April 26, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:27:46
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Five, four, three, two, one! | ||
| Boom. | ||
| And we're off. | ||
| What's up, brother? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Nice to meet you, man. | ||
| You know, it's funny that you just brought up Dr. Atiyah. | ||
| You know, when you were saying that you downloaded the podcast, you were saying, I gotta get that guy on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| I was at auto-downloads and that one popped up and I remember thinking about a week before that. | ||
| I was like, well, when we first scheduled this one, I was like, I gotta tell Joe about Dr. Atiyah. | ||
| He was one of the kind of first guys I really followed when I kind of dove into kind of the high-fat approach to... | ||
| To nutrition. | ||
| So, yeah, he's a fascinating guy. | ||
| It was a great listen. | ||
| I had to listen to it like twice. | ||
| Yeah, he's a weird guy. | ||
| He's one of those guys where you talk to him and you think, oh, this is like a normal, really nice guy. | ||
| And then as he starts getting into the medical aspect of things, you go, oh, okay, you're a fucking super genius. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He tricks you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I remember one of the first things he ever said that really kind of resonated with me was I think someone was asking him about like what the effects are or the ketogenic diet in terms of like micronutrients and what maybe he'd be missing based on kind of like that normal profile of what you're supposed to get. | ||
| And he was just like, you know, it's interesting because most of those studies and recommendations are based off of basically a standard American diet or a higher carb diet. | ||
| So he's like, well, you might just not need the same. | ||
| We need to do more. | ||
| And he's always looking to kind of push the envelope a bit. | ||
| So cool guest for sure. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, I'm fascinated by you and I'm fascinated by anybody who does the kind of shit that you do. | ||
| I mean, please explain to people all the different ultra marathons you've done and like what you've accomplished. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting because, like, I still kind of see myself as a pretty average runner because, like, I mean, I competed in high school and made state cross-country and state track and that kind of thing for a small school. | ||
| And then I went to a small Division III school and was... | ||
| I'm pretty much average amongst a real good program at the D3 level. | ||
| I always just did kind of like running longer, though. | ||
| Once I got done with college, I kind of decided, well, let's see what's longer than some of those traditional collegiate races of 5K. To 10 kilometers. | ||
| And, you know, I started kind of just dabbling that stuff. | ||
| And then in 2010, I think I actually did my first ultra marathon, you know, partly because I was just like looking around and there turned out to be one in the state. | ||
| I was I was living in Wisconsin at the time. | ||
| And there was one that was kind of in my neck of the woods, and I actually had just decided to go back to grad school, and that one had a $1,000 prize purse on it. | ||
| And I was like, you know what, if I can win that, $1,000 go a long way during grad school. | ||
| So I did that one, and I ended up winning it, and it definitely hooked me. | ||
| It was like the type of thing where I was like, I want to do more of these. | ||
| And by 2011, I kind of jumped all in at the end of the year and did three 50-milers, and I think it was about a nine-week time frame. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, it gets crazier. | ||
| There's some freaks out there. | ||
| There's guys who will do like a couple and a weekend and stuff like that. | ||
| So, I mean, it never ends. | ||
| But yeah, you know, it was one of those things where after that I was totally hooked. | ||
| What is it that got you hooked? | ||
| You know, it had to be partly just a little bit of success. | ||
| You know, I wasn't necessarily used to winning. | ||
| So, like, I mean, I've had good races and good times relative to what you probably see, like, in an average person. | ||
| But, you know, when I went to, like, a competitive 5K, a competitive marathon or something like that, you know, I wasn't going to win unless it was kind of a local race. | ||
| So kind of finding, you know, it's like anything, I guess, you kind of gravitate to what you feel you're good at, and then that kind of piques your interest. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So that was part of it. | ||
| The other part was just I really enjoyed doing the long run. | ||
| Like when you break up kind of like a training week, you have like a variety of different things. | ||
| You've got like kind of, you know, base level runs, you've got specific workouts for the distance. | ||
| And then most training programs are gonna have a long run once a week. | ||
| And that was the one that was always my favorite. | ||
| So wrapping my head around doing a bunch of those a week instead of just one was was really kind of appealing to me and When you're putting that much time into whatever you're training for, it's, I think, important to enjoy it. | ||
| So being able to kind of enjoy the training process a lot was really appealing to me. | ||
| And then it's just the variables. | ||
| When you're out there for that long, there's so many variables to consider and it's like... | ||
| It's a blast for me to work through those, plan for those, and then adjust to them on the fly when you're out there and things inevitably go wrong or things pop up that you didn't expect. | ||
| It's kind of hard to explain, but it's weird. | ||
| One of the things in ultramarathon running that people always say is they'll have a race, and even if they have a bad race, say, I'm never doing one of these again, and then the next day they're on the internet looking for another race. | ||
| It's There's this weird thing about it that you don't really know until you do it, but it sucks you in. | ||
| That's the case with a lot of people when they talk about things that they have to suffer through. | ||
| I've heard that when guys talk about those extreme hikes. | ||
| You know that one that goes from Georgia all the way to Maine? | ||
| Do you know that insane hike? | ||
| What is that called? | ||
| The Appalachian Trail? | ||
| That they say, I'll never fucking do that again. | ||
| And then they're like, okay, what other hikes can I go? | ||
| It's just once the pain, the physical pain, dies down, there's something about that challenge that stimulates in people like you and people that are into these really long distance things. | ||
| Like, there's something about distance. | ||
| There's something about, like you were saying, like, You weren't the best runner in high school or college, right? | ||
| But there's something about the mind of an ultramarathoner. | ||
| It's a different mind. | ||
| The type of person that can run 100 miles, 200 miles, 238 miles, those type of people, they're different people. | ||
| And there's a strength, a mental strength, and the ability to just keep going on and on and on that I'm absolutely fascinated with. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it is interesting, too, because the sport's grown quite a bit in the last decade or so, but it's still very much kind of a niche group, and then when you kind of hang out in that group, you start to kind of normalize it a little bit, I think. | ||
| So then you start thinking, like, oh, 100 miles, it's just what we do. | ||
| And then you, you know, you actually try to, like, separate yourself from the fact that you've done a few of those, or separate yourself from the fact that you've been hanging out with other people who are doing it, and you realize, oh, this is actually kind of A weird thing to kind of do as a human nowadays. | ||
| It's fucking very weird. | ||
| How many of these things have you won? | ||
| I don't know how many I've won. | ||
| I think I've done just shy of 50 total now. | ||
| Everything from 50 kilometers, the furthest I've done is 200 kilometers, which is about 125 miles. | ||
| I'd have to look to see how many I've won. | ||
| It's really goofy, because when you start getting into the longer stuff, like 100 miles and beyond, you start, at least in my training program, you start to pick smaller races to use as training runs. | ||
| And some of it, I think, is just because for me, if I'm going to go out and do like a 30 mile or 40 mile training run or something like that, it's kind of tedious to do that by yourself and then plan all the logistics of it. | ||
| So if there's a race nearby and that's not too hard to get to, it's easier just to sign up for that, go and do that. | ||
| So some of those, you know, I'll win if they're small enough, even though I'm not necessarily trying to go all out, so to speak, because I'm hoping to recover, kind of, and get back into training. | ||
| So you'll pace yourself at one of these local races, maybe? | ||
| Yeah, you know, the way I describe it is, and this is a real hard thing for a lot of people to do, I think. | ||
| It's like you go into a race saying this is going to be a moderately difficult long run. | ||
| So maybe a little faster than what I would do if I was just going to do it by myself, like unsupported, that sort of thing. | ||
| And then I always tell myself 80% is the hardest you can go if you want to be able to come back and start training on time to meet the actual goal or the A-race. | ||
| So when I do those, it's one of those things where, who knows, someone might show up that's as fast as you, or maybe a little slower than you normal, and if they're deciding to just hammer it that day, they might beat you, and you gotta be okay with that. | ||
| Does the competitive part of you flare up, though? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Well, yeah, it does, and that's the hardest part, and that's, I think, the main reason why some people won't do that approach, because there's certainly people who just, they stay away from races unless it's their A race, and they just say, if I'm gonna do a long run, I'll do it on my own, and Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| It's kind of a sport that I think is still a lot to learn, which I think is actually the case for a lot of things. | ||
| Even things that are well-established, there's always something to learn or new things to pick up on. | ||
| Well, it's one of those things, right, where once someone runs 100 miles and then a bunch of other people start doing it, like you said, it almost becomes normalized. | ||
| And then people start to try to push that boundary. | ||
| Now, I've been hearing talk about the woman Candice who runs the Moab 240. Yeah. | ||
| They're talking about doing a 500. I heard that. | ||
| I was like, you're out of your fucking mind. | ||
| People are going to die. | ||
| But maybe that'll be normal in five years and we'll get used to like four or five day races. | ||
| Yeah, so it's really fascinating. | ||
| It took me a couple of years to do this before I got into the sport, but once I was in it for a couple of years, I kind of did a little research to see what the deal was with some of this stuff. | ||
| The funny thing is that type of a distance isn't even unheard of. | ||
| I forget what the book is called, but they actually had in Madison Square Garden, they used to host a six-day event where Guys and gals, I'm not sure if gals were doing it back then, but guys for sure were going there and seeing how far they could run in six days. | ||
| Yeah, I know, crazy. | ||
| And I think if I remember right, people were betting on them that way, and so they'd fill it up. | ||
| People would come and watch this spectacle. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| It was in the late 1800s, I think, is when they started it. | ||
| Wow, here it is. | ||
| Six-day cycling? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| The six-day grind at Madison Square Garden? | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Look at this, man. | ||
| So some crazy person decided to leave the bike at home, I guess. | ||
| This is super old. | ||
| We're looking at this on YouTube, folks. | ||
| It says six-day cycling, the six-day grind at Madison Square Garden. | ||
| And so it's just a track. | ||
| And these people are... | ||
| This is old-timey shit. | ||
| This looks like the 30s, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That guy just went down. | ||
| And so they're just riding their bike for six days. | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| When they wipe out. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| They probably had terrible breaks back then, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was their feet. | ||
| Probably, right? | ||
| Or the railing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So endurance sports like this are nothing new. | ||
