Ultramarathoner Zach Bitter breaks two world records—100 miles in 11:19:13 and 104.88 miles in 12 hours—while debunking myths about running shoes, injury risks, and pacing. His 3,100-mile San Francisco-to-New York run, inspired by F-bomb but renamed for Justin Wren’s Congo pygmy cause, prioritizes awareness over speed, despite potential sacrifices like skipping a racing season. Bitter’s training blends periodization, extreme elevation (e.g., JFK 50’s 3,000 ft climb), and ketogenic experiments, proving ultrarunning thrives on adaptability—both physically and philosophically. [Automatically generated summary]
It's really interesting when you dive into the world of footwear and stuff.
I learned this recently.
The number one indicator of low injury risk, which is what runners are always looking for.
They're going to minimize risk.
Comfort is the identifier for that.
If you find yourself going into a specialty running shop...
Ask them to try on a variety of different pairs, a variety of different models, and find the one that's most comfortable for you, and that's probably going to lower your risk to the lowest you can get from your footwear anyway.
I think it's one of those things where it's kind of half true, half not, where you kind of have to look at what's the purpose of what you're doing.
So the way I kind of describe it is if I'm trying to strengthen my lower legs, you know, I want that low cushion, that firm platform because that's going to really activate the muscles in the lower part of the leg.
But if I'm dealing with some lower leg issues or a little sore, I did a workout and my calves are kind of sore or my ankles sore, then cushion can be great because it's going to relieve that kind of initial impact on the lower part of your legs.
And the caveat though is those impact forces have to go somewhere.
So they're kind of going to move further up the kinetic chain.
So what I usually tell people, if you're dealing with lower leg pain or injury, then you might want to consider something a little more cushioned.
And if you're dealing with something like in your knees or your hips, then getting rid of some of that cushion is going to just keep that kind of more precise foot plant and maybe alleviate some of those impact forces from ending up in those areas.
But at the end of the day, the mechanics of it all are going to be the real driver.
You want your foot to come underneath a bent knee.
Because you're using your legs as kind of like a three-foot spring, essentially.
So if you can get that foot plant under bent knee, it's going to absorb it in the way your body intends versus absorbing it in a way that could maybe send those impact forces into the wrong areas.
And he said that five years ago he hired a coach, which is kind of crazy, like a 65-year-old dude hiring a coach but trimmed a bunch of time off of his marathon, I think more than five minutes off of his marathon.
I think it was quite a bit more than five minutes.
And he was running for a long time before that, but yet a coach sort of shortened his time in finishing a 26-mile race at 70 years old.
The bent knee is really important because a lot of folks who don't pay attention to the history of footwear don't understand that this fat cushioned heel that everybody sort of thinks of when you think of a running shoe and when you watch a lot of people run that don't know any better, they run and they land on their heel, which is sort of something that was created, was it by Nike?
Is that what it was that created that fat bottomed heel thing?
Yeah, I think they were the first one to do the offset, where it was traditionally, I think it was like 12 millimeters where your heel would be that much higher than your forefoot.
But I think even when we get into kind of like, say, heel striking versus forefoot or midfoot striking, heel striking is another thing where it's not inherently bad.
It all comes down to what I was saying before, where if you can heel strike, but your foot is still underneath that bent knee, you're probably not going to do anything too detrimental.
Yeah, I don't know for sure if there's a height thing that would do.
I think it would maybe just come with the mechanics of the way the person learned to run in the first place and just maybe some nuances with the way their body is kind of more or less designed.
But I mean, there's heel striking folks that are not injury prone or have never gotten injuries or hardly ever get injuries.
But usually, I think if you're doing that, that's probably because you're under that bent knee and you're not kind of having that point where your foot is out in front of your knee and then you kind of have that straight leg but at an angle where it's going to be, you know, not ideal for kind of absorbing those impacts.
Yeah, I mean, I couldn't say for sure, but I think there's a lot of nuance, and it ends up being kind of like an individual situation with a lot of these cases.
It's hard to know for sure.
There's probably people who can talk to mechanics better than me.
So it was, the event itself was called Six Days in the Dome.
And really what it was, was you could do anything from a 24-hour event to a 48-hour event to a six-day event and just see how far you could run within that time frame.
But yeah, so I've been, it's interesting because there's not a lot of timed events that are necessarily structured for 100 mile or for like 12 hours.
So a lot of times you find yourself jumping into some of these other events that are longer in duration and just kind of using them as a way to try to run a fast 100 miler or a fast 12 hour event.
So the race director for that particular event had reached out to me because he's known me for a while and knew that I was targeting fast 100 mile times and just said, hey, I've got this cool event set up at the Olympic training facility in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Pettit Center.
And I think it's going to be pretty conducive for fast times.
And asked if I wanted to do it.
So I actually didn't have an ideal timeline that I would have normally wanted to work with in terms of getting ready for it.
But training went really well.
And I went there targeting the 100-mile world record, which was 11 hours, 28 minutes, and 3 seconds prior to that.
And ended up running 11 hours, 19 minutes, and 13 seconds for 100 miles.
And then since we have like this 100 mile distance and also this 12 hour timed event kind of structure, you can find yourself if you're under 12 hours kind of double dipping and getting two events for the price of one, I guess you could say.
So I kept running after I hit 100 miles and ended up going 104.88 miles total in the 12 hour time frame.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, like, when you look at it, because I think sometimes people look at, like, 100 miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes, and there's not a lot of context in their mind, unless they're kind of familiar with ultramarathon running.
But when you start to break it down into, like, the subcategories where it's like, well, that's like four...
Like sub three hour marathons in a row or I can't remember how many or what the 5k time is.
Well, this is because the carnivore diet people want to claim you.
And we discussed this kind of the last time you were here, where you take in a lot of glucose, and you ramp up your carbohydrates considerably before a race.
But, like, what is a daily diet, let's say, in training, like you're preparing for something like this, what's a daily diet for you like?
I think there is some nuance within that even because when you think of my lifestyle, the way I like describe it is if you took a calendar year and you grabbed a single day out of there and you grabbed a day where I was at like a peak training day versus a recovery day, those are like so drastically different in terms of my energy demands.
So like things tend to fluctuate quite a bit and change quite a bit.
And I think that's oftentimes what confuses people because they want to, they look at what I'm doing, say on race day, or they look at what I'm doing on one of my big workout days or my rest day and think that's what I'm doing across the board.
So when you get the folks saying, oh, well, Zach follows a carnivore diet, they're probably looking at like a post-race recovery day where then I might be eating almost all just animal products, a lot of eggs, a lot of salmon, you know, red meat, that sort of stuff.
But if you pick a day out where I'm doing like a big training day, doing like a 30 mile run or something like that, that's where I'm going to kind of bring back some of the carbohydrates to try to supplement that activity.
And the best way to maybe describe it is, you know, there's like this kind of train low, race high, or this carb periodization concept that's getting more momentum behind it and more studies and science behind it too.
There's some interesting folks that are looking into this in more detail.
And if folks are really interested in doing a deep dive in it, there's a guy named Dr. Mark Bubbs.
He wrote a book called Peak and he kind of dives into kind of like some of the nutrition science where it's been and kind of where it's, it's kind of heading and, and they highlight some of that.
And one of the big things they, they're starting to recognize that even with the elite athletes, when you're periodizing your training, like I do, uh, you know, your nutrition should be being periodized as well.
The science is pretty clear that if you're doing a workout and you take in glucose or fructose, I think most science says a two-to-one ratio is ideal for maximizing the amount you can take in.
And you're going to give yourself an advantage.
That's like rocket fuel.
So then it becomes a question of, do you need that 100% of the time?
Because what they found out is when they started doing a lot of the exercise science and nutrition was that the real limiter is your gut.
So on paper- So absorption- Yeah, there's a finite amount you can absorb and you increase the amount you can absorb on average if you have that two to one ratio versus all of one or the other.
I think like the way – like most like sports supplements and things like that are going to be designed to kind of meet those specific – because they're looking at the literature and they're seeing like, okay, this is how you optimize it.
Yeah, I'd have to look to see exactly if they have that, but my guess would be they would be if they're looking at the research and where that's kind of at.
But yeah, so really the question that I think needs to be asked with a lot of this stuff is if I want to make a workout feel as easy as possible, if I can get in, say, 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour, it's probably going to do that.
My perceived effort at that pace is probably going to feel easier.
But then you have to ask the question, like, how often do you need it to feel that easy?
