The Mad Scientist Of Ultra-Endurance: David Roche’s Hyper-Precise Experiment That Broke The Leadville 100 Record

26:27And the main one for him, for baby Leo when in the first year was Moana. and one thing I remember thinking very specifically before the start of the race, understanding what kind of what I was getting into was that if you told Moana what she was about to go through, she probably wouldn't have ventured off that island. Like you kind of have to embrace that. Well, isn't this true of any hero's journey? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Joseph Campbell stuff, like that's one reason I do lean on things like myth and the way that these thinkers outside of running talk about journeys to understand something like an ultra, which if it is life in a day, as people say, than trying to set an unbreakable record.

27:02You gotta lean into stories from prehistory rather than maybe athlete stories who I don't really identify with. Like there are people who are my idols in sport as it relates to what they can accomplish. Jim Walmsley, Courtney DeWalter, these heroes of ultra running. I am not them. Like there's no part of me that feels like them. The stories they tell, how they train, it's just not who I am. I relate a lot more to the person that's trying to finish under a cutoff. Like that's who I've always felt like emotionally. And then also I feel like, you know, these people that are just plucked from obscurity and stories and then go do impossible things.

27:43Like that's what I felt like. And maybe that's partially just a story I'm telling myself, but, you know, when I was on that start line, part of it was like, yeah, nobody believes in me, but nobody believes in the hero at first. But you identified something really important that I think has been too long overlooked, which is this idea of applying a speed mindset to a very long distance. And it makes sense because when you look at track and field and marathon running, the best marathoners mature from a track and field background. They were fast for a very long time at 5 ,000 meters, 10 ,000 meters, and then they migrate into the longer distances.

28:23and mature further in that new specialty. You know, you can look at swimming, like people go, they don't go from open water into the pool. They go from the pool into open water. And anybody who is at an elite level at 1500 meters is gonna do pretty well in an open water race. Like, because open water is sort of a little weird subculture that doesn't attract the most elite athletes in the world. And when you look at ultra running, you can make the same argument, which is this is a subculture that's been around for a while, but it's kind of a granola thing. And it's only in recent years when the aperture has widened and more and more elite athletes are curious about it.

29:06But we have yet to see somebody who podiumed at the Olympics in the 10 ,000 meters saying, you know what, I'm gonna go to Badwater directly. Or do you, you know what I mean? Like we, because the sport is too new for that and there isn't the kind of economic incentives, et cetera. But what if somebody like that were to say, you know what, this is my next thing and I'm gonna go into that. My sense is they would absolutely dominate. I mean, I don't know, but basically just thinking about that and looking, like look at Christian Blumenfeld, like he won the Olympics at Olympic distance triathlon and then went into Ironman and absolutely crushed.

29:43People don't go from Ironman to Olympic distance. They go from a speed background and then they develop that capacity to go longer as they age up. Yeah. So I agree with part of it. And the part where I push back slightly is, you know, more of a lesson from coaching just generally is that on one hand, speed matters, right? Like I'm trying to optimize these little bits in the top end of zone two, which is correlated with your top end speed. But the difference between someone like at my level, let's say, an Olympian at those is not a huge amount in terms of minutes per mile. It's a lot, But what is subsumed by that in ultras ends up being the, essentially the substrate equation.

30:22Like it is such a hard equation to solve. And like the place where I focus maybe the most in this race itself was if you're going to be pushing this fast, the body is doing so much work. How do you keep the body fueled for that work? And so in the past, people have come at this from a couple of different angles. One is you do just a ton of miles and the more time you spend on your feet, the more your body is resistant to breakdown and you just go pretty easy for yourself and you're okay. You just kind of do a lower intensity. I'm like, no, actually, the only way I'm going to beat Matt Carpenter is a high intensity.

30:52The other way is people that might try to really optimize their fat oxidation capabilities who might do low carb approaches. And that's also not me because I need the carbs to do really high output in training. And so the hard part for some of these athletes that might come from the Olympics is essentially, I was taking in 500 to 550 calories an hour and doing it at high altitude where you're so at risk of GI distress. And that basically the logistics end of ultras require so much failure almost to learn. So that's the one place that I do have a big advantage is one, I've coached so many pro athletes.

31:30So I've gone to see, I've gone to learn from other people that have done way better than I have at a lot of different things. But two, I've screwed up myself for so many years that now I'm like, all right, I can do this up and down mountains. Yeah, so the idea being, if I'm gonna run in the higher end of my zone two over a hundred miles, I mean, we're talking like six minute pace, right? Like in Leadville, I'm gonna have to figure out how to fuel myself without GI distress. And what you do is so interesting. You're like, well, most people are taking in 60, 90 grams of carbohydrates an hour. But you look to these studies with cyclists and realize like, what if we raise the ceiling on that?

32:14Is it possible to consume upwards of 100, 120, maybe even 150 grams of carbohydrates an hour without GI distress that will then, you know, basically ameliorate that breakdown aspect of this. And I think nutrition and your body's ability to assimilate those calories without GI distress is something that every endurance athlete knows about and they kind of practice it, but they don't prioritize it in the way that you did. Like you put this front and center, like this is what I have to figure out if this is gonna work. Yeah, and it gets back to like, there is an equation that I have to solve that is maybe one of the hardest equations out there and maybe one that of the major commentators in ultra running, I'm not sure what the percentage would have said that I could have solved this equation, but it's probably pretty small, which is how do you push hard enough to break this record that's considered unbreakable by someone that theoretically, if we measured us both in the lab, is way better than I am on a raw level.

33:16It's I need to be able to push harder than he did, which at the, you know, when you're starting to push up toward the top end of zone two, and even into zone three, you're burning a massive amount of glycogen all the time. Like you have to have fuel going into the fire constantly. And, you know, so for me, as I approached it, I'm like, all right, if I need to do that, then I need to figure out how can my body assimilate that much? And so there's been some studies in just the last few years that have looked at this and they found that 120 grams per hour can be tolerated. That's like 480 calories an hour.

33:47But the most interesting uncontrolled experiment in the world is happening, which is the cycling pro peloton, where the wattage numbers that they're putting out are going wild, especially fatigue resistance, like you mentioned earlier. And when you talk to coaches behind the scenes and they're honest with you. So I've gotten conversations with people that would know if there was cheating going on, I assume, at least I hope. And they're saying, no, actually the Peloton for the most part is clean. What it is is people are taking in more calories than the studies. I did notice that watching the Tour de France this year.

34:18That's wild. That was something that was discussed a lot with Pogacar, like learning how to eat more. So he's constantly like consuming calories the entire time. Yeah, and maybe I'm being naive when it relates to cycling, but for me, I'm like, I at least know that the data that Precision Fuel is putting out, which they publish all their athletes' data on just Instagram. And they said that Victor Campenarts, who won stage 18 of the Tour de France, got up to 150 grams per hour and was averaging 132 in this unexpected win. And I'm like, well, I'm also trying to do an unexpected win. He's putting out a massive amount of power.

34:51and you know if the studies are amazing but they're always going to lag behind elite athlete practice because how many times you're going to get to study hour 13 of leadville at this pace like you just can't and so i was like well if i'm taking a big shot i need to take risks not just in the saying of the shot like this isn't an intellectual exercise this is a substrate cellular exercise and so megan and i were like how can we do this and so i actually looked to a totally other world, which is the world of competitive eating and how they train their stomachs. And I think that that was probably maybe another way that I hopefully pushed the field forward is that you don't have to do this just by taking in a ton of gels.

35:32You can do this through other means of getting your stomach to tolerate the volume. Right. Because the question becomes, is the capacity to consume that many calories per hour something that's just fundamental and unique to certain people, or is this something that can be trained, right? And then looking to like, well, let's look at the guys who eat like 5 ,000 hot dogs in an hour and what are they doing? Yeah. Well, I mean, the kind of scary part is, you know, I'm keep referencing Scott or Matt Carpenter's VO2 max being like, I'm no Matt Carpenter. I'm an everyman. Maybe if we could actually measure GI talent, you know, if we had some number for GI talent, that kid that was playing football when I was 16 and was 60 pounds heavier than I am now, maybe what he had all along was an ability to drink protein shakes because he had GI talent.

36:13And that same GI talent is manifesting now in this manner that's very strange, but points out the weirdness of talent. But I also think it just points out that, you know, we all have different abilities and finding what those are is cool. But I think the GI system is just, it's a magical, essentially we have this magical process within our bodies where a woman who is four feet, six tall, or a man who's six feet four, they both basically have the same caloric, you know, capacities over what they they can do per hour because our GI systems are just these wonderful tapestries of carbohydrate absorbing ability.

36:47But the problem is when you put that many gels down your throat, it's very easy to come up in a very bad way. So what did you learn from the world of competitive eating and how did you actually train yourself so that you could increase your ability to take in so many calories? Another do as I say, not as I do moment for the listeners. So I would focus on their use of fluids primarily. So what they do is my understanding is like, they're not doing it with hot dogs all the time because that wouldn't necessarily be, you know, good on the GI system either. They're using large amounts of quantity of fluids to train this.

37:21So what I would do on a run is like, have 48 ounces of fluid all at once, sometimes periodically, or take in three 40 gram of carb gels. So 120 grams of carbs all at once or do both at the same time. And hopefully I think what happened is that gave my stomach an ability to tolerate the bloat. And then the cool thing to get a little more scientific is some of the rationale for GI training specifically is that the cell lining in the gut has very rapid turnover. And there's a certain amount of epigenetic signaling that's passed down from cell line to cell line. So over time, these little types of interventions are actually a learned trait that can be developed.

37:58The question is how long does that need to be? Because I've been doing this for years. Or is this the type of adaptation that can happen fast because the turnover is fast? And so did you notice a marked improvement in your ability? Like if you would, you're like, okay, let's see how much fluid I can drink on this run without throwing up or whatever. And then two months later, you're like, oh, that doesn't cause me any distress anymore when it once did. Yeah, absolutely fundamental change almost immediately, like within weeks. And so for any listener out there, you need to be really careful about electrolyte balance.

38:30Like, you know, I'm having nightmares about people that like overhydrate. Hyponeutremia. Yeah, you need to be careful about that. I'm doing this when I actually have fluid needs and I'm monitoring my electrolyte. I know my electrolyte losses, but the change was pretty quick. And then I found over time that that needed to be coupled with, so that was one part of the equation is solving for the bloat and the body's almost inclination to reject with what happened to me in the first long race I tried. So I hadn't done a race over 50K until last year. And then I entered this race and I took a specific type of gel and immediately had what ultra runners have sometimes, which is rejection of it.

39:10And that was eyeopening to me because I learned, I need to figure out a way not just to get these in, but to stop the rejection of them, which happens not in the GI system, but happens on your palate itself. And that was the next part that like, I have an advantage and we all have an advantage over athletes of the previous generation is the current nutrition products are designed so that they're not like, you know, Matt Carpenter out there taking in these viscous gels that are just really hard to get down. We have been approached that if you do it, you can slurp them and essentially figuring out a way to get this down past my palate so that there was no chance of rejection.

39:49And so did that require that during this race, you had to have all your nutrition in your vest at all times? Did you, I mean, were you in a position where you had to rely on aid stations or did you have that all sorted ahead of time so that you knew exactly what you were doing when you were doing it? Yeah, we watched the F1 show on Netflix sometimes and like we modeled it after that. I was just using stuff from crew and I only had a belt in this process too. I didn't even have a vest. So I would have, I had a double belt set up where I'd have a belt in my shorts that was built in. Like I have this pair of like John G shorts that has a belt where you can put in like gels and things.

40:28And then I had an actual belt on top of that. and I'd be carrying eight gels at any given time and two bottles, one in my hand, one in the back of the belt. And I would come into the aid station, flip the belt over, all the gels pop out empty. And if they weren't empty, Megan would scream at me. And then all the gels were just thrown back in. So I was stopping at aid stations for 20 seconds, the big aid stations that people used to sit down in. Because I'm like, I can't afford to give away 10 seconds. Every second I give away, Matt Carpenter's bounding up the trail. On your spreadsheet, you had the estimated finishing time if you were to follow this protocol with precision.