| Yeah, it's actually fascinating when you kind of look into it, because nowadays, in the United States, the trail running scene is definitely way bigger than the road running or certainly the track scene, but that wasn't always the case. | ||
| If you look back into the 70s and 80s, there was a pretty big surge in ultramarathon running for flat-fast stuff. | ||
| That's where we see a lot of the records coming from. | ||
| So that's like a track, and you run as far and long as you can on a track? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Track or a road or a really flat road? | ||
| I had Goggins on, David Goggins, and he was talking about the first time he did one was on a track. | ||
| Just ran in circles on a track, which has almost got to be more taxing for your mind because you're just seeing the same shit over and over and over again. | ||
| Yeah, it's really fascinating to me because I've done both. | ||
| I've done 100 milers on the trail and I've done 100 miles on a 400 meter track. | ||
| And the fascinating thing is it is like what you said, it's almost a different event where mentally you're doing everything you can on that track to kind of separate yourself from the actual environment, envision yourself being somewhere else, you know, looking forward to little things to kind of not necessarily be thinking too far in advance because that can get overwhelming. | ||
| Whereas when I'm out on the trails it's like you're usually in a pretty pristine beautiful area and you can kind of just take it as it comes and say oh cool now I get to see that or this is a neat area or I like this section and you look forward to that kind of diversity. | ||
| Whereas on the track it's you see it once and you've seen it every time. | ||
| And then it just kind of beats you up mentally from that side of things. | ||
| But then, you know, there's other things about that, too, that help out, like, logistically. | ||
| When you're on a track for 400 meters, you bring out one person, you put everything you may possibly want on a little table, and if I want something, I say, hey, can I get that? | ||
| 400 meters later, I have it. | ||
| And even if we mess it up, I'll get it 400 meters after that. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah, whereas, you know, the trails, it depends. | ||
| They've gotten a lot better with aid stations as the sport's grown. | ||
| But, like, you know, you mess up your aid station, or if you get caught up in the moment and just blow through it and don't take care of yourself, you might have to suffer for an hour plus before you get help again. | ||
| So that's where it kind of gets a little different, I think, logistically, when you're on the trails versus on the road. | ||
| But yeah, it's kind of a different thing. | ||
| The track is interesting too in the sense that you're essentially making that same exact motion the whole way. | ||
| So like there's certain areas of your body that fatigue and they don't get a break. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because of the turn? | |
| The turn and just running flat. | ||
| Like running flat, you're going to kind of localize some of the way you stimulate your muscles or your gait is going to be pretty similar throughout. | ||
| Whereas when you're on the trails, like you might be going on a slight incline, a steep incline, a slight decline, a little bit of flat, some rolling, all kinds of things in between. | ||
| And then trails can be kind of undulating. | ||
| So you're just kind of moving all that forces around your legs a little more than you would be when you're running on a flat surface. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, it's one of the things that I always tell like my coaching clients and myself when I'm planning for something is like, if you really want to meet your full potential, like specificity is king. | ||
| You need to be on that environment in the environment you're going to race on and really get your body used to kind of that type of emotion. | ||
| It makes it a little more interesting when you're doing a track race because that means some kind of long runs on a track. | ||
| So you're kind of balancing doing just enough to get ready for it and not doing too much so that when you get to the race, you're like, screw this. | ||
| I've done too much of this already. | ||
| I don't want to see another loop. | ||
| That's kind of an interesting concept. | ||
| It's interesting to me, too, that if you're planning to run 100 miles, like what you were saying about running these shorter races as a training run, which makes sense because how else are you going to prepare for 100 miles? | ||
| If you just decided to just go out and run 100 miles, you'd have to map it out. | ||
| How far is 100 miles? | ||
| Where am I going to park? | ||
| Where am I going to put water? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and then people also kind of forget about the aspect of just all the stuff surrounding the race that you can kind of fine tune when you're doing a race as a kind of training run where usually you're going to travel a little bit for stuff like this. | ||
| So you're probably going to stay in a hotel the night before. | ||
| You have to wake up early in the morning. | ||
| You have to get your gear ready. | ||
| And so it's kind of like going through that process of what you're going to have to do on race day. | ||
| So then when your big race comes up, you're like, okay, I've done this three or four times in the last six months. | ||
| So I know what I'm doing. | ||
| Now, what's different between you and a lot of guys, and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you about this, is that you are on a fat-burning diet. | ||
| You're essentially on a ketogenic diet and running these races. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's a little interesting because the way I kind of, at least the way I came into it, like I explored the ketogenic diet mainly because I started noticing some things. | ||
| Try to pull this thing. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| No worries about it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I started kind of exploring the ketogenic diet back in late 2011 because I started noticing some goofy things going on with my body from the high level of training and then the racing. | ||
| And that was right around that same time I did those 350 milers in nine weeks. | ||
| I would wake up like three or four times at night and then like I'd have to like pee all the time at night and I'd have like swelling in my ankles and stuff a lot of just like huge energy swings throughout the day like I would you know I was I was a teacher at the time so I remember thinking like every day at like one or two o'clock I could have laid down and take a nap on spot if I had had the opportunity to so it was just like a lot of weird things that I thought was pretty abnormal for a 25 year old male at the time and And | ||
| so it was kind of becoming clear to me that what I was doing was either unsustainable or the way I was doing it was unsustainable. | ||
| And, you know, I was really intrigued by the sport and I didn't really want to necessarily back off of that if I didn't have to. | ||
| So that's when I kind of started to explore nutrition and diet and things like that. | ||
| I was very much following what I would have considered a healthy diet before that at the time. | ||
| It was high carbohydrate, but it was what you would think of as a healthy high carbohydrate diet. | ||
| What was a normal meal? | ||
| I'd wake up and I'd usually go for a run and then have some oatmeal, raisins, maybe some fruit or something like that. | ||
| Some eggs or something with that in the morning. | ||
| So not junk food, just high carbohydrates? | ||
| No, it was clean. | ||
| They say get your whole grains, fruits, vegetables, that sort of thing. | ||
| I definitely focused heavily on that and made sure I wasn't eating junk food. | ||
| I wasn't going through fast food restaurants or eating Oreos and bonbons and that sort of thing. | ||
| So it was kind of interesting to me to think like, okay, I didn't really realize that it was necessarily the nutritional side of things. | ||
| Like it wasn't like a big slap in the face in the sense that, oh, I just got to cut out the junk because like, according to most people, I wasn't eating junk. | ||
| I was eating really good food. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, that's when I kind of got introduced to some folks like Dr. Volek and Dr. Finney, who are kind of, I guess, the pioneers of like this latest wave of kind of the high-fat approach. | ||
| And, you know, they were – I started reading their books, listening to podcasts and things like that. | ||
| And, you know, it was interesting because I was training upwards of 20 hours a week at the time. | ||
| And, you know, I started kind of thinking like – How much time am I going to invest in just running? | ||
| How can I kind of kill two birds with one stone? | ||
| And that's kind of when I discovered podcasts and thought, this is sweet. | ||
| I can learn something and train at the same time. | ||
| And so I just kind of went all in on listening to a bunch of podcasts and stuff like that. | ||
| And actually, one of your previous guests, Ben Greenfield, was one of the first podcasts I really kind of did a deep dive into. | ||
| And he was always kind of like... | ||
| Rolling out stuff that was kind of new or cutting edge. | ||
| So he definitely had a lot of information there. | ||
| Yeah, he's a maniac. | ||
| Don't take his advice on what he does with his dick. | ||
| He's shooting stem cells into his dick. | ||
| Yeah, he's turning himself into a guinea pig. | ||
| He's an odd duck. | ||
| But yeah, he definitely had a lot of info from guys like Dr. Finney and Dr. Volek, and I was lucky to meet those guys too on a couple occasions. | ||
| And with Dr. Volek, I've done some podcasts with him and certainly exchanged emails and stuff when I've had questions. | ||
| So I kind of just tested it out. | ||
| I was like, what's the worst that can happen? | ||
| I can always go back. | ||
| It's not like I have to stick to this for the rest of my life if it's not something... | ||
| So your issues were swelling and energy, and why did you attribute that to your diet? | ||
| What was making you think that it was your diet that was doing that to you? | ||
| Yeah, so I wasn't sure. | ||
| I thought for sure that something I was doing was wrong. | ||
| Did you get your blood work done, check your hormone levels, all that stuff? | ||
| Yeah, you know, I didn't have probably as much blood work done as I would have liked to, to really, like, look at stuff and see. | ||
| Like, the way I look at blood work is if you're doing it regular, like, often enough and not changing things, that's what you're going to see the most, because you're going to see changes, versus just like, oh, I'm chronically low in this, or I'm always low in this, but it doesn't seem to be an issue. | ||
| But, you know, there was no big red flags on my blood work. | ||
| Like, nothing that would have said, like, Thyroid disease or something like that. | ||
| Nothing quite that wrong. | ||
| And it wasn't like the wheels were coming off at that point. | ||
| These were small things that I kind of associated as nagging things. | ||
| They were things I could get through, but they weren't ideal. | ||
| So I've kind of been a curious person my whole life, so I was just looking to kind of optimize, I guess, more or less. | ||
| And I didn't know if it was going to work. | ||
| I was... | ||
| Terrified that I'd find out it wasn't and then I would have to stop running as much. | ||
| And at the time I was like, that doesn't sound like what I want to do. | ||
| So this was just something I decided to explore first. | ||
| And it's really goofy because I've certainly evolved in kind of how I use it from that when I first started. | ||
| When I first started, I went really low carb, like that clinical ketosis level where you read about where there are like 50 grams of carbohydrates or less. | ||
| I did that for about, I think it was like four to six weeks, and I didn't have as hard of a time as what I think I've seen some people have with it. | ||
| You have people talking about everything from the keto flu to just feeling really lethargic for a while before that kind of metabolic switch flips. | ||
| What I kind of noticed was I felt really good doing like really like low-level type mundane tasks, just like day-to-day work and things like that. | ||
| But like maybe every second or third day I'd go for a run and just feel awful. | ||
| And I kind of knew enough about it that I thought, okay, let's give this a solid four weeks before I make any judgments on whether that's going to be something that sticks around or not. | ||
| And, you know, after about that point, my energy level is kind of normalized. | ||
| And then, you know, I was so at that point, I was like excited. | ||
| I was like, this is sweet. | ||
| I should have mentioned to like, during that process, I started sleeping through the night again, which was like, kind of really an eye opening thing for me. | ||
| Because usually, like, I'd wake up at least three times. | ||
| What do you attribute that to? | ||