So for me, the answer to that is like, well, if I'm doing something really strenuous or something that's in a little bit of a gray area where it's just fast enough to dip into the glycogen stores, but just slow enough that I can do it for quite a while, like maybe even a couple hours, then you're kind of in this area where that could be an advantage for you from a performance standpoint.
But if I'm going out for an easy run of like 60 to 90 minutes and it's going to be like a 2 to 3 out of 10 perceived effort anyway, like there's no real need for me to be hitting glucose during that or, you know, sports drink during that to make that feel even easier yet because my goal isn't necessarily...
To, you know, make an easy run feel even easier, I guess is the way to make it.
Well, and I think that also brings up a really good point, too, where, like, a lot of this stuff, when we're looking at carbohydrate usage and performance, is we're looking at elite athletes.
We're looking at folks that are training for, like, you know, the Olympics.
You know, sometimes they're even Olympic medalists.
And that's just not a very good comparison, I think, to the average person who's out there running.
Because, you know, their purposes are different.
You know, their objectives are different.
Their lives are very different.
Like, one is doing basically everything around a specific date and distance and trying to run as fast as they can on that date.
And another person may be trying to run as fast as they can, but there's so many other factors in life, like their work, their relationships, their, you know, the level of training they're actually able to have with the time they have, and then also, like, You know, managing their own health and nutrition because like, you know, elite athletes don't have a very rosy picture in terms of long-term health either.
So for someone who's like, you know, maybe 10, 20 pounds overweight and is trying to run to get into shape or trained to get into shape or something like that, they're probably thinking just as much about health as they are about performance.
So for them to be, you know, shuttling in 60 grams of carbohydrate every hour during training and racing is probably not the direction that they'd want to go.
Now when you get ready to do something like this 100 mile run, how many miles do you run on a typical day and do you ramp that up or do you just give yourself a base and know that you can push through?
The way I kind of describe it is like I'm always focusing on specificity kind of being king.
So depending on the race, distance, and the intensity is kind of how I'm going to structure my workouts.
So the rule of thumb that I use is the closer I get to the workout, the more specific the workouts I do are going to be towards that race, distance, and intensity.
Uh, so for me, what that oftentimes means, since I'm training for like a hundred mile distance races is early in a training block, I might be doing some like shorter interval work, like VO two max, like an example that would maybe be like a three minute, uh, kind of almost all out effort followed by like a three minute recovery jog.
When I first started, I might just do three by three on that.
And my goal really is to every week is to kind of build volume within that.
So that first week, it might be just three of them.
But by like, say the eighth week, I might do a total of like 24 to 27 minutes worth of volume within that VO2 max context.
Yeah.
It's really interesting because like, you know, I could go out on any one day and do like maybe 10 of those.
But if I do that, and then it takes me like a week and a half to recover from that session, it's not nearly as probably effective as if I spread that out a little bit and said, did like five by three and then five by three.
three days after that give your body a chance to recover and build versus just destroying it all in one and then feeling like shit for a couple weeks exactly i like to i like to call it micro stressing when i'm working with folks and my own training i'm like we want to micro stress we want to stress you just enough to elicit a response and so you get stronger and then we want to do that over and over and over again are you aware you i'm sure you are you're aware of that you're You know who Pavel Tatsulini is?
So he's got this sort of concept when it comes to weightlifting with kettlebells in particular called greasing the groove.
Whereas instead of doing all these sets to failure, you would just do like half of what you're capable of and then do it again in a more frequent manner.
Do it again on Wednesday.
Do it again on Friday.
And then give yourself a lot of time in between each individual activity, too, particularly in training for strength.
He actually recommends as much as 10 minutes of recovery in between sets, which is kind of crazy.
I mean, most people don't have the time for that.
Six sets is an hour in.
I mean, it seems like you're just laying around at the gym.
Yeah, and I think endurance is a patient-person's game, so I think if you can build that volume in a micro-stressing or in a sustainable way, that's what's going to get you strong, and it's also going to make it less likely to get injured.
It's just short enough where you have to be pushing like a fairly intense pace, but it's just long enough where if you make a mistake, you're going to pay for that for quite some time.
So you're on such a razor's edge and you're also just one tiny mistake away from things going really badly.
In running, I guess, the two kind of big players historically have been Suunto and Garmin.
And Coros kind of came to the market a few years ago.
They wanted to try to take that high-end technology, but...
make it maybe a little more affordable and also make it user-friendly because now everyone's there they they care more about the post-workout or the post-run data that you're uploading to these platforms like strava so like corals kind of made it a big uh uh point to make it real user friendly on that end so you like i get down at the run and i load it up to the app and it's up on strava like within a few seconds sometimes and then you go dissect all the data like how much elevation gain and loss your pace per mile uh
Yeah, and I think that's actually a good – especially when you get into ultramarathoning, I think the metric that people should dial in the most is their rate of perceived exertion because that's something that's not going to necessarily lie to you.
Like if you base your thing – your stuff off heart rate exclusively or a pace exclusively, you can find yourself like justifying something that's not necessarily where you need to be.
And if something like that malfunctions and that was your only compass, then you're in trouble.
So when I'm doing my training and when I'm working with other folks, I like to use heart rate and I like to use pacing and stuff like that.
But ultimately, I'm trying to get the person to really understand how hard is this effort and then across the board.
Uh, from like very easy to very difficult.
And then when it comes time to race, we can kind of dial in like, this is the intensity you're trying to look for so that they can kind of feel that out.
I have a scale of like one to 10 that I'll use a lot of times.
And there's like a whole variety.
Like most people are going to be using some sort of like, probably like zone system of training where there's like There's numbers that are associated with heart rate ranges or intensities, and there'll be descriptors.
And, you know, there's some that are like 1 through 20. There's some that are kind of 1 through 5 and then 1 through 10. Isn't that so weird too, right?
It can be tricky and it is very subjective, but I think it's one of those things where it falls into the same category that a lot of endurance events are where you just got to be patient and really work on kind of understanding that.
And you learn from experience too.
Like you find out like, oh, I went and did this workout and I thought that was the right pace and intensity, but it turned out to be a little too fast.
I did it a lot when I was in college and I did it a lot when I first started when I was really trying to kind of learn my body and kind of learn what things mean and how I respond to them.
But now I've been kind of doing it long enough where I have enough of a...
Like an understanding of kind of how, like when things go wrong, like why they did, or if something went really well, like why it did, that I don't feel like I need to take as detailed notes.
But I think it's really valuable for someone who's, especially while they're trying to learn the rate of perceived exertion and kind of really dial those things in.
It's probably worth their time to write that stuff down so that they can look back at it and they have that resource available to them as they're kind of reflecting on things.
Now, say if you're getting ready to do something like this crazy 100-mile run, trying to break a world record, how much time are you giving yourself to really, truly prepare for that?
Is it based on how you're at right now, like what your baseline is, like what kind of preparation you've done before you knew that this race was available to you?
Yeah, no, and this is, we can kind of hop back to where we were talking about before, because when I was talking about the VO2 max workout stuff, that's kind of early in my training plan, because that intensity is very unspecific to a 100-mile pace.
You know, those VO2 max workouts are much closer to something shorter, like a 5K. So what are you trying to do with those VO2 max workouts?
Yeah, there's the different systems of training, and that's kind of a higher intensity system.
So it's not very relevant to the race pace that I'm doing specifically, but it's not irrelevant to my overall aerobic efficiency.
So, like, by doing some of those faster stuff things, you can work on things like your form.
And just because when you're running that fast, like, things tend to be a little more dialed in.
And it just expands.
Basically, what you do is you give yourself kind of a bigger range of what your potential is going to be when you start focusing more in on, like, the aerobic side of things that we're going to see, like, as I would move further down in the training plan.
So once I kind of do that section of training, to answer your question though, like ideally I'll have maybe about, since I'm coming into most programs, not completely out of shape, like four months is kind of the sweet spot for me.
If I was coming like off the couch, so to speak, six months would be a little more appropriate.
So what I think, I don't know, it's hard to know for sure, but what was, the way it was described to me when I was going in and getting that stuff checked out was what likely happened was I had such a history in kind of flat running that I was actually preparing for a race that had a lot more climbing and descending, so I started changing my training to more climbing and descending.
And when I did that, like, uh, One thing that sometimes happens when you're running a lot of flat, hard surfaces is your ankles and your hips can get pretty tight from that real kind of uniform mechanic that you're doing.
So my range of motion was semi-limited.
So when I was doing some of that hard downhill and uphill running, I just probably wasn't very efficient with my form.
And it ended up, kind of what we were talking about before, those impact forces ended up in the wrong spot.