41:07And your actual finishing time was something like only 24 or 26 seconds different from what you predicted for yourself, which is insane. Ultimate beginner's luck there. I mean, I like to say - I mean, so many variables. Yeah. So many unforeseen things at such a great distance. And also just, why did I choose a time that was like 16 minutes faster than Matt Carpenter rather than saying two minutes? I don't know. Yeah, basically I got to go see the course and that took away a little bit of the fear. So the fear for me was always the unknown, but then I saw the course, I'm like, well, this is just running.

41:42And I kind of know theoretically how fast I can run a lot of these things at certain heart rates. And if I do that, this type of time should be reasonable. And so, I mean, the problem is we're looking at an N equals one experiment, but on a certain level of everything, I'm most proud of that spreadsheet because, you know, eventually I'll be 86 years old and hopefully I'll still be running ultras. And I might not get course records then, but I'll still have my spreadsheets. And I'm pretty proud of that one.

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47:30So on the one hand, we have people like Killian, Courtney, Jim, who basically just head out into the mountains all day. You know, it's the Anton Krupika, you know, sort of philosophy of training, which is just go get lost in the mountains and come home in time for dinner, right? And that's worked very well for them. yours was sort of stripped down to what's absolutely necessary. And from what I gather, for the most part, it's a lot of track work, threshold runs, like doing intervals on a treadmill at a high grade, cycling, and then strength training. Yeah, so Anton Karpicka, who you mentioned, he's a good person for me to just like come back to because when I came into the sport and first saw Leadville in 2008, I read his blog.

48:24That was my introduction. I remember when his blog was legendary because that was early internet. The best. And he was the only one who was really sharing transparently about what he was doing every day. And he would have these topo maps. Yeah. You remember that? And he would have song recommendations. I still listen to Cold First by Cold War Kids because he recommended it to me. And I think of Anton. And he would do these weeks of like 200 miles in his minimal shoes. And I was like, ultra running, what a wild sport. I could never imagine to do any of that. but I aspired to it. And over time, I've tried to do higher volume for me.

48:56I tried to get to a hundred miles a week and it just didn't work for my body. And then eventually it didn't work for my life. I just couldn't fit it. I don't have the time for that. And, you know, as I reflected on, essentially, I just didn't want to play the game that other people played when I'm not gifted in the same ways they're gifted. I have different skills and different life constraints. And so for me, the speed, the understanding too that life miles count, that I think sometimes people think of mileage in the same way that Anton was adding it up. And for me, like, yeah, my weekly miles might not be quite as high as everybody else's, but, you know, carrying a baby up the stairs counts for something that adds miles.

49:34And I guess the part of what I learned in this process as like in a specific way, I've always had this theory that if we could add up what the actual mileage you get in life, it's not that that takes away from your miles. It's that you're actually adapting as if you're doing more, as long as it's within the running context. And so, you know, in that framework, like strength training was really important to me too, where we got our first squat bar and it's the first time I've squatted since I was a football player. And I'm embarrassingly weak now, but I still do it. And kind of essentially focusing on all the little things, focusing on the training little things, the fueling little things, and then also the little edges of performance science, like sodium bicarbonate before hard workouts, which is baking soda, but by fancy marketing, post-exercise ketones to improve blood responses to training, slightly higher protein, things like that, just to round it all together.

50:28Well, I wanna talk about each of those. So suddenly everyone's talking about bicarb as like this panacea, right? Yeah. Which is essentially baking soda, but it has been demonstrated to kind of buffer fatigue, right? Killian's used it. I think the Propelaton uses it. How did this suddenly become a thing? It's something that's been around forever. Yeah, so they've had it in research studies for decades. And essentially this company Morton figured out a way to encapsulate it so it's a little bit more easily absorbed by the GI system. So the problem before is, I hope this is okay, we call it bicarb cholera, where you take like baking soda, let's say, without this encapsulation form, and you find yourself going to the bathroom literally 50 times on the trails, not something you want.

51:18But this way of encapsulating and then having it with a hydrogel seems to get into the system more easily for most and it buffers acidity within your body. So when you produce lactate, it's accompanied by a hydrogen ion and thus reduces your lactate levels or helps you sustain slightly higher lactate levels. There's a little bit of debate exactly how it works in different athletes. But the crazy part is I started getting this opportunity to coach professional track athletes. And the way I like to learn is never to rely on myself or rely on studies. I like to talk to the best coach in the world.

51:50So I'm like, I reached out to some people and they started telling me about this bicarb because I was the ultimate skeptic. I was like, no, no. So baking soda, no. I'm just always, I didn't think it was reasonable. I was like, I don't get it. Suddenly grandma's remedy is like, you know. No. And then I found, oh wait, this has already hit track. And it's hit track in such a major way people just aren't talking about it. And this year, for example, in 800 meters, 11 of the fastest 20 times for men wherever were run this year, whereas the previous 10 years had had like zero of those. So it's hitting track and that's probably a bicarb influence, you would assume.

52:28And the studies now have come up showing benefit up to an hour, which makes sense because that's when you're most acidic. But I experimented with it for these athletes myself because I wanted to see what happened and saw just a wild increase in my own personal endurance in long runs in particular that does not yet have a physiological basis. But I guarantee this is one of those places that 10 years from now, we're gonna look back and like, how did we miss this? This like longer distance endurance impact. And I think Killian's probably already figured out. That's why he's taking it in the long runs.

53:02And the reason that the studies demonstrate benefits up to one hour is because the studies have only studied people up to one hour, right? So there needs to be more research here, I presume, to really figure out what's going on. But were you taking it, so taking it during training, but also taking it throughout the race? No, just before the race. Just before. I think there might be a benefit to taking it during. The problem is - You're gonna have a volcanic situation on your hands. Perhaps, but the worry for me is that I can't really test it because I'm not doing long enough runs in training to get the opportunity to get enough tests to know it's reasonable for me.

53:43And that's where it's gonna be great to have more research because the one problem about being a slightly lower volume athlete, and I did a 50 mile training race before this, but other than that, I did a couple of 20 milers. I didn't really go that far that often is there's a certain amount of your going on faith. Sure, sure. So was your longest training run no longer than 20 miles going into this? I got the, I got a 50 mile training race in early July, which was a huge brick in the wall. And then, um, a couple of 25 milers and then a 20 miler on top of that. So, um, and then, you know, year round, like, um, I think one thing that people need to be very careful about is, you know, when you apply this type of strategy, it's the years and years of work.

54:26So for someone like me or Camille Heron, like not to compare myself to Camille, but she's a goat and I'm just like, you know, a little. You're so self-deprecating. Rich, thank you, thank you. It's so wild to be here. But like, at the same time, I mean, you know, if you're aware a little bit of the ultra narratives, like, you know, I still, even after the fact, I can't help but sometimes look at the comments and people are like, this is impossible. This is like, how did this person do this? You know, like his score of rankings is this and then he did this. So, I mean, yeah, I love myself, but also I try to be realistic about it.

55:02I appreciate the humility, but I think it's okay to be like, yeah, I did a cool thing. Yeah. I deserve to stand atop that platform for that performance. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, I think the hard part is often the people that model athletic achievements that blow my mind seem to have such a natural confidence to them about their abilities athletically and kind of the opposite of my baseline where even athletically, I'm like, I don't know if I'm the guy, which maybe now I need to transition that narrative a little bit in my head. But how does that square with the guy who sets the audacious goal?

55:42I'm playing a character, Rich. So deep down there, there must be a reservoir of confidence that maybe you feel reluctant to like voice, but certainly you don't set a goal like that unless you have an adequate amount of self-belief in your ability to accomplish it. Data is my confidence, right? Like the spreadsheet is my confidence that I know at the end of the day that my brain is not gonna be what gets me this. Though maybe what I learned on that day is that my brain was the superpower all along. But. you know, throughout the training, I would look at my numbers and be like, those numbers can do it.

56:20Those numbers can do it. Those numbers can do it. And having faith in that, like faith in the science aspect mixed with kind of the spiritual aspect of being like, it doesn't matter if my tendency, if I think my character is to not believe. At the end of the day, we're all playing characters. So I need to choose a character that does believe and lean into that as hard as I freaking can, because that's gonna be the one that sets the record. Like maybe you just need to put a name on that avatar, like the Iron Cowboy, you know what I mean? There's James and then there's the Iron Cowboy or there's David Goggins and then there's Goggins.

56:54You know, they adopt a sort of superhero nom de plume. Oh, I like it. You know, for the purposes of, so that they can create distance between the vulnerable, like sort of actual self and the performative self who's trying to do something very hard. I like it, I like it. So we have Superman with the cape and I can be sensitive boy with the chafed penis. At the end of the race. Yeah, I wanna talk about that. My favorite in doing the research, there was a hilarious article, my favorite article that was written about what you did. And hold on a second, I wrote it down here. It was on a website called Defector and the headline of this article was how David Roche nearly ran his dick off and maybe changed ultra running in the process.

57:44And I was like, well, I'm reading this article. Oh my God, I'm getting chills. This is truly insane. So Defector, literally my favorite website. And it was called Deadspin before. So Deadspin went through - Oh, I didn't realize that. I knew Deadspin. So all those writers quit and started Defector. And hey, literally my favorite site. And first day subscriber. And when I got contacted by that writer and saw that came out, and like that is what I want my legacy to be. Sensitive Boy wants his legacy to be a Defector article but when saying I nearly ran my dick off, like that is everything to me. Yeah, meaning basically that you got some insane chafe down there.

58:23Yeah, yeah, yeah. That became problematic. That's probably a place where experience would have helped, right, like instead of letting it happen, I should have saved something. Thankfully to listeners, I'm okay, I'll survive. Psychologically, I might never be the same, but physically I'm okay. All right, let's talk about the exogenous ketones. Yeah. Where does this come into play? Where is your head around like what's effective here, what's hype, and what's your experience? So yeah, I think it's pretty settled now, both in research and practice, that before and during, it is not necessarily beneficial unless there's some ultra protocol that's not really shared publicly.

59:00So the studies are generally finding that for short events, it's kind of the reverse bicarb. It causes slight decreases. You're not improving in a time trial when you take it before. And during, usually it's about a wash. And the couple of times I took it during, the lights were out. I don't know exactly what the cause was there. There's some theories for, you need to have a lot of carbs on board to really make the most of it or be more fat adapted than perhaps I am. So people use it for that and it can work for them fine, but it's perhaps not, I think, necessary for everyone. But where the science is kind of wild now is in post-exercise use.

59:34So this really started to gain steam last year, where, again, I was a ketone skeptic because Ketone IQ reached out like six or seven years ago when they first started and asked, hey, do you want some of this? And gave these wild claims. And I was like, this seems weird to me, no. But then you see more and more athletes take it. And then last year, these studies came out that showed taking it after exercise. Basically, if they overloaded athletes with six days a week of two by daily training sessions, they couldn't overtrain them when they were taking post-exercise ketones in the same way that if they weren't.

1:00:07So there was some recovery benefit. And then another study came out that showed post-exercise natural EPO production. So your body's ability to produce red blood cells increased by 20 % taking them post-exercise. So there's some interesting wrinkle happening here in human physiology that we don't fully understand the exact method of. And that's what's wild and a cautionary thing for me is we're hacking an evolutionary process that was developed over millions of years. Right, and you don't do that without some downside. There's always another aspect of this, right? And so what is that? And maybe we don't know.

1:00:46We don't know for sure, but there's some theories that Megan has just from seeing athlete blood work that there could be effects on the endocrine system, particularly testosterone production. So more data is needed, but there's one little study that didn't get any traction that found decreased circulating testosterone and people taking endogenous, you know, exogenous ketones. So - That's interesting. The sort of hybrid athlete bro culture might need to get that memo. Well, they might be taking testosterone from other means. Yeah, that's probably true. Just kidding. I uplift everything as long as you're not competing in an event, clean sport.