| You know, I don't know for sure. | ||
| But, you know, it could be anything from just the amount of stress I was causing on my body from kind of two angles from the training plus like, you know, like, I don't want to demonize carbohydrates because I think they have a place. | ||
| I think they're a great tool. | ||
| I just think like the the question everyone should ask is at what level do they become kind of a margin of diminishing returns for you and you know what I think was likely happening is that you know I was reaching past that margin of diminishing returns and it was causing more stress than what my body was was able to tolerate and that was causing cortisol spikes or something like that that was waking me up at night but you know who knows really like it's | ||
| All I know is the only thing at that time I changed was my diet. | ||
| And we should probably point out that this is not universal. | ||
| That everybody's diet is going to affect them differently. | ||
| Some people are fine with carbohydrates. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there that eat a high-carbohydrate diet and they have zero issues with it whatsoever. | ||
| And that's one of the weirder things about people. | ||
| That we are so variable, depending upon your ancestry, what part of the world they evolved in. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating to me because I'll look at folks doing the complete opposite of who I am and they're doing just fine. | ||
| Then I'll look at some folks, too, that are doing the opposite of me and they're doing just fine for a while and then they ultimately start noticing the same kind of things I did and then they can clean it up. | ||
| I think at the end of the day, you just got to be kind of honest with yourself. | ||
| Some people, I think, are... | ||
| Really, really robust. | ||
| And they can hit their body with that high octane fuel, carbohydrate, like day in and day out at a high level and it doesn't seem to bother them much. | ||
| But, you know, other people I think just that it can kind of, it's like playing with rocket fuel a little bit where, you know, a little bit can be great and too much of it can kind of burn you up a little bit. | ||
| So you're saying that you started off at like 50 grams of carbohydrates a day, like real strict ketosis diet. | ||
| What did you eventually move to? | ||
| So the way I call it is I periodize it. | ||
| So like when I look at my year, you can pick out a week where I'm kind of in peak training and then pick out a week where I'm kind of in like a recovery phase or off season. | ||
| And it looks like two completely different lifestyles. | ||
| So my first thought after kind of like working through the whole ketogenic approach, because I should add to like once I got like feeling good about that, I started adding back speed workouts and things like that. | ||
| And I definitely noticed that I was missing kind of that last year. | ||
| Like it was a lot more difficult to go out and really throttle down. | ||
| I could run all day at a slow pace, but if I decided to go out on the track and do 400-meter repeats at a really fast pace, it was really hard to be able to do that. | ||
| That's a common complaint. | ||
| Rob Wolf, you know Rob Wolf? | ||
| Rob Wolf had a similar issue. | ||
| He's gotten like very heavily into jujitsu. | ||
| And he was telling me that he just can't stick to that 50 grams of carbohydrates a day and still have the energy to go hard. | ||
| Do you know, does Rob Wolf workout more than one time a day? | ||
| I do not know. | ||
| He looks very fit, though. | ||
| I'm not sure what his schedule is, but I know he works out very hard. | ||
| And if he's doing jiu-jitsu, it's very difficult to do jiu-jitsu any other way than hard. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is one thing I've always been curious about, too. | ||
| I'm not trying to come on here and say everyone should switch to doing what I do. | ||
| I think you should follow your own personal self and be honest with yourself. | ||
| If you feel great, do what you're doing. | ||
| If you don't, then probably look to change something. | ||
| But one thing I'm always looking at now or suspecting is that it's more about the recovery between efforts than it is about the intensity of the effort or the duration of the effort in terms of how much carbs you need to bring back or want to bring back. | ||
| Because I've also had circumstances where I'll do a big workout or a race or something like that, and then I'll go really easy for a week. | ||
| And during that week, I'll go like super strict keto because I'm recovering. | ||
| I'm not doing anything intense. | ||
| I'm not doing anything too long. | ||
| So that's the point of my training where I kind of say, all right, let's get rid of the fast-acting fuel sources. | ||
| I don't need them right now and reset that whole fat adaptation thing. | ||
| So you feel like the fast-acting fuel sources like carbohydrates, you only really need them when you're pushing hard. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you're really running fast. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, and I actually think it's when you're doubling down on those on a regular basis. | ||
| So if you're working out really hard for 45 minutes to an hour a day, I think you can probably get away with almost a ketogenic or a really low-carbohydrate approach because you're giving yourself 23-plus hours between sessions for your body to restock glycogen stores from other areas, from fat and proteins and things like that. | ||
| I think when you start getting into a system where you're like myself, I'm doing two days a lot. | ||
| And then sometimes one of those is a speed session. | ||
| That's when I feel like I need to bring some of the carbohydrate back. | ||
| And I think it's probably just to get some of the glycogen at a little faster rate because that is going to replenish your glycogen stores faster as a carbohydrate than like a fat or a protein probably would. | ||
| So how many grams of carbohydrates a day would you have on a day like that? | ||
| When I'm in like peak training, which is about 20 hours a week of running strength training and mobility type stuff, you know, I'll probably let myself get up to like 15 to 25% of my intake from carbohydrate. | ||
| What do you think that is in grams? | ||
| It depends a lot on what I actually do. | ||
| Because I don't count calories very often. | ||
| I used to just to kind of see what was going on and then I kind of got intuitive with it. | ||
| Gram-wise, it's probably anywhere from 200 to 300 maybe. | ||
| And then when I'm in those phases of training, it's really intense in terms of just... | ||
| Or I shouldn't say intense. | ||
| It's just really tedious in the amount of time and energy required for it. | ||
| Now, are you blood monitoring at that time? | ||
| Are you checking your millimolar levels? | ||
| I am sometimes, like when I get curious about that type of stuff, or I've done it in the past. | ||
| What I did originally is I got the blood ketone monitor, and I also got one of those ketonics. | ||
| It's like this little USB thing, and then you blow into it. | ||
| Is that accurate? | ||
| I think there's varied results. | ||
| I think they've gotten a lot better with it. | ||
| But what I did is I actually measured my blood ketone and then I would use that and I tried to find kind of like if mine was matching what that thing would say. | ||
| So I kind of had an idea where certain ranges on that thing would kind of indicate whether I was in ketosis or not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, I very much was coming out of ketosis during peak training. | ||
| Like, especially when I would get up to 200-300 grams of carbohydrate, I would come out of ketosis, and I'd probably go back into ketosis throughout that phase. | ||
| When you say go back in and come out, like, what kind of time period are you talking about? | ||
| The time period was more indicative about what I kind of ate during it, too. | ||
| Like, if I did... | ||
| If I did, or I shouldn't say what I, like how I kind of structured those 200 to 300 grams of carbohydrate, like if I did like a big bolus of it in one meal, I'd get back into ketosis a little quicker because then I wouldn't come back to the carbohydrates again for a while. | ||
| So would you vary inside the day? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And here's where it got kind of interesting, I guess, is I do a lot of the heaviest bulk of my training in the morning. | ||
| So I typically wake up and have some coffee with coconut milk or heavy whipping cream or something like that. | ||
| And then go for my run. | ||
| So then when I get back from a run, it might be two hours, sometimes even three. | ||
| And at that point, I just slept for eight to 10 hours. | ||
| Then by the time I got done with my run, I hadn't I had essentially done a small intermittent fast for the most part. | ||
| So even when I had the higher amounts of carbohydrates, I'd find myself going back into ketosis at the end of something like that sometimes. | ||
| But really, to me, it wasn't necessarily a question of whether I was in ketosis or not, because that really wasn't important to me. | ||
| Performance is important. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| And what I wanted out of this approach was... | ||
| I wanted to be able to rely on my body to burn high levels of fat when I needed it to, but I also wanted to be metabolically flexible enough where if I needed to hit the gas pedal, I could do that as well. | ||
| And I think that's where people get a little confused or up in arms or something because there's not a whole lot of studies that kind of... | ||
| Look at that specifically. | ||
| Can you do that or can you not do that? | ||
| Some people think it's kind of an all or nothing thing where you either get really fat adapted or you get really carb dependent and then everything else is kind of like this gray area that you can't really get into. | ||
| But that's not my experience. | ||
| My experience has been that I can... | ||
| Here's my kind of litmus test. | ||
| If I can go for like a four hour or even five hour run with no fuel other than water and electrolytes, then I'm fat adapted enough. | ||
| I don't need to get any more fat adapted than that because I can eat during a race and everyone else is going to be. | ||
| So I don't really need to get more fat adapted from a performance standpoint. | ||
| So when I get to that point, then it's like, how many carbohydrates can I bring back to kind of give me that extra nudge or that extra fuel substrate? | ||
| Have you ever tried mixing exogenous ketones with carbohydrates? | ||
| Because Greenfield was talking about that, and he said it's like doing steroids. | ||
| He said it was incredible. | ||
| But again, he's a maniac. | ||
| He's a maniac, yeah. | ||
| Who else was it? | ||
| Was it Dominic D'Agostino was playing around with that stuff quite a bit, too? | ||
| Or he might have helped... | ||
| He might have helped with the creation of some of that stuff. | ||
| I know there was... | ||
| I'd have to look back in my emails and stuff. | ||
| But I actually had... | ||
| There was a guy who was doing a real clinical version of the exogenous ketones. | ||
| And he had sent me one a while back to kind of do a little test for him. | ||
| And it was like just this little canister of exogenous ketone. | ||
| And he wanted me to kind of check my ketones when I woke up in the morning. | ||
| Take that, test it 15 minutes later, and then test again after my run. | ||
| Is that like a ketone ester? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Super potent stuff, tastes like Godzilla's dick. | ||
| Matt Brown brought some of that in. | ||
| It's like, woof! | ||
| Did you test your ketones when you took it? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| I didn't have a monitor on me, but it tasted terrible, but I felt great. | ||
| And you have to take it with glucose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| See, I think that's maybe that's where I messed up. | ||
| But besides that, like my ketone level shot up. | ||
| I woke up that morning. | ||
| I think I was at like 1.0 millimoles or something like that. | ||
| I took that exogenous ketone. | ||
| And 15 minutes later, I test I was at 3.7 millimoles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So it was like, okay, stuff works. | ||
| Yeah, it works. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| Here's my question is, with that stuff, from a performance standpoint, is people are looking at that kind of, I think, more like an electrolyte, where it's like I take this on top of my energy source, whereas that's actually an energy source, a fairly potent one, too. | ||
| So when I'm out there racing and I'm trying to kind of limit... | ||
| I'm trying to eat... | ||
| A certain amount so that I kind of keep that energy where I want it, but I'm also trying not to go overboard because I don't want digestive stress. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So as you're running, you have to maintain a certain amount of food in your system, but you don't want to have a large meal. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because, like, basically the way I... To simply put it, like, digestion requires blood volume, you know, to move into your gut and, like, digest the food. | ||
