh, this is the same hill that he hits every time he comes home. And then I might go back and look at that hill for versus other times that you've done it in the past and just compare them and see if that is a, is in fact a comparable hill and uh and from that perspective then i look at the big picture okay what was uh what we call the heart rate to power relationship so in heart rate to power relationship it's uh hr colon pw and what that is is it looks at basically the first half of the ride compares power to heart rate and says okay for every watt you get this heart rate then it looks at the second half of the ride for every watt, you get this heart rate.

16:59And if the ride was long enough and intense enough, two and a half hours or so, then you might see what we call cardiovascular drift. So that power heart rate relationship will be, you know, 5%, 10%, could be 20 % as much. Now, if I see a, let's say this was a two and a half hour ride, you come back, your power heart rate relationship is 18%. I'm going to say, okay, well, number one, was it hot? because heat will create cardiovascular drift? Or two, did you get dehydrated? Or three, is this just a really tough workout that you haven't done in a while and you just don't have the cardiovascular fitness quite yet to do it?

17:38So we need to kind of back off of this intensity, maybe come back, do a little more tempo work, extend some of the time that we're doing a tempo work. So that'll be one that, another one that I'll look at and especially kind of in the early spring when we're coming out for the off season and then certainly in the in the hot summer months as well too so that's another one so yeah it's just because there's a lot of little fun things to look at yeah then you got to go back and say well how does this fit into the big picture like well what's what's this fit into the big picture what's my chronic training load now how many tss points did i get for this and and how is this going to impact me tomorrow etc so it's it's all fun Well, that's it, right?

18:23So one of my big takeaways from that is there is just so much data, and you need someone who understands the data to be able to interpret it for you, never mind then to be able to explain it to you. So when we've got lots of wearable tech at the moment or head units with incredibly elaborate apps that attach them and they purport to examine this in the way that you've just done, but in an artificial intelligent type of way, it's more dumb than that, really. it's not quite AI, but are those things actually useful to riders? For example, the idea that I've got a training readiness score off the back of having done two rides yesterday and today, Garmin's now telling me, and I don't want to single out Garmin, it's not about Garmin, it's just the platform is telling me, I am in a poor state, which is quite condescending, but I'm in a poor state to go cycling tomorrow, and I'm going to need some ridiculous amount of rest.

19:22And to me, I'm thinking like, yeah, I don't know. I've had a bad night's sleep because I've got a little daughter and da-da-da-da. But I don't know about, I don't feel poor. So are we getting good information from the companion pieces that go with the instruments measuring it? Or is it just, there's no point in having a power meter unless you've got a Hunter Allen type person explaining what those things are? Yeah. Well, I think so. All these new wearables are very exciting. First off, I'm really excited by them because I think that they can be very good at measuring life stress, right? Each of these have their own strengths and weaknesses.

20:02Let's just kind of single out the top three, right? We've got the Garmin watch, we've got the Aura Ring, and we've got the Whoop band strap. And so those guys have been doing this for a while now. Each one of these things are really have their own, like I said, strengths and weaknesses. I think the Oura Ring is probably the best at sleep. It gets really good sleep numbers. It's very accurate. I think Garmin is on the sleep. The Whoop is pretty good on the sleep. So if you're looking at sleep, then maybe that the Oura Ring is your thing. None of them get great heart rate data in exercising. They get good heart rate data at rest and at sleep.

20:42I believe the Garmin, the newer Garmin watches, they have a medical grade ECG in them to measure your heart rate. That's very, very good. They've done a great job with that. So they're going to get HRV really, really well. And Aura Ring and Whoop also do this too very, very well. So that's great. So if you're looking at HRV, which is a really important one to see, you know, what's happening And that's highly correlated with whether you need to rest or whether you need to, you know, are you really fresh or whatever, or you're building form, etc. Or you're coming down off of form. So just unpack that quickly, the HRV bit.

21:23So that's heart rate variability. What is that? And what numbers might somebody see that would indicate X or Y about themselves? Yeah, so HRV heart rate variability is the measure of the time between your heart beats. So we have, it's in milliseconds. And what's really crazy, right, is the fact that when you're fatigued, your time between heart beats is very stable. So that HRV number will be low. I'll give you my personal example. You know, when I'm fresh and ready to train my HRV, I'm 56 years old now. Now, my, and so there's age factor in here somewhat, but it'll be around 50 to 60 milliseconds.

22:07Okay. But once I, you know, give me seven days of really hard training, maybe even 10 days or so, and I'm really fatigued and I'm just kind of struggling with everything, then that could come down to 15 or 18 milliseconds. So that shows me that I'm really tired. You know, so that's a big range for me. Now, I've got a young rider that I do coach. He's an aspiring professional. He's 21. His HRV is 130. And when he gets tired, it comes down to 100. So, you know, everybody's scaling is different. And it is a really great one to look at, overlaid on top of other power data. So I have a chart in the TrainingPeaks WKO software that lays over this one, over the entire what's called a performance manager chart.

23:02And that is really great because I can be looking at your training data and it looks like, man, he's riding really strong. He's doing really, really well. But all of a sudden I look at your HRV and your HRV is tanking. It's a great leading indicator to tell me like, OK, wait, timeout. What's going on? Are there other things happening in your life? And if we don't stop those or if there's stuff that we can't stop, then we probably need to back off on the training. So it gives me that clue to know kind of where the life stresses are. So back to your original question. Do you need somebody to help you with all this data analysis?

23:42It certainly helps. But at the same time, you know, there is so much information out there now to help you learn about it. And I would argue that that's part of the fun of cycling or running or triathlon or whatever sport you're in. It's like another layer of the onion to peel open. It's just like how we get so excited about some new carbon fiber bit or, oh, man, I'm going to get these new wheels. Or I've got to research about wheels and find out wheels and find the best tires. What's the best tire pressure, right? I mean, we dive down these rabbit holes, and that's a fun thing, a fun part of cycling.

24:20to me anyway, some people maybe not. But the same thing with this is like, wow, this is another thing I can do. I can learn about this. I can learn about my body. I can learn how my body responds to certain training stimulus. I can learn how my body responds to more sleep, less sleep. Should I eat after seven o 'clock at night? What happens to my REM cycle and deep sleep cycle? What does alcohol do to me? I mean, yeah, it's endless. Yeah. Do you think, so this is an idea that I came across, and it's not his idea, but an anthropologist endurance runner called Dr. Michael Crawley, and he wrote a book called To The Limit.