1:01:24But yeah, I think the interesting part for me is that when I started taking them, I definitely felt, which was last year, I felt that, oh, all of a sudden my recovery has improved. because I'm fighting father time, like every athlete is to a certain extent, where I hope I have a lot more years in this, but my peak power wants to go down. And I felt all of a sudden that my body was able to sustain more and sustain better with just taking ketones after exercise three to five times a week. They definitely work. I mean, there's a reason why the pro peloton is pretty much universally on them and they're consuming it during stages, right?

1:02:02And I just know from my own anecdotal, personal experience that, you know, when I take them, like I feel like I can ride my bike all day and I don't feel hungry, you know, and I'm less inclined to take calories on. So I think the question becomes, what is the ultra protocol? What is the longer distance protocol? And that's the place where I can't get cycling coaches to open up. Like I haven't gotten anyone to go on the record and say, how are you using this? And it's hard because - Because they wanna just keep it proprietary and so they have a competitive edge. They clearly think it works. in the manner they're taking it.

1:02:36And my guess is they're taking it in such a cocktail with carbs and other sources of like, you know, benefits that it is a little more complicated than, hey, take a ketone at hour two of your event. And I haven't cracked that code as a coach yet of helping athletes on that journey and figuring out what works more generally. And I know for myself, at least when I did do it, it was just wild how much my body didn't respond. So yeah, I use it in that narrowly tailored way, but Megan, very specifically at the 50 miler, she snuck one into my little race bag so she could give it to me at the finish because she knew I would finish that 50 miler and not wanna register for the 100 because that's the only way I got in.

1:03:15I finished the 50 miler, sure enough, and was like, Megan, I don't wanna do 100 miles. 50 is way too far. And she said, David, take these post-exercise ketones and sign up no matter what. Right, and then you take them and you're like, actually, I feel better now. I will sign up, right? Maybe that's the secret. What can we extract from your coaching expertise and your personal experience around what is universal and what is very personal? Like you just spoke about your kind of like unique response to exogenous ketones. And I'm wondering whether this training approach is suitable for other athletes of your ilk who over many years have built huge bases and have this speed capacity.

1:03:59because I just know from my personal experience, some athletes are just ones that fundamentally respond better to high volume training and others respond better to less volume and more quality work. And if you switch those people, even if they are on paper, their results look similar, they're gonna have mixed results. Yeah. So I think there's two training elements that are absolutely universal from what I did and can apply to everybody listening. The first is that peak power output is an essential variable in determining every single metabolic turn point that you have. And it's wild in both the studies and the real world that if you take someone and measure them, let's say, on a 30-second hill stride and correlate that with their paces everywhere else, there will be a direct correlation across their career.

1:04:51And so the studies then come in and if you introduce something like 20 or 30 seconds accelerations, which the reason I'm mentioning hills is it's less impact, anyone can do it. Like if you're listening to this and you've run 20 times, you can go do hill strides. When they introduce this stimulus, athletes in just four or six weeks see 4 % improvements in their running economy. So they're taking less energy to go to the same pace, but without any improvements in aerobic variables. So it's this ultimate hack that you're getting like a biomechanical nervous system change in your body. And so that's top end speed output framework is essential for everybody.

1:05:31The wrinkle is that the best to do it might not actually need to do this because they're so naturally gifted that it doesn't need to be reinforced. Like Jim Wamsley, yeah, he does some plenty of speed, but he's so fast no matter what that he doesn't necessarily need to do any of this stuff. Maybe he will as he ages, but not now. But for other people, I mean, we have seen the most wild, you introduce a stimulus like this, they do it two times, four to six by 30 second hills twice a week. And you see them improve their easy paces by like five, 10 % in three weeks. And then it sustains, it's just wild.

1:06:08And then number two is that aerobic training doesn't necessarily need to be mileage. Like I biked a lot and the studies are pretty unequivocal that cross training can do it. So as soon as I was able to get back on the bike, it was what I did, you know, and I was able to incorporate that and to essentially not view yourself as a number of miles. And as long as you're running enough and doing some of the speed, it all goes into the same aerobic pot. And from the cell's perspective, from a single cell, it does not know the difference. And I think it's only our brains that see a bar chart on Strava and then think that, like identify with that a little bit too hard.

1:06:45Yeah, I think I heard you say something like, to train for this race, I need to train as if I wanna run a sub four minute mile. And on top of that, like if I can look at somebody's best 5K or best mile, I can predict that if they follow kind of some version of the protocol that you went on, what their finishing time would be at a race like Leadville. As long as they're able to withstand the impact of it, like Leadville has big old mountains and I had to go out there and run on those mountains in the few weeks before. But also so much of it is about the mind. Yeah. It's mindset as much as anything.

1:07:24Yeah, and I think if I didn't get in a bike accident and go through some things this year, if I didn't have a kid, I probably wouldn't have been on the start line able to apply any of this stuff in the way that it was because I was running unburdened. Truly for the first time in my life, I was able to understand not saying it, not thinking it, but like fully living it, that it's not about the process. It's not about the results, it's about the process. And like, I just wanted to have a day out there. And whether it was a good day or a really hard day, it was gonna be my day. And I was okay to just say that.

1:07:58This was not about the community. This was not about anybody else. This was about for once in my life, this is about me and Megan and my family. It's about us, it's about our journey. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it took kind of hidden rock bottom a lot emotionally and mental health wise to get there. Why is it that not more runners do cross training on the bike? Because I just think cycling is such an effective and efficient way to build an aerobic base because you can go, as you know, you can go out for hours and hours and hours on your bike and be in that zone two place and get fat adapted and build that aerobic capacity without the pounding and the risk of injury, other than getting hit by a car, getting into an accident, which is a real concern, obviously.

1:08:45It just, and also build stability in other muscles that are supportive to the principal running muscles. And I don't know, it just seems like a good idea, but it doesn't seem like that many people are into it. And I was the same way because I wanted to chase weekly miles for a lot of my career because I assumed at the end of the week that kind of summarized a general approach. And what shifted my framework outside of, in my own journey is thinking about some of these athletes, especially female athletes and how they train. So, you know, Megan's this top researcher in female athlete health. And we've coached a lot of the best women in the world.

1:09:25So for some of them, because of bone injury history, let's say they've had stress fractures. They do a lot of cross training. So Parker Valby, who we don't coach, but is well-known for using the arc trainer. Ali Ostrander, who we do coach, uses the elliptical, the bike constantly because of a bone injury history. And these athletes are having success at the top international level on low running miles. And I think sometimes the worlds come from the other end. It's like, oh, well, this male athlete's out here running 160 miles. We should all try to emulate them unless we can't. And then we should do a dumbed down version of it that includes cross training if we have to.

1:09:59And as I aged and as I saw this growth, like Megan essentially was like, do it the other direction. Like these athletes are having success beyond what they ever done before. Maybe it's because they're doing that, not in spite of it. and so yeah I love biking and I do a lot of zwifting indoors um and I just think all right sounds fun to me and so I run five days a week you know and it's replaced by biking and I just had to be comfortable with yeah if I do something like this people are gonna go look at my Strava and comment on let's run this guy doesn't do anything this guy sucks this guy's a piece of shit or you're secretly training and not posting it on Strava right that's a big one well I got I got sent a thread recently that said, if David can do this, why doesn't everybody go do this?

1:10:43Like just in terms of performing well, because like he's only doing 70 miles a week. He's not, and I'm like, it's a little more complicated than that, you know, like, but at the same time, I think it was a little more approachable and particularly with age or, you know, a hundred miles a week is so many miles. It is so much running and mixing it up, I think is a really good thing. Yeah, I mean, I can't help but think, you know, when that's sort of the standard, a minimum of a hundred miles a week, and then you look at, you kind of canvas the history of ultra running. There aren't very many high performers that are able to maintain high performance for very long.

1:11:20Right, like, you know, there'll be these flashes of brilliance, but those performances are very difficult to repeat. And it's only a very few select number of people who've been able to kind of maintain that level for even a couple of years, let alone a significant tenure of time. The question is, are we starting to see a shift in that too? Because athletes like Jim Walmsley and Courtney DeWalter have now been the best for an extended period. So the question becomes, is it all about fueling at the end of the day? Is it when you do that much training, it's hard to just not have your body break down because you're not fueling it enough.

1:11:56And now that we understand it, everyone is kind of playing with house money and new endurance sports. And I kind of think it might be, though some athletes obviously can't sustain it. And I know I couldn't. But I think what we're seeing is sometimes that confounding variables in endurance sports end up being seen as the driving variables in ways that they're not. So like, I think weekly mileage has been a red herring for a really long time that we're looking at that, we're looking at that, we're looking at that. But in reality, it's, are you getting enough aerobic work to adapt? And are you building your peak power output?

1:12:30and are you avoiding breakdown because you're fueling and not overstressing your body? And the problem when we only look at weekly miles becomes like those athletes are almost all gonna break down you would assume because it is so much on the body. I never lose sight of the fact of that kid that was like three miles is so far because it is so far. A hundred miles is far, three miles is just as far sometimes mentally and thinking about the load the body's under, it's kind of like mind-boggling what endurance athletes entails and what your body has to adapt to. So I just focus adaptation. If I can't adapt to it, I'm not gonna do it.

1:13:09Even if it looks good on paper. Because it's not a sustainable strategy. Not sustainable. And also, you know, stress without adaptation or breakdown without adaptation is self-destruction. Sure. So when you look at, for example, Anton, who was so brilliant for a good amount of time and then disappeared for a long time. But he was riding his bike long distances and climbing and doing all sorts of different things. And I would sort of check in and see what he was doing. And I never thought like, oh, this guy's ever gonna come back to the sport, let alone at the highest level. But sure enough, the other year he did come back and acquitted himself beautifully.

1:13:50But I think taking that period of time off and doing other things is what allowed him to return. Yeah, I mean, maybe the reflection I've had here so much is that what the body's capable of longer term is just so truly wild. Because I'm not lying, when I say two years ago, I couldn't imagine doing 100 miler. And it's not because of the mental side, it's the physical side. I needed to go through such a long journey to get to the point that my body was ready for this, probably because I came from a football background. So I was more of a faster Twitch athlete and I needed to have some of the aging.

1:14:25Aging was actually beneficial in that journey. But you look at someone like Anton and it represents this journey that a lot of athletes have of when you hit rock bottom for whatever reason and something bad happens. It's like if you left foot, right foot, your way out of that and give the body space, what it can come back to and achieve over three years is so beyond the realm of what you could ever conceive of in the moment. And so that's why I just come back to little bricks in the wall because I just can't imagine a wall, Thinking about a wall is impossible.

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1:16:40The internet seems to be obsessed with Zone 2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the more people who understand it talk about it, it seems like the more confusion it creates. It's like, there's a lot of hand-wringing and Reddit threads about, is this my zone two? Is this zone two? I'm not sure if this is, how do I test for zone two? You've written extensively and spoken at length about how to measure one's zone two, but maybe talk a little bit about how you define it and how we should think about it and how we should measure for it and why it's important. So zone two is the, in a five zone model we're talking about here.

1:17:16So there's five, let's say five training zones. Zone two is capped at the top end by your aerobic threshold. And at your aerobic threshold, you switch from primarily fat burning to primarily carb glycogen burning, which is why it was relevant in our earlier discussion because you can see your carb burnings going up as you get higher. So I needed to solve that equation. But for everybody, once you start to get over zone two, and these are all in spectrums, it's not exactly a specific point on the curve, your body starts to produce more lactate, which is accompanied by more fatigue byproducts. Some of those hydrogen ions we talked about earlier and that's accompanied by more stress on the body, less mitochondrial adaptation.