| So when you're running, especially when it's hot, your body's also trying to use your blood volume for muscle function and cooling and things like that. | ||
| So by kind of introducing another use for that blood volume, your body is running out of resources to kind of make all those things... | ||
| Run smoothly. | ||
| Which is why a lot of times in ultramarathons people find out like they have the worst luck with like throwing up and stomach issues when it gets really hot out. | ||
| Because their body's got to go double down on the cooling side of things with the blood volume and then it's like well something's got to give so it just pukes up everything you put in your stomach. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| Is there a way to mitigate that? | ||
| Eat less. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| So if you're running, what's a size portion? | ||
| Say if you're doing a 100 miler and you have to pause for fuel. | ||
| I'll typically aim for around 100 to 200 calories an hour when I'm doing a 100 miler. | ||
| And to kind of put that in perspective, when I was high carb, I was aiming for 300, 400, and sometimes even 500 calories an hour. | ||
| So when I kind of went into the approach where fat was my primary fuel source, the need for that carbohydrate essentially got cut in half, if not more. | ||
| And for me, that's a win as long as energy levels are the same, because it means I have to eat less during the race. | ||
| It's one less logistic thing, one less potential stomach issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what's a typical meal? | |
| While you're running. | ||
| Oh, while I'm running. | ||
| You know, I usually stick to, like, water-based stuff. | ||
| So, like, I'll use a product called X Endurance Fuel 5. And it's essentially, like, a really, really high-level sports drink with, like, a varying – it's carbohydrate-based. | ||
| And I can tell you why I use carbohydrates instead of fats during a race in a minute, too, if you want. | ||
| But it's like five different types of kind of carbohydrate that release at varying points. | ||
| So you get some that's kind of a little quick jolt and others that are more sustained like kind of like a sweet potato type of a release. | ||
| So I'll be just trickling that in. | ||
| So like if I'm doing like a hundred miler and let's say I'm aiming for like 30 to 40 ounces of water per hour to kind of stay on top of hydration, I'll put... | ||
| You know, 100 to 200 calories worth of that stuff in that water. | ||
| So then I'm kind of killing two birds with one stone and getting my fuel in as well as hydrating at the same time. | ||
| And why are you taking carbohydrates while you're running instead of fats? | ||
| Yeah, so that's the other thing. | ||
| And I see this as somewhat of a... | ||
| I don't know if it's an issue necessarily, but it's an interesting thing at the very least. | ||
| When I talk to folks who are really into the high-fat approach, some of them are zero-carb or really ketogenic all the time, 24-7, they'll be taking in fat sources during a race. | ||
| And I've never understood that, just because... | ||
| When you look at your body's energy systems during a race, like you have your glycogen stores and then you have body fat. | ||
| And I think a lot of people kind of get misled and they think, oh, I'm a really lean runner, so I can't rely on body fat. | ||
| When in reality, even the leanest endurance athletes have enough body fat to get through an endurance race. | ||
| Like even if you're 4%, 5% body fat at your leanest, that's a much bigger fuel source than your glycogen reserves. | ||
| So, when I'm doing a race, I've got enough fat to take care of the fat metabolizing portion of that energy requirement for the race. | ||
| What I might run out of is those glycogen stores, which are really small in comparison. | ||
| So, I'm trying to just slowly trickle in the sugar or the carbohydrate. | ||
| During a race, just enough to kind of keep my glycogen stores where I want to be so I can hit the gas if I need to, but not at the level where it's going to cause stomach distress or compromise or heavily compromise my body's willingness or ability to burn fat either. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| So as you're running, your body could switch back and forth between fats and carbohydrates because you're so fat-adapted? | ||
| Yeah, and it's actually probably happening simultaneously. | ||
| It's just at different rates. | ||
| Someone who's really fat-adapted, they could be running kind of the same effort, and the fat-adapted person might be burning 80% fat, 20% carbohydrate, and the carb-dependent person might be a 50-50 split. | ||
| So that carb-dependent person is going to exhaust their glycogen stores a lot quicker, or they're going to have to fuel themselves at a much higher rate to make up for that deficit. | ||
| And when you look at, like, how difficult that is, because, you know, some of these, especially some of these mountain races where you're running uphill, it's like you might be burning 800-plus calories an hour, and it's really hard. | ||
| Yeah, that's a different animal, right? | ||
| Yeah, and it's really hard to replace that on the fly. | ||
| Yeah, those running uphill ones, I would think that's a much more difficult race. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a different setup. | ||
| It's, you know, it's one of those things where I'm pretty new to that, actually. | ||
| Like, most of my ultra running career, I focus more on flat stuff. | ||
| And part of that just because I've lived in a lot of flat areas. | ||
| And like I was kind of saying earlier, if you really want to nail a race, you have to be specific. | ||
| So I learned kind of early, probably around like 2013 or so, that it was in my best interest to make my peak races flat ones if I really wanted to meet my full potential. | ||
| Now I live in Phoenix, so I've got a lot more access to mountains. | ||
| I can get on the trails and do some significant climbing right out my back door. | ||
| So I've certainly been able to practice that more. | ||
| And as I've gotten more competent at it, I do recognize like, oh, it's not quite as hard. | ||
| As I thought it was originally because I was going into it essentially under-trained. | ||
| Whereas now it's like I go into it and I'm like, oh, I'm more adjusted to this. | ||
| So, I mean, it's still hard. | ||
| Like going uphill is hard no matter how you skin it. | ||
| But it's like it's one of those things where if you kind of figure out the pace, it shouldn't be any more hard. | ||
| Like it should be just as hard to run flat because you're going to have to run faster. | ||
| And it's just then it just comes down to, I think, the right training and pacing everything right. | ||
| It's interesting you're saying you're living in Phoenix. | ||
| Do you run the summer in Phoenix? | ||
| Because Phoenix is fucking insanely hot. | ||
| So I moved there in January. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good move. | |
| Big wake-up call come June. | ||
| You're like, whoa! | ||
| Yeah, it'll be warm. | ||
| I actually kind of like it because right now I'm training for the Western States 100. And that's in, it starts in Squaw Valley and ends in Auburn, California. | ||
| And they go through like these four canyons that can get brutally hot, like 110 plus some years. | ||
| Do you run with like a vest where you have water bottles attached to you or anything? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| Yeah, that stuff has come such a long way since I started the sport. | ||
| I remember when I first started, it was pretty primitive type stuff. | ||
| And now the sport is, I think through hiking plays a big role in this too, has gotten like... | ||
| So popular or popular enough where now companies are really dialing that stuff in where you can get like a pack that just sits nice and snug on you and you can put water. | ||
| Like I use a brand called Nathan. | ||
| They have like ones that have bladders on the back where they also have ones you can put water bottles on the front. | ||
| And then just, you know, different setups and stuff. | ||
| So yeah, that's like a must. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, because even in early mornings, it's got to be brutal in Phoenix, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I have yet to see the worst of it. | ||
| Why'd you move there? | ||
| Well, part of it was... | ||
| You want to carry a gun? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| You've got crazy laws for that. | ||
| Well, I moved from Sacramento, so let's say I'm looking into that now. | ||
| It was a combination of things. | ||
| For me, I'm trying to balance a few different things. | ||
| I train a lot. | ||
| I also work for one of my primary sponsors, Ultra Footwear. | ||
| For me to be able to do the stuff for them that I was wanting to do, it made more sense to be in Phoenix. | ||
| Like product testing and stuff like that? | ||
| Yeah, that and just putting on small group runs and events and things like that in the area. | ||
| If I wanted to appropriately handle the territory, Phoenix made a lot more sense than Sacramento. | ||
| Northern California has just grown so much for that company in the last couple of years that they needed to get someone in there who was going to do full-time plus to really cover the area. | ||
| And then I also got engaged in January as well. | ||
| So my fiance, she was best served being in the Phoenix area too. | ||
| So it was kind of a mutual... | ||
| She was from Dallas originally and Phoenix was kind of like a mutually good spot for both of us. | ||
| So we both kind of looked at it as like, well, what do we want? | ||
| And it was we want trails right in our backyard, but we also want access to flat stuff. | ||
| And we actually kind of want the heat because there's races where you need that to train for. | ||
| So when it gets hot earlier, you can prepare for them. | ||
| What a crazy reason to move to Phoenix. | ||
| I'm enjoying the heat for training. | ||
| Well, I'm not even the craziest one in the house. | ||
| My fiancé is a savage. | ||
| She... | ||
| Yeah, her name is Nicole Kalidropoulos. | ||
| I've always thought I'm a hard worker and someone who puts a lot of time and effort into things I do. | ||
| And then I met her and she's cut from the jock-o-cloth, let's put it that way. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| She works for a company called Towers Watson and manages the Midwest division for stuff. | ||
| So she'll be on a conference call with Amazon and then You know, go out and run three hours after that and then come back and get on another conference call and just keeps going and going and going. | ||
| So, yeah, it's, you know, it made sense for her job and my job to kind of be in Phoenix. | ||
| And with as busy as she is and as busy as I can get from time to time, like, it's nice to be able to go out your backyard and be on the trail five minutes later. | ||
| Whereas both of us didn't have that before. | ||
| We both had to drive to get to any kind of trail, especially her. | ||
| Dallas, it was a lot of just, like, flat road running in her area. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Dallas doesn't have hardly any hills. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Well, and that's what is impressive with, like, so she's done Western States a few times, the race I was telling her before with the Canyons, and she's been sixth place there twice, just training on flat roads, basically. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Does she do anything to augment that, like doing lunges or anything like that? | ||
| Uh, she does, uh, some strength work and stuff, but really, you know, a lot of it was just, you know, she would go out and run and run a lot. | ||
| And then I'm sure like she hasn't met her full potential at that specific event or certainly like mountain type races just because she wasn't trained in mountains, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she's She's good, though. | ||
| She was a Division I recruit for college and stuff back in the day, so she's got some running talent, no doubt. | ||
| And then she puts in the work, because consistency is a huge thing. | ||
| If you can't find the specific stuff and you're really geeked about a specific race, I don't think not having the right training environment is a reason to not do it if you're excited to do it. | ||
| So for her, she was more excited to get out on the trails than she was to go do something on a track or a flat road like I was. | ||
| So for her, it was like, even if I'm not quite where I would like to be, I'm going to do it anyway. | ||
| Now, I'm not familiar with ultra footwear, but what I wanted to ask you is, does anybody wear minimalist shoes and run these ultra marathons? | ||
