← Some Work, All Play
Some Work, All Play
311. The Science Episode! How To Stop Cramps, Fat Oxidation Changes, Missing Link Heat Training, The Difficulty of Physiology Data, and More
01:41:56
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- [00:01]
A
Woohoo. Welcome to the Some Work All Play podcast. We are so happy to be with you today.
- [00:05]
B
Happy Tuesday. It's Tuesday, and we are swimming in some veggie sticks on this Tuesday.
- [00:09]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't feel great about this one. So you were gone this weekend. You went with Leo back to where you grew up in Pennsylvania. It was a really special trip.
- [00:18]
B
It was so much fun. It was my first time traveling with Leo solo in a minute, and we had a blast. Like, I feel like he's actually at that age where it's enjoyable to travel with him, and it was great.
- [00:27]
A
Yeah. And you said you have delayed onset muscle soreness in your thumbs right now.
- [00:30]
B
I do. I played field hock and I went to the turf and, like, went to my high school, and they had this box, this bin of, like, a hundred balls. And as soon as I hit two or three of them, I was like, I gotta keep going. I was like, I should socialize right now. I should hang out with Leo. But it activated the, like, high school primal part of my brain that was like, I cannot stop. And so I probably hit, like, 75 balls. And now my thumbs are sore.
- [00:53]
A
What a tricky time, because you're waiting to exercise until you get another hard test done. So right now you see a hundred balls and you're like, I gotta go. I can't. I can't stop.
- [01:01]
B
I mean, I feel like at any time in my life, there's, like, this, like, true competitor within me. And as soon as you put me on that field, I'm like, I just can't stop. As soon as she sees balls, I'm like, it's addicting. Help me. And now, I mean, it's legitimately. It actually, like, makes me smile that my thumbs are sore because it reminds me of just, like, a prior self.
- [01:19]
A
Yeah, well, that's beautiful. What's not beautiful is while you were gone, I was with Ollie, who's our younger kid. And because I had a lot of free time, it's like, okay, how can I be the best parent possible? I'm like, I'm gonna make their nutrition just a little bit better.
- [01:33]
B
Okay. I love this, by the way, because you had this thought as I was in Philadelphia feeding Leo, like, soft pretzels and Rita's water ice.
- [01:40]
A
Those are great. The problem is when our kids are eating Fritos for their meals, which, you know, obviously Fritos are part of a healthy diet, but not the entire healthy diet. And so I ordered, like, $300 worth of what I thought were healthy snacks. And most of them were okay.
- [01:54]
B
You texted me and you're like, megan, I got veggie sticks. I got yogurt pouches. I got fruit pouches. I was a little bit like, oh, I'm excited to see what shows up here.
- [02:03]
A
Well, we uplift all food in this house. But today Megan went to the veggie stick thing, and I just assumed because it was veggie stick, it was like, veggies.
- [02:10]
B
You ordered Zesty ranch veggie stick. I was reading the ingredients to you this morning, and it's like tomato powder.
- [02:18]
A
No, no, Tomato powder wouldn't be bad powder. Potato starch is the first ingredient. Not potatoes. Potatoes starch. So I feel like the veggie stick, the veggie of extra work. So I don't know if I accomplished my full goal, but I'm still proud of myself for trying.
- [02:34]
B
Megan, I feel like veggie sticks are veggie signaling. They're, like, putting it out there and you fell for it. But you know what? I love that you, like, thought about this and you're like, I'm going to invest in their nutrition. We're going to mix some fruit and vegetables into their lives. And, you know, potato starch just goes hard sometimes.
- [02:50]
A
Yeah. Before we know it, we're going to just be blending Fritos with Diet Coke. That's going to be their meals, actually. Not Diet Coke, regular Coke. But yeah. I mean, it's an interesting del dilemma as a parent, just as a little aside, is I want them to be totally open to all foods, right? To have no, like, issues with any food. I mean, so much of us, so many of us grew up in times when you do. Like, I grew up in the fat free time of the 1990s, and so that infiltrated my brain for so long that it made me less healthy as a person.
- [03:19]
B
And I remember how they talked about, like, the food pyramid in school and the breakdown of, like, what is healthy. And it was kind of wild. When you think about it today in the context of, like, how we talk about nutrition. And it is a little bit jarring, which I feel like my brain was not really primed to pick up on that. The rebel on me was like, I don't know about this food pyramid business.
- [03:37]
A
That entire time, you were just like, balls, balls.
- [03:39]
B
I must hit more all the time.
- [03:41]
A
I'm addicted to balls. But as a result, I'm now overthinking it. And I probably need to go online and research how you can balance, like, intuitive eating with not just feeding Your kids. Frito slurry. So we'll see.
- [03:56]
B
Well, Leo, for the longest time, wakes up in the morning and the first thing he says to one of us is like, Fritos or cake.
- [04:01]
A
He doesn't do it anymore.
- [04:02]
B
He doesn't do it anymore. That's true.
- [04:03]
A
Yeah. We've progressed.
- [04:05]
B
We do need to find that balance between, like, you know, having this, like, free loving environment with food and also having like, a few boundaries. And I feel like we're getting there.
- [04:13]
A
We're getting there. One veggie stick at a time.
- [04:16]
B
One Zesty Ranch veggie stick at a time.
- [04:18]
A
Zesty Ranch is key. Okay, we have the zestiest episode for you today. Uh, we're going to start by talking about a new missing link. Heat study. I love that one. How fat oxidation can change on short time cycles.
- [04:28]
B
Okay. The figure on this one was wild. It was like, it was kind of like an artistic scatter plot of just lines going everywhere.
- [04:34]
A
Yeah, it was truly bonkers. I think I sent you a picture of it because it blew my mind. Then a discussion on the difficulty of studies. The amazing dark wizard documentary.
- [04:44]
B
Okay. This is on hbo. It blew our minds.
- [04:46]
A
It was the best.
- [04:47]
B
It was so good.
- [04:47]
A
And then how to stop cramps. And a Q and A on the true goat of endurance. Running versus biking, Uphill treadmill relationships, tragedies and races, uphill time trials, going for it, and more.
- [04:57]
B
Okay. You listed a lot of Q and A on there in the roadmap. I feel like we're gonna get to like half of those.
- [05:01]
A
I think we can do. I think the science studies are more quick hitters on this episode. Like, they're very interesting. They tie into a lot of big themes. But maybe not to go the whole episode on.
- [05:11]
B
We'll see what happens. I feel like you're Q and A signaling over there.
- [05:15]
A
You're just over there thinking about balls. So that's on you. Okay, before we get to that, a quick promo for the feed. Go to the feed.com swap, swap. Just go in there for your first order. You get 40% off. So do some huge ass order. But if you're a returning customer, you get $10 back for every $100 spent. And they have a hot deals section. You just go click on hot deals. And they have flash deals of 50% on some of the best products all the time. It's a great place to just try things out.
- [05:39]
B
Okay. My brain can't help myself. I feel like it's when I'm around a bucket of like 100 field hockey balls. I'm like, I must click the hot deal section over and over again.
- [05:45]
A
Yeah. Must go crazy on hot deals. So the things I want to promote first, Enervit Mango is back in stock. It went out of stock after we started talking about it a lot. I think they ordered, like, 18 shiploads of it. So go get it now.
- [05:57]
B
It is genuinely so tasty. I actually miss it. So I haven't consumed a gel now in three weeks, and I'm quite sad about that. Like, I miss. They actually, like, you know, you have, like, certain nostalgia for things as I'm, you know, taking this break from exercise to heal my heart. And one of them are enervit mango gels. Like, I can't help but miss them.
- [06:13]
A
This is like you going back to Wawa and getting the soft pretzels that you ate cold. Like a sociopath. Like a true serial killer.
- [06:21]
B
That is a true east coast sociopath, though. I had. I like Strava Ed. I strava'd my walk to Wawa. This is where we're at right now. In my heart journey.
- [06:29]
A
This is where we're at.
- [06:30]
B
I'm making a summit to Wawa. You guys, I love this. For us, it's one point. Oh, I really love this. For me, it's a 1.68 mile walk. And I'm like, here it is. Here's the Wawa pretzel. And someone commented they're like, hot take. Why do you East Coasters love cold, soft pretzels? And I actually like fair. I kind of agree with it.
- [06:45]
A
Same goes with Rita's. I think Rita's. You're just being gaslit by your upbringing.
- [06:49]
B
Rita's is water ice. And I think water ice isn't even a thing.
- [06:53]
A
It is all just bullshit. You are indoctrinated.
- [06:56]
B
There's custard on the bottom. There's custard on the top. It's like, sandwiched between custard. It's delicious.
- [07:01]
A
Just give me custard. I don't need any ice.
- [07:03]
B
I did find myself, like, digging the custard out and kind of getting to the ice last, which maybe is a sign. Maybe it's a sign.
- [07:08]
A
Maybe it's a sign.
- [07:09]
B
But you know what? I still love it.
- [07:10]
A
Okay.
- [07:11]
B
I can't help it, but I miss mango gels.
- [07:14]
A
Yes.
- [07:14]
B
And hopefully I'll have them back in my life soon. I just feel like it's like, one part of training that I. I just want to take a gel.
- [07:19]
A
They're fantastic. So Enervit Mango. The other thing I wanted to give a quick promo for is the Koros heart rate monitor. I'm going to write about it for the feed this week, so get them now. These might sell out. This is what every pro is using. Like if you look at the finish line of Zegama, which was this weekend, you see it over and over and over again. The Coros heart rate arm band is awesome and it pairs with any watch. Like we both have Garmins and it works fine.
- [07:39]
B
I also feel like it's great too because we're getting more real world studies on like what's happening to heart rate and how athletes are racing. And it's actually accurate because it was so frustrating for the longest time just looking at Strava files of clear wrist based heart rate and being like, like, ah, I can't do anything with this.
- [07:51]
A
Yeah. The analogy I'm writing for the feed is that chest bands, chest straps are kind of like rim brakes on bikes that they used to have where they're lighter. So that might help for climbing, but they're worse in the fact that you might not stop in the rain. And then armbands are like disc brakes which everyone uses now, um, but might be a little bit slower to pick up very short, like 30 second intervals, but you don't really doesn't matter for training. And then wrist based heart rate is like using your feet to stop like you're Fred Flintstone. Just don't do anything right.
- [08:21]
B
It's a great analogy.
- [08:23]
A
Thank you.
- [08:23]
B
I really like it. For the longest time I was like, nah, I'm not gonna go with the armband. I just like my chest band. I like safety pinning it to my sports bra. And not once have I gone back and thought about the chest band.
- [08:32]
A
No, arm, arm straps are so good. Just seeing it brings me a spark of joy. And then the final thing is another promo for bicarb. We talk about it all the time, but the more athletes experiment, the better their results. So you can go just right bicarb into the search bar on the feed, but get the Morton 25, like the highest dose, the dose made for like, you know, the largest people and then you can cut it. So I only take a third dose or a half dose and that's plenty for me. It makes it last a little bit longer and don't tell them we told you.