1:17:54So that is important to go over zone two, but it's less about the aerobic end of the spectrum and more about the mechanical end, the biomechanical, making your muscles more powerful and ability to buffer and transport that lactate, which your body needs very little of. The amount of signal you need in that space in zone three, four, five is at most 20 % of your training. but sometimes what we're seeing more and more is it might be five, 10%. The signaling pathways are saturated right away. So you don't need much. But under that curve, you can just fill it up. And so zone two is so magical, I think on the internet, specifically because it helps people slow down and understand that if you go too hard, you're just gonna be regressing aerobically and you'll get initial adaptations.

1:18:39But what happens after that is what every athlete that's been an endurance athlete, I know I went through, is you just go out, all of a sudden running gets, like just stagnates and then you get injured. And if you can stay below that - And you plateau and it becomes very difficult to excel beyond that ceiling. Yeah, because everything is resting on the aerobic base because what we're talking about with everything I was doing in the race and everything athletes do in 5Ks or miles even rests on the same process of your body's ability to shuttle lactate. So as those lactate curves start to go up and you're really under stress, that's all a mitochondrial process.

1:19:16And the body's ability to do that is formed by the aerobic system that's in zone one and zone two. And so zone two basically gives athletes that are more beginners or working into running or even advanced runners who might not be running like blazing fast 5Ks, gives you permission to just go really slow. And but for advanced athletes, it might be, you can develop that so much that your body can get an all day pace that allows you to run these things aggressively and disrespect the 100 mile distance. And that's kind of my theory is that I wanted to see what happens if instead of respecting 100 miles, I just disrespected the hell out of it.

1:19:52Yeah, I think one thing that is underappreciated, at least from an amateur perspective, is how taxing zone two work can be at the high end of elite performance because your zone two is 530 miles, right? And so you're gonna be tired, even though your heart rate isn't escalating that high and you're not producing lactate. There's still load that you're putting on your body that is much more significant than the beginner who goes out and anything faster than 10 or 11 minute miles, the heart rate starts to spike. And so they go home and they're like, well, I don't feel like I did anything because to your point of building that house with tiny bricks over a long period of time.

1:20:38Like they're at the beginning of a very long journey, right? But eventually over time, you get to a place where you can run quickly and you're still in that zone. But that doesn't mean, yes, it's your all day pace, but you're not gonna wanna go and run all day at that pace when you're at that level. Yeah, no, I mean, most of my training is so slow. Like if you look at, again, if you look at my Strava, but he's running at, you know, maybe I'm trying to race Leadville. first mile of lead fill is just over six minutes, right? But most of my runs are 7.30, 7.45, eight minutes at lower elevation, which is zone one for me.

1:21:15And I also have that same mind blown moment when I look at cyclists, when they do zone two training, they're doing my peak power on the bike. They're like, yeah, like their zone two is like 300 watts. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's just, you know, the process of the body to adapt to that is great, But the permission to just go easy is so liberating because running, if you don't realize that kind of sucks. Like, I mean, not for everybody. Some people really enjoy pushing themselves in ways that like I don't, but running can be the most transcendent thing when you get joy out of just bouncing around a little bit.

1:21:50One of the things that I still don't know if I fully understand about zone two, and I asked this question to Peter Atiyan, I'm not sure I got an answer that satisfied me, which is this idea that zone two is your all day pace, right? This is the level of exertion that you should be able to meet out for a very long period of time. But you can look at two different athletes who both have the same zone two on paper, like your 530 pace. Let's say somebody is in eight minute, they can run eight minute miles and their heart rate is at 140. And another person, same thing, right? But one of these athletes can do that all day or they can do it for six hours or seven hours.

1:22:32And another athlete can do it for maybe two hours and they get tired. Those are two very different profiles. And my sense is that that speaks to the breadth of the base of that pyramid. Like how big is your aerobic base? So yes, there's a few variables that I think are essential. The first being what you said exactly, that building up the aerobic base essentially moves the fat oxidation curve up. And I think there was a period of time where people became obsessed with hacking your fat oxidation system. This is the low carb, high fat stuff. And not to dismiss that at all. I mean, there are people that have had success with it.

1:23:11It has not stood the test of time in elite endurance sports because the reality is if you just train aerobically, over time, your ability to fat oxidate will improve. Right, and that has so much less to do with what you're eating and pretty much all about how you're training. Exactly. And maybe at the margins of human performance, you could hack the system slightly so that you create these fat oxidation monsters. The problem is the types of interventions you have to do also make you a lower output athlete because you can't - Can't get into that higher gear. Yeah. So that's on one end that matters for sure.

1:23:45And that's where it took me 18 years. The other is muscle fiber typology. So two athletes who might look the exact same on paper in every metric you're aware of might have very different muscle fiber contexts. And so we can have these type one slow twitch fibers, which burn really efficiently all day. And what happens is you have a lot of endurance athletes who are genetic freaks with type one fibers. They come out of the womb and they are slow twitch to the core, which has this mitochondrial power that can just do anything. And I hope what I represent a little bit to people is you can be a faster twitch or intermediate athlete and over time reshape your body so that those muscle fibers act more like slow twitch fibers.

1:24:26And maybe my favorite study of all time was a twin study done on twins separated at birth. And one was a 55-year-old triathlete, one was 55-year-old sedentary athlete or sedentary person. They thought forever that muscle fiber typology was relatively stagnant and could move a little bit in how they acted. But what they found is there was something like 70 % different expression of muscle fibers in the active athlete. So there's a longer term process. We haven't isolated in people that can change. And so that matters a ton. And then just the ability to replace calories. So because you're playing a substrate game in zone two, some athletes can take in, at the top end of zone two, you might be burning 450, 500 calories of glycogen per hour, depending on the athlete.

1:25:08Some athletes can do that, some athletes can't. And you need to practice it because if the body doesn't have the ability to do it consistently, then even if it has those calories on board, it's gonna immediately go back into what it's used to, which is heart rate drift. And we all have that experience where it's just, your heart rate goes up and up and up and up. Sure. You're done. Yeah, you're done. Well, let's dig into that a little bit further. And perhaps this is a dumb question, but I think it's one that maybe a bunch of people are ruminating on right now, which is the whole idea here for you with Leadville and in your training is I'm gonna run this race at zone two or the higher end of my zone two, Occasionally, I'm gonna tip into zone three when I have to do these ascents.

1:25:51But your zone two, 530 pace. So if you're running six minutes, 630s or whatever, you're so well below that, that that should feel easy, right? And as somebody who is so proficient and efficient in your running mechanics and somebody who is so fat adapted in this aerobic space, why is it important that you need to be taking in so many calories? Because isn't that the zone in which you're burning fat for fuel? Like, why do you need all of this glycogen? So, amazing question. And you found out exactly the pace that some physiologists on Twitter pinged me. So, really interesting studies have come out just this year, which found that essentially unoxidized, unused carbohydrates go to the brain preferentially.

1:26:42And if when we're we're talking about fatigue resistance, the fascinating thing about this entire process and maybe a place that I've an advantage as a coach is it all for some reason, and we don't know the pathways, goes back to the nervous system. So brain mediated processes, why do some people slow down and others don't, despite being under the same number of load, having the same amount of calories, the same capabilities, it might just be a nervous system difference between those two athletes. And that might be maybe the flip side of your question that maybe Peter Atiyah didn't get to. So suck it, Peter, is that the nervous system is a huge product here.

1:27:17We are not closed physiological systems. It is all mediated by, you know, starting in our brains, going to the spinal cord. And, you know, if we're talking about that system needing to be active, probably what these studies are finding is that by having unoxidized carbs on board, you're getting brain glucose, essentially. Your brain's getting the ability to continue to allow your body to have this volitional power. Otherwise, you have this self-regulator that just gets keyed down in the background. And I mean, I certainly noticed that. I think the combination of caffeine and calories is that's the new doping.

1:27:55Like it's just give the brain what it needs. Mindset fuel. Yeah, yeah. Because if your mindset breaks down, if your brain isn't being nourished and then your ability to kind of navigate the pain cave is gonna be incapacitated, that's what you're saying. Yeah, that's - That's super interesting. I've never heard that before. So part is if it's volitional. And part of it is if we literally just measured electric signals in working muscles, some people's erode faster than others, their ability to conduct electrical signals. And I think the amount that you can influence that partially is influenced by training.

1:28:29Things like eccentric muscle contractions are one good way to do this because some studies on eccentric contractions, which aren't just runners running downhill, also weightlifters or whatever, find that there are changes in the axons of nerves that happen. And that's where delayed onset soreness comes from. It's not necessarily muscle breakdown. Part of it's like a nerve ending process. And you can influence it slightly by making yourself more trained to it. And then on the flip side, it's like that same process after 3 ,000, 4 ,000, 5 ,000 kilojoules of work is happening. We just don't know why.

1:29:04So fatigue resistance is also called durability in the research. that is the great frontier. And I think somehow I solved it at Leadville. I don't know how, because I have all these theories. I did all these things, but I don't know which one it was or which combination and what is real, what is a confounding variable. I don't know. So I need to repeat it because otherwise I'm just like, an N equals one experiment that might mean nothing. So what are some of those crazy theories? So about fatigue resistance generally? Yeah, I mean, I think the crazy theories that I have with what led to the performance change.

1:29:40I think that there might've been a change in my accident with my brain. As weird as that is, I don't understand exactly what happened during the race. And speaking of the nervous system, like I did not get tired. And when I did get tired, it was because my stomach started to get a little bit, just I was trying to prevent GI issues. And I don't know why, but from a less woo, more specific theory perspective, I think, you know, one entering the race fast, but to the way I train is after every easy run I do, I go down to the uphill treadmill downstairs in our house and I hop on the uphill treadmill for 10 minutes at 20 % grade.

1:30:18And I think it's fatigue resistance practice. And in long runs, at the end of long runs, I would do much more consistently like five minutes hard. just a short little bout motivated by a study on cyclists that found fatigue resistance correlated directly with an athlete's ability to access carbox after fat ox. So you do this large amount of fat ox and then you do some carbox. And what they found in those athletes is that the ones that had better fatigue resistance overall were better able to access it. And so again, it's probably not showing that that is specifically the driver. What's probably showing is that there's some natural ability that's developed in training to make that happen.

1:30:58And biking, I think biking played a huge role. Like I'm not the best cyclist in the world, but better than most runners and developing that skill over time probably made a big difference. Yeah, what about heat training? Yeah, so the heat training revolution has hit cycling hugely. So there was a woman who unexpectedly won the Olympic road race a number of years ago where they didn't realize she was off the front. There's no race radios here. And this woman, they thought they had caught her and they didn't. But still, she had a magical performance, this gold medalist that almost, it's even more improbable than what I did at Leadville.

1:31:33And she was practicing heat training before anybody else. And the cool part about what happened since then is that the protocols have come out that don't only find what they always knew, that heat training helps your heat performance, but that heat training fundamentally changes your hematological context with your blood in a way that is maybe the biggest training influence you can have for free. Like it's like no cost on the body to have this system where by exposing yourself to heat, it's the quickest adaptation in the human body that your blood volume increases. There was a study done like six or seven years ago that found an elite cyclist, a 17.3 % blood volume increase after four days of being in a sauna after exercise.

1:32:16Think about that. So not even training in hot environments, but exposing yourself to heat post-training. Yeah, for these cyclists, and so that blood volume variation happens so fast. And if you look at long-term, so if we zoom out, humans have like a seasonal cycle, right? So lower in winter, higher in summer. What happens if you just leave that high? So think about that cyclist that has the increase in blood volume. So that's plasma volume, primary liquid content from water. So essentially your body puts more fluid into your blood so you can get cool the surface of the skin more easily. You don't die.

1:32:52That's why it happens so fast because in nature we would just die if you didn't have this adaptation. But what that does is it offsets hematocrit. So your percentage of red blood cells. So you have your hematocrit going down and your kidneys sense that naturally produce EPO to bring it back to reasonable levels. Oh, interesting. And so you have a higher denominator, which if you're gonna have the same fractional number, you get a higher numerator. And so what's come out just in the last couple of years is these studies on elite athletes who are already theoretically pushing their limits, showing increased hemoglobin mass, which is the holy grail of exercise training.