24:57And in it, he explored the way that wearables have sort of kind of philosophically changed our approach to training. So they started off as what has been coined as kind of compass tools. So they directed you, they gave you little kind of nudges to, it pointed you in a direction it didn't prescribe. Now they exist as sentinels. So they're kind of on guard. They're not just providing bits of direction. They are really kind of pushing you like, okay, today you now need to do this. You might think you're feeling good, or you might think you're feeling bad, but actually I can tell you, you slept really badly and you shouldn't go out riding today.

25:37And that's changed our relationship to the way we train, but also maybe towards those sorts of rabbit holes as well, because as much as you want to, for example, delve into tire pressure, do we actually more and more just want someone to say the best pressure is 67.5 PSI? And then I don't need to know why. I don't need to know why, just pump my tires up to that and I'll ride that every day. Exactly. Exactly. Well, there's certainly, there are a lot of people who just want to know the answer and just tell me the answer. And I've got, I've had clients, you know, over the years, where like, I don't want to know the why.

26:13I don't want to know any of this crap. You just tell me what the number is and I'll go do it. Right. And, and they're highly successful that way because they just say, you know what, I just do this number and Hunter tells me to do it. And man, I get stronger. I, he tells me to rest and I rest. So I think that, um, that certainly can be the case. There's no doubt about that. I like the idea of this, the Sentinel. And I think that that makes a good sense. However, I do think that a lot of these things, they do require, yeah, and this is where it becomes challenging. They're not always right. And I think that's where it becomes an issue.

26:51For example, if you listen to your Garmin, right? I mean, I think they're notorious and everybody who has one knows this. And I don't know why Garmin doesn't fix this. And if you guys are listening, please fix this. You know, you get back from a ride and it says you need 48 hours of recovery time. And you're just like going, well, if I, if I had just listened to this thing, I would never actually ride my bike. I would never get fit. Right. Yeah. Right. So, so it's comical, you know? And so then that makes you question all of them because it's like, well, it says that I'm tired. I don't feel tired.

27:25Should I go and train today? Well, it says I'm tired. I'm not going to train today. Well, darn it. You probably just missed a really important day of training. And then we also have to remember too, that part of training and part of doing these things is fatiguing yourself down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, and becoming very fatigued and then recovering, you know, you're overloading, you're recovering, and then you're getting adaptations, you're getting fitter. So you have to also understand that like, man, I need three super hard days in a row. And even after the first day, my numbers are not going great.

28:05Whatever. I'm still going to do the second day. And if I'm about on death's doorbed after the second day, I'm still going to do the third day. And then I'm going to rest. And so I think that that's some things you have to always take into account as well. Yeah. Because I'm always amazed. And this isn't obviously, this sticks out to me for my conformational bias, right? I like stories like this and this won't be the case across the whole pro peloton but i'm amazed at the number of riders uh pogaccia recently um i say recently i think it's probably last after last year's tour de france on a podcast discussed how he didn't really trust power meters doesn't really ride with one he rides on feel we have peter sagand on this podcast and he said that although a heart rate monitor has actually saved his life in in in racing mountain bikes and it detected this kind of arrhythmia.

28:53Throughout his road career, he just didn't ride with heart rate at all. And he didn't have a power meter. And again, so it's these top, top pros who just say, nah, I do it on feel. And Graham O 'Brie, do you remember Graham O 'Brie? Oh, sure. Yeah, our record contender with Boardman, Chris Boardman back in the 90s when our record was this mad big thing. And he had Chris Boardman in the lab with his carbon fiber Lotus bike and wind tunnels and cutting edge tech. Graham Obery, he's got his bike that he made himself with bearings he took from a washing machine. And his training kind of protocol was he goes out down the garden path and he gets to the gate.

29:31And if he feels good by the gate, he goes out. And if he doesn't, he goes back in again. And of course, that's an apocryphal tale, but there's some sense in that. So is it actually better to try to move more into understanding the feel of our bodies? or can you only get there if you've trained with with numbers um i don't think that um moving towards that is the answer i think that more of it is having both right is is being aware of both and not being committed a hundred percent to one thing or the other like you have to on days like you have to train hard on days you don't feel good, right? I mean, the pros do it all the time, right?

30:17The best ultra racers do it all the time, right? If you just only trained on your good days, like if I only came to work on days that I felt good, like, I would probably work like a lot less. I just don't feel great this morning. I didn't have a good sleep. I think I'm just gonna stay at home. Right. Um, you know, I mean, like we have to do work on days you don't feel good. And some days you go out there, right. And you do an interval and you feel like crap and you're like, Oh my God, I feel bad. And then you do another one and you do, and then you're like, Oh, you know, I'm starting to feel better, man.

30:52And then you start to feel better. And then all of a sudden at the end of your ride, you're like, Oh my God, that was amazing session. Right. And if you'd have quit after that first one, then you would have missed a really great opportunity to gain some fitness. So I think that being a slave to one thing or the other is the wrong answer. I think taking both into context and using them and saying, okay, gosh, if I'm feeling great and I'm going out and I'm hitting all the numbers on my power meter, and I'm actually exceeding the numbers on my power meter, then I'm gonna keep going, right? That's awesome.

31:29I can continue to do more intervals. You know, I can continue to push myself. I can continue to improve, et cetera. And so that's a, you know, kind of back to your confirmation bias, right? Your power meter is confirming how you feel. Yeah. So that's really good, right? Now, if you go out and you feel like crap and then all of a sudden, man, I'm supposed to be hitting 250 watts and I can't even do 225 and my heart rate's through the roof and I'm just dying here at 225, then, okay, that's, you know, I'm going to do one more and try it again. Maybe I'm just not warmed up yet. And I do it again and I'm still at 225.

32:07Then it's like, shut it off. Let's go home. Right. Because now you've got two things that are telling you that, right. Then my, my feeling in this, and maybe you've got your, your heart rate, you know, variability is also telling you that. So now that's giving you those clues to say, shut it down. So that to me, I think is the art, right? It's taking the science pieces and then using them with your own experience, with your own brain and saying, okay, this is a better answer. Yeah. So which leads me with a very clunky segue into the new science piece, which you're discussing in your latest book, Training and Competing with Continuous glucose monitors, which you also refer to as CGMs, people refer to them as CGMs.