- [08:59]
B
In fact, you wrote an article this week for Patreon on cramping and ways to prevent cramping. And one of your strategies in there was bicarb. And I love that you included it. But it wasn't because of like the sodium load. Or maybe it is. We're still figuring it out. Maybe it's the sodium load on race day, maybe it's actually taking it. But I do feel like there's something that happens longer term when you accumulate taking bicarb within training sessions. And I'm excited to talk about that ahead because that's like a David Roach hypothesis that goes hard.
- [09:22]
A
It goes hard. The nervous system comes into play, as it often does. And so we'll talk about that in the how to stop cramps section, which I think is going to be a really interesting training discussion. So go to the feed.com swap just write in your email and you get all that there. Now let's talk about the missing link heat study. I love to say missing link because heat training has been this black box for a while. So you see all of this information in real world practice and then you don't really see the studies backing it up. And since that offset was identified a few years ago, we started to see the studies fill the gap and come back with the results we expect. So this one really tickles my senses.
- [09:59]
B
Okay, it tickles my senses too because it feels very rational. Like I feel like in a lot of these heat studies we're seeing these drawn out protocols, especially focusing on active heat, which can have more of an inflammation based response. It can be harder to mix with training. And the question has been like, okay, can we achieve similar findings with passive heat? And I feel like we're starting to fill that missing link. And I like that science is doing it in a practical manner of ways in which like, it feels very attainable for an athlete that doesn't have, you know, a bunch of extra hours a day to spare to do these protocols. And I like that.
- [10:27]
A
And this is also telling us stuff about how the body adapts not just to heat that we'll get to at the end. So it's very strange. So this is the title. Daily hot water immersion preserves altitude induced hemoglobin mass expansion following descent independent of epo. So erythroprotein. I don't know exactly how to say it. There's too many syllables there. They should definitely cut out two or three.
- [10:46]
B
Actually, I just realized I was about to go for it and I realized I've actually never. I always just say EPO because even in the medical world you don't. You're not just like erythropoietin. Yeah, that's how I Say it. I made some enunciation there at the end, I started to panic.
- [10:57]
A
You put a little bit of Zesty Ranch onto that.
- [11:00]
B
I did. I saw your tomato powder and was like, here's some Zesty Ranch.
- [11:04]
A
So it's natural EPO here, not like synthetic, the illegal type. This is the type that your kidneys produce. Um, and so the background here is that altitude increases hemoglobin mass. That's why almost every elite athlete does altitude training. But then it goes down very, very quickly when you go down in altitude within seven days. And. And what this study finds is even faster than that. It does a four day protocol and finds the athletes dropping hemoglobin mass even when they're not going all the way to sea level, which we'll talk about in a second. So that's an interesting variable. And this study comes on top of one that was one of our top studies of the year last year, which found that passive heat, like this, hot water immersion, so hot tub, increases hemoglobin mass at baseline. If you do it for three to five weeks, this is filling another gap. Does this also preserve hemoglobin mass that you've already created?
- [11:49]
B
And so how they did this was, and I actually liked the methodological design of the study, I felt like they structured it well, was they took 13 men and 8 women for 21 athletes total. And they had them go to 3800 meters for 14 days. And 3800 meters is actually quite high compared to other, like traditional altitude studies and how you think about it in real world practice. So the 3,800 meters is like 12,000 ish feet a little higher than that. And that's quite high for sending these athletes in a shorter duration than like typical athlete camps. Did you also catch that the way that they describe this? And this was like in the abstract, they're like, they sojourned, sojourned at altitude. And then they used it as a noun across the rest of the paper. Yeah, they're like in the altitude sojourn. And I controlled F. I was like, how many times did they use sojourn?
- [12:29]
A
Wait, did you really? How many times?
- [12:30]
B
They used it 11 times as a noun and once as a verb.
- [12:33]
A
11 times? Hell yeah.
- [12:36]
B
Isn't that great? I mean, there you UK researchers, maybe that's like a UK maybe phrase that we use less often in the US
- [12:42]
A
I think that they might have been challenged. Right. I was reading an amazing article on ESPN that was about coach Steve Kerr. You should all go read it. It's one of Those life changing articles. It's 20 pages long. It's something like that. But within it he talked about just to make the process more interesting to him during his post game news conferences for an entire season, he worked all of Taylor Swift's All Too well lyrics into his answers.
- [13:06]
B
What?
- [13:07]
A
And no one ever caught it.
- [13:08]
B
Steve Curtin.
- [13:08]
A
Yeah. And he did it for his family.
- [13:10]
B
That's wild.
- [13:11]
A
And then they compiled them all into the full song.
- [13:14]
B
I thought I, like loved him a lot and now I love him even more.
- [13:17]
A
So maybe that's what the sojourn's coming from here. Do you know where they went to for that type of altitude?
- [13:22]
B
That's a good question. I actually don't know.
- [13:23]
A
I didn't really go. So that's very, very high. So you're getting a pretty quick response. And then they went down to 1200 meters with two groups. So after 14 days up higher. Um, so the two groups were the hot water immersion group that did 45 minutes at 40 degrees Celsius or hotter water, which is overlapping with other passive
- [13:41]
B
heat studies that's at least 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
- [13:43]
A
And then a control group that didn't do any at all.
- [13:45]
B
Which is actually interesting because we'll get to this ahead. But like, water immersion actually has properties that may impact hemoglobin mass. And I feel like the study would have been a lot stronger had they had them actually just do cold water immersion as a control. Um, because I do think like when you have a four day exposure, a short. It's like a short time. And I feel like that is kind of a fundamental limitation.
- [14:03]
A
That's why I sleep like a pickle, just like suspended. I never cramp or like, what is it Baron Harkonnen from Dune, who's in the liquid? You don't know that reference?
- [14:13]
B
I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
- [14:16]
A
But an interesting note on this protocol is there was no iron supplementation, which is probably a variable that changes this slightly because especially with female athletes, when you're going to that elevation, iron supplementation will probably be a limiter. So you might be partially just sensing how much athletes are iron limited in both their response to altitude, but then their loss of hemoglobin mass after. So I think if they're going to do this again, they should give some heavy duty iron supplementation.
- [14:42]
B
Agreed. They also use recreational athletes here too. And I feel like the. There's some fundamental differences in how recreational athletes and elite athletes respond to altitude. Um, and I think that could actually impact EPO response. And so I'm curious to see if they repeat this in elite athletes that have had like, you know, practice essentially flexing that muscle and Curious to see what happens.
- [15:00]
A
Yeah. Vsrs variable sojourn responses. Okay, so the results were very interesting. There's a 24 gram hemoglobin mass increase after altitude, which is pretty substantial. That's nice. Um, in the control group, There was an 18 gram decrease when they went down. In the hot water immersion group, there was another 9 gram increase, which was 9 non significant. So it shows that you're not only sustaining it, you're maybe even increasing it a little bit. Um, and interestingly, there was no difference in circulating EPO amongst the athletes or no difference in plasma volume. And that contrasts with all of the ideas of how this would actually be sustained. You would think. So. On one hand, you have the crit meter theory, which we talk about all the time, that heat increases the plasma content of your blood, so the liquid content of your blood. So you have to increase red blood cells to keep up with it. This isn't CRP meter because there's no plasma volume changes. Everybody lost some. Or you're getting some circulating EPO benefits from the heat itself, which is one of the theories, and they're not seeing that either. So what the heck caused this change?
- [16:00]
B
Okay, that was like my running mind brain response as I was running the study. It was basically just like, like, wtf? How is this happening? Do you have. Did you develop some kind of hypothesis as you're reading this as to why that could happen?
- [16:11]
A
Well, here is a quote from the article that I think just gives this, like, cute clue because the authors didn't speculate too much. They kept it mostly general, which I
- [16:19]
B
actually appreciated because I feel like the logical thing here is to, like, want to speculate, and it's a little tricky to do that. And so I felt like they kept it vague intentionally.
- [16:26]
A
Yeah, and we're not gonna. That's not what the study's for. But I think it's interesting when you apply this outside of heat, which is relevant here. So our findings resemble endurance training interventions in which hematological adaptation continues despite normalization of circulating epo. So in other words, when you do endurance training, your blood values usually get slightly better in terms of, like, red blood cells and things. But without an EPO response, we're not exactly sure why that is. It could even be something like shearing forces on, like, circ, like circulatory elements, like capillaries. It's very strange stuff like that.
- [16:59]
B
It's weird to think about, like, shearing forces in the positive. You're like, oh, yeah, these positive results are shearing forces.
- [17:04]
A
I often think about that when I'm on the bike doing, like, higher resistance.
- [17:07]
B
You're like, I'm shearing. Yeah.
- [17:09]
A
Basically, I'm Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran in my quads right now. What are his songs? You do any of his songs? Off Top of your head? Come on. Come on. I don't know. He has. He has a couple pretty cringe, like, sex songs that I kind of like.
- [17:22]
B
Yeah, they are pretty cringe.
- [17:24]
A
Yeah.
- [17:24]
B
It's kind of wild, actually, that you're like, give me edgeron off the top of your head and I can't.
- [17:27]
A
Yeah, he's. I do kind of really.
- [17:29]
B
I actually really like his stuff.
- [17:32]
A
Um, so that could be the impact here, is that essentially heat itself, that doing this passive heat is a training response. Like, it is the similar training response, even without the simple things that we're measuring. So it's almost no different than going out for a training session when you do passive heat. So even though it's not stressful and you can do it any day and it's not gonna detract from your other training, just doing it is good for you. And so, like, if you're in a rest period, even doing it then could be a productive thing, even without these variables that we measure pretty simply.
- [18:02]
B
Okay, here's my theory. Okay. Is that it just gets down to water immersion. So they actually. There's an interesting study about hemoglobin mass that was followed in 10 days following altitude exposure in elite swimmers. And they actually found maintenance of hemoglobin mass after they just went swimming. And there's this pretty significant impact for reasons that are complicated beyond this discussion on water immersion and hemoglobin mass. And I wonder if that's just what they're seeing here because it's short enough like. Like over four days. You might think that might have an impact.
- [18:26]
A
Yeah. Well, you know what the new hotness is?
- [18:28]
B
What?
- [18:29]
A
PT no longer a physical therapist is now pickle theory. You're bringing the pickle theory. You're bringing the juice baron Harkonnen theory. Yeah. No. So it could be some water immersion effects, maybe. I don't think so, though I doubt
- [18:41]
B
that seeing this magnitude of response is high.
- [18:44]
A
And it overlaps with the hemoglobin mass study of last year that found that passive heat for three to five weeks increases your hemoglobin mass, much like Active heat would. And so here's just another vote for some heat exposure. And it doesn't have to be much. It can probably just be one session a week. It can be hot tub, it can be sauna, it can be IR sauna, it can be active heat. Um, and then we have more advanced protocols that we write about on Patreon where we get into it in greater detail.