| Yeah, there was actually a gal, I cannot remember her name, this was a couple years ago, who ran ultras in those Vibrant Five Fingers. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and the trail stuff too. | ||
| She must have been a beast. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's hard to run just a couple miles in those things. | ||
| Yeah, and it's, you know, it's interesting because, so Ultra Footwear made this shoe this last year called the Vanish, and it's essentially a minimalist shoe. | ||
| Just like a little bit of fabric on the top, super hard, flat base, and that's kind of what I like when I'm on a road or a track. | ||
| So I was wearing that. | ||
| It's called the Vanish? | ||
| The Vanish, yeah. | ||
| Can you pull that up and see what that looks like? | ||
| So I went to this ultra race and I wore those thinking I'm going to have the lightest shoe out of anyone here. | ||
| Three guys show up running completely barefoot. | ||
| What? | ||
| They ran an ultra-marathon barefoot? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Dude, that's another level. | ||
| Yeah, there was one guy who's... | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| He's like a 2.22 or 2.23 marathoner, and he's barefoot, and he said... | ||
| He runs a marathon barefoot? | ||
| So he doesn't do the marathon barefoot. | ||
| He actually said that the... | ||
| So that's a little bit of padding in that, it looks like, or unless there's a lip on the outside. | ||
| Is that the vanish, or is that the... | ||
| It says vanish. | ||
| Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so there's a little bit there. | ||
| There's a carbon fiber plate, and you see where that little cut is in there? | ||
| There's a carbon fiber plate in there that makes it a little more firm. | ||
| So what I'm looking for in a shoe, when I'm looking for that natural feel, is something that's got a firm midsole or a firm durometer, because I don't want to squish down into the shoe. | ||
| I want to pop right off the ground. | ||
| And I think, really, that is just... | ||
| I mean, you've probably experienced this with the Vibrams, where... | ||
| If you spend the time, your feet get stronger and stronger and stronger. | ||
| And it's only a matter of time before they get strong enough. | ||
| You just got to keep kind of working at it. | ||
| Just like, you know, a weightlifter, you know, when they start out weightlifting, they're nowhere near where they are 10 years later. | ||
| So like for me, back in 2012, 12, I think? | ||
| I kind of, like, you know, I read Born to Run. | ||
| Have you heard of that book? | ||
| Yeah, I've heard it's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I read that and I was like, this is intriguing, you know, and it made a lot of sense too. | ||
| It's like, you know, if we were meant to have a wedge on our heel, like, we would have had a wedge on our heel. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's a ridiculous thing that Nike came up with and it's really unfortunate that so many people have adopted that and they run heel first like that. | ||
| Yeah, well, and the problem, I think, too, is that, like, a shoe is essentially a cast for your foot. | ||
| Even that Vanish that I had up there, that's a little cast compared to what you're normally going to see, but it's still a cast. | ||
| That's why I like those five fingers, because there's nothing. | ||
| There's just a very, very flexible piece of rubber underneath, and it's a glove for your feet. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, people just don't know that I think that you can really work those foot muscles to a point where you can exhaust them the way you would in a shoe. | ||
| It just takes a lot of time because, like, if I broke my arm and put a cast on it and then, like, six, eight weeks later got the cast taken off, I went back in the weight room and did a normal routine, I would be wrecked the next day. | ||
| So when you take your foot out of that shoe cast you have it in or take it out of the position it's gotten used to and put it in a different position, it's like taking a cast off and trying to do that full mode of training or motion. | ||
| So when I first kind of got into ultra running, I worked my way down to a minimalist shoe. | ||
| I spent probably six months before I was running exclusively in something that was really minimalist. | ||
| And when I say minimalist, I mean zero drop and no cushion or little to no cushion. | ||
| Because I think some people confuse that too. | ||
| Like the shoe you saw up there, because you're like, oh, it looks like it's got a little bit of padding there. | ||
| So that's like zero drop with cushioning. | ||
| Or that shoe really doesn't have a lot of cushioning. | ||
| But there are shoes that Ultra makes that does. | ||
| And what that does is it takes you from like, the way I describe it, this is someone in like a, Someone in a traditional running shoe, real built up, cushioned, a lot of support is on one end of the spectrum. | ||
| Barefoot runner like those dudes that I ran into at the track, they're on the other end of the spectrum. | ||
| There's all these steps in between to get to that. | ||
| I can't believe people run ultras barefoot. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| I don't think there's too many people doing it. | ||
| Look at this fucking savage. | ||
| Look at this dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Barefoot Ted. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Barefoot Ted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hi, Ted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He also uses this. | |
| The sandal, yeah. | ||
| Runs in a sandal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it wasn't that in the Born to One that these guys had made sandals out of tires. | ||
| Yeah, uh-huh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've been using something called a... | ||
| Pull up this Vivo Vivo Barefoot. | ||
| I've been using these. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What I like about these is that I don't have to look where I step. | ||
| There's no cushioning at all. | ||
| The trail one, I use that one on the far left. | ||
| The far left? | ||
| Yeah, that one. | ||
| There's no cushion to it, but it's got some tread and the bottom is hard enough so that I can run on hard rocks. | ||
| And then I don't think about it. | ||
| It's hard to tell in that image how little there is underneath it. | ||
| But there's nothing going on in terms of like there's no squish to it at all. | ||
| There's just some good size knobs so you have some good tread so you can get good traction and dirt and mud and stuff like that. | ||
| But they weigh nothing. | ||
| Yeah, and you can crumble that thing up. | ||
| So your foot muscles are flexing every which way they work. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| It's made a big difference with me, man. | ||
| But honestly, the five fingers are probably the best for that. | ||
| They just don't have as much traction and I have to look where I'm stepping. | ||
| I have to be careful. | ||
| Sharp rocks and stuff, I have to look down. | ||
| Don't step on that one. | ||
| I don't like looking. | ||
| I'd rather just run. | ||
| With those, I can just run. | ||
| I can get a faster pace with those. | ||
| That's where I draw the line, too. | ||
| When I'm on the roads and on the track, I don't mind having that no cushion type of thing. | ||
| When I go on the trails in Phoenix, it's very rocky and hard. | ||
| Then I'll use a shoe called the King MT. That's kind of like the one you had there. | ||
| It's a little less nimble, I would say, than that one. | ||
| It's got that That, like, really aggressive lug. | ||
| It's got the foot-shaped toe box, so I don't feel like my feet are getting pinched together. | ||
| What do you think Barefoot Ted does? | ||
| On the trails? | ||
| Those trails. | ||
| I think he probably wears those sandals. | ||
| Oh, probably, right? | ||
| Yeah, just something where he's got just something that keeps him from getting cut. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there are guys who just do that barefoot, too. | ||
| Fucking animals. | ||
| I think there's very few, but it's doable. | ||
| Have you ever seen that show, Dual Survivor? | ||
| It's one of those wacky Survivor shows. | ||
| I don't know if I've seen that one. | ||
| This one guy, I think his name's Cory, who has the most disgusting feet I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Almost as disgusting as that one guy was cutting the bottom of his feet off and feeding it to dogs. | ||
| Remember that guy with a knife? | ||
| Yeah, that video's awful to watch. | ||
| But this guy walks barefoot everywhere and his idea is like, you gotta toughen your feet up because you might not have shoes. | ||
| You know, they get real crazy with this whole survivalist thing. | ||
| So this guy basically has, I'm not joking, like a good solid half inch of callus under his entire foot. | ||
| It's amazing what the human body will do when you put it in a position to need to. | ||
| Yeah, when it has to adapt. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the reasons why I'm fascinated by guys like you, these ultra runners, is because for the average person, that's an impossible feat. | ||
| But you've built... | ||
| There's that guy's foot. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Dude, what in the fuck? | ||
| It looks like elephant skin. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking gnarly. | ||
| But guys like you have adapted your body to this position where you know you can do that, and it's just a matter of putting in the training runs and making sure you're fueling up correctly. | ||
| A 100-mile race is not a question whether or not you can do it. | ||
| It's how fast you can do it. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| The cool thing, and this might go back to what you asked, like, why ultramarathons? | ||
| And I think it is, part of it, too, is, like, in 100 miles, it's almost like it's not a matter of when is something going to go wrong. | ||
| It's a matter of when and how do you respond to it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what's a typical thing that goes wrong? | ||
| You know, I think a lot of people will have, like, cramping or they'll bonk. | ||
| I mean, this is one of the reasons why I love the high-fat approach is because, like, bonking from the, like, energy side of things is essentially non-existent. | ||
| Explain bonking to people who don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| So bonking is essentially what happens, and I think it's actually more common in the marathon just because people are running a lot faster in those. | ||
| But essentially what's happening is you're depleting your glycogen stores to the point where your body doesn't really have access to that fuel substrate anymore. | ||
| And if you're not good at metabolizing fat or you cannot burn fat at a high rate at a decent clip, it grinds you to a halt. | ||
| You see people staggering and falling over and losing their mind, hallucinating and stuff like that in those situations. | ||
| So bonking is something that is an issue with ultramarathons because you're out there for so long. | ||
| If you get behind on fueling, you could bonk and stuff like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I talked about before, there's a lot of logistics with an ultramarathon, and these variables are just so prevalent when you're out there that long, that if you can eliminate some of those or reduce the potential of them flaring up, that's usually a win, because then there's less chance of something popping up that you wouldn't expect or an uncertain thing happening during the race. | ||
| But it still happened. | ||
| I would say the most efficient 100 miler I've done is when I ran 11 hours and 40 minutes and 55 seconds at a race in 2015. Holy shit. | ||
| You ran 100 miles in 11 hours? | ||
| Yeah, that was one on the track. | ||
| I don't give a fuck if it was on the moon. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You ran 11 hours, you ran 100 miles. | ||
| Yeah, so I think the thing that... | ||
| How long does it take to drive 100 miles? | ||
| Okay, it takes... | ||
| I mean, if you go 100 miles an hour, it takes an hour. | ||
| Well, it might take me longer to get to the airport if the traffic on the 405 is bad. | ||
| That is fucking crazy. | ||
| How Zach Bitter broke the U.S. 100-mile record. | ||
| You average seven fucking minutes per mile for almost 12 hours. | ||
| Dude, that is insane. | ||
| That is fucking insane. | ||
| Bert Kreischer, he brags when he runs seven minute miles for like three miles. | ||
| What did Bert end up running that LA marathon in? | ||
| Six and a half. | ||
| Six and a half? | ||
| I think it was shorter than that. | ||
| I think it was five. | ||
| Five something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, no, no, Ari's dad. | ||
| He's like, oh, fucking Jamie! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jamie's giving me a bad rap! | |
| Well, I'll say this here. | ||
| Bert, if you're listening, contact me. | ||
| I'll get you to four and a half in six months. | ||
| Bert! | ||
| You heard him! | ||
| Zach is a fucking man. | ||
