Win The Inside Game: High Performance Psychology, Busting Fitness Myths, & Getting Unstuck With Elite Coach Steve Magness

29:33When you're in protect and defend mode, you essentially shut down listening and learning. And what all sorts of research tells us is that the easiest way to get in, protect, and defend mode is attach yourself to some sort of group identity. And there's some fascinating work that essentially shows that, while we think that we choose our groups based on like our ethics and morals and values and all that stuff, it actually kind of works the opposite way is once we're in a group, our values, ethics, morals shift wherever that group goes to a large degree. And that's why it's really important to A, choose your groups wisely, and then B, have some sort of like decentering or like not clinging attachment to that group where it's like, again, there's certain people you're married to, right?

30:29Your wife, your family, they're part of it. but everything else we get to choose. And I think that is the key is that for whatever reason in modern society, because of some of the things that we've talked about living in this kind of threat survival mode is we tend to cling to those groups and attach because like they fill a void. And when we do that, we stop listening, learning. Yeah, there's group identity and then there's our own identity. And I think when you mistake those with each other and your relationship with your own identity is so kind of intrinsic or tied to in an unhealthy way, the identity of a group, that any kind of threat to the group is a threat on your own identity.

31:17And again, this goes to like nuance, right? Like an intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations. Like we wanna be intrinsically motivated, which means we need to have this connection and relationship with ourselves where, we understand what our own identity is and what's important to us. But when we hold onto our identity too tightly, those extrinsic kind of ideas or impulses are then kind of taken as a threat to that. There's ideas or opinions, but when those are too closely aligned with like, who you think you are and how you hold yourself out to the world, then it becomes problematic. It's one of the central problems of our current world.

32:06Because think about it, whether we look at, I'm not gonna go there, but politics, whether we look at diet, even fitness, health, there are certain topics that if you brought them up to certain people, to a large amount of people, what happens? We go straight into that protective end mode because there's that identity intertwinement Yeah. Where it's like, you can't even mention it. Well, now it's so, I mean, it used to be like sort of growing up, you know, as a Gen Xer, it's like, okay, you know, politics and religion, those are the third rail. Like, you know, everybody has their opinions, kind of maybe steer clear of that, but now it's everything.

32:41It's guys fit. Everything is now kind of a political football in which identity is intertwined with, you know, whatever your philosophy is in a way that makes everybody, like it's creating the anxiety, but it's creating the defensiveness and all the aggression and everything. And this is the experiment that we're running on social media as it continues to kind of become atomized and there's more and more subgroups, you know, like that's only gonna like proliferate as far as I can tell. Yeah, you're spot on. We've made everything politics. And the result is like politics used to be. Until every single person is their own little political.

33:21Right, but that's - Separated. This is the thing. Our desire to be part of a community then leaves us like completely alone on our own, like, you know, a deserted island. Bingo, because it's everyone is either with us or against us. We've created a zero sum game. And when we know, when we have a zero sum mindset of like either win or lose, you're on my team or you're not, like it pushes us towards like living in threat mode. It pushes us towards like reaching for those cheap extrinsic things to fulfill us. And we're just miserable. And as I kind of outline my thesis in the book is this, is that a large reason why we're there is because we're not fulfilling our basic psychological needs with good quality stuff.

34:08We're reaching for the candy. And we've known this for a long time, going back to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, right? in the 1980s, wrote a wonderful book, said, hey, all clubs, activities, hobbies are decreasing. This is going to impact us. And I think what we're seeing is the end result of that experiment on steroids with the internet, social media, because now the reason we have this politics of everything where we tie ourselves to these ideas is because we know that belonging is a fundamental need. and if there is nothing quality to fulfill it with, then what do we do? We reach for our group identity.

34:50We say, hey, this is my tribe on social media. This is my tribe on blah, blah, blah. And I'm gonna just cling and attach to it as hard as I can to fulfill that need.

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40:20There's an alignment problem because our environments are kind of pushing us towards this, you know, without us even co-signing it. Like it's just sort of happening in the background. All the tectonic plates of our external environment is kind of driving this result. So in terms of like opting out, like, you know, to me, it feels like a big piece within this is on us. Like, you know, we have to take individual responsibility to kind of rebut these forces in a way that maybe we never had to in the past. But at the core of being able to do that is this identity piece that you talk about in the book.

41:02but that requires like a degree of real discernment. Like you have to really know who you are so that you have a barometer or a compass that can point you towards whatever your true north is and be able to distinguish like what you actually care about and what you don't and how much, like what to really invest yourself in and where are the things that it's in your best interest to detach. I think the issue, and I think you're spot on, the issue is this, is it used to kind of, that development used to kind of take care of itself. There wasn't an alignment problem. The environment kind of pushed you in the direction of happiness and fulfillment and meaning and connection and all of these things.

41:46Exactly, right? We had, even if you look at kids, kids had time to explore, right? They weren't inundated with social media comparisons. They explored locally, right? So me and running, how did I fall in love with running? I found out I was pretty good, right? Not globally, just within my class and like, you know, middle school and beyond. And if I had to compare myself to everyone, when I was a middle schooler playing soccer and running the mile, I'd look and I'd be like, oh my gosh, I'm so much slower than all these guys over here and so much slower than many of the girls of the same age. Why would I pursue this?

42:27But because the comparison was local, I said, hey, I'm pretty good compared to everybody, you know, the 50 other kids who are in my class or grade or whatever. Yeah. I'll keep doing this. Now it's global. Can you imagine young Steve? Like he runs a, you know, like a 558 or whatever a mile and he decides to post it on social media and just gets shellacked with like, why that's a terrible time. Exactly. And then what do you do? You're like, I'm not doing this anymore. Bingo. That's it. Like we have cut off the role for like finding and exploring in a secure environment where we get to dabble long enough to see, do I enjoy this?

43:06Am I good at it? Does it bring me significance and meaning? Because if we post about it, share about it, we're going to get killed essentially right away, right? I'm like, no, no, I'm not that good. But the reality is none of us are that good until we try something for a long enough period of time. But we've kind of just kind of - We're not allowed to not be good anymore. And I even struggle this with myself, right? Because as adults, what happens? You stop trying to do things that you're not good at because you're used to being competent at things. So we stop trying new things. And I think when we have societally something that shifts and pushes us from stop exploring, then we're going to end up in bad places, whether as adults or kids, because we don't get that natural cycle of like exploring something until we figure out if we're good at it.

44:05So what's the solution, Steve? What have you discovered going down the rabbit hole of this problem? Like how do we emerge out of it? Just read my book and I'll give you all the answers. No, but here's the nuance of it. Is there, there's, there's no great answers because there's societally things that we need to address. But what I try and do is tackle what we can actually do on the individual side. And I think if we simplify it to degree, I think we have these, you know, fundamental psychological needs to belong. We talked about, we need some sort of direction or purpose. We need to have some sort of coherence, meaning our individual and social self.

44:45we need to kind of make sense, right? And we need to feel some sort of significance, like we're doing something meaningful. If we can have those things, research tells us, that we get to turn that threat alarm down a little bit. And that's all we're talking about here, because if we can turn that threat alarm down a little bit, we feel secure, we can explore when we need to, We don't have to kind of, you know, shut down and get narrower and narrower. So I think it's on us, both as individuals and in the environments we have control over, is how do we help people and help ourselves, like, fulfill those needs in a productive way?

45:30Like, how do we reach for the vegetables instead of, like, the candy that's just going to give us temporary fulfillment? but an hour later, we're gonna feel miserable and hungry again. Breaking that down to its kind of elemental pieces, a lot of this stuff is sort of stuff we intuitively know, like, yes, we should choose the vegetable and not the candy and we need to do hard things and we need to feel like we're part of a community and we should do something that feels like it gives our lives meaning, all of these things. but it's in that gap that lives and breathes in between thought and action or like idea and execution that we get hamstrung, right?

46:16So, we could take a couple examples. Imagine, maybe it's a middle-aged man who is on a trajectory where he's starting to feel like, is this really what I'm supposed to be doing? Or like, I remember when I used to do these things and they were fun and now I'm kind of out of shape and I'm in a job that doesn't feel like it's providing me meaning. And, you know, after a long day, it's just hard to not eat ice cream. And, you know, like the normal stuff, right? Like what is the first step or the kind of catalyst to like trigger somebody out of that rut and get them into kind of a new way of behaving?

46:57Yeah, so this is the crux of the problem and it's the crux of coaching, which is behavior change. It's easy to talk about, hard to do. But I think step one is actually that awareness and perspective is identifying that like, hey, these things, maybe I'm feeling something that I don't appreciate or that doesn't feel fulfilled in this manner. And that awareness is the thing that then can push you towards, okay, not necessarily action, but exploring and understanding. And what I mean by that is what research tells us, again, lots of psychology tells us that our basic needs that we outlined are what we call substitutable.