1:33:29So the denominator is blood plasma volume. Blood plasma volume, yeah. Okay, and then the numerator is red blood cell density, right, so increasing that volume by heat exposure signals your body to produce essentially more red blood cells. So you're increasing your red blood cell volume as a result of that, which is basically that's what EPO does. Yeah, and it's also, you know, that blood, it's not just the red blood cells, it's also the healing factors in the blood and your body's ability, the circulatory system is everything. And because these variations are massive in the body, I mean, if we're talking 17 % or at baseline 15 % seasonally, if you do year-round heat training, I think that there's these incremental gains that happen as the body then adapts to it.

1:34:16So the magic of it is, yeah, you get maybe some of the red blood cell impacts in just a few weeks, because that's how long, that's how quick this can happen. But then you train with that and you train with that and you train with that. It allows you to train harder, recover more quickly. So there's an aggregate kind of impact of that over time. And then add that in to, let's say there's some benefit from ketones on a similar, you know, HIF system, they call it. Like there's a similar system of benefit on that. And then you added in with the fueling revolution and how that's changing recovery. And essentially athletes now are working in this context where you can do adapt to more work so much more rapidly.

1:34:54But I think heat's an indispensable part of it. Super interesting. Do you have a sense of like minimum effective dose? Like what's the protocol? So this is where, here's my stack, everybody know. Yeah, exactly. People don't know. That's the, and again, everything I'm talking about here is kind of at the edges of human performance. And that's why it's so fun to kind of be the experiment. And these are, I mean, there's, when you're you, that's significant. For the average person, these are kind of cherry on top of the Sunday stuff, you know, because there's a lot of other fundamentals that you have to master before that becomes important or interesting.

1:35:30But maybe heat would be the one that's, if you're listening to this and you never wanna run or exercise, it's kind of free exercise. I mean, not quite. I don't wanna like overstate it. But it's something along that range in terms of how your body responds. So the studies, some of them that find hemoglobin mass increases, it's three-week protocols of five training sessions in a down jacket, essentially. But other studies find that you get the same blood volume stimulus from passive heat, which I just use the hot tub. And I just get in the hot tub after our baby goes to sleep and it's delightful.

1:36:01And I listen to Rich talk to people about spirituality and I love it. And what makes sense though, so theoretically, I think in 10 years, The research is essentially gonna say, anything that causes this blood volume stimulus does the trick. And the reason - Whether it's sauna, putting on a down coat, or getting in a hot tub. Or whether it's during training or passive. Because during training makes some sense because it's a higher circulatory demand and you raise your core temp more. Immediately after training makes sense because your core temp's already higher, so you need less stimulus. But passive does the same thing.

1:36:34So in terms of blood volume stimulus. And there's some researchers in England right now that when I announced this, and I've tried to be such an open book online because how cool is it that you have an athlete that did this and might, I wanna know what do people think worked? What was it? I wanna ask the same question you did. Well, you can also ask the Badwater athletes who put their treadmills in the sauna and train at incredibly high heat. I don't like excelling enough to do that. Yeah, that's very intense. Borderline dangerous. That's a scary thing, but that's a common practice amongst those athletes.

1:37:11But there was a researcher in England that reached out and said, we have preprint data on hot tub use in the way you're saying that does cause the hemoglobin mass changes. So I think probably one to two times a week is enough for background stimulus after the initial. So you probably do need some sort of initial block of maybe four days where you're really stimulating your heat acclimation. But then after that, you just need to keep the blood volume high. What about cold therapy exposure? Like the whole thing about going from the sauna into the plunge and back and forth. I think that might be intriguing from a self-signaling perspective.

1:37:49I don't think that the, I generally agree with the background physiology of it where people say there might be some impact on brain chemicals and brain chemistry, probably less impact on athletic performance. And in practice, that's kind of what you see nowadays is that elite athletes aren't generally doing cold exposure. And I think part of it is probably the research saying that it might blunt some adaptations. Yeah, you want that physiological adaptation. You don't want that removed. And there's some sense that prolonged cold exposure might mute that. But I also think it's another place where I'm like, you know, the researchers can also suck it.

1:38:29No, I'm just kidding. But the point being that they sometimes miss that if it makes an athlete feel good, there's probably something there that we're missing in the research. And so cold for me makes me feel terrible. I hate it. Like we're gonna go - I love it. Oh, yeah, see, like it's probably just different things on our N equals ones. Like we're gonna go to the Pacific Ocean later and show Leo the ocean for the first time. And I'm like, I couldn't even get my feet in. It scares me so much just to be cold. And other people like Megan, who has a little bit of an autoimmune condition, such a cold responder.

1:39:05So maybe it has to do with inflammation context or brain chemistry, who knows? But I think that there's so much more to be found in endurance training and in training generally and understanding the human body. Like, how does this make a person feel? What are some of the other recovery protocols that you think are important? So nutrition matters, but I think people way too much control it from the perspective, like background nutrition, because it's such an easy variable to tie everything to because we all eat, we all have opinions on it. And we think, so I feel like that's a place where high enough protein intake is pretty unequivocally important, but how you get there can vary a lot.

1:39:46Like what I did before this race was I had my morning tea that I always have and I mixed it with Nesquik and creamer and salt. Do not recommend that. But like - That sounds horrible. It's amazing. What we're gonna get now is like, mess quick stocks are gonna go through the roof. But obviously that's not what drove the performance, but it shows it makes me feel good, I like it. So nutrition definitely plays a role. Then another place where I disagree with research, like if I don't stretch, I get injured. I'm a tighter athlete at baseline. And it's important for me. So I do it, I stretch every day just in a background passive way.

1:40:23But - I think that's important. It's weird that that went out of vogue, especially in running. and there was a lot of articles written about how you shouldn't stretch. And I bought into that. And I think I did to my detriment. I was always a very flexible athlete and I lost a lot of that. And I think it led to some injuries and some problems I could have easily avoided. I think maintaining flexibility and pliability is super important. So, I mean, you know, the body is a wonderland. And I had, after my accident, I had severe back pain, severe low back pain. I never really had it before. and so much love to anyone that deals with back pain because I'm like, so miserable.

1:41:01And then one night I was just like, fuck it. I'm gonna stretch my hamstrings to like, you know, kind of like get my back loose glimber. And within three days I was 90 % better. And not to say that that's everyone's experience, but the point being like, even now, I sometimes resist my own desires to do a little bit of flexibility. And so that plays a role. And then also just background massage. So I don't have time to get a massage, but we have a number of massage tools and I pound my body to no end with that stuff. What about gear? I've heard you talk about training in super shoes. Yeah, yeah.

1:41:37A lot of discourse around that on the forums. I'm a huge, I think super shoes are the ultimate delight. So super shoes being the shoes with the advanced foams that have a plate within them. And I think what's missed with them is not the percent gains that you might have on the day. It's that, especially at 36, when I go do a hard workout, it's very stressful in my body. These things offload so much of the stress because it almost feels like you're playing a video game rather than running. And so for my hard speed workouts in particular, always in super shoes. Interesting. And it definitely has aided my recovery and adaptation in a way that is game-changing.

1:42:17So use them on my workouts. I don't use them the rest of the time, but sometimes here's a hack for the marketing is wrong. You can wear these things long. You don't, they do not go bad. Like they say in a hundred miles, maybe you don't want to use them in the Olympics, but I've worn my pair of Adidas Pro 3s for 600 miles of, you know, speed workouts and they're still fine. But then maybe another wrinkle in the development of Trail and Ultra in particular is they might've just cracked the code a little bit on how to bring these shoes to Trails. So I was wearing, and again, I'm unsponsored. of any shoe or anything.

1:42:54But I was wearing the Adidas Trail super shoe. And I think it's a big advantage I had over history is that just this year, this is the first one that I wore. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah, we're just at the beginning of introducing the super shoe concept to ultras in the trail world. It's gonna, I can't imagine where it's gonna be in five years. Because in Rhodes, this has fundamentally changed the game. If you have not run in a super shoe, it is just such a joy. It's such a different experience, but in a way that makes it feel much more access to the transcendence of running for me.

1:43:31And I don't wear it on just like my normal easy runs, but for speed in particular. Have you seen the on light spray shoe yet? No. Oh, is this the one that - The one that they spray with the filaments? 3D, that Helen O 'Beary was wearing. Yeah, Helen. Well, I mean, she trains in Boulder, right? So I figured you guys all know each other. I see her all the time. Yeah, no, we - Yeah, she wore it at Boston and she wore it in the Olympics. I have a pair next door afterwards, I'll show them to you. And On is coming into trails too. Like they sent a pair recently and I'm like, oh, this is good. They have some really cool stuff coming down the pike in the next year or two.

1:44:06The hard part is the amount, these are rocket ships, right? And rocket ships require NASA research and development. And now companies like On that have the pockets are invested in the trail side as much as the road side, that's when things go wild. And so we're in an arms race right now that is going to be, I think, unthinkable in terms of what comes out of it. I'm very excited because I think it'll make the sport more fun for everybody. And I think that's the part of Super Shoes that people sometimes miss is at the end of the day, if this is about having fun, they make it so much more fun. It definitely makes running more fun.

1:44:39Oh my God. I definitely foresee 20 years from now, I'm just gonna be like, everything I said about only doing in workouts, I'm only gonna be in super shoes all the time. Like I'll be doing another appearance on here in super shoes because I just can't do anything without them. Are you someone who's tracking all kinds of biomarkers also like heart rate variability? I assume you're wearing a heart rate monitor strap when you're running. Are you looking at your sleep quality and metrics? Like what do you pay attention to and what do you think doesn't matter? So during running, another piece of tech that's just amazing.

1:45:14They have these armband heart rate monitors now, like from Coros, game-changing because wrist-based heart rate is not very good. Chest strap, I just can't stomach. I could, it feels like some very weak person is trying to strangle me around my chest. But the armband is great. And so that's where you see all these athletes like me that are unsponsored wearing them in races. That's how I was monitoring my heart rate. So I pay attention to that during training. Outside of training, wrist is fine. And there, I look primarily at resting heart rate because HRV for me seems like a random number generator that I can't tie to anything.

1:45:46And if I start looking at it, I just get panicked that I'm doing something wrong all the time. But resting heart rate seems to generally track how I feel within a couple of beats. So I monitor resting heart rate each morning and I try not to look at sleep ever because I have too much background anxiety to look at sleep numbers. You have a young child also. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll just induce anxiety that's gonna impact your resting heart rate, right? What about, have you played around with that device called Core that you can strap to your heart rate monitor that is monitoring your core body temperature?

1:46:20As somebody who's interested in heat, I know like the Norwegians are super into this and more and more, I've seen a lot of triathletes who experiment with this. I think that is another kind of new frontier because heat is the limiter, right? In the same way that your ability to absorb calories is. When your core body temperature reaches a certain temperature, you're unable to perform. And knowing when you're inching up to that so that you can ease off and developing strategies to keep that core cool is a massive kind of lever in terms of performance. Yeah. So, I haven't personally used it. I've seen them used within races.

1:47:00So, shoe companies, again, are coming to these races sometimes and testing athletes, and I'm getting to see the data. It's really interesting. Because it seems as if some athletes are better at buffering really high core temps than others. And I don't know, we don't know why that is yet. But I haven't personally used it, but athletics is kind of a contest to see who can keep their core temps down. So cooling is huge. But again, in a mode of full transparency, with that in mind, one thing I did during the race was, and I do not suggest this to anybody, but I want to just make sure everyone knows everything I did, was I took a Tylenol, which theoretically could do some of that work, which I don't think anyone should do because who knows.

1:47:42But for me, it definitely, I felt a difference in the heat of the day because it got to 79 degrees, which at 10 ,000 feet feels like the surface of the sun. And it felt like heat didn't affect me as much. But I do think the cooling revolution is in the other place where I haven't personally explored the limits. Right. But imagine like really figuring that out and then go into a race like Badwater. Yeah. Where it's all about heat. In Western States, the 100 miler there has become this wild heat journey. That's the weird thing about all of these sports is the, hopefully like the thing that we're seeing is just I'm riding the very start of a wave that a few years from now, we're gonna look at everything has changed at every race for every level.