32:53So what is a continuous glucose monitor? And the bigger question that I think, you know, will arrive at some point in the next 10, 15 minutes is, will they be, will they prove as game-changing as power meters, or are we already seeing that they've changed the game? Those are great questions, really good questions. Let's take one at a time. So what is a CGM? A continuous glucose monitor is a small little device that is inserted with into the space, what's called the interstitial space, which is between your outer skin layer and the muscle. It's kind of in the fatty area in general here. And I'll just kind of see, I guess I get on this arm right here right now.

33:38Now, you know, I've got a little patch over mine right here. It's just right here on your tricep and in that kind of little fatty layer right there. And it's got a little filament that goes inside there. And that little filament basically is an oxidase way that it connects, you know, it oxidizes with the glucose molecules and creates a little electrical signal. And that electrical signal is then translated into how much glucose you have in your interstitial fluid. So we have to kind of set some of the terms here, right? A lot of people will say blood glucose. Well, it's not really measuring blood glucose because blood glucose can be measured by a prick on your finger, right?

34:21That's called a finger prick. Then blood glucose could be measured intravenously in a hospital as well. That's a different thing. So it's similar to measuring power on a power meter. It's like, well, if I'm measuring power at my pedals versus measuring at my crank and my spider versus measuring in the older power tap hub in the rear wheel, you're going to get three different measurements. Same thing here, intravenously, finger prick and the interstitial fluid. The interstitial fluid is the one that kind of comes the last, similar to like a power tap, the old power meter that was in the hub. Yeah.

34:53Downstring. But it's still a very, very good place to measure because it's easy to measure. You don't have to prick yourself. if you don't go to the hospital, you can wear it 24-7, etc. These little devices pair to your phone via Bluetooth, and then that gives you an update depending on the kind of device you have, either five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes or even one minute. It samples that and sends that information to your phone. Of course, more data is better, so every one minute is the best one. And that way you can see what is happening with your glucose levels. Are you rising? Are Are you falling?

35:28Are you staying stable? You know, what's happening from a perspective of what does it do when I'm training? What does it do in the middle of the night? What is it doing when I'm just sitting at the office desk? What is it doing when I'm getting excited for a presentation at work or anything like this? So there's so much information that is kind of encompassed in your glucose levels that you have to give it more perspective. And what I mean by that is, what have you eaten? What's your mood like? Are you moving or not? All these things.

36:08I reckon a while ago, the bike computer market looked all sewn up. There were two big players, end of. Kind of like how once upon a time group sets meant either Shimano or Campagnolo. So there's a wonderful synergy in the fact SRAM busted open the group set market back in 2006. and now SRAM's computer arm, Hammerhead, is blowing the doors off in the same way with the Hammerhead Karoo. My favourite thing about the Karoo is how much it's like a smartphone. So the touchscreen is really crisp and punchy, so data and mapping, which is way more like a phone's mapping than a classic bike GPS, by the way.

36:43Those things are super clear. But unlike a phone, battery life is a huge 35 hours with GPS on and your ride recording, plus it's also way smaller. it's up there with the smallest head units given what it does and it does loads from predicting gradients in real time to making routes on the fly to running apps like spotify and it will even tell you how fast you're going there's a whole lot more that we'll get into in other episodes but for anyone who just needs things now now now head over to cyclist.co.uk and search hammerhead crew 3 to read our in-depth review and find out why we gave it our cyclist recommended badge of honor.

37:19Then head to hammerhead.io and use the promo code cyclist to get a free heart rate monitor with every purchase of a crew. Just make sure we put everything in the basket first before applying that promo code cyclist, promo code hammerhead.io is where you can find all the gear.

37:40Hello lovely listeners. I just wanted to tell you that cyclist isn't just a podcast. No, cyclist is also a beautiful print magazine it's packed full of all the best rides from around the world the newest bikes and kit and loads of in-depth articles featuring guests just like on today's show so head on over to cyclist.co.uk slash subscriptions and check out our latest cyclist magazine subscription offers.

38:16So one question that arises, are we better off? Are we performing better if we're at a steady glucose level? Is that what we're trying to, and I appreciate different sports, you know, the horses for courses, but sticking with endurance sports, cycling on a six hour ride, should I be hoping to keep that glucose level steady or put it a different way if i'm tally pagaccia and i've got one of these things and i'm racing up von 2 does my coach want to tell me my ds want to tell me when to eat because they see a dip is is that the kind of is that the the usefulness of it um is to be able to kind of monitor and then predict and are you therefore yeah trying to predict in a way that you keep that glucose level basically steady.

39:05Right. So each of us have a similar to training in with power meter with training zones. We have a glucose, optimal glucose zone. And in each of those are different as well. So women, their glucose numbers are lower than men generally. So their optimal glucose zone could be between, let's say, 80 milligrams per deciliter up to 115 milligrams per deciliter. And they perform perfectly great at that level. Their energy levels are high. They nail all the intervals. They race there. They do great. There could be somebody who, let's say a male could be between 150 milligrams per deciliter and 200 milligrams per deciliter.

39:52Those numbers could be perfect for them. So we need to kind of understand what these are. And let's give it a little bit of scale for people who are listening and don't really know what this means, right? Because it's kind of the same thing as a power meter. When I first got a power meter or when a client back in 1998 sent me his power meter file and it said 200 watts, I was like, is that good? Is that bad? I don't know. I have no idea. So it's kind of the same thing here. So in general, we measure here in the US by milligrams per deciliter. Other places measure millimoles, but milligrams per deciliter.

40:30If you're 100 milligrams per deciliter or below, this is determined as, you know, as kind of what your normal basal level is for pretty much most of the population. If you wake up in the morning and yours is 85 or 75 or 90, that's great. Now, If you wake up in the morning and your glucose level is 125 in the morning or 130 or 140, then you might have a problem. That would be probably, that would start to tell you that you have what's called some insulin resistance and you might be pre-diabetic or even diabetic. So those are, it's a great medical tool from that perspective. You can see like what's going on.