- [19:08]
B
And I love this Patreon question that came in that I feel like builds off of this discussion as well. It says, is heat training a good idea in the week after a race? I'm thinking some idea of your recent answer about during taper week. This is for half marathon, if that matters.
- [19:19]
A
Okay. So do you want to do heat after a race? My answer is a big fat yes.
- [19:24]
B
I was going to say mine was a big fat fuck yes.
- [19:26]
A
Oh, shit.
- [19:27]
B
I was coming on top of you. Coming over top.
- [19:30]
A
Coming over top.
- [19:33]
B
That's the best mess up of all time.
- [19:35]
A
You did to balls.
- [19:36]
B
You can really see where my brain's at.
- [19:40]
A
Megan has a lot of energy right now and nowhere to put it.
- [19:42]
B
I do. What am I supposed to do with all this energy?
- [19:44]
A
I don't know.
- [19:45]
B
I actually came up with a hypothetical and I've been asking a few people, like. Like, if you had to retire from endurance training, but you couldn't funnel that time, which was my first response, into parenting or work. I was like, I would just work more. I'd parent more. What would you do with yourself?
- [19:57]
A
What would I do with myself?
- [19:58]
B
I haven't asked this of you yet.
- [19:59]
A
Yeah, I'd probably write a lot more. I'd like, write books and just write outside of endurance.
- [20:07]
B
Like novels yet.
- [20:08]
A
Novels, just for the intellectual pursuit of it. And I'd also play video games. Both of my answers are extremely sedentary, just for the. The sake of this discussion, but also for the sake of my personality.
- [20:22]
B
Would you do something like hiking or climbing or like.
- [20:26]
A
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I'd go outside every day.
- [20:28]
B
Maybe, Like, I'd expose myself to some sun.
- [20:30]
A
Maybe I should see the sun occasionally. But I don't know. I feel like the thing I need the most is the intellectual outlet. So when you were gone, I really struggled with having no one to tell stupid jokes to. Like, Ollie wasn't that interested in them, to be 100% honest, at 16 months. And so, you know, without you, life was just so boring. And I was like, well, if she wasn't here more often, I would probably just need to write a lot more. And that's probably Similar. I need somewhere to put some of that just overall energy. So much more direct answer and important answer. How about you?
- [21:02]
B
Well, it is interesting before I answer that, that you had a blog before you met me, and then it's like kind of within meeting me, like within a few weeks or months, you stop that blog and you're like, I have an outlet for these crazy thoughts.
- [21:13]
A
Basically. Yeah, basically.
- [21:15]
B
Okay, my answer. Climbing. I actually, I'm terrified of heights. And like, even going up the rock wall in gym class made me shake my pants. But I feel like maybe I could get past that.
- [21:24]
A
I like that.
- [21:24]
B
And I think it'd be really invigorating to like, work through that fear of heights. And I could probably do it at like a low enough heart rate where it'd be okay.
- [21:30]
A
Would you trust me to belay you?
- [21:32]
B
Oh. Ooh.
- [21:33]
A
I was wondering that because last night when I said, oh, I'm learning to belay and I'll. I'll help you, you didn't respond. You changed the subject.
- [21:38]
B
Well, I feel like logistics are a very important part of climbing.
- [21:42]
A
Megan. I'm good at logistics when I care. I mean, Megan, when have you done any of our logistics? Why are you trusting yourself?
- [21:49]
B
I mean, I'm the one up in the wall. I'm not saying I'm belaying over here.
- [21:53]
A
Okay.
- [21:54]
B
I think I trust you. I think so.
- [21:56]
A
You think so?
- [21:56]
B
I think so. Maybe we can work on it.
- [21:58]
A
Well, we'll work on it if your genetic tests come back.
- [22:00]
B
Yeah. Okay. So climbing, I think, is one skiing. I would love to learn how to ski.
- [22:04]
A
Okay.
- [22:05]
B
Pottery. I think it'd be really fun to put like a wheel. And we have like a little barn outside. It'd be really cool to put a wheel in the barn and make it like a studio.
- [22:11]
A
Yeah.
- [22:12]
B
And then poetry.
- [22:13]
A
Okay. I like all of those.
- [22:14]
B
We actually have very different answers.
- [22:15]
A
Maybe we should do them anyway way.
- [22:16]
B
Yeah. Ah, that's a lot of time. I. We have an infinite time. I would. But that's a lot of time for those.
- [22:22]
A
Yeah. So getting back to the. The question here, I think that heat after a race is fantastic. Or in your taper. I think both of those windows are wonderful times to do some passive heat. Because one of the things that you're trying to like, contrast throughout training is when you have blood volume reductions. So blood volume reductions can happen on extremely short order. Like this study found a four day reduction in hemoglobin mass. Right. When an athlete comes down, reversing almost all the gains of a two week altitude. Trip. Um, and so similarly, even on like a rest day or when you dial back training, your blood volume can decrease due to lack of training stimulus. And so by adding heat, you aren't only gonna like, make that go back to baseline. You might even increase it. And so I think heat is great to do on your rest days. It's great to do on your recovery windows. It's great to do when you taper. And we've piloted this with a lot of professional athletes at this point and seen incredible results at the Internet national level. So I think that this is one of those elements that allows swap athletes to rest more throughout the season than other athletes who like, I think historically a lot of professional runners especially have not rested at all. Like, we'll always run an hour every day no matter what. And I think that what's that, what that's catching is that they're trying to stop blood volume reductions from rest. And so if you just add some heat on that day, you're golden.
- [23:38]
B
I also think heat too, especially in that post race window, can be great for circulating healing factors, which is a very like, broad way of describing that. But also I think it's great too, like, you know, combating post race blues and getting some of this. Like, I feel like when you're actually like doing focused heat training, it feels a lot like regular training. And I think you get some of those endorphins that even when you're resting, it's nice to kind of some activate some of those chemicals and like feel good about doing it. Um, and then I think also just too like, you know, when you're coming back after that period of time off and seeing elevated heart rates upon returning, it's like, I think, you know, heat training can kind of help solve that and keep heart rates from becoming elevated as you come back.
- [24:12]
A
Yeah, just blood volume response plays a huge role here. Okay, so let's get on to the next one. Before we do that quick promo for patreon, go to patreon.com swapSWP and Megan, I did the thing I always do.
- [24:22]
B
What did you do?
- [24:23]
A
Where I just pasted a bunch of different things.
- [24:26]
B
I'm so excited.
- [24:27]
A
So I'll just read a couple of them. Just looking through the training plans and this is a huge resource you guys are basically giving away. Thanks so much. So it starts at $5 a month. You get tons of training plans, bonus episodes, unlimited questions. At 10amonth, you get heart rate zones and a bunch more content. So go check that out.
- [24:43]
B
How was your episode this Week, week, like solo while I was traveling.
- [24:46]
A
It was existential.
- [24:47]
B
It was existential?
- [24:48]
A
Yeah.
- [24:49]
B
About what?
- [24:49]
A
Everything.
- [24:50]
B
Yeah. Why were you feeling existential?
- [24:51]
A
Well, because of your health stuff.
- [24:53]
B
Yeah.
- [24:54]
A
I was still in the thick of it a little bit, so I didn't know that I wasn't to the Zesty ranch part of this journey yet.
- [24:59]
B
I was facetiming you while I was gone. You seemed good. I didn't realize you were existential.
- [25:03]
A
I mean not like unhappy. I'm just. Everything became a bigger answer than they were looking for.
- [25:09]
B
Yeah, well, it's funny like after, you know, I've taken this time of rest now and I feel like everything gets more peaceful once you've rested for two weeks
- [25:16]
A
maybe. Okay, so another one. Shave 13 minutes off my marathon in the worst possible hot and humid conditions thanks to the advanced marathon plan. That one's fun. Um, then someone else. That's probably too long, right? Yeah, Shoot. Okay, well, just finished the 10 weeks winter training plan and I set a PR of 10 minutes on my 10 mile round. That one's cool.
- [25:34]
B
10 minutes. It's kind of wild the like magnitude of responses that we get to the training plans. It's exciting.
- [25:38]
A
Oh, and then I can can give a quick hint on the other one. Someone talked about they felt okay. Heading into the taper. I honestly felt under underprepared and worried I hadn't done enough long runs, especially after being so used to six plus hour long runs in previous years. But I trusted the process. Blah blah blah and beyond words with how the day unfolded. I ended up taking nearly 90 minutes off my a hundred k personal best. So another good thing about these plans, they're not requiring you to be out
- [26:02]
B
all day long, which is really convenient when you have a lot of other stuff going on. I just wanna feel good and.
- [26:07]
A
Patreon.com swaps p Now we're going to get to a weird, weird science one that is from 2020 actually. So this is stepping back in time. Most of the studies we give you came out in the last week. It's called the day to day reliability of peat Fat oxidation and fat max.
- [26:23]
B
And I like how they structured this so they took 49 net women and 50 men for 99 athletes total, which is a little bit more typically than we see within exercise like physiology studies. I feel like we're always looking at N of 14s and it's nice to see an N of 99.
- [26:35]
A
Yeah. When you're getting to this level you're starting to see like a group response. But even then it's kind of funny that while there's this big group, we're not even going to talk about the group response. We're just going to talk about a single figure in this study. So to take a quick step back, fat oxidation and fat max just refers to substrate oxidation, which they can measure pretty directly. This type of thing that if you go in for a lab test and get lactate zones done or anything like that, you're going to get told what your fat max is, where you burn the most amount of fat. That's not the easiest effort.
- [27:05]
B
Effort.
- [27:05]
A
It's an effort that's highly aerobic. It's usually top end of zone two, ish, maybe low end zone three. But it's starting to push the boundaries a little bit where you're burning a lot of fat and a lot of carbs.
- [27:14]
B
And a lot of athletes get these measures done repeatedly through a metabolic cart, which is where you go into the lab and get those measures tested. And I feel like oftentimes, like I've been in the room when physiologists are communicating those findings. And a lot of physiologists do a great job with it. And some physiologists I feel like, don't explain the nuance of this enough that these we're looking at like inflection points. We're looking at a number of different things and these are much more nuanced than just a single number on paper. And I love that this study gets at that.
- [27:39]
A
And this study points out just how hard numbers are. Numbers are tricky and that all snapshots of physiology are probably going to be catching something that becomes wrong as soon as you measure it. Like if you're relying on it in any long term way and not constantly recalibrating, you're fucked.
- [27:54]
B
Especially for anything that's like threshold based. Because if you think about something that's threshold based, you're relying on a lot of different things that are feeding into it. And you're also using mathematical principles to look at inflection points. And those things can be very noisy. Like if you think about small, like small signal changes in there that become noisy, that can change the inflection point quite a bit. And that can vary a lot day to day.