1:48:27And one of the ways is cooling. So there's this famous movie Unbreakable about Western States, just a little documentary. and in it, they show someone cooling themselves off by putting their head in an ice cooler, just like dipping it down, waterboarding themselves. And nowadays you go to Western States and my main job as a coach is to have all of these ice modalities, ice vests, ice bandanas, different places on the body to put ice. And sometimes nowadays it'll be a hundred degrees and you'll have athletes come into mile 62 and say, I'm quite cold. And at the Tour de France, another place, they have ice containers everywhere on their bodies.

1:49:05It's like, how do they even fit it in? They're finding orifices to put ice that I didn't know existed. A long time ago, like very early days of the podcast, I had this professor on, Craig Heller, who's a biology professor at Stanford. He's been around forever. He was like my biology professor when I was there. Yeah. And he developed this cooling technology. Like he started to study the impact of core temperature on athletic output and develop like this glove that had like circulating cold water or whatever, because I guess like the capillaries or the blood vessels are so close to the surface and there's so many of them that actually this was the quickest way to bring down your core temperature is in this extremity.

1:49:47And some glove technology, and then he was taking students and having them do pull-ups and did all these studies and the results were really dramatic. Like if you can keep that core temperature down, your ability to continue to do reps or basically like maintain output was significant, right? The problem is you can't wear these things when you're doing the thing, right? Like if you're at a football game, you're on the sidelines doing it or if you're a time trialist cyclist, you're wearing them when you're warming up and afterwards, but not during. Have you used them? No, no, I've never used them.

1:50:22But I feel like, and then something happened with the partners and like it never, it didn't really, I think there's some applications for it, but I feel like somebody has got to figure this out and there's gonna have, you know, there's gonna be like a massive impact across like all sports. Yeah, if people actually figure out how to do it during activity better, like with tech, that's the place. Because right now it's like, oh, put some ice cubes in your headband or put ice cubes in your hands and run it. That's fine, but like there has to be a better way to do this. Well, have you seen the Ironman athletes that put the, I don't even know what they are, like the crystals on their head and things like that.

1:50:57Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn't there, at the Olympic marathon, there were guys wearing headbands. I think that had something to do with cooling. I'm not sure. And I'm letting my bias show because I hate cold so much. I've personally been a little bit behind some of the tech, like the crystal thing I'm making fun of. Clearly people think it works, so it probably does. And yeah, I'm just letting myself lag behind. You're that afraid of cold that you wanna? Well, here's your growth opportunity, right? What you resist persists. This is like, this is what's calling to you. Yeah, I just hate being cold. I'm like such a cold dinosaur, just watching a meteor come in and be like, this is fine.

1:51:37Totally fine, totally fine, I'm fine. Then how come your first, you know, super ultra wasn't bad water then? You like the heat so much. Yeah, well the thing is, it's not even that I like it, it's just that I hate cold. I am, everyone that does their Instagrams of jumping in an ice barrel or anything, I'm just like, you are the toughest human alive. You have done my version of the world. I think this is why you have to go towards it, right? You have to go towards this fear. There's something special to be learned. Or maybe I can base it in science or pseudoscience and say, hey, that's actually a sign.

1:52:11That's a sign that it doesn't work for me, N equals one. What is next? Like, are you thinking about maybe Badwater, Western States, some of these other races? Now you've had this experience, you had this success. Like, how are you contemplating like what follows? I mean, I really do wanna see, was it luck? Was it beginner's luck? And so I wanna get back out there as soon as it's reasonable for my body and test that limit. So theoretically, I'm in the start list for 100 now at the end of October. I don't know if it is gonna be reasonable for my body. Like the recovery after is so non-linear for these events in ways that I don't fully understand how my body is gonna respond.

1:52:55So, you know, we're recording this not too long after. And I've definitely noticed some like nervous system issues after primarily via resting heart rate, but also heart rate response, just like going up the stairs and things. So yeah, I wanna get back out there, but it might, our kid number two is coming at the end of the year. So this could be one of those moments where I just have to embrace, hey, enjoy the mountaintop while you're there. I think the recovery period is longer than most people realize. The Iron Cowboy just told me like recently, he's like, oh, I finally feel normal from doing his 100, when was that?

1:53:33Wasn't that years ago? Yeah, it was like three years ago or something. Well, do you find anything helps you? I'm actually asking around because I've coached athletes, everything works differently, but I am starting to hit that like little lull of, oh, my body's taking a little more time than I thought it would. I don't know. I mean, I'm probably not the best person to ask, but I would say, take your time. Yeah. You have that 18 years of base and that doesn't go away. The thing you have to be worried about is with aging is your speed starts to decline, right? And that's your superpower. So how do you hold onto that?

1:54:09So perhaps you can stay in contact with, you know, short bursts and efforts, but I wouldn't worry about the base part. Like you can always tap back into that. And I would take your time and enjoy the important things in life, which, you know, are your kids and your family. And that world is always waiting for you. But I think, you know, I think what you've done is really interesting. And I think there's, you're at the beginning of a journey. And I think the journey is more than about you. Like it augurs something really interesting for the future of the sport, which is something that obviously you care about and you've spoken about.

1:54:39Like, I think it's opened people's eyes to what's possible. And I'm curious, like, could you scale this methodology and this philosophy to a Moab 240 or a Transcon run? Or, you know, is there a sense of the applicability? Like, does it apply in a context like that where we're talking about multiples on the distance that you just ran? I think so. And I've coached John Kelly, who's multiple-time Barkley finisher, and Damian Hall, who's legendary in the UK for these multi-day events. And for both of them, also, speed ends up being the thing that distributes down. And so I think the hard part, and ultras in particular, is that enough variables come in that it can be easy to be like, well, if you nail logistics, if you nail every little thing under the sun, maybe it doesn't matter that much.

1:55:35but as the sports get more narrow margin, which is happening in ultra running, like it's happened in every other sport, I think it's gonna be kind of a prerequisite to tap that bell for yourself, not to be the fastest, like it doesn't matter how fast your 5K is, but every person, whether it's someone that's trying to win or someone that's chasing a cutoff at one of these events, if they're not tapping that power bell, they're leaving 20, 25 % on the table. And so I think for multi-day, the substrate equation changes, right? It's different fueling. But at the end of the day, you're gonna be finding a certain percentage of your aerobic threshold out there.

1:56:10And that percentage, if you train huge volume, maybe it goes up a little bit. But at the end of the day, the best way to do it is raise your velocity at aerobic threshold, like raise your running economy. And that's directly correlated to 5Ks. And if people are able to do that, then I think they'll usually see that we often put these self-limiting constraints on ourself, like I did with 100 miles or my capabilities. And what I learned is, well, no, I had it in me all along. I just needed to be like, ring the speed bell and then give it a shot. The other thing that's unique about you is that you come from a football background.

1:56:43I don't know how many ultra runners out there like played college football. And you showed us a photo of you before we started the podcast. Like you look like a completely different person because you have the prototype, like distance runner build. Yeah, you're saying I would get bullied in gym class. No, yeah, it was wild because it feels like a different life, but I wanted to, like I was just obsessed with sports, right? I always wanted to be an athlete. And so football became the thing and got there and did all the weightlifting and drank all the protein shakes and treated that in the same methodological framework that I do running in the sense of it was all science-based.

1:57:26and somehow I hacked my body into being able to run a really fast 40 yard dash and got me recruited, not to a good football school, but a football school. Actually, maybe the worst football school, Columbia. Columbia, yeah. Notoriously bad. I think they lost like 100 games in a row at one point. So it's not gonna be bad on the bat for that. But yeah. But you did play college ball. You always have that. Yeah, you can find my bio on the website, but no games played. And once I got there, I realized on some level that I was playing, that was a place where I was trying to play a character. Like before every football game and every practice, I had to psych myself up to want to hit somebody.

1:58:01And I never did. He's like, no, why don't we play like Scrabble? Not a good personality for football. Yeah, you just love sport. Yeah. You were just somehow ended up in the wrong sport. And I love training. I just love doing, I love purpose. Maybe it's the better way to say. If I had purpose, like that physical purpose for anything, I'd probably find joy in it. So I wanted a new physical purpose. So I'd grown up watching the Tour de France on ESPN2 for 30 minutes at night. My dad had biked and I love my dad. And I was like, oh, I'll bike. So I went to the gym at Columbia and just hammered myself for 30 minutes at a time on that little machine.

1:58:38And yeah, essentially it just started a process of like wanting to keep applying that, all of the learning methods, learning, learning, learning to everything. And so, I mean, the cool part is I came in with no preconceived notions about endurance training because I didn't know anything. And you also weren't somebody who was a college athlete and then did the typical thing where then sports was in the rear view and you went off and did other things and returned to sport later in life. Like, it sounds like you actually never retired. You just went right into it. Yeah, you went right into endurance sports.

1:59:12The bricks keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, for what I did is I was like, oh, I'm gonna read every message board. So talk about Let's Run. You know, I made, I was poking fun at it earlier, but in the mid 2000s, I read every training thread, trying to learn at the, what the, because the best coaches would post on there. And then I would read every Runner's World article and every training book. And then eventually it became every biochemistry book. And learning about - Why'd you go to law school? I don't know. Why did I go to law school? I don't know. I asked myself that question a lot.

1:59:40I know, right? It's beautiful to be talking to someone with like a similar background, you know, sports and then law school and ultra. But yeah, so like, as I went through this process, like, you know, I was just a guy toiling away. And so when I said my talent didn't manifest that much, like I would just be at a race and yeah, I would do great, but I would finish 14th or whatever. And just like a local race. And, you know, there wasn't any future in that sport for me. It was just something I was passionate about. And so, yeah, I was studying environmental science and wanted to do public interest environmental law.

2:00:12So found my way to Duke and everything changed when I met my soon wife, Megan, because she was a field hockey player, same background, wanted to be endurance sports and smartest person I ever met. And she believed in me. And she said that these things you wanna do, these dreams you have are reasonable. So this was like 2010. And we started running together. And I'm like, are you the most talented person in the world? What is going on here? And so it was this chain reaction where I was like, maybe actually 14th at the local race isn't my ceiling and I can like see where the rabbit hole goes. And how did that eventually lead to coaching and you guys being partners in that enterprise?

2:00:57Well, again, so much. She went to medical school. She's a doctor. So I eventually trickled my way through law school. And one of the most hilarious messages we got is someone who I'm a friend with. He was my best friend in law school. And he said that anyone who says this came from nowhere did not see you showing up to your 2L environmental classes just soaked and smelly from sweat in North Carolina. And it's a reminder, I was putting in the work. And then Megan went to Stanford. I got a public interest job and eventually was working from California too. And she's like, David, I have to work all night.

2:01:36and you're just there, you know, working for$35 ,000 a year, you know, for your eight hours a day, what are you gonna do to make this like uplifting? And she's like, you should coach. You've always talked about this, coach. And I was like, who would trust me? Who would do this? But I was like, all right. Yeah, I'm the guy who got 14th at this race. But by then I had gotten good, but I still was that guy in my head. Like, why, what's my background? And, you know, I'm not an exercise. I think you're still fighting that. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, and maybe that's more of a baseline trait. Like, you know, I was the larger kid in my elementary school class.

2:02:10And like, you know, I've always felt the imposter syndrome that a lot of people, I think is probably ubiquitous human experience to some extent. The problem is my trajectory has always then taken me in an unexpected place where the imposter syndrome becomes even more pronounced. So like as a lawyer, well, at least I went to law school. So someone's telling me, is giving me a pat on the back. Yeah, you get, there's a validation boost with that or a social acceptability of having passed a certain threshold. Yeah, at least I had that. But as a coach and as a runner, like never in college and then as a coach, I mean, no.