41:17Do you have insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity in that range? Now, a diabetic, a full-blown diabetic, their glucose could rise as high as 300 milligrams per deciliter because they're not either, their pancreas is producing insulin. If they're a type 1, then they don't produce any insulin. So they could be 300 or 400 and they need to take insulin, inject it. Or if you're a type two, where you just have a lot of insulin resistance, you still produce insulin, but you're just not producing enough and your cells are resistant to absorbing or using that insulin to get the glucose out of the bloodstream.

41:56Those people, they could regularly go to 200 to 300 milligrams per deciliter and stay up, right? So let's say, James, you stick a CGM on, you have breakfast, and it's a high-carb breakfast or whatever because you know you're heading out for a ride. You want to get in a big, intense interval session in. You look at your CGM right before you hop on the bike, and it says 200 milligrams per deciliter. You're like, wow, holy crap. That seems really, really high. But it's like, well, okay, it's high, but you just had a high-carb breakfast. and if you just stood around, didn't go for a bike ride, your glucose would just come back right back down to what's your kind of daily basal rate, which could be 100, 110, 115, 120, whatever it is, kind of just, you just kind of cruise along or 90 or whatever that is for you, you just cruise along.

42:48So having a spike is not a bad thing. It's totally, totally normal. That is exactly what everybody does. We all do that. But let's say, for example, you have a high carb breakfast, your glucose goes to 200 and then you don't ride right you're sitting at the office and it stays there for four hours or five hours and then it finally comes down that would be an indication that you have some insulin resistance and we should probably have a doctor talk talk to a doctor let's change some of your diet let's do some things let's start to reduce some of that insulin resistance so there's lots of strategies you can involve there so it's a great medical tool now back to the first scenario.

43:28Okay, cool. My glucose went to 200. Now I'm getting on my bike. I'm going to ride. That's perfect because now your glucose is high. You need it. You're going to instantly start using that glucose as you start riding. And then that was going to naturally just slide down through the ride and maintain your liver at some point will start to output more glucose. So this 200 comes in, it starts to slide down, the liver outputs more glucose, and they kind of meet somewhere and maybe right at your optimal zone, 125, 130 or whatever. And you're doing intervals, you're feeling great. Now, that glucose, if you don't feed, you don't eat or drink more carbohydrates, then that could come down to 120, to 115, to 110, to 90.

44:17knee. And then all of a sudden you realize like, oh my gosh, I'm starting to feel like I'm going to have a bulk here and I need some food, right? So then you eat at that point to bring the glucose back up. So most of us don't recognize this. We know what a bulk is, right? Everybody knows what that is. We've all done it, but we can recognize it sooner using a CGM because that way we know when we see what I call that slow slide of the glucose. So that's a great way to start to use it is to learn like, okay, I need to keep this thing around 125. It could go to 200. It could come back down maybe to 110 or so, but I'm trying to get an average around 125, 130 for my workout or for my race.

45:05So the goal isn't stability necessarily, because when you eat more foods, it's going to go up when you don't eat it's going to come down but it's kind of like let's keep it in this range does that does that help yeah so in being able to then have an athlete assessed in that way does that translate into is that one of the reasons behind why we're seeing such incredibly fast times from riders so if you look at this year tour de france pagaccia out of one two he breaks Mayo's record by a minute and some seconds, a minute and 10 seconds, something like that, which is huge. That's a record that stood for 24 years.

45:47And let's be honest, happened in 2001. So there are other things happening in 2001 too. And concurrently, I'm often seeing headlines on other news outlet sites about, you know, breakthrough, we can now absorb 140, 160 grams of carbs per hour. When I started this job in 2012, if you went to a company like SIS Science and Sport, a nutrition company, they would kind of be suggesting, no, you should be looking at taking 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour or three of our gels, that kind of thing. Whereas now it's almost double. So are all these factors conspiring to make, is that why riders are getting faster because they're able to feel better.

46:32Could it be responsible for those sorts of leaps? Right. I don't think it's responsible for that kind of a leap. I think it's multifactorial, right? I think we've got a lot of things going on causing those leaps. Number one, our bicycles are way better than they were 24 years ago. Crazy aero, tire pressures are optimized. Those two things alone are massive. And three, these guys, Sadi Padegacha and all these guys can tell you they're not using power meters, but let me tell you, they're using power meters and they're training scientifically. And they've got really good coaches who are helping them prescribing their training and their training with the best tools.

47:14Okay. So power meters, heart rate monitors, respiration straps, CGMs, whatever they are, right. They are training very, very scientifically. So I think those things are there. The glucose piece is absolutely a big factor, right? Because before, even the best riders in the world, not to mention just masters and the normal rest of us, right, we would get low in glucose and we wouldn't necessarily know it and not realize that it was the reason why our power was down or a reason we weren't performing really well. It actually had to do with the fact that our glucose was on the state of decline or already was down here, we weren't getting the signals to our brain to say, eat, eat, eat, right?

48:00That signal came too late and now our power was down as well. And do we need 120 grams of carbs, 150 grams of carbs per hour, et cetera? I mean, if you're putting out 450 watts in an hour, then you're burning a massive amount of calories, okay? Yeah. So if your FTP is 450, then you're cracking out almost 2 ,000 calories of energy every hour. So yeah, you probably need to put in 120 grams of carbs every hour just to match that output. Now, if you're a master's racer like me or a cyclosporite rider or a Gran Fondo rider in your 50s, like, man, you know, if you do 300 watts for an hour, if you can ride at 300 watts for an hour, you're going to burn about a thousand calories.

48:53Okay. So gosh, you know, a thousand calories. I mean, I don't need 120 grams of carbs for that. That's the most I could do. And if I'm in a Grand Fondo or a Cyclo Sportif, I'm not going to ride for an hour at my FTP because I won't be able to finish the thing. Right. So, you know, I'm going to be down at 600, 700 calorie per hour burn doing some kind of, you know, workouts or events. So back to the 60 to 90 for the rest of the world, that's absolutely plenty, you know, from, from that perspective. So I think that you have to keep those things in mind when we look, we hear about what the pros are doing and say, does that really apply to me?