| If he tells you he can do it... | ||
| Dude, that is an incredible number. | ||
| That you broke the U.S. 100 mile record by running seven fucking minutes per mile. | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| The interesting thing I thought about that event was, when I was talking about efficiency, is I stopped twice during that race. | ||
| And it was for maybe a total of like 60, at most 90 seconds total. | ||
| And it was just to pee two times. | ||
| Did you ever thought about just peeing your pants and just keep running? | ||
| Wear black shorts. | ||
| Keep the party rolling. | ||
| There was a guy who did that. | ||
| It was two years before I did that race, and he was trying to break 13 hours, and he was right on the edge. | ||
| He just whipped it out and peed all over the track, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Why would he be just peeing his own pants? | ||
| I don't know, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think that's probably what I would do. | ||
| Yeah, that guy doodied himself. | ||
| Well, everyone who's been doing endurance sport long enough will have a situation like that, unfortunately. | ||
| That guy's got it in the front of his legs. | ||
| He must have just exploded. | ||
| He lost it, yeah. | ||
| It must have been a bomb. | ||
| Bomb went off. | ||
| Oof, yeah, it's, you know, it's... | ||
| It's okay to poop your pants. | ||
| This guy has a sign. | ||
| Is that him? | ||
| With the same guy? | ||
| Different person. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very sensitive subject for folks. | ||
| Yeah, it's a running joke in the endurance running community though, because if you do it long enough, it's going to probably happen to you eventually. | ||
| Oh, it has to, right? | ||
| I would imagine you're running 100 miles and your body's going to be misfires. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| How do you time your meals before you run? | ||
| Say if you're going to run 100 miles, when's your last meal before you get there? | ||
| Yeah, so I'll eat a big dinner the night before, probably around like 4 or 5 o'clock. | ||
| And what would that be? | ||
| So I'll do like a huge steak. | ||
| I try to keep... | ||
| 16 ounces, 20 ounces? | ||
| Yeah, at least. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| 1620 is probably a pretty good number. | ||
| How much do you weigh? | ||
| 140 pounds, give or take. | ||
| That's a lot of fucking meat. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Well, this is where it gets fascinating with the lifestyle thing I was telling you about is like there's days during the year where like I'm in training where I'm metabolizing two to three times my resting metabolic rate. | ||
| So I've got to feed myself appropriately for that. | ||
| And that means a lot of steak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So is that your primary food source? | ||
| I don't know if I'd say steak for sure, but definitely fatty meat sources. | ||
| A lot of like saturated fat-based oils like coconut oil, like ghee, that sort of thing. | ||
| But yeah, I don't shy away from meat. | ||
| I usually have meat or eggs for every meal for the most part. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| In every meal, I should say. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of talk lately about the carnivore diet. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are delving into that, including Jordan Peterson's daughter, which is a really interesting case because she had severe autoimmune disorder. | ||
| Like, she had some severe issues with, like, horrible arthritis, where she's had... | ||
| I know she's had hip replacements, and I believe she's having an ankle replaced soon, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Like, severe issues, and... | ||
| If she eats anything other than meat, it flares up horribly. | ||
| It's really crazy. | ||
| I want to try to talk to her, maybe even get her in here, but I've never heard anything like that. | ||
| I thought I heard somewhere, it was after the last time you had Jordan on, where he was telling you about how he just basically eats meats and greens. | ||
| That was on his daughter's recommendation. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's cut out all vegetables right now for at least a trial. | ||
| I thought I saw something about that. | ||
| But yeah, it's one of those things where I think like, it's like what I was saying before, like why I don't necessarily want people to say like, well, Zach is saying everyone should do exactly what he's doing and then, you know, they... | ||
| That's important to bring up, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Everybody's body is different. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, to the point where, like, you have people like that, like, when I had, like, the issues I were having were incredibly minor compared to Jordan Peterson's daughter. | ||
| Like, I mean, she's in a spot where, you know, she had to make changes if she wanted to even just probably do daily activities. | ||
| And, you know, that's, I think, the hard part for people to kind of understand is, like, People are at different stages. | ||
| No one's breaking themselves overnight. | ||
| So it's like this is something that's chipping away at people, and sometimes it chips away at them quicker, some people, and takes longer for others. | ||
| So if you have an issue like that, it's like you almost have to go back to square one and say, give me a couple things that... | ||
| I know aren't going to upset me. | ||
| And let's start from there and see if we can start adding things back eventually, maybe. | ||
| Sean Baker, you had on the podcast. | ||
| We actually started recording some podcasts together. | ||
| And we are having this gal come on who's been a carnivore for eight years. | ||
| And she was kind of in that situation where she had a whole bunch of goofy things going on, even with the keto protocol, and she eventually just cut everything up with meat and has been doing great ever since. | ||
| That's a vegan's nightmare, hearing things like that, like, no! | ||
| I wish people could separate their ideology from the reality of certain people's bodies. | ||
| And unfortunately, and this is very unfortunately, you You've got to separate also all the horrors that we associate with factory farming and all the other things that we associate with meat and meat consumption. | ||
| Those things are real and terrible and absolutely should be avoided and absolutely factory farmers should be illegal. | ||
| I think it's one of the great horrors of modern society. | ||
| I really, really do. | ||
| But take that away. | ||
| And some people don't think animals should die at all, but they don't live forever and other animals eat them. | ||
| And it's just like, this is just a part of life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then you're into health and whether or not consuming meat is actually healthy. | ||
| And there's no evidence that it's not. | ||
| There's none. | ||
| Yeah, you know, the thing that, like, I want a vegan to sit me down and explain to me is that, like, when I look at bioavailability of micronutrients, it's like you can't find much better than liver. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's like the stuff is super available. | ||
| Well, that's why alpha wolves immediately go to the liver when they kill something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, so like, it's like, I need that, like, I don't know, I'm sure there's ranges of what people can do in terms of absorbing something like a non-heme iron versus a heme iron, but like, for me, it's like, if my iron levels were low, the first thing I'm going to, I'm doubling down on liver. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Doubling down on liver and it's like... | ||
| As far as nutrients. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're just talking about just from a purely objective standpoint, the consumption of nutrients, organ meats are some of the best. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| You're aware of Chris Kresser? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Chris was a macrobiotic vegan and, you know, I mean, he was like fully hardcore and just having all sorts of huge issues. | ||
| His body just didn't react to it and he fixed all that by eating organ meat and that's like his primary food source. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the gal's name? | ||
| There's a lady who, I can't remember what she had. | ||
| I'm not going to think of it, but if I do, I'll remember. | ||
| But she did pretty much the same thing. | ||
| But some people are fine with a vegan diet, too. | ||
| That's the other thing that's important to point out. | ||
| It might not be the best for them in terms of bioavailability of nutrients, but it's certainly better than the standard Western diet, standard American diet. | ||
| But for some people, they can get by with it and not have any issues. | ||
| Well, and some people get away with even more. | ||
| I mean, Courtney DeWalter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| She eats candy, right? | ||
| She eats candy and drinks beer and eats nachos. | ||
| We took her to a bagel place. | ||
| She fucking chowed down with bagels and cream cheese. | ||
| She's a fucking animal, man. | ||
| I read an article about her not too long ago, and she said that she's got, like, candy jars sitting around the house. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she's like, before I go for a run, I'll go anywhere from just, like, you know, nibbling on it to a small stomach ache. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So we're not operating from the same field, I guess, in that regard. | ||
| Well, she's a real freak, man. | ||
| You know, there's people that know her that just, they're stunned by her. | ||
| Because what's interesting about her is she's not a fast runner in, per se, like the way she would run a marathon. | ||
| She'd run a marathon in like three hours. | ||
| So did she talk about how she got into running when she was on here? | ||
| I believe she did. | ||
| Do you remember her specifically, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just sort of like you. | |
| She ran in high school, I think, a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, she was teaching as well. | ||
| Okay, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And while she was teaching, she was running and doing these things. | ||
| And then eventually she was able to get enough sponsors so that she could run full-time, which is what she does now. | ||
| But with her, I think – and this is one of the reasons why I'm fascinated by you folks – With her, it's her mind. | ||
| Her mind is just unbelievably powerful. | ||
| When she was experiencing cornea edemas, she couldn't fucking see, man. | ||
| She was literally blind. | ||
| She barely could see her feet. | ||
| And she still won! | ||
| She fell, cracked her head open, blood's pouring down her head, and she's still won. | ||
| Was that at Run Rabbit Run? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I think that was what it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's what it was. | ||
| And there's an image of her crossing the finish line. | ||
| Literally can't see shit. | ||
| She's got her hands in front of her. | ||
| She's covered in blood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, she's a fucking savage! | |
| She's... | ||
| If you take... | ||
| The interesting thing about ultramarathons is, like, we kind of... | ||
| We're small enough sport where it's like, you can't really say, like, oh, I'm a hundred miler. | ||
| It's like, okay... | ||
| Everybody would know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it's like... | ||
| Yeah, I know what you're talking about. | ||
| So, like, you have everything from a 50 kilometer that's got over 10,000 feet of climbing and descending to a six-day event on a track, and they're all the same sport. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you look at, like, people who can kind of do really well at all of them, or in Courtney's case, really well at all of them, you can't find a better female, on the female side of things, someone who can do it better than that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, she does it, she goes on the track, kills it, she goes in 240 miles through the mountains, kills it. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, she's something really, really unusual. | ||
| You know, a buddy, my friend Brian was texting me about her while she was getting... | ||
| Brian, he doesn't even run, I don't think, or barely. | ||
| But he was just so fascinated by this one woman that was so far ahead of everybody. | ||
| He was like, what the fuck is she doing, man? | ||
| She beat the second place guy by 10 hours in a 238 mile race. | ||
| 22 miles she was ahead of him. | ||
| Yeah, that's an interesting topic, too, where men and women in ultramarathoning and how that kind of... | ||
| It's one of the rare races where women can win. | ||