2:02:44Like I, what I did is when Megan said that, I was like, okay, cool. So I put an ad, not an ad, but like a post out on Facebook back in the day when that was a thing. And it was, hey, I'll coach you for free if you wanna be coached. and then I think all of a sudden, I had been writing for years. So again, in my method of transparency, I had had this little blog, dot blog spot. The reason I followed Anton Kropitschko so closely is that I was a part of that runner blog world and people had read that and they're like, oh, well, at least he thinks a lot about this stuff and makes dumb jokes and like, we like that.

2:03:22And so some people signed up and then it just kind of, as these things do, as your podcast did. Like it just kind of becomes its own thing. And then eventually Megan ends up joining in too, you know, and we do this thing together. And now you're coaching some of the most accomplished trail and ultra runners in the country. Yeah, I mean, how much - What is it like to be, you know, part of that ecosystem in Boulder? There's a lot of coaches. There's a lot of elite athletes. Yeah, so - And maybe what a lot of it comes down to is like, the people that hate us, hate us so much. And the people that love us generally love us in terms of what we try to put out into the world, that Boulder's a wonderful place because usually there's a lot of love publicly and then a lot of hate privately.

2:04:14So in the geographical location, it's great. You like love to your face, but behind closed doors, sniping. The internet's a scarier place than the real world. And so in Boulder, for me, Like it's the coolest thing to see people that have a similar like worldview, like whatever drives them to do the thing. Maybe it's different than me, but they have the same drive. And so when you're out there on a run near our house, yeah, you'll see Helen O 'Beary or an Olympian, but then you also see someone who is maybe running like a 28 minute 5K working just as hard. And that to me is like, oh, hell yeah.

2:04:50Like I hope if you've ever seen me running, like I will have told you you're amazing, you're awesome. rather than just giving you a little wink and nod because I'm like, anyone who's out there doing it, that's the coolest thing. So for me and for us, like the idea was after Megan, she didn't go to residency, she's doing this, does her PhD. We wanted to go where we felt like our people were and we didn't have any connection to Colorado other than like the beautiful vistas of Leadville. So we wanted to be there. And that's where all the people are. That's the target rich environment. and how did you go about getting your first athlete clients?

2:05:29Well, that little Facebook post, people just reached out, you know? And I think a lot of it was free coaching. So from this guy who was very open about putting his creative work into the world. But, and those people, two of them in particular of the first three are still on the team all these years later on like day 4 ,000, some whatever of their training log. and but over time what ended up happening is one athlete in particular um cat bradley won the western states 100 in 2017 unexpectedly where she like in the previous prediction context was i think picked by one out of 11 000 entrants and when people found out that she was coached by us that kind of started the elite athlete i see like stampede um and then again and also having megan on the team because she was she had herself become one of the best that was also proof of concept but yeah, I mean, like a lot of businesses, usually if you have a big vision for it at the start, the only thing you're gonna learn is that the big vision was not the way it goes, you know, it goes different directions.

2:06:31And so I never had a vision as, you know, this wasn't Leadville calling my shot. This was, hey, free coaching from someone that doesn't know anything. Sure, but look what it's turned into. Yeah. You know, by following your heart and staying connected to what you're passionate about, you're able to create this thing that's meaningful for other people. Yeah. I think it's powerful. Do you still coach like lower level amateurs or is it now kind of an elite only type of thing? No, so everybody that, you know, believed back then, like almost all of them are still around on the team, you know? So yeah, there's, it's mostly pros now and we're not adding new athletes or anything, but our idea generally, and this was like an initial thesis, maybe the core guiding principle of things from the start is that everybody's an elite athlete.

2:07:18And I think sometimes we bifurcate humans into these groups based on things that they have no control over, genetic composition essentially. And it loses sight of the fact that some people, it expresses so differently. And so what I wanted to do is hopefully give people the validation and the perspective that what a elite athlete means to me is not a performance result. It's a approach to the world and your own growth. And that if we embody that, then, oh, fuck it, you're an elite athlete. And so, I mean, I think that was indispensable for me when I was the 14th place finisher at these races, because if I had ever dropped that, I never would have reached what I reach now.

2:07:56And so I essentially want people to show up, have fun and put in the fucking work as if they're going to the Olympics, even if their life context dictates that that's fewer miles. And has winning Leadville changed how you think about and communicate with your athletes, your ideas around setting and working towards audacious goals. Because now it's sort of like, you know, if somebody I'm imagining, you know, the newbie, you know, who's like, I wanna qualify for this. And you're thinking like, yeah, that's like a 10 year journey, you know, but they wanna do it that year. You don't wanna squash somebody's dream or be discouraging to them.

2:08:36You wanna be a realist and you wanna help them. But given the fact that you just did this thing that most people, a lot of people said is never gonna happen. Yeah. Does that change how you think about and counsel around audacious dreams? Oh no, you gotta shoot your shot. That never changed. So Shea Serrano is this writer and basketball writer. At the ringer. Yeah, well, yeah, I love Shea Serrano. Just like one of my life idols. And he always has said, and like he posts this, just these posts that are about shooting your shot, that all he looks for in a basketball player is someone that wants to shoot their shot.

2:09:15And I cribbed that language from him as soon as I saw it for the first time so many years ago. And I'm like, the goal of a coach is to get someone to shoot a shot that they're scared of. One, because that's how you learn. But two, because unless you shoot a hundred of them and miss a hundred of them at some point, you're never going to have that one that you swish from half court. And that's what happened to me at Leadville. And so if anything, I think it just shows I practiced what I preached for so many years. And like, I want everyone to choose some goal that is so freakishly scary and so impossible that it motivates a daily process that is fulfilling.

2:09:52And at the end of the day, if you don't achieve a goal, good. I mean, that's just the nature of scary goals. But like, I didn't think I was going to achieve Leadville. I think, and the Leadville, the reason I'm here, it rests on all the times I've DNF'd, you know? And so for me, like, and that doesn't just apply, coaching with shooting a shot, you know, like starting a podcast, shooting a shot. And all of those are accompanied by similar numbers of misses. It's just like, the thing that scares me the most is when someone, and when I would get through a life, let's say, and imagine, well, what about the shots I didn't take?

2:10:26Like, I just don't want to have that regret. That's the one thing I want to make sure. And that's how I tell athletes to race races. I tell them to try all these things. It's like, the only way you're gonna become better at it is by doing something beyond your wildest dreams and something that you don't think you have a reasonable shot at. You gotta take that first step. Yeah, yeah. And what about the people that do feel like me, that feel like they're not gonna accomplish the thing? And that's why I always try to ground myself in as a coach. It's like, I don't think I'm gonna be a good coach.

2:10:59I didn't think I was gonna have a niche successful podcast, niche emphasis running, or, you know, certainly not Leadville, but like, I think about all the people that, you know, I was also like this in relationships. You can imagine, thank God Megan is the most like swagtastic open person in the world because like I didn't have any relationships before her that were like of any duration, you know, I, but the same problem existed. I hope now I would be, I wish I could go back and tell that kid to to shoot more shots, but I didn't have anyone telling me that. But it doesn't feel like a fake it till you make it vibe.

2:11:36It's more like, oh, I feel drawn to this thing. I love it and I'm just gonna invest in it. Yeah. Without like getting caught up in where it's gonna lead or whether it's gonna be successful. It's just, I'm basically paying attention to my intuition and allowing my heart to lead me. Yeah, yeah. Which is hard after you've gone to law school. Yeah. Well, what's the life, I mean. Law school tends to mute that heart voice. Yeah, yeah,$35 ,000 out of law school tends to mute that voice a little bit too. Yeah, so I feel like, I don't know, I've just had such a hard path at times, like reconciling how I feel about myself with how I want to present in the world, right?

2:12:23Like I want to present as this open, loving, caring, kind person. And then often, you know, I'll have thoughts that tell me I'm not that person. I'm not, you know, like we all do, which is why people like Ryan Holiday, you know, I listen to them so much and you, it's like the reason I listen to this podcast is because that's what makes me a better athlete because it helps me then show up and truly embrace where I want athletes to look, which is what is the day that brings you the most meaning? Not the race result or anything like that. That's dust in the wind, right? Like even Leadville, it is gonna be, it is already starting to slip through my fingers and it is gone.

2:13:01Maybe this is all a dream and if it is great dream, but at the same time, it's gonna be no more substantive in the next 30 years for my mental health. But I know that what Leadville represented to me was a day-to-day process that got me out there and made me do something that at times I love, at times I hate, but in all that life is when I wanted to lead. And if it weren't for Leadville, you know, I wouldn't have been coming back from the accident with my hair set on fire, like I ended up doing. And, you know, I wouldn't have gotten to the point that I was able to actually bet on myself. I would have just been, if it weren't for sports in general, magic of sports, I would have been that kid that was always just a little bit scared of everything.

2:13:43And what sports show me is that you don't need to be scared, you know? And at Leadville, I ran fearlessly. And that's what I'm most proud of. Not the result, because I don't know why that experiment worked. Exactly. I think I have theories, but it's that I ran without any fear. And that's what I wanna model. That's what I want athletes that I coach to take away from it is you shoot a shot. And the key part is what happened next, that it teaches you that you have nothing to be scared of. There's this mantra in ultra running, respect the distance, right? And what you said, which I thought was so cool was you said, I'm ready to disrespect the distance.

2:14:23Yeah, I respect my body. Which is like, that's hardcore. Like that doesn't sound like somebody who's second guessing themselves. Yeah, yeah, but I think - That's like a gnarly smack down. I wish we could go to the most courageous people in history and really dig down with them. And you've done that sometimes. And just like dig down and get them to say that they are scared to death of like public speaking or I don't know. One thing, a little thought I had on the drive here. we landed in LA and we're listening to, you know, some California rap music. And I'm wondering how many of these rappers have erectile dysfunction?

2:15:00Because it's not zero. Someone out there has it and then is approaching the world and saying like really audacious things about their, and they're working through it that way. About their manly prowess. Yeah. But the point just being that like, there's this, that maybe our baseline nature or the way we were raised, you know, it doesn't have to be destiny all the time. And I was great. You know, I had great, I have great parents and such a great wife and I have this support system that I lean on heavily. And through them just learned that like, you know, I want to be courageous specifically because I'm scared.

2:15:34Like, and that the virtue, the practice of virtue is one that is so active all the time for most people, rather than something that's like born and gifted into some and not to others, or, you know, people are just these paragons of virtue. Like, that's not me, you know? And so the reason I love sports is that it's that self-expression aspect. And so I feel like everyone should be an endurance athlete or a weight lift or do something. Not because the physical stuff's great, but the mental part of it, for me, it's where, like, I think I found out who I actually am when you strip away all the layers that have accumulated for whatever reason.

2:16:15Well, that's what the ultra world does. Yeah. That's the real beauty. It's a spiritual odyssey draped as an athletic adventure. Yeah. And I learned that at Leadville in a way, that's what I wanted. So Courtney Walter, absolute legend, is who I was thinking about out there. She was out there cheering at 3.55 AM in Leadville. Because her husband was running, right? And so she made eye contact with me, she's the most delightful person. And I've thought about her talking about the pain cave. and how she has found such joy in that. And for me, it just really set my intention that my goal, once I got out there, was not the course record.

2:16:57I was gonna execute my plan, but that can't be the goal when you're in a hundred mile or it's not gonna get you through, it's not enough. Because it is dust in the wind. My goal was to experience the pain cave of my own volition, not because of a fucking car. And after that accident, I was able to understand that this thing I'd resisted, I've always been the person that, you know, I don't necessarily enjoy pain. I prefer running in zone two when it doesn't hurt, was to get to that point. And I didn't care if it happened at mile 20 or 80. And I was able to push it off a long time, but when it got there, I was like, oh, this is so cool.

2:17:31It's like, I've never fully experienced, I mean, I've experienced something approaching it, but never the ultra version of it, the like 100 mile version of it. And I was just stripped down and I got to see like, who am I actually? and I really loved who I saw, you know? And I would have loved who I saw if he didn't win or didn't run fast. I just loved that like in that moment, in the true vulnerability of it, it's like, this is amazing. This is incredible. I love who I am. And that's something I've always struggled with. Well, it's almost like a psychedelic trip, right? Like this was the message that you were given.