- [28:13]
A
Yeah. So I think we should just describe this figure to start and then get into some of the implications here. So there's two different graphs. We'll post this on Patreon. The first is peat fat fat, peat fat oxidation. The other is fat max. It does trial A and Trial B, which were separated by 7 to 28 days. So not a long period of time, not enough time for anything substantial to happen in physiology. You would.
- [28:35]
B
And they're drawing lines between trial A and trial B. And they broke it down by males and females. And at first when I saw that, I was like, oh great, because like the menstrual cycle is going to impact, you know, peak fat oxidation and fat max quite a bit. But they actually controlled for that and they measured like within the same timeframe for female athletes in the menstrual cycle to control for hormonal response. And when you look at these lines, like the separate male and female lines, they are going in all different directions with steep sleep slopes. Steep, steep slopes, steep changes across trial A and trial B representing a variation in fat max and peak fat oxidation across just two time points.
- [29:10]
A
Yeah. And so if you average them out, it ends up being similar numbers for trial A and trial B. But for the individual data points, almost all of them are a random number generator. Up or down, 1 changes from 0, 65 to 0, 25 on the peak fat oxidation. Um, we're seeing 40%, 60% changes in some of these numbers for individual data points. And it's not just like a couple outliers that might have had sickness or something. We're talking about all of them. They are all pointing in strange ass directions. And so there's a few implications of this. First, from just a numbers perspective, it shows that you gotta be very careful about snapshots. A classic example is I got an email last night that was from someone saying, look, my zone two has changed so much. And I'm like, well, how are you calculating that? And they say, said, I got a lab test that used lactate, so it's definitely reliable. And I'm like, absolutely not. As soon as you measure it, you're relying on something that is already outdated. Which is why we like heart rate as an option that you use all the time, like an armband heart rate monitor. Not because the heart rate zones you get are correct, but because you can constantly recalibrate it based on an understanding of your physiology. And I wrote a whole very long tutorial on Patreon about how exactly to do that, which I can link to, but the idea being like, you need something that you constantly check in with, because if you're getting something that's a snapshot, it's useless to you.
- [30:26]
B
And especially day to day, these things vary a ton. And the researchers actually here had a 48 hour control period of trying to standardize diet across sessions, physical activity, making sure that the 48 hours between, you know, the 48 hours before each session were relatively standardized. But there's still so many variables that impact all of these things. Like you know, broader, like, you know, nutrition intake, sleep, illness. So many different training factors.
- [30:48]
A
Training status is maybe the main one.
- [30:49]
B
Training status is a big one. Yeah. Menstrual cycle status.
- [30:52]
A
I think the training implications of this are the second big point here, here which is fat oxidation can go down very, very fast or improve very, very fast. And this is an immensely important variable as you think about performance. And so this graph doesn't just explain the weirdness of science in physiology and how cool the human body is, how adaptable it is. It also explains why huge ass tapers might not be the best thing for some athletes. Because if you're doing a big taper your body is probably going to be get less economical with fat oxidation because you're doing less aerobic work. So as you go you might get to the start line and be like, I am very fresh. But then all of a sudden your heart rate gets jacked up and even if it doesn't get jacked up, your body starts burning carbs preferentially at preference. Preferentially.
- [31:35]
B
I like that, I like that remix.
- [31:37]
A
Throwing some zesty ranch on it. But it does that and you're going to be less economical. You're going to bonk and you're like, well what happened? Like oh, it's just a bad taper. And we, that's maybe the number one thing we see before races is tapers being way too aggressive. Athletes should not drop volume, aerobic volume that much. Like the old of wisdom about you keep your intensity steady and you drop your volume is so bad for most athletes because it's going to make this chart go the wrong direction.
- [32:00]
B
Okay. I think this chart has a lot of variation depending upon like level of athlete and how much they're training. Like I feel like elite athletes have optimized so many of the variables that there's less day to day perturbations because so many of those things are optimized that like you're not seeing these huge shifts based off of. And I think the training schedules are like relatively like more consistent that there's like fewer change and fewer variable change. Do you feel like that taper like caveat of like not tapering too much applies more to elite athletes or applies more to back of the pack athletes?
- [32:28]
A
I think it applies to everybody.
- [32:29]
B
I think applies to everyone too.
- [32:29]
A
Some Physiology, I mean, you know, anything that changes this fast is a signal that matters. There's the old sayings that people always give that you can't change your fitness now or all the hay's in the bar. And I'm like, you absolutely can think about what changes really fast. Fat oxidation changes really fast.
- [32:45]
B
Okay. I like to say Hayes in the barn.
- [32:46]
A
Like though, yeah, we gotta stop.
- [32:48]
B
It's a fun, it's a really fun statement. I know. Actually, I think about that.
- [32:50]
A
I'm like me making the Hayes in the field.
- [32:53]
B
Yeah. It's in the field until three days before the race. Yeah.
- [32:56]
A
You gotta stop saying Hayes in the barn, Megan.
- [32:58]
B
Yeah.
- [32:59]
A
And I just, I caused us to make an edit there with the dumbest reference that has ever been made on podcasts.
- [33:03]
B
You actually, it was so dumb, honestly, that it confused me.
- [33:06]
A
It confused me too.
- [33:07]
B
Yeah. It's like, what are you talking about?
- [33:11]
A
The brain works in mysterious ways.
- [33:13]
B
It really does. Your brain is on fire. And that one took us down an interesting route.
- [33:16]
A
Yeah.
- [33:17]
B
Should we tack it on a thing? The end.
- [33:20]
A
Okay. Yeah, we'll tag it on the very end.
- [33:21]
B
It was the first time that we've like had a break. We, we do very few edits on this podcast. It was the first time I was just like, that was dumb.
- [33:29]
A
Fair point. So pay attention to this. You know, you don't want to be gaming this system. You don't need to think about it too much. But in addition to fat oxidation, blood volume is another. That's why the heat during taper period might be wise. So like tapering is good, but more taper is not bad. Better feeling more rested could be bad for a lot of variables. And that brings us to the next study, which I think really flows well from the fat oxidation because it might point out that it's all bullshit.
- [33:55]
B
You know, I liked, I feel like stacking the two of these together, it was almost like a warm hug in the sense of like, I love numbers, but sometimes you can't like numbers that much.
- [34:03]
A
Yeah. And I think it just points out how coaching and training theory and anything that relies on studies is so much more of an art than a science when we're talking about exercise physiology. And it's also why if we're talking about medicine or something, those control trials need so many barriers to be efficient in the real world. And that's a good thing. But we don't have those barriers in exercise physiology and training theory and things like that. And as a result you get some weird ass conclusions and it's very hard to isolate variables in the real world. And that brings us to this study, which is called infield validity in inter unit variability of metabolic carts during simulated exercise.
- [34:40]
B
And what they did was they took 57 calibrated metabolic carts and they did follow up measurements to see how these carts were giving out readings and how things were changing across a period of time. And it is wild.
- [34:50]
A
It is wild. And it's a little bit scary because we talk a lot about a lot of studies on here and we always give a million caveats and basically just use it to structure the podcast. I really don't coach that much by studies at all. Um, so, you know, if we were just talking about training theory, it would just touch on studies to justify what we kind of seen in the real world.
- [35:09]
B
Well, I think the hard part is when you're looking at the percentage gains from intervention, like, say, let's take like bicarb or something, which maybe has. It's hard to put a number on it, but maybe like, like a 3% performance intervention, which would be amazing. I mean, which would be incredible.
- [35:19]
A
Probably not, but that would be huge.
- [35:20]
B
Okay. Or 2%. But when you're looking now at the variability across metabolic cart measurements, you're like, that might not be large enough to see gains that are meaningful when you. When you think about the variability of these measurements. And that's where you have to start thinking about what does the real world data say in terms of, are athletes using this? Are they continuing to use it in the long term? Are they seeing results that stretch out across a long period of time? And that, to me, as a coach, is much more relevant.
- [35:44]
A
Yeah, and warm hug in the sense that, that you don't need to worry about a lot of this stuff, more just general principles. So the. In the 57 calibrated carts, they found absolute percentage errors during the simulations from 1.4 to 24.6% for ventilatory efficiency, 3.29% to 10.6% for VO2.
- [36:03]
B
That's wild.
- [36:03]
A
Um, and then, I mean, everything else was in similar ranges and the inter unit variability was extremely high too, of similar magnitude. And thus, if you're looking at errors of, let's say, 3 to 10% for VO2, that overwhelms almost any training intervention you could ever do, because VO2 is an endpoint of a lot of these theories. So if you're looking at VO2, oops. Same goes for things like fatigue tests. So Steve Magnus wrote a tweet that cited a 2001 study that found individual variability of athletes in performance. Me measures even when they have the same fitness, can be up to 4% for like recreational athletes. Athletes just on with the same exact approach just based on how things can change over time. So you have the measurement variability, then you have the athlete variability, and then you're trying to measure changes that are much smaller than both, let alone both combined.
- [36:55]
B
And then you have system variability too. Because a lot of this depends on how the physiologist is actually administering the test, how you're making the calculations. And the paper here actually looked at, they're like, is there some kind of like, you know, metabolic cross cart system error that's happening based off of age of system? And they found that there was actually no consistent relationship between like system age and accuracy or like annual maintenance on the systems. But there's still a lot of input that goes in. And like, I imagine there's some labs that have. And this is actually true. There's probably some labs that have a lot more variability than other labs. And you know, that can be really tricky.
- [37:25]
A
Well, it gets to a lot of the highest VO2 max measurements ever recorded from Norway.
- [37:30]
B
Yeah. And that's. Is that a accidental or is that they're just got their Norwegian pride going on over there?
- [37:35]
A
Well, I think they think they're doing it right. Yeah, I think they think they're calculating the VO2 max correctly and they're not.
- [37:39]
B
There might be some kind of like Norwegian variable that they're just adding to. They're just magnifying everything by that Norwegian variable.
- [37:46]
A
I like it. The Norwegian constant. Yeah.
- [37:49]
B
High five. Top dirty to me.
- [37:57]
A
Like the cosmological constant. Right. Yeah, that was added. Just to explain.
- [38:00]
B
Oh.
- [38:01]
A
Even more why the universe doesn't collapse in on itself.
- [38:03]
B
You had a dad facts to it, David.
- [38:04]
A
But no one knows why the cosmological constant is what it is. And it probably underscores an idea about reality that we're missing entirely. Right. Like there's just something fully out there with whether it's dark energy or something about how the universe is shaped. We just have no idea what. Why it is what it is.
- [38:21]
B
It's probably dark energy for the Norwegians for sure.
- [38:23]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [38:24]
B
And actually I'm pretty sure that's the answer.
- [38:26]
A
I'm pretty sure it's white energy in Norway. Sorry, sir, don't know if that one's okay, but I think we're okay. And. And you know, but you look at their VO2 max measurement of Christian Blumenthal of 101, it's like, well, that's obviously bullshit.