The really goofy thing about it, too, was when I first had the pain surface for that, it was kind of in the lower back glute area is where it surfaced.
Yeah, well, and I think what he said maybe was going on there was, I mean, it was a very fine stress fracture.
I mean, sometimes when people have a fracture on their sacral alle, it's like a big enough fracture where it can be out for like a year.
Whoa!
Yeah, yeah.
So it can be a really bad injury.
But he said maybe the mobility and the strength work I was doing while I had that to try to rehab kind of strengthen the areas around it enough that when I just was running flat, really slow, really easy, that protected that area enough where I didn't feel the pain anymore.
So after that, I think I took another like two weeks off completely just to make sure before I started building back up and then I started kind of building back up again.
I think it was trained to hunt or one of these competitions.
They were making people wear heavy packs.
It might not have been trained to hunt.
I think it was another...
Anyway, they would make you wear a 100-pound pack.
And so the idea was they were doing these races with 100-pound packs on, which you can imagine is a fucking recipe for orthopedic surgeon visits.
And so these people were getting kind of jacked up, and I believe they stopped doing that.
As a running competition.
But there's a few of those similar kind of competitions where they force you to do a bunch of physical activities and then bring your heart rate down and execute shots on targets and then run to the next station and do a bunch of physical activities.
And they were doing that with heavy, heavy weights on.
I think that would be maybe good for if you're going to do like a mountaineering experience and you're going to have to carry a bunch of little stuff like you're doing with hunting.
There's a company called Outdoorsman's that makes a really good one.
It's called an Atlas Pack and it's essentially a pack frame, but the back of it is a universal post like what you would use for weights, you know, like a weightlifting post.
For, you know, Olympic weights, you know, so those big round steel plates slide right onto it so you can get a 45 pound plate on it and then clamp it down.
And so it's like really secure on you as opposed to like, sometimes if you put too much weight in a pack, like maybe it'll sit all at the bottom.
It's This is like, boom, right in the center of your back, and you cramp it down, and then you're really carrying all that weight on your hips, a little bit on your shoulders, and it's all really centered well.
That's a good one for really training, but you don't fucking run with it.
I couldn't find an official testing of whatever, but one person that did a big deep dive into it said its main thing was to fix his gait or it will improve running gait.
That 30% is a number that they read as a sales point.
The running is all pretty much done on the road and the trails.
I'll do some mobility work and some strength work in the gym, and that's where I'll kind of go inside, I guess, for it.
But yeah, I've used treadmills and stuff in the past, and I do use them from time to time, but usually if I have the option to go outside, I'll do that.
I mean, I live in Phoenix, so it's sunny most days.
Well, and that's the funny thing, too, because when I was training for that 100-mile, 12-hour world record, it was through the summer because the race was in August.
So my peak training was like 110 degrees some days.
And the funny thing, too, is the Pettit Center, where I did the race, it was actually built for speed skating and some hockey rinks.
So they keep it at like 60 degrees.
Ooh, that's nice.
I remember one day when I was running, it was like one of the hottest days of the summer.
I remember thinking like, I'm going to race literally at half this temperature.
And I think I'm no expert at it by any means, but I think there's some pretty cool studies and stuff of the effects that happen when you are training in some of those extreme heats, like what happens.
The way it was described to me is it kind of simulates training at altitude to a degree.
This is not something that I read, but essentially what they're doing is they're trying to find out whether or not hot yoga, these 90-minute hot yoga sessions, replicate some of the known benefits of sauna.
versus sauna you know gets much much hotter than that you're in like the 180s which what i like and but the idea is that when your body is extremely uh stressed when you're doing these poses and you're sweating like crazy that your body core temperature rises basically to a similar level than if you're just sitting in a sauna so So you get a very similar response.
And I try to get out relatively early so that it's not like 110 from start to finish.
So like if I get out say at like 6 or 7 in the morning, you know, it might be in the 80s, high 80s and be working its way up so that like I'm...
finishing and it might be 110 for my key workouts.
The way I structure my training usually when I'm kind of in peak is I'll do my biggest workout in the morning.
And then I might go out and do like a second run that's like a little shorter or quite a bit shorter in most cases and really low intensity.
And, you know, then sometimes if it's the afternoon in Phoenix, that's when I would see like that 110, but I'm usually not out for more than like 45, 60 minutes for those.
So hydrating is interesting because, you know, I grew up in the Midwest, so I was very familiar with running in hot, humid stuff in the summer.
And, you know, the dry desert heat, though, it seems like you get thirsty a lot quicker and a lot more frequently.
So, you know, one of the things I learned the first summer I was in Phoenix was knowing where the water fountains are and kind of planning your routes around that.
I think it was in early June called the San Diego 100. And it's got this spot in the middle of the course where the aid stations are a little further apart.
There's like a nine mile stretch and a seven mile stretch.
And I kind of mistimed how much water I did, so I filled up my water in a stream, and it was probably not an ideal spot.
But I rolled the dice, and I didn't get anything bad.
My thought during the race was, this is the mindset in the middle of one of these things, is like, well, if something really bad happens, it'll happen after the race.
And what really helped for me was the situation is since the race was on an indoor track, 442 and some odd meters, I was doing a lot of my big long runs on a 400-meter track.
So when I did that, I would just bring out a cooler and I'd have ice and water in there.
Historically, I've done a lot more flat, runnable stuff, but now that I'm out in Phoenix, I like to try to split the year into two halves and do some trail stuff in half the year and some flatter road or track or runnable stuff in the second half of the year.
Usually, unless I'm going to be away from a potential stop long enough, usually what I'll do is I'll use the pack, but I'll have smaller little flasks, soft flasks in there.
Yeah, and that's part of the reason why I try to go as minimal as I can with water if I can get away with it.
Obviously, if I go out and do a big loop where there's no potential stops, I'm going to have to carry it all from the beginning.
But if it's a spot where I know I can get to water every five, six, seven miles, then usually I'll pack a little lighter and not be carrying as much at any one given time.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the hardest things to really get right in Phoenix was just, like, kind of learning kind of how much you need to be hydrating, like, between sessions.
Because what I usually found out is I could go out and kind of neglect hydration for any one given, like, run or workout.
But if I did that, then the next one I'd probably pay for it.
So, for me, the big motivation to make sure I'm on top of hydration during any given run is because I know, like, if I don't, then the next one is going to potentially be miserable.
That's a weird feeling trying to do anything when you're dehydrated.
It's like you have a bad battery or something.
It's like everything's like, oh, come on!
It's amazing how just normal everyday life, like you could feel like a little run down and you barely notice it.
But once you start physically exerting, once you start training, once you start doing something hard, that's when you become, like, really in tune with how you're screwing your body up.
Like, drinking, for instance.
Like, have a couple of drinks and then run.
Like, oh, God.
You're like, well, this is what it's doing to my body?
It's like a powder that you can kind of mix in with your water by a company named X Endurance.
They make these little tubes now too where like, so if I'm running and I have like one bottle with some in it already, I can have these little tubes that if I refill and want to put more and I can just kind of take them out, pop it off and pour that in.
A lot of other people will use, you can make like little caps that you just like swallow with your water and it's got like the formulation of the different electrolytes in there kind of dialed in and I think that's a little more hit or miss as to where people feel you need that.
Some people tell you you don't really need electrolytes at all.
You just need to salt your foods and things like that, all the way to you should be taking X number of these every hour.
I was part of the FASTER study, which was a study that looked at high-carb and High-fat athletes, and I think they were looking at some of that stuff, too.
And, like, any time I've ever had a blood test done, though, by, like, my electrolytes, like my sodium-potassium levels have always been in range, so I haven't really tried to...
It's one of those things then where it's like, I'm probably not going to try to fix something that's not broken.
Yeah, and I mean, I definitely am not afraid to salt my food.
You know, most of my food is conducive to putting salt on, so, you know, I'm probably getting quite a bit of that stuff just in my day-to-day nutrition, too.
You know, I think like the low and slow is the way to go for a lot of that stuff.
And when I do a, when I roast a, I'll get like a roast and I'll put it in a slow cooker and ultimately some of the fat will separate and kind of form on the top and always take that off and use it, cook eggs and stuff later.
Well, a lot of people have their own idea about what to do and what not to do, but I learned this from a guy named Chad Ward, whose label on Instagram is Whiskey Bent Barbecue.
Well, I feel like if you don't cook in it every day, like when the director of The Cove was in here, I always fucking have a hard time saying his last...
Sohoyes.
Louis Sohoyes was in here.
He was explaining how he was eating a lot of fish before he became a vegan.