49:34And in this case, like, I would, are you not because you're just not, you know, putting out 400 feet. Yeah. What's for an hour? Absolutely. But then, But the thing that strikes me is that the conversation from, I don't know, from the pro side of it, has this complexion of we used to think that this is basically what the human body could take. And we fiddle around with our ratios of, I don't know, multidextrin to glucose to fructose, whatever it is, you always see that number, don't you, on like a power bar, four to one, whatever. And we're doing that to optimize energy absorption. but we've got to this ceiling limit which is basically 90 100 grams something like that and now people are saying no no no no that's not the limit at all the limit is much higher and now we're fueling to that limit where once before we were fueling this is this is the kind of supposition well once again once before we're fueling to the lower limit is that actually the case have have we reassessed how much glucose we can readily absorb and in doing so has that had a genuine in tangible effects on speed?

50:40I think so. Absolutely, the science is there, right? Oscar Jukendrup has done some really great work around this. And he's a giant in this world. And so he's done some excellent work showing that they can be absorbed, especially you can train it to absorb this rate. In my experience, and I'll just caveat it, I am not a scientist nor a PhD, but I've got a lot of data now on 50 or so, maybe 60 athletes using CGMs. I have not seen any athlete where their glucose level is at 150. And then I raise it with more carbs to get it to 200 and they've performed any better. Like I just, I'm very skeptical.

51:32And again, like I'm totally open to this data and totally open to hearing more and see where it is. But I'm very skeptical if like, okay, more is going to be better from 150 to 200 is going to be better. If, if my FTP is, is 250 Watts, if my glucose is 200, I just don't, I have a really hard time believing that you're going to, to ride an extra 10 Watts faster than you would if your glucose is 150. Yeah. I just, I just don't see it because you're not using it. It's similar. Like think about the gas tank analogy in your car, right? It's like, gosh, if we go to the gas station and your car is already full of gas and you go and you put more gas in it, it's just now going all over the ground.

52:24Is it actually going to make your car go faster? No, right. It's not going to make your car go faster, you're just more full now, right? Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to put more gas in the back seat, you know, um, it's not going to make you go any faster. So once the tank is full, the tank is full. Now maintaining it is a different story, right? Because it's like, gosh, I'm running for five or six hours and then I want to maintain this. Then that's important to keep in mind can you maintain it with 60 to 90 grams per hour especially if you're not doing 450 watts if we're doing 250 watts an hour absolutely so yeah something to think about yeah because i mean that that's the bit that like makes sense to me and i remember this from doing the first big distance sportive i ever did and being so green in cycling even then i was the sort if you put enough fuel into your body, then you just kind of keep going.

53:25And the rest of the thing that stops you, and I'm not thinking I eat more, I go faster. I was thinking if I eat enough, I can just keep riding added for an item. And the thing that might stop me is eventually I'm going to need to go to bed or I'm just going to get thoroughly bored or really uncomfortable. But if I just eat, eat, eat, then job's good. And I literally remember, this was in Italy, putting, and this is horrible, like a flatbread salami sandwich up the inside of a bib short because my jersey pockets already had stuff it because I was so worried about running out of food. And obviously, you realize in time, because as you talked about, you bonk, and you realize it just doesn't work like that.

54:01But if you could keep topping up that tank because it drains down, then actually it would work like that. And the reason it doesn't is because it drains down faster than you can possibly top it up. And what I found interesting in your book about training with CGMs, you say that an average ballpark average athlete might be carrying two to two and a half hours of glycogen stored in their muscles and their liver. So you kind of equate it to about 300 grams in the muscles and 100 grams in the liver, which by my reckoning is something like 16 bananas, which is not very much. And then an amateur like me is an hour to 1.5.

54:46So you start with not very much and then you can't really top it up so therefore being able to top it up in the most efficient way and to its maximal is is the goal right is that what it all leads to that's what we're and that's where we'll see performance changes over time not performance changes over outright speed outright wattage but performance changes over a six hour event you'll you'll get to the end overall faster because you haven't fatigued halfway through and needed to slow down Exactly. No, I mean, that's a super point. That's a super point. And I think that that's the thing that listeners here need to take home is that, okay, one, we need to make sure that we're feeding ourselves enough to the highest, you know, to the absorption rate, right?

55:34How quickly can you absorb these calories? Because for you, you may be able to take in 120 grams of carbs, but it may give you such bad GI distress that you can only absorb 60. And now you don't feel great and you've kind of gunked up the system, so to speak. And so there is a limiting factor of how much you can absorb. And everybody's individual. They know, supposedly this is trainable. We'll see. Some people I think it would be trainable. Other people it won't be trainable too. And then at the same time, think about, well, gosh, what am I doing long term? And how is this going to impact me for not only this day, this workout, but also for the next day and then the next day and then the next day?

56:28Because similar to kind of bringing this back around to the conversation at the beginning, looking at this information, like we look at it individually in the workout itself. Okay, what's my glucose in the workout itself? But then I also need to think about the big picture of how are my glycogen stores overall? all. And so if you go out on a super hard ride, say two and a half hours, you end up, you know, for whatever reason, you don't feed as much as you need to. You come back, your glycogen stores are depleted. Then, you know, you had a crazy day immediately. You had to get a shower and then run off to the office or whatever.

57:10You didn't get a good recovery shake or a recovery meal. Now you're not giving your body the chance to replenish those stores. And then it may come, you know, it may be five or six o 'clock in the evening before now you get the chance to eat. Well, you've missed a critical window for replenishing those stores. And so the next day you start out again. And so instead of the, instead of your stores being topped off and fill, now you're starting at say 50%. And so then all of a sudden, wow, you can see it in your, in your, your, um, Your CGM, you wake up in the morning and my normal wake up time and my glucose is 90.

57:47And now it's like 85 or 80. Like, wow, my glucose is really low this morning. And then you do it again the next day and then you do it again the next day. Same scenario happens day over and day over. And all of a sudden you start waking up on the fifth day and your glucose is 70. and it's like, wow, you know, my, I really reduced my glycogen stores so much that now there's, there really aren't many and I'm going to struggle in my workout on the seventh day or whatever. So we have to think of this big picture cumulative effect of glucose as well. And making sure that what we do after our workouts is really important.

58:28And, you know, I've been doing this forever. I mean, I was a pro back in the 90s and early 90s and stuff, and we knew forever, you know, some of the landmark studies of how we need to have carbohydrates and protein in our recovery shakes to replenish these glycogen stores and get nutrients back into the cells. So this is nothing new. But at the same time, now it's quantifiable, right? Similar to power meters, like, you know, okay, hey, the best guy with the highest FTP won the Tour de France. That was Eddie Merckx in 1970, you know, whatever, right? But, you know, now we have power meters and we can see, like, how many watts, you know, was that and how to train by that.