- [38:38]
B
Oh, he also looked at the metabolic cart measurements and it was like, impossible when you consider that, like, his VO2 should actually be much higher based off of the. The findings they had. So, yeah, definitely a little bit interesting there. Yeah.
- [38:48]
A
So basically any coach or theorist out there who says, well, show me the study. How about you show them your ass. Ask them what your ass tastes like as co as Shaq did to Kobe, because, like, it doesn't work that way.
- [39:02]
B
That way.
- [39:04]
A
The changes we're looking for are holistic solely because we can never measure all of them. It's too complicated. There's 10,000 input variables and some of them are much stronger than others. And then you're trying to get little clues from output variables, which is why so much of what we're looking for ends up being qualitative. Those qualitative metrics are quantitative signals, but we can't measure the quantitative signals at all. And so we're trying to infer them. And so inferring them helps. It gives us theoretical rationales. And when you do spot something in studies, it can often be quite significant, but in the real world it is much more of an art than a science.
- [39:40]
B
And I think that's where it can become dangerous when the athletes are like, really focused on numbers and really trying to like, you know, train according to very specise precise metabolic heart measurements. And it's like, that's tricky. And I feel like physiology just doesn't know that. And I think that's where sometimes, like, you know, really being just so locked into that heart rate monitor can actually be hard in the long term term.
- [40:00]
A
I like how you combined specific and precise into specise. Speaking of dune, it sounds like something that they would mind to do intergalactic
- [40:10]
B
travel, but I wasn't trying to remix. I just can't talk. It's good anytime you can't talk and you just be like, remix, remix.
- [40:18]
A
Do you want to read any of these quotes that you put in?
- [40:19]
B
Yeah, I put these in from Steve Magnus. I thought these are well written just in terms of like, what should we actually be focusing on and why is it challenging to listen specifically to studies?
- [40:27]
A
I think coach Steve Magnus does some of the best thinking on. On this topic in particular and most topics. He's pretty wonderful.
- [40:33]
B
You know, it parallels what we've said. He just says it better and so I'm going to read it for that
- [40:38]
A
reason and then we'll remix it.
- [40:39]
B
I know I'm going to remix it accidentally and see what happens. That's why performance in the real world tends to show what works. It's not perfect, but if you've got hundreds or thousands of elites and sub elites taking bicarb and saying, hmm, I ran a bit faster in each race I used it this season. It sticks around. One of the main reasons is athletes don't just test things in a one off set. They test it in training, key workouts, numerous races, et cetera, compare notes with their training partners, et cetera. It's easier to surface a signal over that longer period. Again, it's not perfect, but what often happens is a new supplement tool tech shows up. Everyone tries it for a brief period. You don't quite know as that's a copycat nature, but if the performance boost is significant, it stays. If it doesn't, it fades away.
- [41:16]
A
Yep.
- [41:16]
B
And I'll be curious to see like, you know, I think these last few years have thrown a lot of new things into the world of like, you know, elite and sub elite and recreational endurance performance in the way of bicarb and high carb. And I do think they're here to stay, but I think that will be the true test is not a scientific study. But whether they're here in 10 years with consistent use, bad examples, they're all gonna stay.
- [41:37]
A
I mean, they're already been staying.
- [41:38]
B
Yeah, that's true. I mean, they've been here, they've been here. But I think that, I think they're really going to continue to be here and I think if not, they're going to get pushed.
- [41:45]
A
Like, I feel maybe Gnomeo is a newer one.
- [41:47]
B
That's a good one. Similar.
- [41:48]
A
Yeah, but those are here.
- [41:51]
B
You're like, they're definitively here.
- [41:53]
A
No, they are definitively here. And this gets back to bicarb being a great example of where they all are already here. You'll get pushback and you know, marathon use of bicarbon marathons, classic example. People will say, where's the study? Well, first, it hasn't even been studied. But if it is studied and is found not to be beneficial, you just look scoreboard when those athletes are doing nothing by chance. Right. And so, um, yeah, it's complex because the physiological underpinnings of finding solutions in studies are amazing. And that's how we get advanced in theory. But the actual findings of the studies themselves might sometimes just be overwhelmed by the chaotic nature of being human.
- [42:34]
B
Well, I love Steve Magnus has this really eloquent way of putting it, and we're just like, scoreboard, scoreboard. That's Our thesis statement. It's actually the basis of the thesis statement of the last 20 minutes was just like. Like scoreboard on what elite? Like, on what. What's actually happening in the real world.
- [42:49]
A
Yeah, well, swap. Athletes have been doing pretty good recently.
- [42:52]
B
Yeah. High five. Taylor Stack, third at Sagama.
- [42:55]
A
What a beast he is.
- [42:55]
B
You've been coaching him for a year and a half now.
- [42:57]
A
Yeah, longer than that, I think. I don't know. He wearing, you know, heart rate Armand when he crossed the finish line, which I like. Cool heart rate data.
- [43:05]
B
That's a big deal. I feel like historically, Americans haven't always gone over to Zegama and had great performances. And to get third there is a big deal.
- [43:11]
A
You want to hear the scientific coaching that Taylor Stack did?
- [43:13]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [43:14]
A
Okay. So the night before, I didn't really have anything interesting to say to him. On our call, we talked for literally three minutes. I'm like, just go be yourself. And then all I sent him over text was the Seinfeld clip of his father was a mudda. His mother was a mudder.
- [43:29]
B
Okay, I love that. That is like one of my favorite parts of Seinfeld. Also, I feel like recently you've hated On Seinfeld for so long and.
- [43:35]
A
What are you talking about?
- [43:36]
B
You were like, oh, this is just like a random sitcom and now you're coming back and like, it was actually pretty genius. I'm like, duh.
- [43:42]
A
Well, okay. I think it is a little bit nihilistic as a show.
- [43:45]
B
Oh, maybe that's fair.
- [43:46]
A
And I've become a little bit more nihilistic since I got my injury, but
- [43:49]
B
I feel like that's probably true. But I feel like nihilism was just it back then.
- [43:53]
A
Okay?
- [43:54]
B
Like Ted Lasso and all, like, you know, shrinking. Those shows wouldn't have done well back in the, like, the sitcom era.
- [44:00]
A
I think they would have. You don't think so?
- [44:02]
B
I mean, they're. They're.
- [44:04]
A
I mean, I think Seinfeld was revolutionary because it was a show about nothing, where they ended the entire show, like, in jail. I believe in the very last episode, it was their thesis statement about existence. That is honestly probably correct in a lot of ways. But I reject at baseline because I want to reject it. And as I've gotten older, I've seen. I see where they're coming from.
- [44:29]
B
You're going back, you see shrinking, and you're like, take me back.
- [44:33]
A
Shrinking. If you haven't seen shrinking, you guys gotta watch. It is so wonderful. I feel like the creators of Shrinking are like, we're going to introduce conflict. But we promise you never have to be stressed.
- [44:43]
B
You're going to feel good about it at all times. You know, it's going in a good direction.
- [44:46]
A
I have never seen a show so much that feels like it is putting its hand on the small of my back, like emotionally, all the time. And I do feel a little bit manipulated, but I love it and you know, so I do greatly appreciate it. But as I'm watching it, I'm like, oh, this is too much for me.
- [45:02]
B
But I feel like that show, I feel like it was too early. I mean, I feel like the 90s were too early for that show.
- [45:07]
A
I don't know, man. Megan.
- [45:08]
B
Yeah. People weren't ready for a hand on their small of the back in the 90s.
- [45:11]
A
Maybe that was a bad analogy in general. Also, you were like 5 years old. So what do you know?
- [45:16]
B
I mean, I have great memories watching seinfeld at age 5. My sister found out that didn't exist from Seinfeld. Just maybe great parenting on my parents behalf.
- [45:26]
A
We're gonna have to cut that out.
- [45:27]
B
Oh, fuck yeah.
- [45:28]
A
We can't say that.
- [45:28]
B
Can we just bleep it?
- [45:30]
A
Okay, yeah, yeah, we'll bleep it. And the funny part is, you know what Megan said in that?
- [45:38]
B
Leave what? Carbs.
- [45:39]
A
The female orgasm.
- [45:43]
B
Even better. I want to go on top of that.
- [45:47]
A
I like how we cut out what you said, which is so innocent.
- [45:54]
B
I mean, if we're cutting, if we're bleeping that and that you're adding in female orgasm, I feel like.
- [45:59]
A
No, it's fine.
- [46:02]
B
I love you so much.
- [46:04]
A
All right, do you want to talk about crossover point or get straight to.
- [46:07]
B
I want to talk about the crossover point.
- [46:08]
A
We'll make this one really quick. Um, so this is from a review in the Journal of Nutrition called From Metabolism to Metals Contemporary Perspectives in Revisiting Carbohydrate Guidelines for Fueling Endurance Athletes During Exercise. That's pretty fun title. From Metabolism to Metals.
- [46:22]
B
This is a review study. Do you think they put that into AI to get that? From Metabolism to Metals Sounds very cutesy.
- [46:28]
A
Oh, I think this could come from someone's soul.
- [46:30]
B
Yeah. Deep within the small of someone's back. Yes. I want to pat it, encourage it some more.
- [46:36]
A
I realized that was pretty rough. That is kind of what shrinking makes me feel like. In a good way, though. And it's like someone that I trust. Right?
- [46:44]
B
Yeah, you do. You really trust them.
- [46:46]
A
But not in like abnormal power dynamics way, but like a good way.
- [46:51]
B
It'd be funny if they just came in and punked that trust in the final episode.
- [46:54]
A
Yeah, well, they didn't. At least in the seasons I've seen, I finished.
- [46:57]
B
But what if they do ahead?
- [46:58]
A
That would be pretty epic if it was all a long term performance. No, Bill Ahrens would never do that. The showrunner, he also created Ted Lasso and Scrubs. Scrubs. Like he would never do that. He basically just wants you to feel loved, which I love him. I love listening to podcasts he's on, actually, because how he talks about the creative process is so fantastic. So in other words, I think from metabolism to metals came straight from someone's soul.
- [47:20]
B
From the female orgasm. That's how I orgasm, actually. I mean, you have to backtrack it and fill it in. That's complicated.
- [47:31]
A
I'm going to bleep them all out.
- [47:32]
B
No, don't bleep it out. I mean, I'm going to say it again.
- [47:36]
A
Going to bleep every one of those out. Just made my life very complicated with this edit. Okay, so the main thing we're looking at is only one thing here, which is the crossover point where an athlete goes from primarily burning carbohydrate fat to primarily burning carbohydrates.
- [47:53]
B
And I actually hadn't seen this study before and this was a very small part of the review. I actually liked it. It was like they just compiled a bunch of like sports specific research and then I love. And then they're like, we're just gonna delve into some personal author insights along the way. And so I felt like it was a great mix of like author insights in sports specific research. And this was one paper they highlighted that I hadn't seen before. And they highlighted this figure and I just thought the figure was really well done. And this is where I Wish we had YouTube so that we could like put it up.