He was eating a ton of fish and his mercury levels really shot up because a lot of fish has like a lot of fucking mercury.
And if you eat fish for morning, noon, and night every day, day after day after day, you can develop high mercury levels.
Sure.
But then I talked to other scientists.
They said, yes, if you're eating it every day, all day.
But if you just eat fish like once a week, you're fine.
Because I remember like when, I think it was probably when the Mediterranean diet got popular.
people were all in on salmon and stuff and seafood and uh then everyone went wild caught yes and i guess that's where you'd get the mercury but then and they would say like the farm-raised salmon are not as good for you for whatever reason but then i guess now farm-raised is what you're supposed to get because that's gonna they can control that environment and make sure i heard what louis was saying was that it's even worse oh really Yeah, in terms of the heavy metals.
Because you've got to think they're just sitting there.
At least in the ocean, they're migrating, they're moving around, they're swimming in different places.
That podcast that I did with him was so disturbing.
Because I've always had this weird, not weird, just this sort of...
Peripheral fear of what we're doing to the ocean.
You know, this thing like, man, how many assholes are out there just giant nets just pulling fish out of the ocean right now as we speak?
And how much is that sustainable?
I mean, I think individual people fishing is sustainable.
But that's not what's going on.
It's just huge nets.
They're just scooping up everything.
And the conversation that I had with him scared the shit out of me for the future of the ocean.
Because what's been done...
The amount of damage that's been done over a hundred years, it's very similar to the amount of damage that was done sort of at the end of the 18th century, the beginning of the 19th century in the United States, where market hunters had basically wiped out almost every animal, wiped out the buffalo.
Do you know when they were shooting the buffalo, they were basically shooting them for their hides and their tongues, and they would leave the carcasses to rot?
But we basically almost wiped out every animal on this entire continent until they stepped in and decided to start regulating, hunting, and stopping it, and then sort of made concerted efforts to reintroduce animals.
And still, most of them are not at their historic range.
I mean, there's basically a healthy supply of bison, but not the ocean.
The thing is like the same thing that we did, not we, you and I weren't alive, but that human beings did in North America, they're doing right now, the world is doing to the ocean.
And there's no real concerted effort to reintroduce these animals or fish.
It's basically like another world that's connected to our world.
You know, it's a water world.
We have the land world and the land monsters go into the water world with these floating little fucking killing machines and suck all the living forces and living beings out of the water world and then serve it up on rice.
I've only done, over the last few years, I did the Snowden interview, which I did remotely, and I did one with Dr. Anthony West, who's an Egyptologist, who did it with him.
But...
Most of the time when you do it with Skype or anything along those lines, it's like you're kind of talking over each other.
Yeah, you're taking a step back if you do remote, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's been a cool experience just from a learning standpoint.
I mean, I don't think we really have a specific direction.
I mean, Sean's kind of the guy that everyone looks to from the carnivore thing, so I think sometimes we get identified as carnivore, but we...
Definitely go down a bunch of different rabbit holes.
We've had some of the protein researchers come on and talk about some of that stuff, like Professor Stu Phillips, Professor Don Lehman, Professor Jose Antonio.
They're kind of the guys who are doing some of the more recent research and looking at like, well, what are our protein needs across like a variety of ages as well as when you introduce athletics and then like what is the quality versus – or I guess maybe the best way to look at it is like the bioavailability of different protein sources and things like that.
It seems like something that we'd have figured out already, but there's, I guess, some nuance with that even.
And now they're saying that there's probably reason to believe that our recommendations should be higher than what they have been historically, especially for athletes and elderly folks.
And I think they maybe are learning more, too, about just kind of what role protein plays in bone health, too, as opposed to just because people think of protein as just this building block for muscle.
But there's a lot that goes into it with bone health as well.
So those guys were really interesting to hear about.
And, you know, we've done a lot of stuff with ranchers and some of the, like, The Savory Salatin folks come on the show and talk about kind of that practice versus kind of your standard agricultural production methods and things like that.
So we've had Alan Savory, Joel Salatin, Will Harris from White Oak Pastures on, Bobby Gill, he's part of the Savory Institute.
come on and just kind of share with us like kind of where that stuff is at because i think there's a lot of uh guesswork and unanswerable questions at this point with with some of that stuff because we're projecting like you know way down the road with some of this stuff are you talking about the difference between grain fed versus grass fed meat yeah and most specifically with those guys too just like kind of what it's doing to the soil health and the soil quality
so one thing that i've learned that was interesting was that uh i mean we kind of start to like throw a lot of these different like quote-unquote regenerative type uh regenerative type practices into one like bucket or one category when in reality there's a lot of different variants within them so So someone can say like, oh, regenerative agriculture is going to save the planet and then someone will go dig up a bunch of studies that show like, well, no, it actually doesn't do anything.
The idea is that if you use regenerative agriculture, meaning that animals graze, you're not talking monocrop environments, that these cows graze on open fields of grass, and then they shit all over the place, and then that shit becomes manure, and that this actually helps the plant life grow, and all this stuff sort of...
It all becomes a part of a cycle and that this regenerative practice is actually, instead of raising the carbon footprint, it actually makes a carbon neutral footprint.
And I think where sometimes it gets confusing is if you go and you just look at studies on regenerative agriculture, you get a lot of mixed information.
So what I was told, and I'm still kind of going down this rabbit hole.
The way I like to look at all these types of things is I try to look at one side of the story and then look to the other side and see where the counters are to that and just kind of go back and forth until you hit a dead end.
And then, you know, if you hit a dead end, like that's where you're at for now until something else gets introduced.
And where I got to now is, I think it was maybe Will Harris told us this, that when you're looking for these studies on kind of what practice is going to be good in terms of like soil regeneration, you have to look up adaptive multi-paddock grazing.
Because if you look up like holistic or regenerative agriculture, you're just going to get a whole mess of like different ranges or different types of it.
And, you know, some are effective, some aren't.
So it's really hard to kind of piece out, you know, who's got the accurate stuff and not.
And I mean, I think ultimately some of this stuff is we just don't know yet.
It just means like you're instead of kind of you're you're it's a rotational grazing from what I understand, but you're kind of moving the the herd along to these different products and then they're like, you know, they're doing their thing in a what would you consider like a natural way like it would have been before we came in and shot all the buffalo and all that stuff.
The more of those products you can get, the better because then you're letting the soil and everything in there really heal and develop that deep root system as well as some of that microbiome, like all the insects and things that would be in there and all that stuff.
I think, yeah, I mean, I think you would need, I think the more the better is probably the way to look at it, but hopefully the soil biologists aren't critical.
But the interesting thing, though, is like, I mean, I think there's a lot of work to be done in looking into this and finding out the best way to maybe utilize it.
But the thought, the part that I thought was really interesting is with the Will Harris white oak pastures thing, they just, I think this study is maybe overutilized by like the pro-regenerative or multipathetic group to a degree because it's like it's what they have.
And the thing that's compelling about that study to me is the way it kind of happened was essentially what happened was Will Harris and White O'Patchers, they were raising animals for Epic Bar.
General Mills looked at what Epic Bar was claiming when they were independent and they were saying, our stuff is regenerative.
You buy our product and you're giving back versus taking, kind of a mindset.
And I think General Mills was skeptical about that.
So they spent, I think it was like $80,000 to go in and have a study done on Will Harris' White Oaks pasture to really see if they could back that claim up.
And they went in and they did the study and it actually showed like a net...
Carbon sequestration versus, like, they weren't even neutral.
Yeah, because I guess the way it was described to me is that the inputs of that type of system are so low that, like, you're not – because if you look at just a normal, like, agricultural setup, you know, you have all these inputs of, like, manure and all these other things that are going to add to that, that net effect or that net negative effect of animal agriculture.
So when you reduce the inputs down to next to nothing, because your inputs are all kind of just manpower where you're moving these things around and letting the natural course of things happen over time, that's where you can maybe minimize some of these, like, I guess what you'd maybe call it like a tertiary damage of animal agriculture.
But I think we probably have a lot to learn and stuff with that stuff too.
But it's one of those things when I think about it, it's like, hopefully we're spending a lot of time looking at that stuff because if they're right about the number of harvests we have left, I think, what are the estimates?
We have like 60 harvests left.
I mean, clearly, regardless of whether you're vegan, carnivore, or somewhere in between, you know, we need quality soil, right?
Because I know that there are some large-scale hydroponic operations that are growing vegetables and things along those lines.
And some people think that there's real promise in that because you're not using soil at all.
You're not using – you're not devastating the already depleted ground soil.
And you also don't need to do all the harmful things that are involved in monocrop agriculture, right?