47:43Meaning I don't need them all from one place. And this is one of the fundamental mistakes we've made in society. We try and get it all from our work, right? Or all from our family life. and what we need to do is look at, okay, here's all the things I can do in life. Here's my work, my family life, my friends, my hobbies, et cetera, is I wanna diversify and dabble and see what's interesting and see what allows me to feel a little bit better or fulfilled in these ways. So if your work sucks, but you know I need this paycheck, I can't just quit my job, then you look for avenues elsewhere. You join your recreational softball team, right?

48:26You volunteer to coach your kid's, you know, soccer team. You look for other avenues that kind of fulfill and give you the significance and meaning in small bite-sized ways. I mean, I did it myself when I took up writing. I didn't see myself as a writer, but I was coaching and then going through that whole whistleblower experience we talked about before. and I said, this coaching side kind of sucks in running. I enjoy it, but it kind of sucks because I have this whole whistleblowing experience just raining down on my parade. I need another outlet. So I just started writing, first for blogs, magazines, eventually books.

49:09But it wasn't, I'm gonna become a writer. I'm gonna use this to fund my future life. This was, I need another sense-making outlet that gives me some sort of, you know, fulfills these things that running once did, but can't right now because of the situation I'm in. I think the challenge for a lot of people is confronting their own perception of agency in their lives. Like if you're in that state where things just don't feel like they're working, there is that sense that like, you also lack the inability to change it. And that's where the brain is very good at coming up with excuses why you can't or shouldn't and why that's scary and better to avoid and just stay in your lane.

49:57Like overcoming that is a challenge, but I think what you're saying is essentially like lower the bar of expectations. Like if you were to say like, I don't like coaching or coaching isn't really, you know, doing it for me, like I'm gonna write books. Like, well, I can't write a book. I've never written a book. Like that's for those, you know, people that write books are, you know, it's like, just like, you know, create a safe space in which it's okay to fail, you know? And just do the, like the tiniest part of it. It's really kind of like a James Clear atomic habits thing. Like what is like the easiest lift that you can, you know, that you feel like you can accomplish and to start to like stack those.

50:37And this is again, a consequence of the environmentally live in because what do we do? We don't think, oh, I'm just gonna write my journal or notebook or post some blog. We jump straight to the big thing because like the comparison tells us that, oh, if I'm going to be a writer, I need to write books. That's what everybody else does. But they forget that like, you know, young Steve, before he became a successful author, was writing all sorts of junk. I can send it to you with all sorts of grammatical mistakes that probably makes no sense, but I was allowed to do that because I didn't see it as, I didn't have this pressure of seeing it as like succeed or fail.

51:18And it comes back to one of the things that prevents people is we've internalized failure is if we fail at something, it's I am a failure instead of - The identity piece. Yeah, it's the identity piece. So lowering the bar, it's basically this, lowering the bar and doing anything that takes away that identity piece. It creates a little bit of space so that you can try and not be afraid of failing. So whether that's just, you know, in the writing example, writing for yourself, whether that's sharing with friends, whether that's taking the smallest step to just explore something else in a safe and secure manner, like those are the steps that we need to take.

52:04In terms of running, I tell people this all the time who come up to me and are novices and are like, oh, Steve, you know so much about running. Like, what would your advice be to get started? I'm like, don't run. Start walking. Because if I tell them to go run, that first run is going to be miserable because they're not in good enough shape. It's going to be hard no matter how slow they go. And if every day I walked out the door for myself as a person who loves running, if every day was a hard workout and running, I would hate it too. So we've got to have them like give people manageable bite-sized chunks to allow them to make progress because we know going back to intrinsic motivation, what's the one of the biggest things that fuels that fire is like progress on something towards mastery.

52:51So if we can see ourselves getting better, even on the smallest bit, it's gonna stoke that fire, stoke that fire, stoke that fire. Yeah, the trick of the mind is that we think being better or being really good at something is what nourishes us when in fact it is the progression towards that is the real like kind of like nutrition. It's the quest. It is. And one of my favorite studies I talk about in the book, they looked at Olympic swimmers. And these are like Olympic medalists, some of the biggest names. And they looked at and interviewed them. And what they found is that the vast majority of these athletes at some time had a performance mindset, which was like outcomes, achievements.

53:36I'm going to define myself by this. But at some point relatively early on in their career, they faced an adversity that made them reevaluate things. And they called it an adversity that made them switch to a quest mindset. which is exactly what you're talking about there, which is it's the progress, it's the exploration, it's the doing thing on the way to wherever we end up that makes us and is the important part, but we get distracted and think the important part is like achieving that end goal when it's not. Yeah, the best modern example of that with respect to Olympic swimmers, I think is Caleb Dressel, who anybody who saw him compete in Paris or knows a little bit about his story.

54:26This is a guy who was kind of poised to be the next Michael Phelps and was extremely successful and then struggled and had to contend with some mental health stuff that really derailed his career. And he had to find a way back. And in order to do that, he had to confront these mental health challenges and begin to work through them, which he did. and that like rejuvenated his love for the sport, but the relationship was different, right? It was no longer about performance and podiums necessarily and more about like this fulfilling quest that he was on. And I think when you saw him get very emotional on the deck, I think it was him like really kind of like recognizing that in himself.

55:18Like maybe he didn't achieve the goals that he had set for himself at the Olympics. But to me, I read that as like gratitude for even being able to be there and like really like seeing it for what it was and like honoring himself for having like taken that journey. I love that moment. And I think it's so great. And I think people discount those experiences and think that like, oh, like that's not what got him there, right? But that is the be all, I think that is the crux of performance because it allows us to free ourselves up to not only perform at a high level, but also have the perspective to understand and embrace it.

56:05Because there's so many athletes that I've worked with, you know, who they get the performance and it's wholly unfulfilling. like. They thought it was gonna be X, Y, and Z, but then they achieve it and they're almost like empty. Because there was this implied promise that this was going to fill whatever hole that they have, right, like - Bingo. And then they realize like, well, you take yourself wherever you go, right? And when you arrive, you're still the same person. Even like, even Alex Honnold, who I wouldn't characterize as somebody who is like, has a hole that he needed to fill. And that's why he goes on these climbing pursuits.

56:46He sat across from me and was like, yeah, I thought like, you know, when I did all these things that I would be the man. And like, I didn't even know what the man was, but then I did it. And I was like, well, I'm still like me. I don't know who that man is or whatever. You know, it's like. But it's another great example. But it's identity, you know, it goes back to like this attachment to your identity, being contingent upon these performance goals, as opposed to being, you know, holding it a little bit at arm's distance and saying like, I care about these goals, but if I don't achieve them, It's not a threat to like, you know, the core of like who I am as a human being.

57:23And I think this is at the very center of the existential crisis that I think a lot of people have, particularly men upon whom there's a lot of pressure, like their value is inextricably linked to, you know, their career trajectory and their bank account and all of these metrics, right? And so to your point around like, you know, the American dream and, you know, the sort of incentives of the world in which we live, if you can't measure up to that, then of course you're gonna feel like, you know, you're less than, and that is really the definition of your identity. That's the crux of it. And I think coming to the nuance is, it's not saying, hey, achievements don't matter or performance don't matter.

58:11It's your relationship. It's your relationship with them, right? It's being able to say, okay, I'm gonna strive for this, but I'm still gonna have a little bit of space between this achievement or this goal and my sense of self. And I think that's where the magic occurs. And that's where if you look at elite athletes or elite performers in anything who find sustainable success over the long haul and aren't miserable, that's that sweet spot that they try and live in. But I think, again, environmentally, societally, we forget this other part and we say, hey, just go achieve this and that will take care of everything.

58:53And it's just not how we were, you know, fundamentally, you know, developed or evolved. And I think to your point, it's a really high burden in our current world because, again, I'm going to take us all the way back to the African savannah. If you looked at it, it's very easy to achieve significance, belonging, you know, a sense of identity when it's you and a couple dozen tribe members. You know, it's easy to find something where you can contribute. In our world today, it's really freaking hard. And to your point, if you look on the data on especially young men, they're suffering to a much higher degree than even a couple decades ago when we were younger.

59:38And one of the reasons, I think, is because we've set up this environment where it's really freaking hard to provide, be significant, et cetera, et cetera. Because an end result is like people feel kind of miserable and not motivated. Yeah, what is the avenue where they can contribute and feel good about that contribution? And if that's not available and they're in an environment in which opportunities are scarce, that becomes a challenge. And it's unfair that that should all fall on the young individual to like figure out. We should live in environments that are like kind of moving us towards that.