59:10So I think that's a big, exciting picture. The big picture is exciting from thinking about how do I optimize this daily, individually, but then also over time. And then that also circles back, James, to the idea of like, is this one of the reasons why we're seeing faster and faster times? Not just because of what they're taking in in the race, but because how they're approaching the entire thing. Yeah. So, yeah. So that all makes total sense. But if you haven't got that overview of your blood glucose through monitoring or you just don't have that insight, from your anecdotal experiential evidence how would you advise somebody who's going into a sportive grand fondo they're going to have to ride 200k on sunday morning it's it's friday or let's say it's friday night and they're going to have to ride 200k on sunday morning how should they structure their food intake up until the sunday morning and then supplementary question possibly the bigger one how do they then optimize and again i appreciate we don't have a case study here and this is more ballpark stuff but how would you begin to look at optimizing your food intake your energy intake across those next 200 kilometers so across the next six seven eight hours right so when we think about preparing for an event we have to think about a couple of different things.

1:00:42Number one, we have to think about the pace that you're going to be at, right? So, okay, if I'm going to be mainly at tempo pace for most of this thing, then I'm going to be expending a significant amount of calories. I'm not going to be rotting an endurance pace. At endurance pace, we're burning more fat. So I don't have to have quite as many calories because I can rely on some of my fat stores. But now we're at tempo pace where I'm burning more carbohydrates. Maybe I've got to get over some hills, etc. So leading up to this time, right, we're eating in a way that makes sure that we do have enough carbohydrates on board.

1:01:22You know, I don't think that this idea there was very much popular, you know, carbo loading, you know, for a long time was like, oh my gosh, we got to just like eat tons and tons of carbs three days before, etc. to increase our carbohydrate stores, that's largely fallen out of favor somewhat. I mean, there is a, there is, um, obviously it works, but do you really need to do it? And probably not the way that I advise my, my, uh, clients is like, okay, gosh, two days before the event, three days before the event, then increase your carbohydrate intake by a little bit. Like if you normally have a, uh, a bowl of pasta, have a bowl and a half of pasta.

1:02:03If you normally have a cup of rice, have a cup and a half of rice for two meals. Don't do it for every meal. So it's three days before and two days before. The day before your event, just have a normal meal. Make sure you, you know, normal meals, make sure you have carbohydrates. Don't just go all protein or something. Have carbohydrates. Eat, eat, be clean, eat healthy, but don't need to overeat the day before because there's a lot of of riders a lot of athletes who are eating way too much the day before and they spend all night digesting this food and their body is just not happy with that and they and they're wondering why they feel bad the day of the event it's like well man you're doing a marathon inside your body all night long while you're trying to sleep yeah so um i think that's important so at least we're coming up to the event and then during the event, we say, okay, gosh, now if this event is going to start hard and I have to be on my game right from the start of the event, because, you know, whether there's a hill or maybe there's going to be an attack at the front, or I just want to be right to the front, then one, that morning, you need to make sure that you eat so that you've got a good amount of complex carbs with some proteins with some fats, healthy fats, not tons of saturated fat.

1:03:24Okay. Healthy fats, like some, some oils and stuff like that. So not, not a ton of oil here, just a little bit, but be careful with that. Saturated fat clogs the arteries and it definitely makes, slows down the blood flow within hours of eating saturated fat. And that's not good before event. So keep that in mind. And then that way you come into the event, you're, you've got, okay, a couple hours, two, three hours before, whatever feels good to you, then just before the event starts, 10 minutes before, you need to eat a gel, right? You need to eat something high carbohydrate, simple carbohydrates, 10 minutes before, because your goal is to get a bump in your glucose right at the beginning of the start of the event.

1:04:08Like, okay, my glucose is 100. I want it to go to 140. They flag goes and everybody says go. Now my glucose is 140 and I'm ready to go right from the start. I don't have to wait on my body for five minutes to start sending glucose from the liver into the bloodstream to get to these working muscles. So you're kind of ahead of the curve there. And when you take that gel, is it almost like your body's releasing energy? Does that trigger an energy release? Because it's not the actual gel itself, right, that's suddenly in your system within 10 minutes. Is it, or is it? Is that? Yeah, no, it is. Yeah.

1:04:48I mean, it goes right through. I mean, that's the beauty of these things, right, is that they increase the glucose levels really fast, right? They're digested super quick, and then you can use them right away. So that's part of it. Yes, absolutely. And so then you're moving in, the gun's gone. You're taking your gel 10 minutes before, the gun's gone, you're straight into tempo riding. And just to borrow again from the book, you talk about a rider having what you describe as a kind of roller coaster day. So a roller coaster, not in course profile, but in their glucose profile, they're up and down and they're constantly chasing that to be in that window that you described, but they're not able to make it.

1:05:31What's happening there? Why are they getting the big peaks, the troughs, and why can't they rebalance themselves? What have they, what cue did they miss? So when that happens, it typically means they're eating too much too quickly and then creating a big glucose spike. And then the body is absorbing that glucose very quickly. And then also there's the pancreas releases a little bit of insulin to start to absorb that too. So kind of two things are happening. One, you're abusing it and then you're absorbing it. So what the strategy is, is like, okay, don't just slam, you know, the race has started or the event has started an hour and a half into it.

1:06:17Don't just slam, you know, a whole bag of, you know, gels or a whole bag of these little, you know, cliff gummy bear block things, right? Don't just slam a whole bunch of those things. Or don't just take three gels at once. You know, take these things and do them at intervals and let your glucose slowly come up. For example, you know, I'm watching my CGM. My glucose started at 140. I'm cruising along. 140, 140, 140 is good. All of a sudden that slow slide happens, 130, 125, 120, 120, 110, 115, 110, 195. And then I'm like, oh crap, I'm going to bonk, right? Then you take eight of these things, you smash them in your mouth, you chew them up.

1:07:05Now your glucose goes to 200 or even higher. Your body says, oh wow, there's a lot of glucose in the system here. The pancreas releases a little bit of insulin, starts to pull some of that out. You start using it. Then that glucose comes down really quickly, way faster than a normal, normally it might. And it actually drops down to 65. And so, you know, you were at 95 and went to 200 and drops down to 65 now. And now you're really bonking. Now you're like, oh my gosh, what's happened to me? I didn't eat enough, right? And then you do it again. You smash another eight of these things in your mouth and you go back up again and you come down again.