Yeah.
The devastation on the wildlife, the displacement of wildlife, pesticides, combines that are indiscriminately chewing up small rodents and bugs and rabbits and anything else that gets caught in their blades.
Yeah, so it seems like we'd have a long ways to go.
But I mean, I guess the counter to that would also be we're essentially going back to what we would have been doing historically.
And so it's not necessarily like reinventing the wheel as much as it is just saying, okay, what we did here obviously is not sustainable or potentially not sustainable.
So let's look at, well, what did we do to get back to where we were before?
You know, I've got a theory with social media and that stuff in general is that for a lot of the people who are most active on it, they either take it 100% serious or it's kind of a joke or a game.
And then when those two polar ends meet, that's where you get the big blow-up interactions.
And then it becomes kind of a game of, well, the vegan told me that I should die or something like that.
So then I'm going to go tell that vegan that this or that.
And it goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
The one I always get a kick out of, though, along those lines is someone will come up with a picture of, like, here's the human's jaw system.
And this clearly means we're frugivores.
And then someone will say, well, look at the digestive tract of a human being.
It is clearly designed more to be eating meat or animal products than And, you know, they go back and forth with different, like, parts of the human anatomy to try to, like, prove that we're vegetarian or vegan, fruitarian.
And then I'm thinking the whole time, I'm like, so what we have here is people who can have specific traits that are good for eating fruits and vegetables and some specific traits that are good for eating animal products.
One of my favorite podcasts we've done was with this guy, Dr. Bill Schindler.
He's an archaeologist out of, I think it was Washington University.
And he's such a cool dude.
He said something that was really resonated with me where he said, you know, humans, we're unique in that we've over time developed ways to use tools and things like that to liberate nutrients.
So to look at anything in its raw state is kind of missed the point of why humans are the way they are.
I've seen this argument that human beings aren't supposed to eat meat because if we were, we'd be able to just rip it apart and eat it with our own teeth and go eat a squirrel with your face.
Well, guess what?
You can eat a squirrel with your face if you're so inclined.
If you really wanted to do that, you could do it without tools.
You know what you can't do?
You can't eat a lot of beans without cooking them.
Like, we've figured things out, folks.
I mean, cassava, in the jungle, they figured out that you have to cook this stuff and strain it, and it's a primary staple of the diets of many people that live in the jungle.
And it's fucking toxic as shit if you don't do that.
I mean, it literally produces cyanide.
Cyanide is produced by cassava, which is like one of their primary foods.
They just figured it out.
Just like you figured out you have to boil lentils.
Just like you figured out you have to cook beans.
I mean, you can't eat most of these things that we eat are not...
Good to eat if you just eat them in their raw state.
Some things like fruits are.
Some vegetables are.
But some just are not.
And this is the same with meat.
And this idea that you're supposed to be, we're clearly an herbivore because of the fact that we're not supposed to be killing animals with our teeth.
That's so dumb.
Like, we kill animals with tools, and we've done it for so long that our bodies have adapted.
We've adapted to the fact that we have clothes.
That's why we're not covered in hair, you fucking idiots.
Like, this is like real, clear, obvious stuff.
People who live in the coldest climates of the world aren't covered in hair, you know?
Yeah, you know, and it was interesting because like what you're saying too, when we had Bill on the show, he's got this unique experience where he's actually gone in and visited these indigenous tribes that have been relatively untouched by modern society to basically with the one question of like, well, how do you eat?
So he's been, he's seen like a variety of different stuff.
I think he even had a show on National Geographic for a while that looked into some of this, but he, like just to show you the polarization of what humans can kind of do, he went and he visited the Samburo, which is a branch of the Maasai over in Africa.
You know, they're basically drinking blood and milk for a huge portion of their nutrition.
So you have this tribe that's basically on a primarily animal-based nutrition plan, and they're super healthy.
He said that they were maybe one of the most healthy groups of people he's seen from just like a physical stature, like tooth health and that sort of thing.
But then he also went down to, I think it was in South America, I can't remember the name of the tribe, but they found a way to basically liberate nutrients from a poisonous potato.
And what he said was this tribe that ate basically mostly potatoes, what they would do is they'd literally dig a pit and put thousands of pounds of these potatoes in there and let them sit there and ferment, I guess, for up to six months.
And then they would actually make this clay that they would use because there was still a toxin or something in there that they needed to kind of prevent from interacting with them.
Yeah, so there's this clay and there's this potato and when they dip the potato in this clay, it binds to that toxin so it doesn't become an issue when you eat it.
So by itself, that potato could potentially kill you, I guess, but with the clay, it doesn't.
I guess when your only goal when you wake up in the morning is to find your next meal and kind of build enough around so that you can kind of survive.
You put a lot of time and energy into it.
But yeah, it is interesting to think how they all got passed along from generation to generation and how it got fine-tuned to where it is today.
But I think it's cool to look at that stuff when it just comes to your own nutrition too and kind of when you understand it's less about this food Is net bad for me or this, this food is this particular food item is bad for me across the board.
And this one is great for me across the board more so about, well, this is what this food does.
Well, this is what this one does.
Well, so let's find it.
Like you mentioned mix and match to where you get, get the profile that you're looking for.
Yeah, I think the problem is what we were saying before, is that people are entering into these conversations with this goal that they want to achieve, this goal being plants are bad for you, or meat is bad for you, or we're supposed to be only eating meat, or we're supposed to be only eating plants, and here's why.
And, you know, you have this confirmation bias.
You're not looking at any other piece of evidence.
And particularly, the biological variability of human beings is pretty incredible.
Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria, and human beings.
We are dangerous organisms.
Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat in the mountains.
Wow, say that word.
Guanaco and Vicuna?
Like llamas.
Wild relatives of the llama lick clay before eating poisonous plants.
The fucking llamas figured it out!
The toxins stick more technically absorb to the fine clay particles in the animal's stomachs passing through the digestive system without affecting it.
Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a gravy made of clay and water.
Eventually, they bred less toxic potatoes, though some of the old poisonous varieties remain favored for their resistance to frost.
Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.
But look, people do what they gotta do to stay alive.
We're just so fortunate we don't have to do that.
You can go to a crossroads and have a nice vegan meal if you want to.
You're not really worried about staying alive anymore.
We're worried primarily about...
Yeah, well, people are worried about the environment.
They're worried about the health consequences of certain diets and the environmental consequences of certain diets.
This is what I've really gotten into after Chris Kresser was on the podcast recently debunking the Game Changers when he was talking about the positive net benefits of regenerative farming.
I don't think that's clearly been established worldwide or in large scale.
Yeah, you know, I think that's, I mean, that's the million dollar question right now too, right?
Like, well, how are we going to feed however many they're predicting?
Like how are we going to feed the 10 billion people we're going to see in X number of years?
And I think it's interesting and it's certainly worth thinking about, but like, it's also like, well, how far do we keep kicking that ball down the road before we find ourselves in a situation where like, you know, then what's the next question?
15 billion, 20 billion and so on and so forth.
And eventually like, you know, we just overpopulate the world and it ends really badly for us.
I think the real key for us, I think, is going to be, and I think this is within our lifetime, is going to be lab-created meat.
And I think they're really close to doing that.
And I think if you have some sort of ethical...
Lab-created, nutritious meat where you don't have to worry about suffering or death.
If this has been established, then we open up a whole new avenue of exploration because now you can say, okay, all these people that are vegan for this moral and ethical...
That sort of dilemma that they have with animal agriculture, killing animals, suffering.
Let's take all that out.
Now you can eat lab-created meat that has absolutely no suffering attached to it.
Let's find out how healthy things really are.
And let's find out how many people stay vegan and how many people revert to more omnivorous diet.
This is something that vegans hate to hear, but it is a fact.
Eighty-four percent of people who start a vegan diet quit.
Now, is that because of taste?
Is that because of...
And then there's the argument that, well, people that do it over a long period of time, you get a higher retention rate.
That's fine.
But 84% still is the number.
I mean, it doesn't matter if you get a high retention rate for people that are doing it more than two years or more than three years.
Like, if you stick with it, you can do it.
No, they're just more committed.
But the reality is 84% quit.
This is what's been firmly established.
What would the number be if there was ethical, humane, lab-created meat that had no suffering attached to it at all?
It's just science-based.
It's just made with compounds and whatever they use to create this stuff.
That would be interesting.
It would be interesting to find out.
Could we eliminate large-scale animal agriculture in favor of lab-created meat?
And what, if any, environmental factors would there be that would be negative that were attached to lab-created meat?
Because you've got to think...