1:00:22Yeah. Inevitably, you know. It is, but what we've done is again, And societally, I mean, a lot of the book is about narrowing and broadening, but societally we've narrowed those paths. So if you're a young kid or young male, especially you coming out, you see only a handful of paths, right? And what we need to do is create a world where it's like, okay, there's many different paths. I mean, even you can see it in like going to college versus trade schools and things like that. Like we've kind of minimized the non-college route and pushed everyone over here, but that minimizes potential paths for people.

1:01:00And I know we're talking about young men, but it applies to everything. I mean, the role model effect is real. So my wife's a teacher and there's all sorts of wonderful data that shows us essentially like one of the biggest impactors for young kids in school is being able to see a future in something. And there's data, for instance, on, we'll take teachers. If a black kid has a black teacher, it increases his chance of graduating, going to college and being successful by, I forget the exact number, but it's something like 15 to 20%. Okay. Why? Role model effect. You see a future and that future is a little bit more attainable because like you have someone to relate to, right?

1:01:47The same thing applies to whether we're talking out different jobs, avenues, anything, is we've gotta be able to see future paths. And instead what we've done is kind of narrowed them so that it's kind of impossible. At the same time, and this goes to the, it's not a black or white thing, and it's kind of yes and and both. We're also, I think it needs to be said, like in an environment where we can find mentors and we can find inspiration and we can find role models in a way we never could before. Like any kid who goes on YouTube can find, somebody who looks like them, who's doing something that they're interested in that 50 years ago would be impossible if you lived in a small town in Alabama or whatever, right?

1:02:37Like, so the exposure to that type of inspiration is like at full blast right now. And you can go on Spotify or Apple podcasts and find a podcast where somebody who does that thing that you're curious about is gonna tell you exactly how he figured out how to do it and create a career out of it. So that too is also at play and yet amidst the narrowing that you spoke to doesn't seem to necessarily be the full antidote that we need. Well, what it is, is we've solved part of the problem with that is we have what I'd call like distanced awareness, right? I can go on YouTube. I can listen to many of the guests you've interviewed and say, hey, this is cool.

1:03:23I'm gonna try and explore this. But then we don't have the, what I'd call like depth or local awareness because we've kind of given away those paths or understanding. And I think we need to have some way to connect both both in avenues to connect both, to be able to give people potential paths. I think the other aspect of it is, again, if you come back to the idea of like, we evolved to grow up in local communities. In fact, archeologists and some scientists called it like the transition from known to anonymous societies. So there's all sorts of data that showed that, again, way back in the day, tribes generally expanded to about 150 people.

1:04:07And then they had infinding and split up. And for millennia, they couldn't get past the 150 people number until the solution was social institutions evolved. So we started to have religion, marriage, things that researchers called men's club, which were essentially things for men to do besides fight. And these social institutions allowed us to break through this 150-person barrier to go move to anonymous society where we didn't have to know or be connected to everyone. And the argument I would make nowadays is we're at another transition. We went from a society that wasn't all interconnected but was global to now we've hit this like you're connected to everyone.

1:05:01There's potential paths almost everywhere, but it's overwhelming. And we need some sort of, I don't know what the answers are, but some sort of social institutions that say, okay, here's how we organize, here's how we do things, here's how we have paths that provide like the ability to expand past that barrier. At the same time, that's beyond the individual's sort of agency or capacity to create. and turning back to like what we can do, what we do have control over and perhaps our example of the middle-aged person who's having this crisis of meaning. To me, and let me know what you think of this, like I think the biggest piece obviously is your relationship to your own identity and being willing to go on that kind of inward journey to understand who you are.

1:05:53But within that, in terms of like the way out or like the spark to kind of snap you out of whatever situation you're in and move you towards a new one, begins and ends with your relationship with curiosity, which is kind of the generative force of every exploration. So rather than say, well, I don't feel like my life's so meaningful, so I guess I should run a marathon. Like, are you really curious about that? Or is that just a reaction to, you know, an external stimuli because you've seen other people doing that and you don't know what else to do. Instead, like, I think that the better path is to really understand your own curiosity.

1:06:38The problem with that is that, you know, it goes back to our environmental, you know, kind of incentives like this American, like capitalistic society is not conducive to everybody kind of create, you know, sort of investing in their own curiosity. Like, in fact, our culture is an antagonist to curiosity because curiosity is a threat to security and kind of institutional, you know, kind of rules and regulations, right? Like if you have a job, you're not like directed to like, be curious, try things. No, it's like stay within your lane, right? To go back to what we said at the beginning. So we cut off our relationship with our own curiosity to the extent of like not even noticing it or paying attention to it.

1:07:26We've relegated it to some kind of dark place. So when you say like, be curious or invest in your, it's like, I don't know what I'm curious about. Like my whole life, I've kind of like never even thought about my own curiosity, right? Like how do I even get back to that place where I can be curious and like notice things. And then when I do notice them say, oh, like I do feel like maybe I'd be interested in that and then follow that up with taking some kind of action to then go towards it. You know what one of the biggest propellers of curiosity is? Boredom. And we've eliminated boredom. Because what do you do?

1:08:03If I'm standing in line at the airport, I pull out my phone, right? And then I scroll mindlessly. And the algorithm will say, I know what you're curious about, But are you, or are you just impulsed in some kind of addictive way, you know, that's being directed by your lizard brain? Right, that's it. So, and again, what psychology research tells us is that, like, if you're bored for a little bit, your brain then pushes you to find some sort of solution, which is where curiosity comes from. Again, look at young kids, right? What do they do when they're bored? They often create games, right? They pick up a stick in the yard and start playing war or whatever it is because they're filling that space.

1:08:51And what we need to do is get back to moments in our lives where we have more of that. This is why I love running and love exercise or love walking, whatever it is, because I will leave my phone at home and I will go out. And just raw dog it. And I'll just go, right? What a courageous man you are. It's almost like you're cutting against the grain to even go running without your earbuds in and the latest podcast or music album that dropped. But that, and I'll tell you this, 100%, if I didn't do that, I would not be writing books because most of either my ideas or the solving of how in the hell am I gonna make this connect and work in this book comes either on a walk or a run without a podcast or things.

1:09:39And I'm not, look, I love podcasts, but I listen to them intentionally. When I go on a run, I use that as my curiosity time. Let's let my mind wander. And whether yours is running, walking, some sort of meditative experience, doing things without being plugged in all the time, I think we have to figure out ways in our environment to bring that back. And the other thing I would say in terms of curiosity is we need more what I'll just call play. Because again, the kid example, what sparks curiosity? You're playing. And in fact, some recent researchers came out and had this big statement that said, hey, one of the reasons why the youth health mental crisis is coming around is because we've over organized everything to death so that kids aren't playing.

1:10:32because if you look at the role play fulfills with kids is it teaches them how to interact. It teaches them how to develop their own rules and constraints, et cetera, teaches them how to solve problems and like explore. And I think as adults, you're probably saying, well, I'm not going to go out in the yard and swing or what have you, but what's play for adults? Think about it. I mean, as a writer, play for me is reading and exploring ideas with no in-game insight, saying, you know what? And I'll do this. I'll go on, I call them down the rabbit hole days, where I get sparked by maybe a research paper or an interview or even a podcast I listen to.

1:11:16And I say, you know what? I don't know if this is going to go anywhere, but I'm just going to spend a couple hours and just go down the rabbit hole, one article to the next or one interview to the next and learn more about it. And most of the times nothing comes out of it, but every once in a while it sparks that curiosity and then it turns into a major chapter or part of a book or something else. And it has that, that end result that is valuable, but I didn't start down that path saying, Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to use this for, to create my next book.

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1:13:38I do agree that running is like the ultimate kind of instigator for, you know, kind of creative thoughts and curiosity. I wonder, maybe you know this, Like, is there science around how being in a kind of elevated state of exertion, you know, in that kind of like comfortable zone two state where your blood is pumping and lends itself to your brain kind of being in that, you know, to inhabit that space? Yep. There's lots of science. And here's what it goes is there's a sweet spot in terms of what we just call physiological arousal. So think stress response, adrenaline, et cetera. If we get elevated enough, it enhances our cognition and our thinking.

1:14:22If we go too elevated, we stop being able to think because that attention has to be direct towards the activity we're doing. So if I'm running VO2 max intervals or something, I can't be creative because all my resources are diverted towards It's like surviving the interval. But if I'm running an easy run, what happens is we get elevated enough. We get blood flow, we get the adrenaline, we get the arousal going, but it's mindless enough where my brain is free to wander. So you have this nice interaction between, we'll just call it the thinking part of our brain, the executive function and the default mode network or the like more creative side.

1:15:06in easy runs, they're like at like this peak where they both can interact together without getting in the way. If we go too hard, we essentially shut down part of that thinking and creativity. The problem arises for me though, because that's the place where I have all these ideas. I've learned that I often like forget them. You know, it's sort of like a dream. Like you're like, that's an amazing idea. And then you're done. And so I do bring my phone with me, but then I find myself stopping all the time because it'd make a voice memo or to like, you know, put it in my notes app or whatever. So I don't forget it.