1:07:50You're creating this. This is called a reactive hypoglycemic crash. You're actually creating the bulk. Okay. So what's better than doing this, right? Because a reactive hypoglycemic crash is when you're here, let's say 90, you go to 180 and you crash down to 65 afterwards. That's, that's what people talk about when they've talked about the crash, you've heard it before. Or this is what happens. We can see this now in CGMs, right? Well, it's better. Okay, gosh, I'm at 95. What am I going to do? I'm going to take four of those blocks. I'm going to stick two in my mouth. I'm going to chew two of them.

1:08:25I'm going to stick two in my cheeks like I'm a squirrel, and I'm going to suck on those. And I'm going to suck on those for 10 minutes or five minutes after I chewed the first two. And I'm going to look at my CGM and say, oh, okay, the first two brought me back up to 100. Okay, I'm going to chew the O2. That brought me back up to 110. Then I'm going to wait another five minutes. Okay, now it's at 115. Now I'm going to eat two more. And then it brought me back to 120 again, 125. And then now, instead of going to 180, it's like, oh, I'm back to 125. And then you're just kind of titrating out the glucose from there.

1:09:05Okay, in 10 minutes, I'm going to eat half of a bar. Okay. and then you know in 20 minutes i'll eat the other half of the bar and that makes it come up a little bit more but still in that same range instead of just chomping everything at once yeah so you've got to kind of override your brain saying you're knackered you're blowing out your backside give me food and then you just chomp it all down and you need to just meet it out a little bit like steady, take that same bar, eat it over 10 minutes as opposed to one minute or 20 minutes as opposed to five, whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely. And that prevents this roller coaster because once you're on the roller coaster, it's really, really hard to get off.

1:09:49And it's like the only way to get off is there's only two real ways to get off is one, either stop and have a proper meal. or, you know, you say, okay, gosh, I'm going to somehow I'm going to get some food that is a proper type meal where now I'm eating a sandwich that's got protein and carbs in it or something like that, that I can then mute this big glucose spike, because that's what you're trying to do is mute that spike. You're trying to say, okay, gosh, I don't. And again, back to the kind of So your very first question, is the goal being stable? Well, the goal isn't being stable, but the goal is to mute the spikes, right?

1:10:36So that's different than being like this straight line. It's like, we're going to have spikes, but instead of having them huge, let's have them lower and not quite as tall. That's more of what you want in terms of how to do that. Hopefully that distinction is clear. Yeah, yeah. So this makes me think of going right down into that deficit. You've nosedived and you're 65, 60. Your blood sugar is incredibly slow. You've bonked. You're screwed. There's that sensation like someone's just undone both plugs in your legs and all the water's been drained out. Can you keep riding to some extent and eat and ride out of it or is there a point where it's just too much and you have to stop?

1:11:22It's that age-old question. Can you ride off or ride out of the bonk? Or do you just have to accept your fate and pause and regain yourself? And as you say, try and seek out some decent slow burn sustenance. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think once you've true and properly bonked, right, you're riding really, really slow now, right, obviously. And it's very difficult to not stop and just eat. And if you get to that point where your glucose is down at 60, 50 or whatever, then yeah, you should just stop and just eat, right? And then at that point, don't worry about the hypoglycemic, reactive hypoglycemic crash.

1:12:02Just eat everything you can, get the glucose up, know that you're going to have a reactive hypoglycemic crash if you don't then continue to eat, okay? So the worst case scenario is you're at the end of a long ride and, you know, you've got like two things, you know, in your back pocket and you still have 30 miles to get home. And you're like, oh man, I'm totally bonked here. I've only got these two things to eat and I'm going to eat them both now, but I'm going to bonk again right before I get home. So that's the worst case scenario. You know, maybe better to say, okay, gosh, I'm going to stop at a store and get some food.

1:12:48And then that way I can get home with food and not have a double bonk in this kind of scenario. But I don't want to, this is complicated stuff. Like this is really complicated stuff, just like training the power meter is can be very complicated. Glucose is more complicated because we've got lots of factors in there. And that's to me why it's exciting and interesting because it's something that, you know, how do you understand it? But if you're really bonked, don't worry about having a hypo crash afterwards. Just eat, right? Sometimes you just need simple sugars. Sometimes you just need it. Just like dump everything in, know that that crash is going to come.

1:13:29And so you can then say, oh, this is going to happen in 30 minutes or 45 minutes. I got to be prepared with more food. You know, I've got to have more food on the back of it so like okay that peak's coming up and it's coming down and i need to have the other peak coming up right here and so now i'm trying to keep all these things my levels high yeah gotcha brilliant well hunter i'll let you go but i just want to ask you one more question if you had to choose you can only have one training tool to take to a training desert island a watopia style desert island you're going to take a power meter you're going to take a cgm or would you take a good old heart rate strap i'll take a power meter

1:14:12fantastic well hunter thanks so much for coming on the podcast um it's been a pleasure to talk i think i'll have to go away and re-listen to it just just to get my head around half of the stuff we chatted about because yeah it's some seriously deep stuff and there's so much more in your all kinds of training manuals but latest one training and competing with continuous glucose monitoring it's deep but it is incredibly interesting so pick up a copy and who knows it will be in another 10 years time it'll be as seminal as training with power was back in when was that when was that first release 20 2006 2010 2006 2006 was the first edition of training racing with power meter yeah which i think is still the most sold training manual of all time so you know fair play it's Still carries weight today.

1:14:59That's fun. Well, James, thank you. This has been a pleasure to be on here. I really appreciate this, and thank you so much for having me on.

1:15:11Hunter Allen, ladies and gentlemen. Will, all of that go in your little noggin? Yeah, it's all in there. Yeah, going to use that to train differently, harder, more smartly, more intelligently, I'd say. I'm basically going to be a pro in 2027. 2027? Yeah. That's quite a long time away. It's a whole year away. Couldn't you sort of manage something by the summer? Well, we need some time to execute training plans. I suppose you need the time for your body to adapt and all that jazz. Anyway, well, that's nice. But in all seriousness, I do reckon there is a lot to this. And I do know that a lot of people use it, especially on the track where it's a bit easier because I don't think you can kind of, you know, you'd have to drive up next to your rider in the Pro Peloton and have your little app out to be able to Bluetooth the data from the patch to do the work.