| Yeah, and the interesting thing to me about it is women can and do win some races, but when they're like... | ||
| Courtney's very much the most, I would say, talented person to do one of the 200 milers yet. | ||
| There hasn't been a lot of what... | ||
| The top of the sport hasn't really moved into that. | ||
| I mean, Courtney certainly is top of the sport, but she's... | ||
| Do you think she's the best? | ||
| I think she's the best woman all around. | ||
| Certainly in the United States. | ||
| Do you think she's the best at running those 200 milers? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is it dependent upon altitude gain and loss? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| And just variables to the day. | ||
| There's a guy named Killian Jornet. | ||
| How do you spell his last name? | ||
| J-O-R-N-E-T. And, uh, he won the, um, or he, he's, he's, he's essentially the best mountain runner by far. | ||
| Like there's maybe one other guy who could maybe compete with him at something under a hundred miles. | ||
| But if it's like, he's, he's, he would probably like beat everyone by who knows how much in a 200. We've seen one of these videos before. | ||
| Yeah, he'll run on these ridge lines and it'll be death on both sides and he just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Play that, Jimmy. | |
| These fucking guys, man. | ||
| Oh, I have seen this. | ||
| This isn't even nearly as thin as some of them get. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He looks like a freak, too. | ||
| A GoPro strapped to his head? | ||
| That's gotta throw your balance off. | ||
| He's running with a GoPro! | ||
| Put that down! | ||
| Pay attention! | ||
| If that was my son, I'd be like, pay attention to where you're running, kid! | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| Yeah, he's interesting, because, I mean, his parents were, like, mountaineers, I think, and, like, so he was, like, basically playing in the mountains at, like, age three and basically grew up doing this stuff, so... | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah, so he's the type of guy who, like, he's probably the best in the sport right now, and it's... | ||
| Oh my god, he's jumping around. | ||
| He's an asshole. | ||
| He's an asshole. | ||
| He is running, folks. | ||
| What is this video? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's on his Instagram. | |
| I don't really know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And spell his name K-I... Is that two L's? | ||
| One L. One L-I-A-N-J-O-R-N-E-T. And he's running in Chamoy... | ||
| How do you say that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
France. | |
| Chamonix. | ||
| Chamonix. | ||
| Chamonix, France. | ||
| And he's running on what looks like the fin of a shark if a shark was the size of a mountain. | ||
| This guy's a fucking animal, man. | ||
| That is so scary. | ||
| I get sweaty. | ||
| My hands are sweating. | ||
| It's scared just watching it. | ||
| And so he's the best? | ||
| Yeah, on the mountains for sure. | ||
| He doesn't do anything that's not mountainous. | ||
| He did Western States and won it in 2011, and he was complaining about it being too flat. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| What is the gain and loss of elevation in Western States? | ||
| That one's net downhill, so it's 23,000 feet down, 17,000 feet up. | ||
| What? | ||
| He's complaining about that? | ||
| Yeah, it's too flat. | ||
| 17,000 feet up? | ||
| And it gets much crazier in that you can do 50 milers or 100Ks that have the same profile as that. | ||
| If you're doing what he's doing, that probably does feel kind of flat for him. | ||
| He likes that steep technical stuff. | ||
| But yeah, as far as the mountains go, he's the guy to beat for sure. | ||
| And he'll do races on a regular basis when he is running because he's actually a professional skier too. | ||
| So he's only running basically half the year and he's skiing the other half. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So he's a fun dude to follow for sure. | ||
| But yeah, when you look at some of the races that are kind of the big races, like Western States 100 is the most competitive 100 miler in the United States, and Ultra Trail Mount Blanc, which is actually by Chamonix where you saw that video, is probably, at least last year, was the most competitive in the world. | ||
| Those are the races I like to look at to kind of see where the divergence is from the males and the females. | ||
| And if you look at course records and winning times, the men are finishing two plus hours ahead of the women on a pretty regular basis on that type of stuff. | ||
| At Ultra Trail, Mount Blanc, sometimes it's four or five hours. | ||
| It actually is more in line with what you see with other endurance distances, like marathons and stuff like that. | ||
| The crazy thing about it, though, is that doesn't mean that's going to happen every time. | ||
| Like, there's certainly years where women do really well and finish, like, in the top 10 amongst, in, like, Western States or UTMB. | ||
| One year in 2006, this gal, Nikki Kimball, she finished third overall at Western States, which is the highest finishing place for a woman other than this other lady named Ann Trayson, who she doesn't really race anymore. | ||
| But she's kind of like the legend of the sport from the women, where she's won Western States, like, 14 times and had, like, 20 world records at one point and stuff like that. | ||
| But Nikki Kimball, she finished third and part of it was because that was like the hottest year in the Canyons on record. | ||
| And if women do, one thing I'm pretty confident women do better at these 100 miles than men is they're not nearly as stupid. | ||
| Like the men will go out and like if it's competitive... | ||
| It takes one or two guys to kind of run a little too fast and he's going to bring five, six, seven guys with him. | ||
| And then it's actually a fascinating racing concept, I think, because then it's like, if you're watching it, you're like, okay, one of these guys is going to have the race of his life and hold on for dear life and run a spectacular time. | ||
| Everyone else is going to blow up epically. | ||
| When's it going to happen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So you can thin out that men's field really easily when that happens. | ||
| I think the women are a little smarter than that. | ||
| That happened at MOAB, right? | ||
| Wasn't there a guy that was like way out ahead? | ||
| Yeah, that might have been the case. | ||
| Yeah, he dropped off. | ||
| He couldn't keep it up. | ||
| He was probably running way too fast for what he was capable of doing. | ||
| And you see that all the time. | ||
| And it's really easy to do at 100 plus miles because really at the end of the day, like if you feel comfortable at the start, you're probably going too fast. | ||
| Now, how do you pace yourself in something like that? | ||
| Are you using your watch? | ||
| Are you counting steps? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Yeah, I like to get to a point where I can use perceived effort, which is basically listening to my body. | ||
| I can know, okay, this is a little too hard. | ||
| I need to dial it back. | ||
| I'll use heart rate a lot in training to kind of get myself... | ||
| To the fitness I'm looking for. | ||
| Yeah, Rich Roll was talking about that. | ||
| He was saying that he tries to stay under 140 or in the 140 range. | ||
| Yeah, and the thing about heart rate that I... Where I kind of deviate from heart rate is when you start getting into these really long events that go past like two or three hours, heart rate starts losing its value in terms of being able to trust it as like a metric that's going to tell you to do the right thing. | ||
| Like there's so many things that can kind of disrupt that from like dehydration to just cardiac drift. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All kinds of things. | ||
| So I think if an athlete really has things dialed in, they can use heart rate in training and they can look at heart rate if they want, but they also need to connect that with perceived effort so that if something goes wrong with that or issues start coming up with the heart rate side of things, they can still kind of reflect back in on themselves like, okay, this is a sustainable pace for me or this is not a sustainable pace for me. | ||
| Rich Roe, we should point out, is a vegan. | ||
| He's one of the few guys that is fully functional, has no issues at all keeping that diet up. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I think he puts a lot of work into that, I think. | ||
| Oh, you have to. | ||
| I mean, you really have to be just super dedicated to making sure you're getting the proper amount of nutrients, making sure you're getting microalgae and all the different forms of B12. Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And whenever someone comes to me and says, like, I'm a vegan or I'm a vegetarian or something like that, it's like, who should I look to? | ||
| And he's the first guy I point to. | ||
| He's like, if there's someone doing it right, it's him. | ||
| Yeah, no, he's definitely doing it right. | ||
| Now, when it comes to something like Moab 240, how does someone like Courtney blow that whole field away like that? | ||
| I think some of it is just that's a really new event. | ||
| I think they're in their third or fourth year for 200s. | ||
| There's three of them in the United States, and there'll probably be four or five in the next couple of years. | ||
| So it really hasn't... | ||
| It's in its infancy. | ||
| I mean, think of it like with UFC back in the 90s, and then where it is at today. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So those 200s are kind of like UFC was in the 90s. | ||
| I see. | ||
| And if that becomes a thing, if people start gravitating toward it, then you'll see some of these course records just get blown out. | ||
| I mean, we saw that with the 100-mile distance, and we've seen that with a lot of other trail course records. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because a lot of fast guys and gals have moved into this sport in the last 5-10 years. | ||
| So it's been just deeper talent pool, more likely to get a complete genetic freak. | ||
| And the other thing too is a lot of times what you have is you get competitive enough in a sport, then people start playing with fire and training. | ||
| And they're doing it because they know they have to get to their optimal best. | ||
| And sometimes they overtrain? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Overtrain, get hurt. | ||
| But then the people that make it through that are there as fit as they can get. | ||
| So then you can see some really good times. | ||
| Do you peak for a race? | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| The same way a fighter would peak for a fight? | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| I'll usually pick two, maybe three races a year. | ||
| And those are the ones that I'm really going to try to nail. | ||
| Those are the ones where... | ||
| I'm going to try to do everything I can to be ready to hurt during that race. | ||
| And then I'll usually do maybe... | ||
| It's usually ranged. | ||
| I'll usually do about six to eight ultra marathons in a year. | ||
| And then the other ones are kind of like those training races that I talked about before. | ||
| Or every once in a while I'll get invited to a race that's overseas and it's like a free trip to go to China or something like that. | ||
| Well, speaking of hurting during a race, I know that a lot of ultra runners are utilizing CBD and even using edible marijuana while they run, and that they found that this is a great performance enhancing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't... | ||
| Have you ever messed around with CBD or... | ||
| Yeah, not within workouts, though. | ||
| Like, more as, like, a sleep aid than anything. | ||
| But, like, or an inflammation thing. | ||
| So it's, like, more of a post-workout type. | ||
| Wasn't there... | ||
| There was an Esquire article or Maxim, one of them, Guy Guy magazine type things, and it was all about marijuana and ultra-running. | ||
| And that it's somehow or another become a big part of it for a lot of these guys. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting because, like, you know, marijuana use, I'm not sure about CBD, but marijuana use is, like, is illegal in competition. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| In all of them? | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| So there's, like, a USADA-type standard? | ||
| Yeah, it's the same. | ||
| It's the USADA protocol. | ||
| So I think it's, like, it has to be below a certain level for, like... | ||
| That's great, then. | ||
| So they're testing you for EPO and all those things? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's still pretty primitive and ultra-running. | ||
| Like, there's testing at some of the big races, and that's even relatively new, like, in the last year or so. | ||
| So, like, Western states, they'll test the top 10 on each side and then a few random people. | ||