1:15:44And if you're really in that space, you gotta stop a lot in order to do that or to pull it out and like, which is obviously every time you do that, you're interrupting that flow. I need someone listening to make a device that doesn't interrupt where I can record ideas. So Rich and I can just somehow record ideas without disrupting it because I, same deal, there have been so many times I figured out something or thought I have, and then been like, oh crap, I've gotta make it like the three miles home without forgetting the thing. I know. So then if you are in that place where, I don't know what I'm curious about, like it doesn't have to be running, but if you can find some kind of activity where you can inhabit that like elevated state, like maybe that's a nice trigger.

1:16:34Yeah, exactly. It's like, think of it as like, how do I put myself in these states just slightly more often, again, lowering the bar, but slightly more often to get curious and then give myself the ability to dabble long enough to see if that curiosity turns into interest or passion. And you see this, like good companies do this, right? It's the old classic like 3M example, right? where they had 15 % time, which basically meant, you know, 15 % of the week, they got to just go do or explore whatever they wanted to during company time. And some great ideas came out of that. Like the sticky notes came out of that.

1:17:14Other companies have copied stuff like that, but you need to have like this, this time and period where you just get to explore things and dabble long enough to see if they're interesting. And, you know, some things won't and that's fine. But if we never go on that journey, then we never spark that curiosity. We never get that exploration kind of gene going. And instead we stick to narrow, comfortable, you know, same old, same old. And then our identity tends to, you know, constrict around, you know, whatever it is, as we get that kind of numbness of experience. It's harder in the work context, unless you have like a management structure that is conducive to those sorts of activities.

1:18:03I mean, Ed Catmull comes to mind, like what he's done around like the importance of cultivating creativity in the workplace and kind of taking failure off the table, because to do something different in that construct is a threat to job security, right? So it creates this constriction, But outside of that, to take failure off the table, you just have to shift your relationship to it to not be a goal-oriented thing, but rather like to your point earlier, like just an exercise in curiosity or an exploration, right? So it's, a lot of it is around like terminology because we have this weird, you know, kind of obsession with success and failure in a binary context, but to just use kind of different words to, you know, kind of convince yourself that this is not like that.

1:18:54All you're trying to do is convince your brain that it's okay to try and fail. I mean, this is like - You're not gonna die or get kicked out of your tribe. That's it. Like, because when we activate these things, like our brain goes, okay, like I'm gonna be alone and get kicked out of my tribe. Like, I can't try this. And that's like the circuitry that is there. In so much of life, especially in a world as we've talked about where like failure is public. If we look at the number one thing that causes things like choking in sport or the yips or whatever have you, it is fear of public failure. Choking doesn't occur in private.

1:19:34Okay? Why? Because as humans, if we fail publicly and we're trying at something that is central to our sense of self, that pushes us, our brain to just freak out. And so much of whether we're talking in sport, performance or creativity is figuring out these almost like mental games to convince our brain or convince the people you're working with brain to be like, okay, that's not gonna happen. Like if you mess up on this cartoon creation or this writing assignment, like your life isn't over. The lion isn't going to eat you. It's not an existential threat. And again, that goes back to your relationship with identity.

1:20:17I mean, that's what you just said is like at the core of Michael Gervais book, Fear of Other People's Opinions. Yeah, and like how that short circuits mastery. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things that is simple to talk about, but really freaking hard to do. Why is it so hard? Because we're human. Because we have these, we have an inbuilt psychological immune system that wants to convince ourselves that like we are the hero of the story, that we are a good person. and that like, we're going to be okay. And it will do anything possible to defend anything that comes against us. So when failure or threat threatens us, our psychological immune system goes into a hyperactive state and says, no, no, we're gonna like shut that down.

1:21:03We're gonna disconnect from that. We're gonna make sure that that doesn't attack us. What is your sense of how learnable, teachable these things are? On some level, when you look at people or perhaps like athletes that you've coached and you see people who kind of understand these principles naturally and are able to kind of be adaptable in their environments, that's often a function of the environments in which they were raised. When their brains were still kind of forming and those neural pathways were kind of being created in an environment where they did feel safe and like the parenting and all of that was kind of like dialed in to, you know, create this individual who could be healthy in the world.

1:21:49Short of that, somebody else who, you know, maybe has an attachment disorder or didn't have certain emotional needs met. And they're in the world with completely different neural pathways that you then have to undo and kind of rewire. It's a situation in which that person is going to struggle a little bit more and is gonna be more resistant in that kind of transition. So the good news is this, just about everything is trainable to a degree. Now, are you going to go from like, am I going to go from, you know, maybe not that good to Zen master? Probably not, right? If my environment like doesn't, isn't conducive to that or my genetics or what have you.

1:22:31But everything is trainable to a degree. And we know this from some wonderful research in neuroscience that has looked at things. especially along like mental health disorders, like obsessive compulsive disorder, because what are you doing there except just retraining your pathways in your brain to stop seeing a threat everywhere. And although it is really hard, especially for like severe cases, there is improvement even among severe cases, right? Where we see if we follow this path, if we like retrain our brain and those pathways a little bit, we can stop getting our fear centers to think that like, hey, there's a threat around every corner and we're going to be okay.

1:23:15Now, are we going to take that person and make them like OCD free? No, probably not. But we're going to get them to a state where they can be okay and perform and like live life. And I think that is true whether we look at that from a mental health standpoint or whether we look at this from a performance standpoint, because we can see it In other areas where we take athletes, for instance, who suffer the extreme versions of the yips, there are successful cases of people getting rid of it and getting back to high performance. Why? Because all of these pathways are to a degree trainable if we, again, do the right things to convince our brain that this threat might be there, but it doesn't have to be at the level that it is right now.

1:24:04we can turn it down from a nine to a four. And if we're at a four, we can function, right? And that's the key. In other words, you may not be able to ever surf a hundred foot wave like Garrett McNamara. Yeah. But if surfing is something you're curious about, like go and, you know, first like go out and paddle on a flat lake, you know, and then maybe, you know, get a little, you know, half foot wave and try to stand up. Like, you know, these things happen over time by creating, by putting yourself in a situation that's just risky enough to manage and then developing the resilience that comes with every kind of like notch up from there.

1:24:53It's a long path. This is why like we struggle with it because it takes time to like get that effect to have or that adaptation. It's a slow path, but if you stick at it on, whether we're talking about physical pursuits or mental pursuits, the research is clear and the science is clear is that like a long time spent like slowly adapting our mind or body works. Can we shift gears and bust a few fitness myths? I can't have you here and not like have you kind of roll up your sleeves and get into the muck a little bit. You've been coaching athletes for a long time. You are well-versed in the science of speed and endurance and it must come with some frustration to pay witness to the discourse that you see online around concepts like zone two training, high intensity training, VO2 max, terms that are getting thrown around quite a bit, even more so than a couple of years ago, due in no small part to everybody's fascination around like emerging longevity science, right?

1:26:09And so now we have these like sort of longevity influencers out there who are using these terms. Some are using them appropriately, some not so much, but I think it's creating a lot of confusion for people who are interested in like, should I be doing like, you know, a lot of zone two? And when do I do my strength workout? And when do I need that kind of higher intensity? And like, what am I supposed to think about like VO2 max and its relationship, not only to my fitness to like, but also like in terms of like how long I'm going to live? Do you have like a manifesto on this? Or like, I don't even know where to start with all of this because there's so much here.

1:26:46We could go for hours, Rich. But let me just, why don't I start with this one? I just had Rhonda Patrick in here the other day who I think is super smart. And I think she's, you know, highly, you know, somebody who operates with a lot of integrity and is deep into the science. And she has done a lot of work around the importance of high intensity training, which you would call like vigorous exercise, right? And the relationship of that with this marker VO2 max and the importance of that marker in terms of like longevity. And so for the time crunched individual, she's basically saying like the 80-20 rule, which is like do most of your, 80 % should be like your zone two or whatever, and 20 % the more high intensity stuff, that if you don't have very much time that that should be something you should focus on more because it kind of moves the needle much more so than if you only have used that short amount of time for zone two.

1:27:53So I guess there's that piece. And then there's also the kind of emphasis around all the energy around like VO2 max as this important marker. All right, so let's break this down. And I agree, I think Rhonda Patrick is great at science communication. She is like the OG of it. So I have a lot of respect for her. VO2 max is a marker. Okay, let's start with this. If you look at all the research that does tie VO2 max to longevity, almost all of it does not measure VO2 max. What they do is they do a fitness test, sometimes an actual VO2 max test, but they use the peak speed and treadmill incline as the marker that gets tied to longevity.