Whenever you're making anything, right, industrial, large scale, you're going to have waste.
What is that waste?
Can that waste be mitigated?
Can they figure out some sort of a way to have some sort of net positive effect where that waste is utilized in some sort of a form where it actually can contribute to the natural processes of soil regeneration and manure and composting and things along those lines?
Yeah, no, I think it's interesting and we're in an interesting time for sure.
It'll be interesting to see where they get with that and everything else with that.
And, you know, you brought up an interesting point too, not to keep going down the rabbit hole, but the other thing that I thought really interesting was when you look at waste components.
I feel like we're not maybe looking at that as much as we should be when we're talking about trying to feed a bunch of people.
It's like, well, maybe we should start with what we're throwing away that we wouldn't have to.
And I think, like, at first I just thought, like, well, you know, there's a lot of food thrown away at restaurants.
There's a lot of stuff that's thrown away just because it doesn't meet standards for, like, the grocery store.
It's like, let's start there.
And I actually had asked Dr. Schindler about that, and he actually did a study with some of his grad students where they looked at, I think they took 30 whitetail deer, and they processed it down to, like, the very last potential calorie to find out how much is wasted, even in, like, you know, a A deer that say you go and you shoot a deer and then you take it to the process and get it all done.
He said it was between, I think it was between like 13 to 30 days worth of human nutrition that gets wasted in a single whitetail deer.
So I guess maybe the way to look at it then is, like, what are we...
If we're looking to just...
If our objective is to feed as many people as possible and we're maximizing the amount of nutrients we can acquire from a specific thing, like...
We're leaving a lot on the table or we're giving a lot to different areas, like different animals and things that would be- Well, we're doing it wrong.
We're putting our waste in bags and we're throwing it into the landfills.
Have you seen they did this aerial study of Los Angeles?
They're trying to find out where most of the methane comes from.
It's fucking landfills, man.
Landfills are disgusting.
And this is not how it's supposed to be.
It's supposed to be animals are supposed to have access to what's left over.
I mean, this is what would happen if a bear killed a moose.
If a bear killed a moose, it's going to consume a big portion of the body, and then it's going to leave whatever's left, and then rodents and vultures and then eventually insects and bacteria are going to break it down.
And this is a natural cycle of life for animals.
This is how it's supposed to be.
What we do is we take it, we cut it up, we eat some of it, we throw some of it away, we put that in a plastic bag, we zip tie it, we dig a fucking hole in the ground, and we throw that bag in there.
We're so enamored with this idea of getting a job.
We're so enamored with this idea of the structure of civilization as it stands in 2019 is the way to go.
So we're teaching kids how to complete this life that they're born into, the way it's established for their parents, the way it's established for their neighborhood.
Get in your car, drive to work, work all day, come home, eat what you can, throw the rest of the garbage, go back to work in the morning.
And this is nonsense.
This is not how you have to do it.
You don't have to do anything.
There's a bunch of different ways to live this life, and there's only 100 years if you're lucky.
So this thing that we're setting up, we're setting up kids to essentially be as miserable as everybody else before them doing the exact same thing that everybody else has done.
Like maybe you can get lucky, like I have been or like you've been, and you find something that you actually enjoy doing.
Then you get lucky.
Like, oh my god, you know, Zach found a job that he really loves and he got really good at it.
And now he actually has joy in what he does.
But there's a lot of different places in this country alone where you can live and you can do things in a non-traditional manner and you can get by.
And you'll probably be healthier and happier than someone that gets stuck in the same goddamn civilization cycle, this industrialized cycle that we're all in.
And we don't teach kids that.
What we teach kids is, here's history, here's math, get your SATs in, get the score, go to the college that you want, get a job.
And this is the standard path that seems to be rewarded.
And if you say, well, I'm going to drop out and find myself, oh, good luck, loser.
You're going to fuck up your life.
What are you doing, man?
You're not even going to college?
Jesus Christ.
And it's very unfortunate that we have this incredibly rigid system.
And it really made me feel like a failure.
I didn't fit into the system.
Because I have ADD or whatever, emotional issues, whatever I had, I just could not sit still in class and concentrate.
I had way too much fucking energy.
This was just not for me.
I was twiddling my thumbs and tapping the floor and looking at the clock.
I literally didn't do any homework my entire high school career.
I didn't do any.
I just got by being smart enough to pass tests by learning what I learned in class and not putting in any fucking extra effort.
I just wanted to get out.
And I found something that I was good at.
I figured it out.
I got lucky that I did that.
But for a lot of people, they just live these lives of frustration.
You know, and they never do find, and they're not taught to find a thing.
And there's also, I think, there's great satisfaction to working on something that you enjoy, whether it's working with your hands or working on something that's creative.
And working with the land.
You know, you talk to people that run their own little organic farms.
Like, I know this couple that runs an organic farm.
And, man, when they talk about their food, they talk about the vegetables they grow and the stuff they grow, they, like, beam.
If you could figure out a way to run an organic garden and you do compost, you don't use pesticides, you do everything organic and everything is regenerative and you actually can feed people, my God, how good would you feel?
You have to be one of those outside-the-box thinkers because school's essentially set up for scale, right?
It's set up for, you got 500 kids, you got to turn them into not losers.
How do I get 500 kids to not be a loser?
Well, just standard path, you know, like standard American diets, like standard American education, these like standard paths that will work for X amount of people.
You get 10 people, 7 of them won't be losers if you just shove them into this machine and pump them out in this fucking form.
I'm not the guy that's supposed to be running 200 miles.
It's just your realm.
And it's also, I don't desire to do that.
Conversely, if you had to become a stand-up comedian, you'd probably be like, well, fuck this.
I don't want to be thinking about things that's funny.
And the first time you bomb, you'd be like, what am I doing with my life?
Everybody has a different personality and these different personalities and these different interests and desires, they take different paths.
And I think we need to open that up to people more and just sort of in some way encourage people to seek more, to genuinely try to find the things that interest you.
Maybe you should be a fly fishing guide.
Maybe you should be a guy who makes homemade mugs out of wood.
Exotic hardwood.
Maybe you're a knife maker.
Maybe you should make fucking dream catchers.
I don't know.
Don't make dream catchers.
Does anybody really like dream catchers?
There's something you buy and then you put it on the wall and you go, what the fuck am I doing?
I'm pretending I'm a Native American or something.
But there's things you can do, man.
You just have to find that thing.
And I think that's so hard for people.
And that's why people, when they find someone like yourself that's doing this unusual, unorthodox thing and you're extremely successful at it, it becomes so attractive to people to hear your story.
Yeah, and I think I would have never guessed I'd be doing what I'm doing now 10 years ago.
So it's equally surprising to me, I think, sometimes.
But, you know, it is interesting when you think about just...
Where you thought you would maybe be and then where you end up and all that stuff in between.
Ultimately, I think you want to be smart about stuff.
I didn't necessarily just quit my job and say I'm going to be an ultramarathon runner.
You kind of have a few different options available or you just keep options open to...
For me personally, I like to coach too.
So I'm going to do some of that and that helps supplement things.
And then, you know, podcasting has always been a fun thing to do.
So historically, I'd always go on podcasts.
And then a couple of years ago, it was like, well, if it's this much fun to go on them, it must be fun to do them too.
So, you know, starting these other, I think when people start kind of really exploring where their curiosities are, you find these different avenues too.
And it just kind of snowballs a little bit as opposed to being, you know, maybe you start out making the dream catcher and then you become something else or Right, right.
After really good, hard workouts, first of all, I'm always filled with gratitude.
I'm always really thankful after long, hard workouts.
And I've thought about doing this thing called the Gratitude Series, where I do a podcast immediately after really hard workouts.
And just talk about my feelings.
I mean, it sounds fucking corny and self-indulgent.
But realistically, I think there are some lessons that I learn off of really hard workouts.
You know, where it's like at the end of it, you know, when it's all done, first of all, there's always this feeling like eight out of ten times I don't want to work out.
Really?
8 out of 10. I work out 10 out of 10. But 8 out of 10, I'm like, fuck this.
I want to call people and tell them I care about them.
There's moments post-workout in particular where you just feel really good.
And I think life is sometimes about...
Getting over those periods of feeling kind of shitty or low energy or lethargic or unrested or what the fuck it is and just pushing through that because you know the territory.
You've been there before and then developing a habit of being able to do that and being able to know and have faith in the process and understand that this, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you don't want to do it.
And I think in my own training, I get that from a lot of different workouts.
But the one that I really love is when I get closer to a race, and like I was saying before, you start dialing things in to be more specific to the activity you're trying to prepare for.