- [48:16]
A
Yeah. But the basic finding here is simply that when you're going pretty hard, this gets back to what we've talked about in recent weeks, that carbohydrates are the more efficient fuel. Like you're going to be more economical with carbohydrates when you go to fat. Yes, you can go all day, but it gets much slower. And so a weird thing happens when you're pushing something like a marathon, something pretty hard is that in all conditions, no matter how many carbohydrates you're taking in, you start out by burning a large number of carbohydrates because your body is going to the most economical fuel. But as you go Depending on how many carbohydrates you take in, your body starts burning fat because it's running out of carbohydrates. And so even before you bonk, your body's going to downregulate performance because of reduced carbohydrate output, thus moving you to fat, which requires athletes to go so much slower because it is such a reduced economy fuel.
- [49:05]
B
And there's a crossover point and in which you start burning more fat than carbs and it becomes really relevant. You want to push that crossover point point for best, like more economical performance, going to push that crossover point back as far as you can. And that is actually dependent upon the substrate that you're putting into your body. And I like to me that was so exciting to see this crossover point change based on the amount of carbs that athletes were taking in.
- [49:26]
A
It's just such an obvious visualization of the point. I'll also post this on Patreon because this shows why if you go to mile 20 of a marathon and some people are just really struggling, right? Like the hitting the wall in a marathon is the chart. This explains it a hundred percent. Um, those athletes have gone past the crossover point. They're burning way more fat, their bodies are cooked. That is what a bonk is essentially. Yet we still hear people talking about fat burning as a good thing, which it is to a certain extent. Right. Like fat burning supports your carboxidation, but carboxidation is what powers performance. And so this chart is very intuitive. It starts at zero, has a 45 gram per hour, has a 90 gram per hour and 120 gram per hour hour. And the significant finding is that crossover point gets pushed back more and more. So at 45 grams per hour, it's like two and a half hours or two, a little under two and a half hours. At 90 grams per hour, it goes almost to three hours. And at 120 grams per hour, there is no crossover at all across a
- [50:22]
B
three hour exercise period. Which is so cool. It's really cool to think about, like, you know, I feel like we always think about carbs as the substrate we're putting in. I think we don't actually think about it in relation to how that actually impacts fat oxidation and our ability to use carbs as a substrate. And I was like, this is so cool. I do have a question though, because, like, commonly now we're seeing some studies in like recreational athletes. This is actually done in a cohort of 51 cyclists, but they found actually that there was diminishing Performance of like, with intakes that were greater than 78 grams of carbs per hour in these, like, longer time trials. Why do you think we're seeing this discrepancy here of pushing back the crossover point but seeing diminishing performance returns so
- [51:00]
A
that there's just not that many more benefits when you go higher? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just that the athletes aren't pushing hard enough.
- [51:05]
B
That's probably a fair point. Yeah.
- [51:06]
A
You know that these are recreational trained athletes. It, it points out the physiological principle but doesn't demonstrate its use because those athletes are mechanically limited at that point. Like, we're not just aerobic systems on sticks. You also have the mechanical implications of all this and the neuromuscular ones. And so even if those athletes are fully fueled, they're not going to have the capability to use it appropriately unless their training backs it up, unless their power backs it up. And so this is most exemplified in the real world performance at the elite level, which is why we always pointed out for elite athletes, because they have the training to use it optimally, but everyone who trains optimally can use it even if they're not an elite athlete. It's just that most of the athletes that are being tested in that cohort just don't have the background to push themselves that hard after two hours anyway.
- [51:51]
B
Does it change how you gain, like nutrition guidelines for athletes that might be like middle to back of the pack in terms of, do you have athletes in those realms that are potentially putting out less power, go over 90 grams of carbs an hour?
- [52:03]
A
Rarely.
- [52:03]
B
Yeah. And that's, that's what I was gonna say too. It's like, I feel like for me, if I'm coaching an elite athlete or sub elite athlete who's pushing, you know, high power output or even just like high mechanical output and running, that worth. I, I often like push them up higher above 90, but rarely do that for athletes that are more middle of the back of the pack.
- [52:18]
A
Absolutely. Output matters too. And that's why, why in super long ultras you gotta be careful about it. And our guidelines all stay start at 75 and then only push up if you see benefit. But if you see benefit, even if you're a lower output athlete, you can keep pushing up using.
- [52:32]
B
And if your gut is trained to handle that.
- [52:33]
A
Yeah, because this also applies to marathons, like in a marathon or ultra marathons, like you don't want that crossover point ever to happen, um, even in those events. And it clearly does. Like, it's very hard to avoid. Um, but if you can put push. You can burn more carbs, and eventually you can just go faster. So that's kind of why every course record is getting broken every single weekend nowadays. Like, Transvulcania was the other week, and I think eight men went under. The historic course record. It's all this chart.
- [53:01]
B
Okay, okay. Transvulcania, men. Pish posh. How about Tove at Zegama? That was crazy. That was bonkers.
- [53:08]
A
A single data point does not make a physiological trend.
- [53:12]
B
Absolutely nuts. That's okay. Fair, fair, fair.
- [53:14]
A
You just wanted to talk about her.
- [53:15]
B
I just want to talk about her. I'm just obsessed with her. And I think that's, like, one of the best of the year, like, so far and maybe of, like, the last decade. And I'm very excited about it.
- [53:22]
A
Yeah.
- [53:23]
B
I can't. I can't help myself.
- [53:25]
A
We just talked about female orgasm.
- [53:26]
B
That's the thing. We just talked about
- [53:31]
A
another one. I'm going to have to bring.
- [53:32]
B
We're going to leave it all in.
- [53:33]
A
No, I'm going to have to control f. All these. Like, you control f Sojourn.
- [53:36]
B
I know. We're going to. We're going to make it higher than Sojourn.
- [53:39]
A
Okay. Should we do how to stop cramps?
- [53:41]
B
Yeah, I told you, I'm not going to get to very many questions. Yeah.
- [53:43]
A
Um, okay, so this is a big discussion that I. I wrote in an article on Patreon, so you can go check it out. Um, but I wanted to bring it here because cramping is such a fascinating place of physiology. This builds off the fatigue resistance episode last week where there's clearly something happening in the nervous system. So. Megan, have you cramped? No, not really. Right.
- [54:04]
B
I actually don't think I've ever cramped.
- [54:06]
A
Isn't that strange?
- [54:06]
B
I'm thinking, you know, maybe like, after one or two races, but, like, I. Yeah. And those haven't even been full cramps. Especially in, like, a partial cramp.
- [54:14]
A
Yeah. I've cramped so, so much in my life. I remember at the world champs in 2017, writhing on the side of the trail as Ladia Albertson Junkins passed me, and she said, are you okay? Like, desperately worried about me? Like, full body cramps happening. This happens all the time.
- [54:29]
B
I mean, you also get cramps. More snuggling sometimes.
- [54:33]
A
Yeah.
- [54:33]
B
When you've done, like, hard training and then go into a. You're just like, sorry. Ow.
- [54:41]
A
Unfortunately true. And, you know, sometimes it'll happen in my forearms, sometimes in my feet. And so clearly there's A genetic component. Right. Because Megan's almost never cramped. I always have. My dad has cramped a lot, and it was a problem when I was young. But interestingly, it is almost not a problem at all anymore. I've cramped at the very end of javelina and was able to get out of it. But, I mean, at mile 90 of a race, that's not too bad. Don't cramp at all at Leadville. And so it's an interesting theory here about. This is also the fatigue resistance signal we've seen in myself. So I used to have bad fatigue resistance, and now I have good fatigue resistance. So what changed? And the big overarching theory that I have is that there's a unified element to this so much. Like, there's a maybe a unified theory out there for how to connect, you know, quantum mechanics to the theory of relativity. That's like the holy grail. I think in endurance training, there's a unified theory that connects fatigue resistance with cramping with the nervous system. And once we figure that out, we're going to really understand how the brain dictates performance outcomes in almost all long events and in short ones.
- [55:46]
B
And we still. It's kind of wild that we still have so many mysteries related to cramping, because you would think at this point, like, we could figure it out. Like, it's such a common thing for athletes, such a common thing for, like, the general population, too. And the fact that we still have these mysteries is kind of wild when you think about it. And when you say we're going to figure out the nervous system, that's actually quite complex because there's also so many things that feed and impact the nervous system. Like. Like, we're still figuring out how high carb and, like, fueling may potentially impact the nervous system. And so when I think about your journey, it's like we've thrown so many variables at the nervous system, like high carb, bicarb, we've thrown heat, We've thrown different training that all stacks together and accumulates in time, and it becomes really complex when you think about it.
- [56:25]
A
No, Megan, we're gonna map out the entire brain for the sake of endurance training.
- [56:29]
B
That's why maybe AI could do it for us.
- [56:31]
A
I mean, we don't understand the brain at all. Even from a broader point, like, you know, there's a lot of theories about how we figure out super intelligence in future generations of AI or approaches. And the problem is we don't even have the brain map, so we have no idea how consciousness Works in humans. We're starting from square one. And so there's ideas that we need to map the brain first, but the money isn't going there and it probably should. So yeah, I mean saying nervous system is a big black box. And one of the ideas I've had in the last week is a lot of these thoughts that we had about nervous system response. Neurons were initially piloted by Tim Noakes and his central governor theory decades ago, which I think is revolutionary and true. Right. Like that the brain is a modulator of performance. We don't know exactly how, but it has a lot of different variables. And what's so interesting is that Tim Noakes in the real world has decided to become this low carb zealot when it's so obvious that the reason high carb works is because it touches his central governor. So he is.
- [57:29]
B
It touches the small of the back of the central governor. Oh no, this thing doesn't touch the
- [57:34]
A
small of the back. This thing is doing that big, big creepy office massage.
- [57:39]
B
Did you report to hr?
- [57:40]
A
Yeah, yeah, he's definitely report that one to hr. Thanks for saving me there. Um, and it's just fascinating that you know, a thinker and a physiologist that brought the central governor into common perception of, of the brain's role in exercise performance missed the reason that we're seeing brain changes happen across the entire sport sporting landscape and you know, just points out how you have to stay open minded minded and also how it's probably not super intuitive and the only reason we're seeing it is not from seeing studies mechanistically, we're just seeing it about oh well here's the real world like solution, like the what's happening and what is clearly the answer and then asking why and then trying to backfill with brain studies.
- [58:20]
B
And I think we do have a lot of data on that, like both from athletes that we've coached ourselves and then also Patreon too because we talk about these things and yes, it's a very biased sample and we hear, you know, listener messages, we hear things about it. And that to me is actually kind of a fascinating data set that parallels a lot of what we were talking about with Steve Magnus's of like thoughts of like real world matters for this stuff. And I think it especially matters for the nervous system as we're still trying to figure this all out. Yeah.