1:28:38Or in other cases, what they do is they do a sub max test that then they estimate VO2 max with to get tied to longevity. So what does that mean practically? Practically, it means that it's not necessarily VO2 max that is tied to longevity. It is endurance performance. Because if you sit me up on a treadmill and say, hey, go run to exhaustion in 10 minutes, which is essentially a VO2 max test, how fast you get at the end of the treadmill, Yes, that spits out a VO2 max number if I'm on the equipment. But what matters more is how fast you got on the treadmill at the end of the session. If you reach 10 miles an hour, 11 miles an hour, or 12 miles an hour, what have you.

1:29:23That is what's tied to longevity. So to me, I love some VO2 max conversation. I like to simplify things. You don't need to go to a lab to understand your VO2 max to see if you're going to live longer based on the research or the longevity piece. All you need to do is go down to the track and go run a mile or do the equivalent in cycling, swimming, anything moderately aerobic. And the faster you are, the better your, you know, predicted longevity will be. And I think that that message is a little bit more practical than telling someone like, hey, go figure out your VO2 max number because what do most people do they go look at their watch which gives you estimated vo2 max which you know the research on that is like some watches do it pretty well some are like all over the freaking place so like and you don't have to be a mile it can be anything moderately aerobic anywhere anything from a couple minutes to you know 10 15 20 minutes do so go sign up for your local 5k do something pretty hard see if you see what it is and then You can improve on that and you're improving on your marker for longevity.

1:30:37In other words, stop obsessing about this marker as an end game, but look at it rather as a byproduct of doing all these other things that will naturally, it's, and it is interesting, like when you, of course, elite athletes aren't really concerning themselves with longevity and their VO2 max, you know, numbers are incredibly high, but not because they're focused on elevating them, only because they're focused on the training that the VO2 max of which is a byproduct of that. So there was a lot of like energy around Tade Pogacar going on Peter Attia's podcast. And Peter is someone who's very interested in VO2 max and curious about it.

1:31:20And somebody who is a longevity expert. And it seemed to me that he was somewhat surprised that Tade was sort of dismissive of this or like not all that interested in like measuring it very often. And that's just because like, and it's the same with Christian Blumenfeld, right? Like these guys have incredibly high VO2 maxes, but that's not like what they're aiming towards. You know, I've run many VO2 maxes. I've done them with other athletes as a physiologist. But the reason for that at the elite level, especially this is because of all the components of endurance performance, it's the least trainable.

1:32:01meaning it will boost up, but at some point, your lactate threshold, your running economy, your anaerobic speed reserve, all of these, your fuel intake, all of these things are way more trainable than VO2 max. So in the coaching world, we generally say VO2 max is going to take care of itself if we don't train like an idiot, because it's going to reach a natural number and then kind of fluctuate a little bit, but it stays. But it stays. It stays. It's not something that's wildly vacillating. Right. So if, yeah, exactly. My lactate threshold, my speed at lactate threshold will vacillate more, right?

1:32:39Based on if I'm doing more of that work or if I'm not. And that's why in the endurance community, like we measure the thing to get an idea, but we don't like tie everything to it. And I think in the longevity community, they've missed that lesson a little bit and that they tie too much to it because it's a nice round number that tells us something and is like fancy. And we tie something to it without realizing like, hey, like holistic endurance performance, you know, holistic performance is probably the better thing to worry about, which includes all these other things. So like, let's just worry about getting people a little bit fitter.

1:33:20Right, but then you're opening up the Pandora's box of like, well, how do we get there, right? And is it a function of endurance or this tempo threshold work? I think people really kind of like the idea of the hard threshold tempo, high intensity training sort of thing and aren't exactly all that enthusiastic about like, you know, all the zone two stuff. Although there is a lot of energy, like people are fascinated by, in a way that I would have never predicted. I can't believe how many people are like, so into this notion, which is cool. My sense is that things are as they always have been, which is like, yes, you need threshold and you need speed and you need to kind of get that lactate going and all of that, whether you're an endurance athlete or a sprinter or an average human being, but all of these things are built upon a foundation without which you're never gonna reach your potential.

1:34:20And that foundation fundamentally is, is building your aerobic engine and the resilience that comes with it on top of which you then build all of these other things. And you can't short circuit that. We have 120 years of history of training to tell us exactly what you just said. And this is where I'm a science nerd, but I love going towards the history of training because it's essentially this natural evolution of training where coaches from the late 1800s to now have progressively figured out, okay, this works a little bit better. This works a little bit better. And what we've known for at least the past 60, 70 years, exactly what you outlined is that if we care about performance, yeah, the sexy stuff of high intensity stuff matters.

1:35:16But if we do that without a foundation, our improvement is capped. Yeah, you will plateau. You will plateau. And furthermore, I would argue your risk of overtraining, especially if you're a novice, is higher because you don't have as much gap to make a mistake because if you have aerobic foundation, you can handle a little bit more and you can bounce back quicker from the intense stuff. If I don't have that, and I'm running intervals every day or every couple days, overtraining is going to happen at some point. And we, again, we know this as a college coach, I would look at this all the time because you'd get high school kids and some high school kids are really well trained.

1:36:01And some had like the assistant football coach as their cross country coach who just like stood at the track and timed them every day. And they did intervals. And you'd see, you'd be like, hmm, how come this kid ran really fast in the early season? Then performances got way worse. It's like, oh, you had a football coach telling him, you know, repeats on the track every day and his aerobic base was gone. So we know this. Now, time crunch for novice or recreational people is a real thing. You can't replace it all with high intensity stuff and expect to over the long haul, like get the benefits you need.

1:36:41you might not have the balance of like the 80-20 rule because you're not running that much or you know doing much endurance but you have to have some sort of aerobic foundation or aerobic base in order to maximize or even get most of the benefits of the intense stuff and if you don't like it's a recipe for disaster i always comes back to you this is elite performance but i think it applies generally to everyone uh frank shorter gold medalist right legend in the marathon way back in the day said when asked about his training, he essentially said two hard workouts, a long run, and as much mileage as I can handle repeat for months and years on end.

1:37:24And it's still the case. It's still the case. Like we can argue over the nuance of, well, should this be at like lactate threshold or 10k pace or 5k pace or repeat 400s or miles? And I get that. I have those arguments all the time, but those are playing in the details. and those details mainly matter when you're at the upper echelon of like trying to maximize your performance. But for most people, it is essentially, you know, can you get one or two hard workouts a weekend where you go in something that makes you breathe kind of hard and then lots of easy stuff and do that consistently for months on end.

1:38:03On some level, the arguments around the margins are from a psychological perspective, like a sort of masturbatory, excuse making machine that gets in the way of just going out and doing the thing, like let's, it's, you feel like you're doing it if you're arguing about these things rather than actually like kind of executing on the thing that's gonna move you forward. But I think to take that a little bit out of the abstract and into kind of a practical example that maybe people can understand who are less familiar with these ideas and tell me if you agree with this. If you are somebody who's doing a lot of interval work, notice how quickly you're able to recover in those time periods in between the interval.

1:38:52Like how much time do you need in order to go hit it hard again? Or if you're out riding your bike and you're kind of riding along and then you attack a hill, how long does it take for your heart rate to come back down to where it was when you were at the bottom of the hill, right? And that is a pretty good marker of where you are in terms of your aerobic fitness. And if it takes you a while or you're doing an interval set and what felt easy on that first interval by the sixth or the eighth interval, you're like struggling to even complete it or you're really falling off a cliff in terms of like trying to keep these things even, that's because you don't have an aerobic fitness foundation.

1:39:37I couldn't have said it better myself. I totally agree. It's a quick, easy marker that tells you. And I'll tell you this, as someone who runs 35 to 40 miles a week when I used to run 100, even my recovery between intervals when I do them now is not anywhere close to what it used to be because I know I don't have, I have a good aerobic base, but not the lead aerobic foundation that I used to. And even I can tell, you know what? On these 400 meter repeats, I used to be able to take 45 seconds. I'm digging 90 seconds. Why? Because that's, my foundation isn't there. And that applies to the lay person as well, is understand like when you do something hard, are you instantly like bending over, catching your breath, like having a hard time or not.

1:40:30And if you are, that tells you that like, hey, maybe you need to do a little aerobic stuff because at the end of the day, I like to simplify training as this, is if we see a seesaw on one side, we have the endurance side, another we have speed or intensity and we want to build that up progressively so that it is balanced for the event we're taking on. So a balance for a mile will be different from a marathon, but it still needs to be balanced. And what we try and do is we realize, hey, we need to balance this. We need to build this aerobic side up a lot because the speed side is heavy. So when we start adding blocks of the speed, it's easy to get it unbalanced.