| And then, I think, UTMB, which is the other big 100-mile I was talking about, they test. | ||
| Like, I was tested after... | ||
| When I broke the 12-hour world record in 2013, I got tested after that. | ||
| Have there been any big superstars that pissed hot? | ||
| There's been people who have. | ||
| They weren't like individuals that were kind of like a poster child of the sport necessarily. | ||
| Not like Lance Armstrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Nothing like that. | ||
| It's really interesting because there's certainly people skirting the rules in ultramarathon running. | ||
| I have no doubt about it. | ||
| What do you think they're doing? | ||
| Probably like... | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I doubt they're doing like blood transfusion things like Tour de France style because I mean that's an expensive hard thing to kind of put together. | ||
| You need a doctor essentially if I'm understanding it all right. | ||
| So they're probably just doing little like minor things like maybe like peptides or something like that would be my guess. | ||
| But I also do think it's not nearly like people I think nowadays like with Icarus and all that stuff like now people are on the opposite side of what they were a few years ago where they suspect everyone's doing it. | ||
| Versus, ah, no, they're not doing it. | ||
| They haven't gotten caught yet, which is where we were probably a few years ago. | ||
| In ultra running, I think the culture plays a huge role in that. | ||
| I mean, when you had Lance on, I think he was pretty good about talking about how you come into the sport, you go over to Europe to race, and they ask you to get on a protocol. | ||
| If you say no, they send you back. | ||
| That's a cultural thing then, too. | ||
| It's like you have to do it to be in the sport, almost. | ||
| With ultra running, it's kind of the opposite, I think. | ||
| I think the culture is stay away from that stuff. | ||
| Like, we don't want that. | ||
| Because it's a mind thing, almost more than anything, which is why people like Courtney, who aren't maybe the fastest marathon runners, but have this just bulletproof mind that allows them to compete. | ||
| And that you really, there's no supplement for your mind, for willpower. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And there's things that can go wrong just from the duration you're out there. | ||
| Yeah, I can imagine. | ||
| I mean, it seems to be, so much of it seems to be your ability to deal with discomfort and pain and just press on. | ||
| Yeah, you know, the way I describe ultramarathon running is, it's still a running sport. | ||
| See, runner's high. | ||
| The athletes use marijuana to improve their training. | ||
| What was that in? | ||
| Was it in Esquire? | ||
| I typed in Esquire. | ||
| I typed both of those in yet, but it was Guardian case. | ||
| Stone marathon runners may seem like walking contradictions, but there are hints that the drug and long-distance running could go hand in hand. | ||
| I'll tell you what, man. | ||
| I've only done it a few times where I got super baked and went running. | ||
| It feels awesome. | ||
| It feels great. | ||
| You feel so scared, though. | ||
| Like, ah, what am I doing? | ||
| But I would imagine for some people it's, you know, euphoric. | ||
| 50% of the runners I mean are avid cannabis users. | ||
| To say almost none of them are open about it, says Avery Collins. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Avery Collins is, you know, he's interesting because he's a spokesperson for marijuana use and, you know, You don't have to look far into marijuana and how it got to be where it is in terms of its legality or illegality to recognize there's some tomfoolery going on there. | ||
| I mean, you don't have to be a historian to find out... | ||
| Why that's criminalized, whereas alcohol isn't, and that sort of thing. | ||
| And Avery's been a pretty big proponent about destigmatizing it. | ||
| But he understands that it's illegal in competition, and I think he's been tested at least twice after races. | ||
| I mean, he was sixth at Western States last year, so he had gotten tested for that. | ||
| Is caffeine illegal in competition? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think at a certain level, I think it is, although they may have just removed it. | ||
| I'm trying to remember if I saw that right. | ||
| But it used to be like you can have caffeine, but at a certain level it would be illegal, but it was like the equivalent of like 16 cups of coffee or something like that. | ||
| So you'd have to put down like four of those nitros or six of those nitros right before your race if you wanted any chance of going over that. | ||
| And you'd probably go into cardiac arrest before then. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And by the time you got to the end of the race, it would probably be out of your system anyway. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Well, it's interesting. | ||
| I actually, this is diverging a little bit, but I read a story a while ago that there was some high school kid who was playing football and he like slammed a Red Bull or some, one of those like high caffeine energy drinks and then like was like on the kick return team or something and returned a kick for a touchdown and was just jacked out of his mind, slammed another one and then went back on the field and had a heart attack or something. | ||
| I'm sure it could happen if you go too hard. | ||
| It's not just caffeine, right? | ||
| A lot of those things have a bunch of other wacky stimulants in them, too. | ||
| Remember Red Lines? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I took one of those once, I drank the whole bottle, and then I looked at it, it says like four servings. | ||
| I'm like, oh, shit. | ||
| And each serving is like 150 milligrams of caffeine or something nuts. | ||
| Yeah, well, and then they put a bunch of other stimulants in there that people don't know about. | ||
| Yeah, taurine and all sorts of other shit in there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the kind of those pre-workout supplements were kind of wild. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah, ephedrine. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, remember those ripped fuel? | ||
| I took ripped fuel once and went to a jiu-jitsu class. | ||
| I had to stop. | ||
| I had to stop training. | ||
| I'm like, my heart is beating so fast. | ||
| I could die here. | ||
| Like, this is not good. | ||
| And that was right before they pulled it off the market. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Cut it in just in time, I guess. | ||
| There was another thing they pulled off the market, too, that was killing people. | ||
|
unidentified
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Was it called Jack 3D? Oh, I think I remember hearing about that stuff. | |
| Yeah, yeah, that killed a few folks. | ||
| I think it killed a few folks in the military. | ||
| So, you know, you're not talking about, like, some fucking sickly old man's like, I'm about to get jacked! | ||
| No, it's like fucking soldiers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'll use caffeine in races. | ||
| I think it's pretty clear that caffeine is a performance enhancing and it just happens to be one that's legal. | ||
| But it's a mild performance enhancing. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Are you using coffee or are you taking pills? | ||
| I've done a variety of different things. | ||
| I did a race once where I was trying to figure out my fueling rate and what was ideal. | ||
| This was a while ago, but I did a 100k race and I did nothing but Mountain Dew. | ||
| It ended up coming out to about 158 calories an hour of just Mountain Dew. | ||
| I added some electrolytes to it. | ||
| Well, I feel like if you're just sitting around doing nothing, Mountain Dew is probably terrible for you. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But if you're running hills and really kicking ass like that, the amount of fuel you're burning, Mountain Dew might be a great move. | ||
| If you don't go overboard, I mean, so does at every aid station at pretty much every race. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's definitely something people have identified as useful. | ||
| But since then, I've been... | ||
| That product I was talking about before, the X Endurance Fuel 5, they make one with a little bit of caffeine in it too. | ||
| So now I'll usually, if I want caffeine, I'll just use that instead of the non-caffeinated one. | ||
| But then I'll do, like, you know, I'll still sometimes do a little bit of soda, especially at the end of the race, just to kind of change things up a little bit. | ||
| Because that's the other thing, too, is, like, if you do the same thing, you know, after a while, it's like, just give me something different. | ||
| Yeah, well, I know Floyd Mayweather drinks soda after he works out. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people were like, what an idiot. | ||
| And I was like, maybe not. | ||
| First of all, maybe the best boxer of all time, so definitely not an idiot. | ||
| He's doing something right. | ||
| He's doing something right. | ||
| And if he's that good on top of having a terrible diet, I think part of his terrible diet is a joke. | ||
| He'll eat cheeseburgers and shit and show you and say, look, motherfucker, I'm kicking everybody's ass eating cheeseburgers. | ||
| But not really. | ||
| He really does have... | ||
| He goes home and the chef's making some gourmet meal. | ||
| I mean, he has a personal chef. | ||
| There was a whole article about it recently. | ||
| But I think that the fueling up with really heavy sugary drinks after a very hard workout, it's not a bad idea to replenish the glycogen in your muscles. | ||
| Yeah, I think that depends. | ||
| I think like, I think the science is pretty clear if you're on a high carbohydrate or at least a higher carbohydrate diet that, you know, carbohydrate and protein within like, you know, 30-45 minutes of the post-workout is going to be in your best interest. | ||
| A lot of people like chocolate milk for that, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's gotten kind of like labeled as that perfect ratio. | ||
| Yeah, of protein with sugar. | ||
| Protein with sugar, yep. | ||
| Where it's not clear, or at least it's getting clearer, is like where the variance there is for someone like myself who's following a high-fat approach. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And we had a little bit of a glimpse into it from some studies. | ||
| And the interesting thing is what they did this one study called a FASTER study. | ||
| And it looked at like it was 10 guys who were on a high fat diet and 10 guys who were on a high carbohydrate diet. | ||
| And, um, the guys on the, they try to pair them up as twins. | ||
| So like similar, like performance achievements, uh, similar like body metrics, and then kind of compare the two in the, the high fat cohort actually, when they finished the, one of the workouts was a three hour treadmill session. | ||
| And then they were, they taken like blood tests and stuff and they had like the oxygen mask and things like throughout the course of it. | ||
| And they tested things before or after, um, And one thing they saw was, like, the high-fat folks actually had this kind of big, like, surge of glucose in the bloodstream post-workout. | ||
| So the thought is, like, you might not want to double down on that if you're in a fat-adapted state because, like, I mean, some of the levels... | ||
| This goes back to... | ||
| It would have been, like, this is something I'd like to ask Dr. Atiyah about, is that, like, you get these big... | ||
| Kind of post-workout, like, blood glucose spikes, sometimes to the level of, like, what would look like a type 2 diabetic. | ||
| But it's in a different context than what you would see in someone who's just, like, following a normal diet, where that would be kind of a red flag. | ||
| And so, like, to hit the body with another source of glucose, essentially, might not be affecting you the same way. | ||
| So, yeah, it's interesting stuff. | ||
| So, like, it's actually, like, what I've done sometimes, too, is after a big, hard workout, if I'm not hungry, I don't always eat right away. | ||
| I wait for my stomach to come around and, like, my body to say, you're hungry, just to let all that stuff kind of go through and then I'll have, depending on what I'm doing next, like, if I'm taking an easy day or a couple easy days, I'll go, like, really low carb. | ||
| But if I'm going back out that afternoon for another workout or the next morning for, like, a speed session or something like that, that's when maybe I would... | ||
| Try to drop in a little bit of carbohydrate to kind of speed up the glycogen side of things. | ||
| So I'm ready for that next one. | ||
| Well, Zach, you're a bad motherfucker. | ||
| I wish you all the best. | ||
| I really appreciate you coming down here and talking to us. | ||
| And it's fascinating what you do, man. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much, man. |
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