2:18:09Like it's, you know, you are enough and you are worthy of love. and that you actually met yourself as you truly are and saw a person worthy of that love that you could love, right, like the self love piece. And maybe if I could say anything to you, it would be like really spend time with that because I think that is the antidote to all the tendencies towards self deprecation and self minimizing that seem to kind of be a recurring pattern with you. Yeah. Like it's telling you, you don't have to be that way anymore. And I think a lot of the reason is I'm just really excited to get up and see the world and it's so bright and beautiful.

2:18:54And yeah, I mean, I think the psychedelic connection is like a really apt one in the sense that, you know, I've had Megan here for the last 14 years telling me these things about myself. And it is a thousand percent of the reason that I've accomplished what I've accomplished. but like on some level, I'm always ready to hear the first thing. Usually it's from the outside, but sometimes from my own brain saying otherwise and grasp onto that. Sure, that's very human. Yeah, but I think something about first having a kid and like, you know, all the cliche things that I never wanted to have a kid and then I have a kid and I'm just a full freaking cliche.

2:19:35and then just truly like seeing that this 18 years of work these 18 years of brick building like all along I did it without any end in mind and then that in the background was doing this magical thing and if I was capable of that then no matter what big obstacle I have no matter what I can't like conceive of then what else could I do if I just gave myself that time, right? that I often expect my brain to respond to things overnight in a way I never would expect my body to. And I don't know, I think I felt a difference in the sense of like, it has felt like there's so much love in the world all the time in a way that I always thought and always heard people say, but now like I feel like I'm tapped into it in just a little bit greater way.

2:20:23And yeah, ultras are the best. Everyone should do an ultra. What a gift. That's an incredible gift. And that's a really profound insight and beautiful thing that you not only have taken away from that experience, but like appreciate, like you see it, you understand it, you're holding it, you're valuing it. And maybe part of the post-race recovery is about just being with that, right? And seeing where that might lead you. Yeah, I mean, the weird part is like, I am getting chills from what you're saying because like, and almost crying a little bit, because like, I never imagined this would happen.

2:21:05Like I put the big goal out there and on some level, you know, numbers wise, I knew it could happen, but I never thought it would happen. Right. Like I never thought in a million years that I'd be the person talking to you and, um, you know, having this experience and to be able to know it while you're in it, in life, like in that moment of your life, you know, like I have just, it's like so overwhelmed with gratitude in a way that, um, yeah, I mean, I'm just literally trying to feel the things rather than think about the feelings because I'm always been the person that's trapped in my head. And right now, like I've probably cried more times in the last three weeks than I've cried outside of, you know, things involving Megan's health and our baby, like, and all of it's disconnected to being like, holy fuck, what just happened?

2:22:00And like, not that I just, I'm still constantly pinching myself and being like, is this a dream? And to be in that moment when you're of life, like after being the person that says, shoot your shot all the time to have that shot go in, in this way. And I, I can't put words to the feeling. I just wish everyone knows that like, you know, this feeling is, is one that when you, whenever you do have it, it just tells you love everyone, love everyone, love everyone. Like that, you know, love each other. Like that feeling is one that that's the conclusion I've had from. It's not that I want to beat my chest and tell the haters to go suck it.

2:22:43Like I wanna just tell everyone, haters, I love you so much because you're the only reason I ever did this too. And that gratitude of being in it and not wanting something more, just being like, oh, that's enough is so cool. Yeah, the halo isn't from the victory. It's from following through on a promise that you made for yourself combined with the sort of long tail or residue of this pain cave experience that's left you with like this, you know, new relationship with yourself and giving you something to look at. Like, I think that's really beautiful that you have that awareness and you can value it and be grateful for it in the present moment, as opposed to looking back on it 10 years from now and saying, wow, that was amazing.

2:23:32I should have been more present for that while it was happening rather than thinking about, well, now I gotta go do this race and now I've got sponsors calling me, like how can I translate this into something more than it has been, which are all very human and on some level responsible things to think about, but to be anchored in the important piece, I think speaks to your maturity and the kind of elevated connection with self that you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I don't have any sponsors, not a professional athlete. And my life isn't gonna change. It's the same life. But the one thing I wish I could do is just go to everyone and tell them, look them directly in the eyes, connect with them deeply and say, do something that really scares you.

2:24:20Like, and do it so many times because on the end of that, it's not the achievement, but it's just like the act of doing it. And I have so much gratitude to the previous versions of me that did things that like are just, not even athletically, just literally everything. the asking Megan out on a second date, like every little thing. I'm just like, do that thing. Everybody just do that one thing, uh, no matter what it is in your life, because like it took thousands of those for me to have this athletic moment. Um, and I, I like, I am at a point now, um, where if I could never run a race again, I'd just be so happy.

2:25:01And I would go out and train in the same way. And I would take the same, you know, bicarb before my workouts and all of that. Because like, this was the moment where that entire process, I just got to look back and be like, damn, that's a big brick wall I've built one little brick at a time. And like, if I can do that, I can do anything. I mean, you know, maybe not win Leadville again, maybe not set a course record, but like, you know, whatever big scary thing that I'm intimidated by, overwhelmed with doubt, like I can do it. So I just want people to know on some level that like they're enough as they are.

2:25:36And that's what gives them the courage to shoot big shots. Because if you know that you truly have nothing to lose, then everyone should fear that person. That should be what's feared is that person. Regret isn't a function of the shots you missed. It's a function of the shots you didn't take. Yeah. So take your shot. Exactly. That's what I'm hearing. And then the other piece that we didn't talk about directly is the patience piece. Like this looks overnight because you had never run a 100 miler before, but this is a 20 plus year journey that you've been on, you know, to get to this place. And the reason that it worked out in large part is because it's always been about the process and being in love with just the doing of the thing, not the result that you get from the doing of the thing.

2:26:29My favorite little like allegory story about this comes from Pete Holmes when he was talking to Conan O 'Brien at the beginning of his career or early in his career. And Conan said something like, just keep hitting this. if you're a symbol player, just keep in the same symbol. Eventually people are gonna be like, you know what we need right now? A fucking symbol. And I think about that all the time, that all I'm out here doing, all I wanna do both internally and externally is hit that symbol. Like, hey, everyone out there, you're loved. I'm gonna be putting in the work and just do that thing. And what's cool about the Leadville experience is that like, it does feel for at least this blip in time, people are like, that's a good symbol.

2:27:12We like that symbol a lot. And yeah, so I'm just gonna keep hitting the symbol. Yeah, the world finally got to a place where they needed to hear your version of the symbol playing. Yeah, yeah. And you were ready because you were banging it the whole time. And then it comes and goes, right? Like Pete's show was canceled and that was an amazing show crashing. I loved it. But you know, it's still the same type of amazing journey. And most likely - But you wake up the next day and you just keep banging the symbol. Keep banging the symbol, yeah, yeah. If you're Ryan Holiday, you put a book out and you're already halfway through the next book that you're writing.

2:27:45Yeah, no, exactly. And I think it's why like my motivators, the people I think about are rarely runners. I love runners, but I don't know, for me, it almost always grounds in thinkers. And so sometimes those are sports people like Steve Kerr, Greg Popovich in basketball, those coaches. But often it's like philosophers or comedians, maybe the biggest one of all, because who else sees the absurdity and silliness of it all and decides that, hey guys, here's this dick joke or whatever. And that to me, I love because if you think about anything we've talked about today with running or ultra or whatever, at a certain point, it's easy to say, that is silly as fuck.

2:28:27It is so silly to care. So you just kept running longer than anyone else? Like, and that's important because why? Yeah, and you mean you're not there for your kid every second of the day because you're out there punishing yourself and pooping in the woods. I mean, I think about that all the time with athletes. Drinking baking soda. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, and I'm anchored to that all the time. I look at the athletes that don't have doubt, like, and I'm just so in awe, right? Like, whether they're driven by a higher power, those athletes that are like, thank God, you know, God made this possible.

2:29:00Part of me is like, I wish I had that. If God cared about my athletics or I thought I did, I would be so much more self-assured. but the part of me is just like low motivation like I'm not compulsively doing any of this stuff and so when I think about the silliness of it like where I come back to is like the community and shared experience of it which is why when I talk about this I always try to think more about the person that's finishing in 30 hours at Wedville than the person that's finishing in 15 and that they're feeling the same physiological sensations I am and that person running the 28-minute 5K right near our house, right next to the Olympians, their journey is the same journey as the one that the Olympians on.

2:29:43Because that sense of like belonging, that's what keeps me going. Like is the understanding that this is a shared human experience where we're delving into like the nooks and crannies of how our physiology works. And that understanding that, hey, if I push the limit just a little bit here and find what's possible, Maybe that'll make that 30-hour finisher at Leadville finish in 29-15 if they figure out how to apply it for themselves. And if that happens, then their daily run might be just a little bit more transcendent, a little bit more often. And that's where it's like, oh, hell yeah, you're on the trail.

2:30:18High five. You're awesome. Because we're all kind of just out there running, pushing back against the cosmic joke of impermanence and all that that everybody else face. And I mean, I hope the way to come out of it is just on the other end, laugh, cry, and make a dick joke. Beautifully put. And also illustrative of the kind of person I didn't expect to meet today. I think when I first was reading into your story and it's about this meticulous approach to your training and spreadsheets, It's like, it's hard to not imagine, you know, some kind of maniacally self-obsessed, you know, ultra running nerd who doesn't think much about anything except the next workout and how you're gonna recover from it.

2:31:10And you're not that guy at all. I mean, sometimes I wish I could be, I would be such a better, I would be a more reliable athlete for sure. I don't think so. Like all the amazing athletes that I've had on here, like there's that instinct, like, well, if I just lived in a cabin by myself and I didn't have family and distractions or whatever, I could be so much better, but I don't think that's really true. I think people that have meaningful lives that keep them grounded and liberate them from that temptation of self-obsession end up not only being happier athletes, but more successful athletes and have more longevity in their careers.

2:31:46Right now, we're on the cutting edge of human physiology where everything is changing at a rate we've never seen before. Where we are three years ago is absolutely light years behind where we are right now. And that exponential growth, to be on the cutting edge of that and to share that knowledge, that's the place where I'm like, all right, this is my purpose now. It's not being a lawyer or whatever. It's not winning races. It's saying, if I can do this, you can do something unthinkable. And you just have to give yourself the shot and then try to have baking soda before you run. I think we did it, man.

2:32:21That's a great place to end it, I think. Wow, that was amazing, man. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. It was an absolute delight to talk to you. Excited to see what you do next and excited for the new addition to your family. Thank you so much. And for people that wanna learn more about you, you have a podcast, Some Work, All Play, which is also the name of your coaching service and website of the same name. And you share all your stuff on Twitter and Instagram and you engage with people quite a bit around these ideas and philosophies. Yeah, my goal is that like, I am at the service of people when it comes to this stuff because I remember when I had questions and I couldn't find anybody to answer them.

2:33:07And then I guessed and tested for three years and failed. So, hey, if you're out there and you want me to calculate your heart rate zones, you can find my email, send me hard workouts. You're gonna get inundated with emails. And the thing is like, that's my joy. I'll just, I'll carve out a day. I'll call out some childcare. But yeah, I mean, Rich, like, you know, I specifically try not to like blow wind in your sails so much that it derailed the conversation. But like, you know, Pete Holmes, Ryan Holiday, you know, people like that and people like you just like the way for the fact that like, you know, you can be sensitive, care a lot about other people.

2:33:46You don't have to be a killer to kill. You know, when it comes to like, if you're talking to comedian sense, like I'm never going to be a killer. But for one day, at least I was able to kill. And I owe so much of that to you. Yeah, thank you, Matt. Thank you. It's just an honor to spend time with you. Peace, Matt. You're the best.

2:34:17That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:36:09Thank you.