1:41:12But if we built that aerobic side a lot, we can add more speed and intensity and maintain that balance and be in a good spot. You got in some heat on social media for responding to a tweet where somebody was comparing, I think it was around the time of the Paris Olympics, comparing like the physiques of sprinters to that of marathoners saying like, it's pretty obvious like who's healthier based upon how they physically present. And you took a bite on that one. And that turned into like a new cycle. Do you wanna explain that? I just think that we've fallen for what I'd call is performative health, meaning how health looks instead of what it really is.

1:42:04And I think if we look at, you know, often we see these memes where it's like, you know, sprinter versus endurance athlete. And people are like, oh, why would you wanna look like the marathon? The emaciated elite marathon runner and the completely jacked 100 meter runner. Bingo. But if you look at the data, and I'm a scientist, I go by the data. There's been tons of studies that I've looked at former Olympians, elite athletes in a variety of sports. And what most of the data says essentially is this, is that endurance or mixed event athletes have better longevity. Sprint, speed, power, strength, pure strength athletes tend to have lower longevity.

1:42:46and it makes sense physiologically because like yes we need to do strength don't get me wrong if you're caring about longevity you need to do strength and i'd argue you need to do some sort of speed power and sprint every once in a while as well but our bodies evolve for efficiency and if we're like jacked we're not very efficient we don't have many mitochondria and the mitochondria density isn't there to handle the energetic load of the force output that we have there. So again, I love sprinting. I love all that stuff. But if we're looking at purely from a health standpoint and longevity, like the endurance athlete, like there's a reason we used to be persistent hunters, right?

1:43:36It's for the efficiency of the thing. You said also back to the point of the aerobic base that there's sort of a narrative like, oh, the long run is dead. Like that contrarian sort of like everything you thought you knew about running is wrong, long run is dead. It's just junk miles, et cetera. And you're like the average collegiate 800 meter runner runs way more than the kind of amateur average person person who's training for a marathon. It's true. Like, so I looked at some data that they looked at, you know, hundreds of thousands of Strava data points or runners, Strava runners for training for a marathon.

1:44:20And they broke it down. A study broke it down from, you know, basically sub 230 to sub three hours, et cetera, et cetera. And if you look at the three hour to 330 hour marathoner, who's pretty dang good, like that's not bad. Like that takes some training. On average, they run about 40-ish miles a week. 40-ish, no, I'm not trying to downplay that. That's good. But you're training for a 26.2-mile race, right? And if you look at a college 800 runner, again, there's variation, but typically they'll run between 45 and up to 70 miles a week. And they're training for an event that takes a minute and 45 or 50 seconds, okay?

1:45:02Versus one that takes three hours. and my point there is to say this is is that i understand why your three hour and change marathoner doesn't train that much because probably life but if we look at it as a coach and we say okay how does that person want to improve i'm going to tell you it's not their interval training or their you know repeats that they're doing it's figuring out how to accumulate more aerobic volume. Some of that could be running. Some of that could be cross training because that's where it is because an elite marathoner or someone trying to maximize their performance is going to do, you know, two to three times that.

1:45:44And I'll tell you again, I'm, I'm a 40 year old guy who runs with my daughter and stroller and runs 40 miles a week. And if you asked me to do a marathon tomorrow, I could do it, but my performance is going to be nowhere close to what I'm capable of. And sometimes we complicate things and it comes back to something that I had to learn when I was a freshman in high school, when I was running five days a week during practice. And my coach came up to me and said, Steve, you want to get better? I said, yeah. I said, step one, run on the weekends when we're not practicing. I said, okay, guess what?

1:46:25I got better. And I think often we overcomplicate things. So if you're a four-hour marathoner, you're essentially running like nine minute plus miles, right? Like that's not very fast. So does that person need to go to the track and throw down, you know, max interval sets? Because if all they need to do is go from like a nine minute per mile to like an 8.30 per mile, there's no fast running involved at all in that. The way to achieve that is just by building your aerobic base. Yes, it's the exact thing that I did when I started coaching high school and you'd get the freshman in who had never run before and has run in like nine, 10 minute miles because they've never done anything.

1:47:18And you say, okay, what are we gonna do? no intervals, no workouts with the varsity or JV kids. We're going to just do some running and increase our mileage. And some of that would be with breaks and walk jogs, et cetera, but we're just increasing our mileage. And I think that holds true when we look at, if you're looking at going from nine minute pace, most of the program, if I was writing a program for them, would be increasing volume in safe ways, gradual ways, and then throwing in like, hey, let's do some feel good strides every once in a while. And that's it for a long time. Yeah, to go from a nine minute to an eight minute.

1:48:00You're taking 26 minutes off your marathon time without ever running fast. Speed isn't the limiting factor if you're talking about nine minute miles for most people, right? It only becomes a factor when you start to get up, you know, kind of below seven minute per mile pace. Yeah, it's the way we look at everything is simple is you look at the gap between the race distance you're running and you're kind of like speed component. So it's simple, simple idea. If I'm running, if I'm coaching elite marathoner and she's trying to run 220, but she's only run 69 minutes for a half marathon, which is just faster than 70, you know, she need to run.

1:48:42I got to work on getting a little faster in the half marathon. I could do the same going from half marathon to 10K, 10K to 5K. We look at the gap between the distances, between like the speed and endurance, right? And at the highest level, you're playing with that gap. Sometimes you're being like, okay, we got to get our 5K time down so we have a bigger gap. So then we can build our endurance on top of that. When we look at novices, often what we're doing is like the endurance just isn't there. so that like the gap is huge in terms of if I took them down to the track and said, hey, go run 100 meters or 400 or what have you, there's enough speed there.

1:49:23It's just they're not fit enough to like have the endurance to do the thing. So we've got to spend a lot of time and it comes down to, I think one of the reasons it's not popular is this, is yeah, there's the time component, but I'd argue this is that if you do an interval session well, and include the warmup and cool down, the time component kind of cancels itself out because you can't just go down to the track and say, hi, I'm gonna go run some hard intervals. You gotta warm up, right? And do some strides and maybe some drills or flexibility stuff. It takes time. And then you're tired afterwards.

1:50:00So you wait around before you cool down. So the time component, I never really buy that unless you're doing your intervals dangerously. Meaning that same amount of time if you had just done a zone two run. I mean, the other piece to that also is that if you're executing on those intervals properly, you actually need a lot of time to recover from them, which impairs your ability to train consistently and regularly. So if you just do that zone two run instead of those intervals, you can wake up the next day and do another zone two run. Whereas, you know, those intervals will prevent you from doing anything hard, you know, for a certain amount of time.

1:50:38Exactly. So I think for most people, it's like, how do I figure out, again, like Frank Shorter said years ago, how do I figure out how to get consistent, good enough of that easy stuff for a long period of time? And then we worry about it. And I think the key is for most people is like take bite-sized chunks. Like if all you can do is fit in 30 minutes, great, do 30 minutes. But then over time, you want to go 40 minutes and 50 minutes and 60 minutes. And the great thing about running, I love cycling and swimming, but I'm biased towards running. The great thing about running is I don't have to go run for three, four hours like on the bike because the pounding prevents me from doing it.

1:51:23Even if I was training at a high level when I was running a lot of mileage. Yeah, there's a limiter. Yeah. So there's the cap. So my advice to everybody out there asking and yelling about zone two and hit and blah, blah, blah, is like, just keep it simple. Get a lot of endurance work in. At some point, you're gonna notice you're fit enough to train. Like, I think we need to get fit enough to train before we train. Once you're fit enough to train, then start having fun with some. Then you can do all these sorts of things. I think that piece that you just said just then is the key thing to understand about someone like David Roche.

1:52:05Like, are you familiar with David Roche? So he's like, he's on the podcast this week. And I think what he's doing is really interesting and cool. All of his like high intensity work and like having his treadmill at an insane grade and like studying competitive eaters and experimenting with his ability to like absorb carbohydrates and bicarbonate and all these things. But these are like, he's allowed to play in those margins because he has 18 years of doing exactly what you said. And I think what gets missed or what we conveniently want to kind of dismiss about his story and his recent successes is the fact that he has this base that he built for like almost two decades before he began to play with all of these other things.

1:52:56This is the number one like misunderstood thing. And I'll use myself as an example. Again, I run 35 to 40 miles a week. I could go out tomorrow and run a 420 mile off of like - Which is insane. Off of very little. But it's, why? Because I've been running at a relatively high level for 25 years. And that aerobic volume, even though I'm not doing as much now, is still there as long as I'm maintaining it to a degree. And that is the key. If you look at the success, for instance, recently in the US, we've had a lot of really successful older marathoners, you know, especially on the female side who are in their late 30s or early 40s.