- [58:43]
A
And interestingly, you know, it has a genetic component. You were an amazing fatigue resistance monster from the beginning. And I wasn't probably also related to Whatever that genetic pathway is, is catching the same things. So first, just quick intro. A 2019 review study found that cramping is a quote, intense and painful involuntary contraction of skeletal muscles. So it's because it's involuntary. Clearly nervous system based related to excitatory drive or inhibitory drive due to muscles. Um, and what I always say is it's almost like the brain and spinal cord could either hold down the gas or the brake. So it's not just overuse of muscles. It can also just be weird under use of muscles. Like your forearms could have this in a race. It doesn't just have to be your quads or something.
- [59:21]
B
And I kind of think about like the gas being sometimes like the spinal reflex loop that becomes overactive and it can like activate muscles too much. Is like one theory and the other theory being that like, like there's sensory muscle like feedback from the muscles that in times of cramping just gets like the brakes come off of that. And it's really hard to like for the body to understand that sensory feedback. And so like things cramp as a result or even just like overworked muscles. Why sometimes, like, you know, if you have an injury site that can cramp first is because that's being overworked and can create also some challenges and signal there.
- [59:51]
A
Well, on one hand that could be overworking, or on the other hand it could be subconscious awareness of that muscle that causes changes in how the nervous system excitatory drive works.
- [60:01]
B
Okay, that is freaky, right?
- [60:02]
A
That that's the weird part of things like cramps is that you're starting to think, all right, yes, it is mostly involuntary, but there are a lot of elements of brain function that go beyond that. And so one of the ways that you can just see how strange this world is in human physiology is you can have someone do an exhausting bout of exercise and just measure electrical conduction in their muscles. So like essentially shock them and see how their muscles respond. And it varies a ton by the person. Like, this has a huge gender component. Women have much better electrical conduction after hard events, which likely overlaps with the fatigue resistance findings we talked about last week. Likely overlaps with the cramping. So some of this has an electrical component which is going to get into some of these solutions. Some of it has a mechanical component and some of it might just have a psychological component. And that probably is also how performance works. And solving for the cramping like part of the equation probably solves for fatigue resistance in our formulation. And both of Those probably also solve for short distance performance because that is also coming from the brain based on like central governor models. So it's difficult to reach the unified theory, but I think via cramping because you get such a direct response back. Like if someone cramps and then they don't cramp, you're getting, getting a very easy binary answer. Whereas if you're talking about fatigue resistance, it's so subject to the difficulty of studies point we just talked about. Um, so fatigue resistance as a in the clouds topic is so difficult to wrap your head around. But I think whether you cramp or not is a really easy one. And so whatever solves cramps might be a solution to training theory.
- [61:36]
B
Okay, you just listed like six hypotheses. Like these are like David Roach hypothesis.
- [61:40]
A
No, no, I think it was all the same hypotheses said six times, different ways probably.
- [61:43]
B
Yeah, now that I'm backtracking, maybe like three hypotheses said different ways. But you know what? I like it.
- [61:48]
A
You like it.
- [61:49]
B
I actually, you know, sometimes you say hypotheses and I'm like, just show me that data.
- [61:52]
A
Yeah.
- [61:52]
B
And you know what, I actually, I like those. I, I agree with you on that. And I think like odds are still trying to figure out this all. Like, I, those hypotheses are the best hypotheses I've heard, honestly. And so I cosine.
- [62:04]
A
Thank you. You co sign.
- [62:05]
B
I cosine. They could be your hypothesis. But I just comment and I'm like, I agree.
- [62:10]
A
You're my guarantor.
- [62:12]
B
Yeah.
- [62:13]
A
So I can rent this house. Okay, let's list off the approaches really quickly here and just rapid fire any ideas that we have about each one. So the first one is high carb, but avoid extreme loading protocols. So high carb is the most easy solution here for the same reason it's the most easy solution for fatigue resistance. It changes how the brain actually processes signals. And whatever excess carbs you have go to the nervous system system preventing like myelin reduction. It could really improve nervous system conduction. So this is the easiest and I
- [62:44]
B
think this is a long term thing. Like I don't think this is just high carb fueling on race day that matters. I think it's high carb within training that changes the body's central nervous system response and that actually matters.
- [62:53]
A
There was a professional triathlete that talked about his cramping anecdotal experience. And he cramped at every race. And as soon as he stopped doing a carb load the day before his cramping stopped, which is an interesting anecdote. It's one of.
- [63:09]
B
What's your. Do you have a hypothesis there? Fire it.
- [63:11]
A
Fat oxidation.
- [63:12]
B
Yep.
- [63:12]
A
Simply that if an athlete is subject to physiology, that changes your fat oxidation very rapidly. Doing a massive carb load can really mess that up. And increased fat or decreased fat oxidation will cause major issues electrically, um, relative to your usual. That's my guess.
- [63:31]
B
And that's where, like, tapering feeds into that, too, because. Same process.
- [63:34]
A
And. And that's why I. I always suggest athletes, like, have some more carbs. But these really intense loading protocols might not work for everybody. Like, my guess, just based on our history, David, hypothesis time. Intense loading would probably work very well for you.
- [63:47]
B
I was gonna say, Brick, give me all the carbs. I. I think I'd be. And I don't do those protocols just because I eat a lot of carbs and I just kind of keep them rolling in.
- [63:54]
A
Too much training. Yeah, But I think they'd work fine for you, and I think for me, I'd be cramping like crazy.
- [63:58]
B
Agree.
- [63:58]
A
So, you know, have some. But don't overdo it. But high carb during. In. In all of your long runs is key number two. Adequate sodium intake. Ideally, high sodium intake during the event, but no sodium loading. Similar principles here. So sodium and all electrolytes are. You know, there's a reason they're called electrolytes, and they help with electrical signaling within and around cells and then across the nervous system generally. And so sodium intake, that's the place with cramps that I get the most frustrated. Because you can read all of these charlatans online. I left the pause. I was debating going for that word.
- [64:31]
B
But were you going for. Were you going for something stronger or char.
- [64:34]
A
No, no. That's a very strong word.
- [64:35]
B
It is a very strong word. I was like, are you going stronger?
- [64:37]
A
Yeah.
- [64:39]
B
All those out there.
- [64:41]
A
I see all these tricks out there. And they'll say, oh, electrolytes don't matter, and then cite some studies. Well, one, the study limitation we talked about. But two, cramps cannot be isolated in studies because we're probably looking at something like 10 different buckets of humans that have different reasons for cramping. So it's. You're consolidating people. You're getting useless information from that. You're not seeing uniform human physiology. All that matters are the anecdotes. And if you talk to any practitioner in the real world, they will talk about sodium intake being one of the primary drivers, if not the primary Driver. So sodium intake really matters. We have entire electrolytes primers on Patreon.
- [65:19]
B
The challenge is it just varies a ton by individual. And I think precision, like scratch testing, those are great testing protocols to get done. It's just like a baseline level. I have seen some wild data from sensors recently and you know, trying to see athletes repl 1 to 1 with sensor data and that can be like, you know, sensors, I think just like there's variations in accuracy. And I also think trying to replace one to one is just also not how physiology works either. And so I think be careful of that.
- [65:43]
A
Yeah, I would definitely say the sensors, as we talked about those studies, you know, the studies had 3 to 10% on metabolic carts.
- [65:49]
B
You put sweat sensor on and it's,
- [65:51]
A
oh my goodness, I bet we're seeing 50 to 100% variation. Sometimes it is wild. It is weird, especially if you measure on the treadmill or something that like, like that. Um, so sodium intake biggest one of all. Like, often athletes who cramp aggressively, especially systemically, have full body cramps, really just don't understand their sodium sweat rates. Um, all right, number three, magnesium supplementation. I see this less in the real world, but it's one that a lot of anecdotes say works for them. So I want to cite it.
- [66:18]
B
I think it's easy to do, which is why I feel like it's cited often. It's like easy to take a magnesium supplement before bed. Um, and so I think toss it on board.
- [66:25]
A
So theoretically it would help the muscle disengage after it contracts. So that's the mechanistic theory for it which gets to the nervous system. Makes sense. And I think magnesium's an electrolyte, right. So it's grouped within that number four, bicarb before races and long runs. So practicing with bicarb seems to matter, whether that's because of the sodium load that's in bicarb, perhaps, but I think it's much more due to longer term adaptations because it doesn't seem to make a difference if an athlete just does it periodically. It's only if they do it consistently. Why? I don't fucking know.
- [66:56]
B
We need a study on that. What happens when you're taking bicarbon stacking that across six weeks, eight weeks, two 12 weeks, six months. What is that doing to the body and how is that impacting cramping and performance?
- [67:06]
A
You know, I just said I don't and then I added the F word there for no reason.
- [67:09]
B
Oh, I like it.
- [67:10]
A
Oh, no, I understand. I do That a lot. I do that a lot. I like cursing. It's fun. Some studies say that people who curse often are smarter.
- [67:18]
B
We curse a lot.
- [67:19]
A
But on. So this weekend, I was feeling a little bit down about my foot, and so I went back and watched the Leadville documentary while I was on the train treadmill and might have hurt my foot during that run, but I.
- [67:32]
B
How is it feeling?
- [67:33]
A
Oh, the foot.
- [67:34]
B
Yeah.
- [67:34]
A
Megan, I think this might just be a season write off this year.
- [67:39]
B
That's really hard, though. I mean, I think it's hard when, like, you know, you've had so much concrete data that you're just great at these a hundred mile races and you're coming off that, like, exciting period of growth. And I also know, like, you talk about this a lot. We talk about this on the podcast a lot. That you'll be turning 38 in June. Like, that is. It's a harder context just at the level in which, like, your body requires a lot of power. You put a lot of power output out.
- [68:00]
A
Even. Killian finished 43rd at Zegama.
- [68:02]
B
Yeah, I texted you. I was like, what happened to Killian?
- [68:05]
A
Oh, no, no, you're not allowed to say that. No, I think you just had a leg injury, Megan. You're not allowed to say my response. Bleep it. Bleep it.
- [68:11]
B
That was Santa. No, I'm just gonna leave it in there now. Santa sojourned. Stop, stop, stop. We can make it a noun.
- [68:20]
A
I don't know how I'm gonna do that.
- [68:21]
B
We had a Santa sojourn.
- [68:22]
A
Oh, my God. Megan, stop.
- [68:23]
B
We're just gonna leave it all in.
- [68:26]
A
Um, so. Yeah, it's. It's hard. You know, I. I think that it's honestly worse than your heart.
- [68:36]
B
It might be.
- [68:37]
A
No, it's not. I'm joking.
- [68:38]
B
I could. I might be back this week.
- [68:39]
A
No, I just want to get back to being able to exercise with you,
- [68:42]
B
which also, it's not a competition. It all sucks.
- [68:45]
A
Um, but, yeah, but one of the comments on there was. Yeah, I just look because the comments are very uplifting.
- [68:52]
B
It.