I'll do a phase of training where I'm running kind of in an area of about 150 to 155 beats per minute.
It's just fast enough where I feel like I'm really kind of working, but it's also slow enough where I can go for quite a while so I can log a really big run.
When I was training for this last race at the Pettit Center, I had a training cycle where I hit a four-week block where...
I had one deload a week, which is basically a reduction of volume and intensity, and three build-ups.
To kind of go back to what we were talking about in the beginning, like when I structure a plan, ideally I start out, I start out with a good base, a good aerobic base, which I typically kind of retain almost year round.
I'll take like off season, but I like to follow a principle where I'll let myself kind of lose some of that peak fitness just so it's sustainable because staying at your peak fitness level is not sustainable.
So I let myself get like just out of shape enough so that I'm not always at that level.
Uh, and then, uh, I, I start kind of building in the, the structure towards the race itself, which starts with those shorter, faster intervals since they're further away.
And then I get closer and closer to the race where I'm doing things that are more specific.
So like the next step would be, I'd be doing some longer intervals or kind of like what you consider like an anaerobic threshold type workout, which generally speaking is about like your max intensity.
If you did like a 60 minute all out time trial.
And then, you know, that's still not specific to 100 miles because I'm out there for 11 hours, so I'm kind of still moving closer to that slower race pace.
Yeah, and it just follows the principle of, you know, hitting all the systems of training like you would in any other periodized endurance plan, but always keeping that compass of the stuff you do or the intensity of the race itself is the type of work you should be doing closest to it.
So you're really just optimizing when you're closer to the race itself.
Like when you say that you want to, you can't really maintain the peak fitness, you want to back off a little bit so that you can just keep your training running.
How do you know where that is and how do you know that you cannot expand that and then...
I mean, you can analyze things if you want to go into like heart rate variability type things, but that's a little bit more on the micro level.
For me personally, like usually I'll get to a point where like I'll do a race and you can just kind of tell like I'm exhausted from that.
And I like to think of it kind of two-folded.
We're like physical recovery and mental recovery.
So if I do a big race and afterwards, like I can't even like bring myself to think of another big training block, I know I need to like let myself kind of get a little bit out of that fitness state, that peak fitness state and just kind of reset or hit the reset button.
So the guy who race directed at Jamil, he'll let me jump in events when I want to.
So sometimes if I'm going to do something, like say I'm preparing for 100 mile and I want to get a really long day, like a 7-8 hour session in, I'll just pick a 100k type event or a 50 miler type event and just do that.
I like to say, those are training tools, so I don't want to necessarily race it all out.
But if you can keep yourself at maybe 80% of what you're capable of, you can get that good long stimulus, but not necessarily beat yourself up so much that it takes away from the race you're preparing for.
Like I just did a 50 miler actually about a week and a half ago called the JFK 50 mile and that took me five hours and 42 minutes.
And that course is kind of, it's got, you go over the Appalachian mountains for about 60 miles and you get on a really flat towpath for about a marathon.
It is, but the funny thing about ultra marathon, especially in North America is like, you know, the trails are where a lot of, you know, there's a lot of interest there.
So 3,000 for 50 is actually considered a relatively flat, fast course.
Whoa!
That's hilarious.
It's really interesting too because like some of the – I live just about two hours south of Flagstaff and there's a group of ultramarathon guys who train up there and they – I got a lot of inspiration from two of them specifically for this last race, the race I did at the Pettit Center.
One guy's name is Jim Walmsley, and he's, for my money, probably the best ultramarathoner we have, certainly in North America, if not the world.
I mean, he's got the course record at the Western States 100, which is the most tested 100-miler in North America.
He's got the course record at the Lake Sonoma 50-mile by a pretty big margin.
He's actually got the two fastest times, but the next closest person to him is like...
18 minutes behind or something like that.
And then he's also got the course record at the JFK 50 mile, the one I just was mentioning before.
And these three events are three of the most tested courses that we've had.
And he's got the course records at all of them, and he can probably go faster on all three.
Jesus Christ.
So, I mean, some of his training is like, he'll do like 150 mile a week sometimes with like 30,000 feet of climbing and descending.
Jim, he had actually broken the course record the year before.
And he took, I think it was like 16 or 17 minutes off the old course record.
Ran 14 and a half hours.
This next year, he broke his course record with the 1409. Jared came in second in, I think it was 1423 or 26, just behind Jim, basically pushing him all day.
So any other time Jared would have won that race, except for that year, and it would have been a huge story for him.
And, you know, it just, I mean, it was an amazing performance from those two guys, and just watching kind of their training, and then their performances, because I was out there crewing and pacing my wife, was, like, a huge motivator for me when I kind of got into the training buildup for that race at the Pennant Center, so...
Wow.
It's just funny with ultramarathoning because you have such a variety.
I think we talked about this a bit the last time.
You can have these 50k races that are like...
I mean, there's 50k races that have 10,000 feet of climbing and descending.
And then you can have these six-day events that are on a 400-meter track.
And they had actually proposed last year, I think they just were maybe spitballing a little bit, but they were like, hey, would you be ever interested in doing that?
Like, go running, you know, doing that cross-country route.
And I was like, yeah, I've been actually wanting to do that at some point.
I just haven't gotten around to actually planning it out.
I mean, just to do one marathon when you're not in shape...
I just can't imagine the just a fucking sheer amount of just will just pure will that it takes to do something like that and to just keep pushing left right left right left right left right even though everything your head your brain your feet everything stop stop stop fuck you left right left right left right i mean he ran how many thousand miles was it The entire length of
It's amazing what people can do when they decide they're going to do it.
Yes.
But yeah, I mean, I think for this particular run, I probably would have kept punting it down the road had I not talked to Justin Wren, to be honest with you.
When you do something like that, part of the reason I think you do that is, for me anyway, is when I see...
Endurance, ultra-endurance sport too, it can be a very selfish sport because you're putting in tons of training.
Race day is like an all-day effort with tons of people helping you out.
They're taking time out of their schedule, their day, to come out there, crew, pace, essentially be your...
Your support system while you're out there trying to do all these things.
Part of it is I want to try to give back in a way as well, as opposed to just always going out and racing for my own sake.
And I think it was on here that I heard his podcast for the first time.
I know I heard him tell I guess what you would call his origin story here and I think I heard it again on like the Mind Pump Media Guys podcast and it's, when I describe just listening to Justin Wren's podcast or his interviews to people, I try to say like well it kind of comes in these stages where he tells his background story of like his experience with bullying and And at first, your heart just sinks for the guy.
You're thinking like, well, how could anyone have to go through that?
I would never want anyone to go through that.
And you kind of transition into this phase of like, you kind of get nervous and anxious because you're thinking like, well, who did I say something mean to when I was younger?
Or who did I potentially affect in a negative way?
And then it's like, then you just want to try to do something to support.
And You know, it's really, when you look at someone like Justin Wren, it's mind-boggling to me that this guy isn't like an internationally known hero or leader, yet anyway.
I mean, Justin Renn is next level when it comes to a leader, I think.
And I think in the current...
Especially in the current climate, our leaders today tend to be people like celebrities, athletes, and then politicians and things like that.
And it's like...
You look around and it can be very underwhelming about just how badly are people actually trying to help people and how many of these politicians actually care about poor people.
How many of them actually care about someone who's disenfranchised?
Yeah, so I think when I look at, I think people want to help, and I think people want to do things that are good for humanity, but oftentimes they don't necessarily have that example to lead the way.
And they look into a void in some cases.
And I think Justin is the type of person who, you know, if the more people we can get to know about him, his story, and what he's trying to do on the wells and the farms with the pygmy, as well as his new branch on anti-bullying, the better.
So when I reached out to him, I was actually kind of surprised.
I shot him a note on, I think, Instagram and Twitter.
And I thought, he's probably not even going to see it because he's not following me.
And he responded in like...
Less than a couple hours.
He followed me, responded back, and he's just like, this is so awesome.
I feel super honored that you'd want to help out in some way.
He's just always looking for opportunities to help promote this great cause.
So then when I got that response from him, it was like clarification of what I think some I already knew about the guy just from listening to him on your show and others.
He's really in this for a big reason.
And if we need to fast track this cross-country event to bring him some awareness, we'll see what we can do.
Antibiotics that you know weaken your ligaments, right?
Like when you take Cipro or any of these like super intense antibiotics, one of the side effects is a lot of times people get injured, like your ligaments get injured, because apparently there's a weakening effect, which is really kind of...