1:53:43For instance, Sarah Hall. Sarah Hall just broke her record. Yeah. And one of the reasons is that is because they've been consistent for a really long time so that they can then play with some of these, you know, things like you're suggesting there. For example, for years I worked with Roberta Groner. Now she's coached by someone else, but she just broke the, I think, 45 plus master's record running 229 or so in the marathon. And if you look at her volume, it's nowhere compared to what she was doing, you know, seven, eight years ago. But she doesn't have to because she's had a lifetime of accumulating this.

1:54:22So you get to experiment with like, hmm, how should I, you know, combine these threshold runs or this like VO2 max work or this intense interval stuff or the, you know, fueling or whatever you have you. that's when you get to play with the margins because like you're fit enough where you know you can. If you build it correctly, it persists. Like it's there kind of latent in the background. Your strength gains and your speed and your ability to be nimble and accelerate, those things fall apart quickly as soon as you stop doing them and you have to work really hard to get them back. But that reservoir of endurance just sort of lingers there and you can tap back into it.

1:55:04And that doesn't mean it is what it was, but it doesn't kind of like completely go away. Yeah, if I stop sprinting, I get slow, right? Because those neural components kind of like to really, you know, get those fast twitch fibers going, they fade relatively quickly. But on the endurance side, the decay is so much slower. Which is why we see so many endurance athletes or ultra endurance athletes, like excelling at, you know, in later phases of life. Like we can't do the a hundred meters like we could when we were 21, you know, but, you know, maybe we can go a hundred miles in a way that we couldn't when we were that age because of those many decades of, you know, kind of being an explorer in that endurance world.

1:55:52Exactly. And I would also argue that like what the longer endurance stuff where you also benefit is coming back to our early conversation is you have some of the mental skills that you didn't when you were younger. So you can navigate some of the pain, the fatigue. You can understand how to listen to your body better. You can let go of some, Sarah Hall who we talked about earlier, like wanna talk about her in the book, but I worked with her for a number of years. One of the things that led to her breakthrough later in life was she essentially said, I let go of this performance outcome achievement thing.

1:56:37Yeah, it's not a threat to your identity anymore. Like it doesn't matter really. Yeah, you're 40, you have kids to take care of, you have family, you have a life, you have perspective. And sometimes that perspective hits us too late to take advantage of it. I guarantee you now, if I could transport 40-year-old Steve into 20-year-old Steve's body, I would run so much faster. We all, you know, yes, if only all of us could do that, Steve. That, you know, that's the longevity hack I need. But the point is like, it's from a physical standpoint and from a mental reservoir standpoint, it's like we have this accumulated wisdom that we can tap into that often is kind of like a neglected part of the experience and the journey.

1:57:24And why I think it's important to whether your thing is running, cycling, another sport, another hobby, I don't care, but have things in your life that like continue to challenge you in these ways because they bring so much, not just physical benefits, but also mental. Sarah just ran 228. Is that what she ran? 223 or something? I think she ran 223. 223, yeah, that's unbelievable. What is her PR? Do you know? 220 and change. So only three minutes slower than her best time, which reminds me speaking of like longevity and performance declines with age, you weighed in on the Jake Paul Tyson fight, you know, when everyone's like, well, Mike Tyson's Mike Tyson, but he is, you know, 50.

1:58:13How's this gonna go? It was an interesting kind of thought experiment because, you know, nobody was as powerful and fast and as fierce as Tyson at his prime. So on some level, he's like an outlier. And how much does age factor in when you're somebody who is just so much better than everyone else, who's gonna now face somebody who's in their prime age, for that particular sport. And the way that you contextualized it was by sharing master's records in running and to show kind of like how this sort of the curve of how these things decline over time, no matter what. Yeah, you know, I think there it was interesting because we had the perfect comparison in running.

1:58:58Because the Masters, I think, 55 plus 100 meter record was set by a guy named Willie Galt. Who was it? He was the guy. He was the guy. So an NFL player, you know, set the world record on the four by one. We knew we could perform at like was a freak at his peak. And then we had his 55 plus year old age. Right. You know. And when you saw it, he's still amazingly fast, you know, 11 point something, right? But if you compare that, you realize like, uh-oh, that's like a very good high school girls time for the 100, which tells us that like speed and power, although it's in the legs, like it has a steep decline, especially once we get to 50, 55, 60 years old.

1:59:49And I think that's what we saw with Tyson is that like, age is undefeated, even among freaks of freaks. Yeah. We're all gonna sustain despite, you know, maybe someone's gonna solve it. But despite what I think what we've seen in the health and wellness field is like, it's still gonna win. So when you look at these longevity influencers and, you know, in particular, like let's take Brian Johnson, right? who you kind of had to go at for, he was sharing his VO2 max numbers and you kind of like, you spanked him a little bit on that. But in terms of like, this idea of like defying death and aging, where do you weigh in my friend?

2:00:40You're just going all the controversial things. I know. Listen, you're the one who like went out there I made a statement about these things. Here's why. And then I'll get to the answer to your question. But Brian Johnson, this is why, okay? This guy is known for optimizing and tracking everything, everything. And if you look at his VO2 max protocol fitness, it is not optimized. I think you said it's like 30 years out of date or something. It's not. What's wrong with it and what should he be doing? So what he's doing, and maybe he's updated. Hopefully he's updated. If he wants some advice, call me, Brian.

2:01:21I'm happy to give it for free. But what he was doing, essentially he was doing four by four minutes VO2 max work, repeating that, you know, multiple times per week. This is the Norwegian. Norwegian. Like this is Rhonda spoke about this the other day as well. Yeah. And here's the deal. That got popular because someone studied it because some Norwegian cross-country skiers were doing it and said, hey, it works pretty well. But there are a million variations of the same workout that will get the same result. They just have not been researched and studied because researchers generally don't study individual workout types because it's really hard to run that study.

2:02:00And the data isn't actually that good because we have to constrain things from a research standpoint. So The reason it's wrong is because no individual athlete, unless we looked at it again, 30, 40 years ago, is going to repeat the same style of workout workout over and over again without some variation of intensities. It comes back to what we talked about earlier. It's like his better approach would be a little bit more easy running or easy exercise, whatever it is. And then a mixture of interval training where sometimes you're going around threshold. Sometimes you're going around 5K pace. Sometimes you're doing this.

2:02:38Why? Because that's going to maximize the thing that he actually cares about, which is like the overall aerobic performance, which is tied to longevity. If you're doing the same workout every single day, your body adapts to that, right? So it no longer is producing the stimulus that was the whole reason why you began doing it in the first place. This is why we change workout types. And even if you said, I wanna do four by four minutes all the time, I mean, your choice. But within that, what would we have to do? We'd have to change the speed sometimes. We'd have to change the rest intervals. Sometimes do it with really short rest intervals, a little slower.

2:03:16sometimes long rest intervals like faster because if we don't we're going to just you know adapt or we're not going to adapt and again going back to history like even though the training was less mature and evolved even people like in the 1940s and 50s like roger banister if you looked at banister did 10 by 400 all the time but if you look at his progression what did he do he started in the fall at 70 seconds per 400. And then gradually got a little faster, little faster, little faster, little faster till they could run them in 60. And occasionally they throw in a different type of workout in there.

2:03:55But again, if you're the guy who's optimizing everything, you shouldn't be training like Roger Bannister did in the 1950s. You should be training like we do in the 2020s. So I think, again, that's just my little track running fault there. But I think on the longevity piece here, here's what I think. I think it's worthy to explore. Yeah, to your point of like, you know, we need to be more explorers. He's certainly that. And it's cool and fun to see him doing something so audacious. It's like, we kind of need somebody like that who's out there like trying all of these things and willing to like have people make fun of him in the public sphere.

2:04:35Is he doing everything absolutely, you know, the way that he should be? Maybe not, maybe, you know, Like everybody's got an opinion. You certainly have legitimacy to weigh in on the fitness piece of it all. Exactly. And I think I have no fault for him doing that exploration. I think, again, I'll tie it to running. Arthur Lyddiard revolutionized training by experimenting on himself. He was a milkman who decided, you know what? I'm gonna try and run 200 miles a week and see what happens. It was a little too much. So he dialed it back, but he experimented on himself. and that's what led to training principles being revolutionized and running.

2:05:14It wasn't like some scientists who like figured this out. It was a milkman. I think that like there is a degree of we need explorers experimenting. I think where I struggle with is we have to separate out what an experiment is on the individual from then validating that with good science. Well, and on top of that, like there's a difference between I'm exploring this thing and I'll tell you what I find versus like do as I do. Bingo. And I think the human mind, like it just wants to be told what to do. And these things are delivered in kind of these reductive pieces that aren't necessarily as helpful as they appear to be.