1:15:57you know, monitoring live in a race. You're not allowed to use it in a race. Are they not? No. There you go. Shows what I know. Yeah, so a couple of years ago, it was the one who won the Olympics, not Remco, the woman, Kristen Brainfog. Yep. Kristen Brainfog. Kristen Brainfog, yeah, who went around the world in 80 days. Yeah. She was wearing one, but she said it wasn't, like, on. Yeah. Strada Bianchi and Faulkner, Kristen Faulkner. So that's Trader Bianchi and came third, but then got disqualified because people saw it on the coverage. You could see the little... Really? So there you go. That's how potentially effective they are if you're the only one using them.

1:16:40So, yeah, who knows if that will genuinely kind of usurp the power meter or be kind of the gold standard up there with power meters, but it definitely makes sense. And I think, yeah, as I mentioned in the intro, we do have a looking in-depth piece in Cyclist Mag. one of the things that came out from that and this is you know championed by the sponsor you know the nutrition sponsor of the team at the time but victor campenarts when he won help me out will don't worry if you can't but you know that stage that tour de france stage where he went solo for like 140 odd k was it even longer than that he just soloed for ages didn't he he was uh in a breakaway there was two or three of them and then he out sprinted people who should have probably had a better sprint than him and he was averaging like 139 grams of carbs an hour or something which is basically huge because most people as you will have just learned from the podcast you know we sort of typically think of a tuned athlete or you know a good club rider sort of doing 90 grams 60 to 90 grams of carbs 60 grams lower end for people that don't ride as much and then you know their bodies aren't that well adapted and if it's a you know however it's delivered, blah, blah, blah.

1:17:49And then like maxing out, absolutely maxing out at like 120. Whereas Camping Arts around 140 and there's anecdotal evidence of people doing sort of 160 grams of carbs an hour, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we can know that's also true because not for Camping Arts per se, but because there is this monitoring tool. So it's also not just like kind of back of a fag packet kind of maths. It's pretty nailed on science. Has anyone ever done maths on the back of a fag packet i suppose they used to back in the day i'm sure that back in the day in a ds's car it was full of galois smoke and and people doing intense calculations over on backs of yeah fag packets and shouting them out the window and holding things up on chalkboards holding out the fag packet out of the window to the rider telling them what the brake was but um victor's always been a sciencey guy so i'm not surprised that he was one that to execute that as a former hour record holder.

1:18:48That's very true. All those things are very true. So there we go. It does make me think, have you got any New Year's resolutions, Will? Because it sort of puts me in the mind of it's 2026 and we're talking about training. Yeah, it's one of those things that I always quite like to have them. And also I turned 30 this year, so I thought it's extra things I want to do before I'm 30, but I just don't know. I just don't know. There's a couple of things like I really wanted to make sure I was really on it with our internal training, GDPR, cybersecurity training. And I'm halfway through that now. So I'm really getting this year off to a good start.

1:19:25I would like to ride my bike more. Yes, we all would. We all would. I get t-shirts made up to say, we all would. Yeah. What about you? Well, I, like Philippa Perry, think that New Year's resolutions, and also my father-in-law, Pete, new year's resolutions are linked to kind of christian ideas of guilt and shame and original sin they're a nonsense just make because basically it's saying do you know what now it's january the first look back at your last year and find all the things that were wrong because there will be some and when you do make a resolution to fix them because if you don't you're a bit crap so try and make yourself better that's kind of what they say don't they yeah but that's kind of that's just a pessimistic way of viewing it right you know it's not like lent where it's that give up something you're a scoundrel for having too much sugar which is what most people do for them but that's not where that comes from is it no it's not but it's how people treat it these days it is how people treat it these days it's true but that's probably also linked to original sin and christian guilt but new year's resolution is for people trying to better themselves and form new healthier habits which is a good thing well yes basically i would like to excuse myself from telling myself once again that i need to stop drinking nearly so much that doesn't have to be your resolution yeah obviously that's where i look first it's the drip feed of peanuts throughout the day and the beers that happen as soon as i knock off work until i go to bed and over Christmas that was all fine and now it's not and I don't want to berate myself for that I want to celebrate it Well why don't you make your 2026 resolutions to drink more, work less and just chill out I'm down with that I'm totally down with that and there's a very good chance that I will succeed so thank you Will so those are my New Year's resolutions drink more, work less, would like to ride more Yes, wouldn't we all wouldn't we all another t-shirt i'll have that on the back what was on the front i can't remember

1:21:38we all would we all would there you go because the other thing i worry about is not so much the long-term health implications of a high alcohol lifestyle but it's also the memory as in you really love remembering all the good times you had when you were drunk no it's more that i think that i might end up saying the same thing that already said such as it's not the high alcohol lifestyle that i'm worried about but it's the fact that it can really affect your memory yeah yeah i just forget things so introducing our podcast what's that will i thought we'd like to go back to the intro we could go we could go back to the intro we can make this perfectly circular episode a bit like do you say esher or esher but anyway mc esher esher whatever seeker psyker the penrose staircase that go he was a mathematical whiz and also great with a pencil.

1:22:26And there's that staircase that appears like the people walking up it are going round and round forever. The bottom becomes the top, the bottom becomes the top. So we can make a perfect website like that. Isn't there a name for the snake that eats its own tail? What's that? Because that's the same thing. I guess you have to ask AI because I don't know that one. That's a good word as well. It used to be on... Again, I knew this once upon a time. Alcohol. Yeah, that's it. But you also get loads of... like songs where they neatly transition out or the end of an album, the transition out means that if you loop the album, it seamlessly starts again.

1:23:04Do you? I've never come across this. Oh, well, you need to look it up. I think you particularly enjoy it. And people do it with songs between songs and albums all the time where you can't tell where the next one begins. I mean that. But if you have the loop between the end and the start of the album, you do that with a podcast episode, it would be infinite Hunter Islands. Wow. Okay, well, that's something for the future, something to look forward to or look ahead to because our guest today is Hunter Allen. Right, I'm going to go. See you later. That was fun. Bye.