It's really fascinating when you think about the human body as an overall organism and that it's really an ecosystem and that when you flood antibiotics into that ecosystem to try to prevent disease from destroying it, you also have these unintended side effects and one of them is weakened ligaments.
There's a lot of correlation between people getting staph infection and then blowing out knees, ACLs, you know, tendons and things along those lines afterwards.
Both of his shoulders are fucked.
This is post-antibiotics, and yet he's still talking about fighting so he can bring more awareness to the pygmies.
I'm like, bro, please, stop!
Just get your shoulders fixed.
Whatever you got going on, let's heal that up first.
And then also, find out what the fuck this parasite is.
You don't even know what this is.
He's not even thinking about himself.
He's like, if I can get in and get a fight in by the end of the year.
I'm like, the end of the year, man, it's fucking December.
Stop it!
You're not getting in by the end of the year.
You're not getting in the beginning of 2020. Let's heal up.
Heal up.
We want you healthy.
He's such a rare, totally selfless person, and he's such a powerful force for good for the people that live in the Congo.
And what he's done for them I mean, I don't know how many wells they've built so far, but they've made an alliance with the Cash App, which is one of my sponsors.
So every time someone downloads the Cash App, when they use the code JoeRogan, whether it's for Google, for Android, or for an iPhone, for Apple, you get $10 goes to this cause.
So they've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they're building wells right now.
It's just this amazing thing that he's done.
And he's just...
Like, you feel like a piece of shit.
Like, when you're around him, you're like, why am I not this nice?
And on top of that, the guy's a world-class mixed martial artist.
I mean, he really is.
He's one of the best heavyweights in the world.
And how much better would he be if he was selfish and spent all of his time training and not getting malaria three times, not having this unknown parasite that they think might be in his fucking brain?
I mean, they don't even know what...
I was just reading this story about some guy who was having seizures, and it turns out he had all these worms in his brain.
And I'm like...
And I was thinking about Justin.
It was from uncooked pork from this guy.
And Justin...
They think...
The problem with the Congo is it's so remote, and you don't get a lot of people that go there and get diseases and then come back.
So they don't even know what this is.
It might be something that no one's ever got before and then made it back to Western civilization to be examined.
Well, you know, it's an interesting—not just an interesting—it's a beautiful sort of expression of what can happen to a person when they experience deep pain and sadness, and then they find a way out, and then they find a way to help other people.
And that's sort of what he's done.
You know, his childhood was really rough.
And he came out of that a super kind person, as opposed to being angry and mean.
I mean, this is what we need more in the world, right?
We need more people building people up and helping, and less people tearing people down and hating.
So much of what social media is used for and so much of what the internet is used for is hate.
It's anger.
There's so much anger.
And to see someone like Justin, this rare soul that has found a way to almost universe...
I mean, everything he does is channeled towards good.
Well, so if I go and try to get close to or right around the record for that, it's about a 40-day-ish timeframe, give or take.
So you're really, I think the biggest hurdle or planning thing is to find the timeline where you're going to run into the least amount of weather issues.
Because you're going across the country, so you're going over the Sierras and you're going through the...
You know, the middle of the country and then all that stuff.
So obviously you don't want to be going over mountain passes in the middle of winter, but you probably don't also want to be going through the Midwest in the middle of the summer.
So some of it's going to be kind of planning around that.
There's probably some good opportunities in the spring and the fall that kind of catch that window of moderate temps versus extremes.
You want to hear something crazy about Pete, though?
So he did that, and then that wasn't enough because he...
I think this was...
A year ago or two years ago, he went up in Alaska and went from Alaska down to the southern tip of Florida all by himself with just one of those push strollers.
And he averaged, I think it was like 50 miles a day or something like that.
When I was following him, he was logging all his runs on Strava.
So it was hilarious to see these...
These weeks after weeks where it's like 50 mile day, 50 mile day, like, you know, like 350, 400 mile weeks and stuff like that.
And then if you like zoomed in on his routes, you could see like he'd be on this route and all of a sudden you see him deviate a little bit and you'd zoom in and be like, oh, there's a grocery store there.
My thought is it's probably got to either be about a 10-month start point or 18. So I could either do it now, or I guess it'd be a little less than 18, but by finishing.
So I would either maybe try to do it this fall, or if I don't have enough in place by then, target kind of the end of winter for 2021. And what would change?
Just, I mean, I'm trying to respect how much, like, planning it's going to take, and I haven't really started that yet, so I don't want to, like, necessarily get, find out, like, okay, let's say I just put a date on the calendar right away, and then find out, oh, I need to, like...
There's a lot more resources I have to try to acquire to make this happen.
Yeah, mostly logistics and getting everything just organized enough to – because I don't want to screw it up.
Yeah.
So there's that too.
And then also planning around my own race schedule to a degree too.
So obviously this will probably – this will take the place of an – the way I look at like seasons of racing is there's kind of two key ones.
You have like your spring, early summer, and your kind of late summer, fall slash winter season.
So there's kind of two.
Uh, so I'll basically just sacrifice one of those seasons for this.
And I probably won't, I mean, I don't really know what to expect cause I've never done anything quite like this before, but I'm planning on dedicating one of those seasons towards that exclusively.
The first known transcontinental journey took place in 1896 by a mother-daughter duo who, needing to raise money to save their farm in Spokane County, Washington, responded to a $10,000 public wager that no one could make it by foot across the country.
Helga and Clara Espy left home with $10 between them, as well as a compass, a knife, a curling iron, and a Smith& Wesson revolver.
Don't fuck with those ladies.
they'll curl your hair and shoot you in the dick they made it to New York City seven months later but for reasons unknown did not receive any reward for their toils on their way home Helga and Clara took the train what the fuck why didn't they get paid someone fucked them out of their money probably Someone fucked them out of their money.
Yeah, so it started again, picked that back up again in like the 60s, and in 1980, somebody that was doing it had his team scramble to get witness signatures the whole way across so he could prove that he did it when he did it and the amount of time that he did it.
Kind of to maybe go full circle with what we started before where we kind of talk about kind of what I periodize with carbohydrates and stuff like that where I think there is a point where the distance is long enough where like a strict ketogenic diet is maybe more applicable.
I think it's pretty well established.
If you follow a strict ketogenic diet or a zero-carb diet and try to perform in some of these typical endurance events, it's going to come at a performance cost unless you have some weird outlying type situation.
Trent Stellingworth looked at, he's a guy up in Canada who works with a lot of the sports performance stuff, and He did some studies that actually looks at if you go super strict keto or zero carb, you get really fat-adapted.
You get really good at burning fat.
But it comes at a cost of your ability to burn exogenous glucose.
So if I went zero carb for a year and then I tried to take in my fueling strategy that I do now, my body would probably reject it or at least I would have to be really, really conservative with how much I used.
He's a very, very interesting guy because he's a super legit fact-based scientist who's also a power athlete, you know, and ketogenic, like for a long, long time now.
But like what I'm trying to say with that is like- He'd probably help you.
Yeah.
I mean, he'd be a great resource for sure.
But like for something like this, like my intensity is going to be so low that like I don't technically need to be taking in exogenous glucose for something like that.
So it might actually behoove me to be as fat adapted as I can get versus what I'm normally doing is I'm trying to get as fat adapted as I need to be, but not necessarily so far that it comes at the compromise of being able to do my in-race nutrition fueling plan.
I think you probably can to a degree, but what happens is you downregulate...
I can't speak to the science perfectly, but Trent Stallingworth did a bunch of research where basically it downregulates the mechanism that allows you to take in glucose and utilize it in a meaningful way.
So most people can tolerate probably somewhere between maybe...
60 to 90 grams of glucose per hour during some of these events.
Whereas if you went on a strict zero carb diet and tried to do 60 to 90 grams of sports drink or fuel or something like that, I don't think your body could clear it because it would have down-regulated your body's capability to do that.
So, I mean, folks who are interested should look at Trent Stallingworth's work.
He would be able to describe it in much better detail than I can.
I don't know if it was consistently the same every day.
So maybe that's where my plan would deviate.
And I probably am going to learn along the way and maybe change things.
But I do kind of like, at least on paper, that idea of targeting a 12 to 14 hour window so that I have at least 10 hours to kind of like refuel and sleep and stay on top of that stuff.
And what that'll likely mean is like maybe there'll be some days where I go well past 70 miles.
Maybe there'll be some days where I go well under.
And you just hope that you average to get the record.
But the record's kind of secondary.
I'm going to stick, if I fall off, if it's clear when I get to the Midwest that I'm not going to hit Pete's record, we're going to just try to keep the main goal in mind of bringing awareness to fight for the forgotten.