2:05:56I mean, in terms of like interval training, four by four, whatever it is, like this goes back, I mean, when I, in the 70s, when I was a kid swimming, Like all you do as a competitive swimmer is intervals, right? And that can mean a million different things. So sometimes it's, you know, 10 times 100 on very short rest. And the goal is to make each one of those exactly the same time so that you're completing it, you know, at the same pace that you initiated it. Other times a little more rest and you want each successive interval to be faster than the one preceded it. It's called a descending set.

2:06:33Sometimes you do pyramids where you build up and you come back down, or sometimes you take an extreme amount of rest and you do fewer intervals and you're trying to just absolutely go all out on every single one and see if you can be consistent to the end. So the point being like, to say you should do intervals is sort of a meaningless concept, other than that, you're taking a compressed time and distance and trying to extract some kind of fitness gain as out of that. But within that, there's a million variations and ways to kind of, you know, improve around the edges of your performance. And this is one of my biggest complaints is we don't understand the nuance of what you're just talking about that in the health and social media world.

2:07:22Because to your point, you know, there was a guy in the 1950s and 60s named Mahali Igloy who coached a bunch of Americans to world records. and he lived in Los Angeles. And because of that, they did all intervals like swimmers, very little easy running. And people look at that and they're like, oh my gosh, you know, the 1964 Olympic gold medalist, Bob Shule, who he coached, he did all intervals. We should copy him. He didn't do any aerobic, your easy stuff. But if you look at how the intervals were set, right? What was it? It was like hundreds and 200s with like laser short rest that wasn't that fast.

2:08:03So we was building that zone two aerobic system. Yeah, you're basically, you're trying to be at the highest or outermost edge of your zone two the entire time, but you're not gonna be able to complete the set if you exceed that threshold. Bingo, and that's it. So I think like that nuance is lost. And I think, you know, again, coming back to Rhonda Prattrick, I think she does great work, but I think her downfall is that when it comes to high intensity interval training is she looks at the science, which is good, But you have to understand the, I'll just call it the coaching artistry of what you're just talking about there, where there's a million ways to do these intervals and how we, you know, twist and turn the variables will impact the adaptation we have.

2:08:52and I get we can't tell everyone how to complicate and like twist all the variables, but my job as a coach is to say like, hey, when we say high intensity interval training, I'll tell you, I looked it up about a month ago to see what the science said on it. It said essentially defining high intensity interval training was anything from, I think it was like 20 seconds to, you know, 15 minute intervals at varying intensities. And when I saw that definition, I'm like, I can do something that puts someone in the hurt locker, you know, in full of lactate and acid with 15, 20 second intervals off like three intervals.

2:09:33We'll just go all out and you'll be done. And on the ground puking. And I can do 15 minute intervals completely aerobically. Yeah. And we'll be fine. Yeah. We would do in Christmas training, like the most intense training season of the year for swimming, every year we do 10 times 1 ,000 long course meters, 10 ,000 meters of swimming. It takes you like three hours or whatever, like a couple hours to do this. That's an interval set. Exactly. And I think this is where, again, I just wish, my call is like, and I'm a scientist at heart, but like the research is good. But I just wish people would take the time on the health and fitness and longevity space to understand some of the history of training, whether it's be, and coaching, whether it's swimming, running, cycling, like it all get you to the same spot in terms of like understanding that.

2:10:33Because I think there's so much data and understanding there that it gets lost. And I think you see that with Brian Johnson, for example, because what does he do? He sees the Norwegian method, the four by four minutes or whoever he's working with. And he says, oh, this has a research study. This must be the best. I'm going to do this. Where if you went down to your high school cross-country coach and they were decent, they could write you a better program because they understand the interval training or the same with the swim coach at the high school because they had to understand and see and test, hmm, if I do this, this, and this, do my athletes improve and get better?

2:11:12And you understand that along with your knowledge and history. All right, so Brian, give Steve a call. He's waiting for your call. But here's the deal is I hate on, or I throw things out on social media a lot on whether it's longevity or health or what have you, but I'm doing that in my areas as we talked about because I have the expertise and hopefully knowledge to pass along. And while I might give some people some shit, I really do want them to understand and update. And if anybody ever comes to me and I've had people do this and say, hey, let me understand this more, you know, influencer podcast or whatever, I will give them free stuff.

2:11:56I will say, here's, let's talk. Here's all my resources for coaching. Like, let's understand this because I think at the end of the day, well, it's fun. It's kind of fun. And you get addicted to like, you know, calling people out on things. The goal is better information. And if you have a large platform and you're talking to health, fitness, especially in endurance world, I want you conveying information that's gonna help people. And that's what I'm about. And sorry if I get on you every once in a while, but like that's the goal. I love the passion. I love the energy. All right, well, let's kind of end this with some concluding thoughts or synthesis of kind of what we've covered today in the context of winning the inside game, which is really, you know, winning the inside game is about the inside job, right?

2:12:47So what do you wanna leave people with in terms of like how they should think about why this is important and kind of how to go about it? Our society's like pull towards success and achievement is A, making a lot of people miserable. We can see this on youth sports, the dropout rate. I think it's like 70 % of kids quit sports by 13. We can see it in academics. If you look at the pressure and stress around everything from elementary to high school, you know, teaching to the tests, which makes teachers miserable, it makes kids miserable, and it hurts our performance as well as if you look at it.

2:13:29And then if you look at the workplace or entrepreneur or what have you, as we've talked about, like the sole zero sum game of like win or lose defining success externally, like causes us to perform worse, not fulfill our potential and make us miserable. And my call in this book is simple. I'm not telling you, forget about achievements. Okay. I have achievements and goals that I want to get as well as anybody else. But what I'm telling you is we need to rebalance that equation. And part of that means we need to redefine success, not having our entire identity tied to it, but diversifying our kind of sources of meaning, diversifying our definition of success and move more towards that exploratory nature where we realize that like myself and I had to, the fact that my mile best ends with 401 instead of three something might have hurt in the moment.

2:14:31But what mattered more is that journey that I went on to understand and explore my limits, even if I didn't find the outer bounds of it, because that led to basically everything else that I've gotten to explore and do. Yeah. If you would achieve that goal and run 359 at some point, you wouldn't be sitting, you would not be writing, but who knows what you would be doing. But like, I really don't think any of these books or any of the stuff that you've done would have occurred because it's that splinter, you know, that basically is the, you know, the generative energy behind like all of this exploration that you've done.

2:15:11It was the worst thing that happened in the moment, but the best thing in my life, because you're spot on. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have gone on that exploration. So like, that's what, and the research bears this out in a number of ways away from sport is like, sometimes those moments that hit us the hardest are the path opening up for us to explore somewhere new where we never thought we'd go down. Because if you asked, you know, teenage Steve or 20 something year old Steve, if he'd be writing a book about redefining success and talking about Eastern and Western religions and like, you know, academic studies and stuff, he'd be like, Like, who were you talking about?

2:15:57Steve only cares about running and running a fast mile. That's all that matters. So again, sometimes that's the universe saying like, hey, get exploring. Yeah, nobody who's in the midst of, you know, kind of dealing with a big failure wants to hear that. But time and time again, it's proven true. Sometimes the timeline has to be, you know, pretty long for that to kind of bear fruit. But I see it all the time. These things that we perceive in the moment to be cataclysmic or just setbacks, ultimately are things we can, if we have the resources and the wherewithal are the building blocks for something better.

2:16:41You could be that guy, maybe you even went on and won the gold medal in the 1500 meters or something like that. But then who are you? Are you the guy who's just dining out on that for the rest of your life? Yeah. Yeah. You know, who knows, right? But I don't know, you seem like you're pretty happy doing what you're doing right now. And what you're doing, I'm sure, gives you that sense of meaning and purpose because it is an act of service to other people. I appreciate that. So I'm just gonna remind myself that Rich Roll tells me, it's all right that I ran 401, we're all good. We thank you for running 401, Steve.

2:17:17And we then of course, thank you for all the books that you've contributed as a result of that deep wound that you're still trying to heal within yourself. The product of which is Win the Inside Game, which is great book, congrats on that. And everybody can get it everywhere. Steve is gonna go home now because his wife is pregnant and is gonna be having a child. And by the time we put this up, you will have a new baby, boy or girl? Girl. Girl. So two girls. So two girls, wow. Wow, that's me too, dad. I'm gonna have to come for you for some tips. Yes, I've been through it all. Well, the youngest is now 16, so I've seen it all my friend and I will happily take your call.

2:18:03Thanks, man. For people who wanna learn more about you, maybe just leave us with like all the places and all the things. Yeah, on all social media, Instagram, Twitter, all variations at Steve Magnus. my website stevemagnus.com and then I've got a newsletter along with good friend and colleague Brad Stolberg called The Growth Equation Newsletter you can find it if you Google it excellent man, thank you buddy thanks a lot

2:18:47That'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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2:20:39Thank you.