- [68:53]
A
And someone said you have like, Jesus within you, which is the best compliment you can possibly get.
- [69:00]
B
I've been getting that a lot, like on different posts and things like that. Oh, I wonder if this is like one person who's really, like, feeling the Jesus card or if it's like, no, I love. I mean, it's great.
- [69:09]
A
I mean, if someone said no, for
- [69:11]
B
me, it's a compliment.
- [69:12]
A
If someone says to me that, like, parts of their faith system they see embodied in me. It's really, really. It's beautiful. It's like the most uplifting thing in the world. World. And, like, it means so much to me. But then they said, but all of the constant cursing is like the devil trying to come out. Well, how do we.
- [69:29]
B
I feel like Jesus would uplift cursing.
- [69:31]
A
I don't. I don't know. I mean, I'm not. I don't think you care. I don't think someone that understands the cosmological constant would necessarily care about word choice, as long as it's not intentionally harming somebody. But maybe it is harming people. I don't know. That's neither here nor there. But now when I cuss, I'm like, the devil's leaving me.
- [69:48]
B
The devil's so churning.
- [69:51]
A
But as always, we uplift all faith. It's beautiful.
- [69:54]
B
It's beautiful. It's so beautiful.
- [69:55]
A
All of the things we talk about are a way of trying to get to the. Hopefully a similar answer, but, you know, through different mechanisms. Um, okay, number five, steep downhills in training. So one, that helps mechanical breakdown get reduced. Number two, it might actually help nerve conduction. So, like the axon oxinopathy at the end of nerves, those types of things can make a huge difference. And those are affected by delayed onset soreness. So, Megan, you're never going to cramp in your thumbs again after field hockey?
- [70:23]
B
I'm not cramping. My thumbs are just sore. I understand, but it's true. It's like it's.
- [70:26]
A
You have dolph.
- [70:26]
B
Delayed sore. Yes.
- [70:27]
A
If you can get doms, not gonna get cramps. That's my theory.
- [70:30]
B
That's very true. I've never cramped my thumbs. Yeah, not yet. Maybe I should try, see what happens.
- [70:34]
A
Oh, gosh. But yeah. So anyone out there that's a cramper. Try to give yourself doms in training enough that you don't get it anymore. That'll probably lead to a big change in our theory of fatigue, resistance and cramping.
- [70:45]
B
Maybe we should change. Just say no to rhapdo, which feels like, you know, there have been people who have suffered very serious raptors, rhabdo circumstances and instances in the hospital. Maybe we should change it to something. Axinopathy.
- [70:55]
A
Axonopathy.
- [70:56]
B
Yeah.
- [70:56]
A
Okay. I'm sure that'll be good for the algorithm, the branding. Um, okay, number six, strength training emphasizing muscular endurance. Almost every anti cramp recommendation talks about strength training. That clearly matters. I actually think heavy strength training pulls the opposite direction of cramping.
- [71:11]
B
Like, what's your Rationale there.
- [71:12]
A
I think it just recruits more intermediate and fast twitch fibers.
- [71:15]
B
And I do think that's a, I think slow twitch athletes. Like I'm, I think I'm fairly slow twitch, perhaps more intermediate twitch. But I think slow twitch athletes cramp a lot less. And I think, you know, recruiting fast twitch muscle fibers consistently can be challenging.
- [71:27]
A
And so everyone that tells endurance athletes lift heavy, it's like maybe. But a lot of endurance athletes are intermediate, faster twitch. And they're getting recommendations that work for
- [71:36]
B
slow twitch athletes, slow twitch pros.
- [71:38]
A
So be careful with that. But I think muscular endurance strength training works for everybody. This is where the single leg step ups come in are quote mountain legs in air quotes.
- [71:45]
B
I like that you added air quotes
- [71:46]
A
to add air quotes all the time. Um, and then anything like that. Like that's why the high rep, like low overall load but constant load comes in handy with strength work. Number seven, heat training, especially hot tub and active heat. One, blood volume improves and that improves how your muscles contract. But number two, there is a nervous system demand from heat that I think really simulates this. So heat can make a huge difference.
- [72:11]
B
I think this is common pathway with how heat may impact fatigue resistance in addition to impacting cramping. And I think that like blows my mind and is so cool.
- [72:19]
A
Your mind mind is blown.
- [72:21]
B
My mind is blown.
- [72:22]
A
Your mind has had its back blown out.
- [72:25]
B
Just what I've always wanted.
- [72:26]
A
People love that reference.
- [72:27]
B
Last week, my back of my left ventricle.
- [72:30]
A
Okay, let's just do the last three. Really just. I'll list them all. Eight. Avoid excessive tapers. Uh, Steve Magnus actually has a muscle tension theory here that too much rest leads to reduced muscle tension because that's a nervous system signal. Too much taper can lead to worse performance, but also just might be a fat oxidation signal. Very similarly. Number nine. Nine. Careful with caffeine. Um, too much caffeine can cause nervous system overexcitement. Very similar to cramping, especially if you're already hyped and stressed by the race.
- [72:57]
B
I think this is where caffeine tapers can be tricky too because like if you do like a week or two caffeine taper and then start taking caffeine, it can cause like, you know, excess excess excitement within the system. And that can be tricky too. Also, caffeine tapers just make me kind of depressed.
- [73:09]
A
Oh my God.
- [73:10]
B
Yeah, sometimes I, I like taper a little bit the day or two before a race just to sleep a bit better. But that's purely for the purpose. Purpose of sleep rather than the purpose of a caffeine taper.
- [73:18]
A
I like a one day taper. So you just, the day before the race, do very little caffeine, um, just solely because you're excited to go to sleep and it makes you excited to wake up the next day. And I think that one day taper followed by not overdoing caffeine on race morning works super well. And then during the race you can do plenty. Um, and then 10 mid race supplements like pickle juice or similar pucker responses. The fact that pucker responses work is so, so weird. Devil, leave me escape through my bowels.
- [73:51]
B
So, yeah, I mean, blow my back out, Devil.
- [73:54]
A
No, no, I don't like that at all.
- [73:59]
B
You're making nice of the devil.
- [74:01]
A
No. You don't think you want to. I don't think that's how it works, actually. I think you don't want to make nice with it.
- [74:07]
B
I feel like you would. You're like, let's be friends with everyone.
- [74:08]
A
I would try.
- [74:09]
B
You would really try.
- [74:11]
A
An interesting. Oh, I'm not gonna make that joke.
- [74:12]
B
You should.
- [74:13]
A
Please
- [74:15]
B
do it. Do it. We can always censor it.
- [74:22]
A
We have to censor the shit out of that.
- [74:24]
B
It's okay. That joke was just for Megan, for my laugh.
- [74:30]
A
Okay. That was worth it just for Megan. But yeah, the fact that the pucker response works shows just how nervous system oriented this is, that it's not like a strength limitation for a lot of of athletes. By taking in these sorts of things, it can essentially tell the nervous system, yo, chill and. Or just kind of redirecting it. Like when there's someone.
- [74:47]
B
It's like a distraction.
- [74:47]
A
Yeah, yeah, A distraction basically for your nervous system. Um, similarly, if you have hiccups, try this response. Um, that can work for some athletes.
- [74:56]
B
Or if you have a screaming toddler, just be like, pucker you, pucker you.
- [74:59]
A
Exactly.
- [75:00]
B
We should feed. Actually. I went to Scratch the other day, like Scratch Labs is a cafe here in Boulder. That's delicious. I love like working there and getting lunch. And they actually had free servings of just like their new gummies, which are sour apple. And they'd be great for the pucker response. And I think like having those on board. If you're a cramper, they're tasty and they have like enough pucker, but, like, not so much that it's overwhelming.
- [75:19]
A
I think you need overwhelming pucker.
- [75:20]
B
I think it depends, like how strong your cramps are.
- [75:22]
A
I think you need super pucker.
- [75:23]
B
You need to pucker space.
- [75:25]
A
Yeah, I think you really need a lot of it. Um, so having these on board, not before, but as an option to delay that return response. It's just a helpful, like in case of a GL emergency break glass type of option. Um, and it also just points out how rel. Relatively important this is to think about the brain response. Okay, then just some other random ideas. Careful with creatine. Sometimes creatine is cited as an example of why people cramp. In fact, there's a player for Kansas basketball named Darren Peterson, a top theoretical pick in the NBA draft. Cramped constantly. They cited creatine. I'm kind of unsure if they were talking about creatine supplementation or creatine kinase levels.
- [76:01]
B
They had that as the headline thing and then they just didn't really talk about rest of the article. I was like, I want to know about creatine, you guys.
- [76:06]
A
But I do see increased cramping and athletes taking creatine. My guess is it's increased faster twitch athletes.
- [76:10]
B
I was just about to say that. Yep.
- [76:12]
A
And slower twitch athletes don't have to worry about it. And then you get all these recommendations from slow twitch athletes saying take creatine. So as always, our thoughts on creatine are nuanced. Some athletes definitely should be on it, not all other supplements. L Citrine may help, which could increase vasodilation, could help blood flow to BL muscles. Similarly, things like BP powder, things like that. KSM 66, Ashwagandha. Ashwagandha could decrease cortisol levels, decrease stress, might decrease nervous system activation as a result. In fact, a review study just came out on Ashwagandha this morning that we might talk about in a future week, showing benefits which over like, I like the KSM66 formulation in particular, but Ashwagandha in general might help.
- [76:50]
B
And it's great too. Like it was hard to find clean sport Ashwagandha for a long time and now we have more options with that too. And so that's really clutch.
- [76:55]
A
Then post exercise ketones, possibly because of how it can alter fat oxidation over time or maybe change your muscle fiber recruitment and typology more towards intermediate slow rather than intermediate fast. But that's incredibly theoretical.
- [77:09]
B
Another one that I think is very theoretical as it relates to fatigue resistance. And another one that I like. I have so many questions on that.
- [77:15]
A
Okay, on that, I thought you were gonna list another supplement.
- [77:17]
B
Oh no. You're like, I can't wait. Tell me. Music to my.
- [77:21]
A
Okay, so that's how to stop cramps. We talked enough about that. And before getting to questions, let's talk about the Dark wizard documentary.
- [77:27]
B
Okay. It was so good.
- [77:29]
A
We're already an hour 18.
- [77:30]
B
I told you. I was like, we're not going to get to any questions.
- [77:31]
A
What the hell?
- [77:32]
B
I mean, we had a lot of science. It was a science heavy episode.
- [77:35]
A
Well, we do have to talk about the Dark Wizard. Maybe call it the science episode.
- [77:38]
B
We should. Yeah, a full science. We should answer one question. Relationships. Just palette cleanser before listener corner.
- [77:44]
A
Okay. Dark wizard on hbo. We watched it last week, finished it right before Megan traveled. It is life changing. It is so well done. Dean Potter, the climber who, no spoilers, but died in 2015, it talks about his journey as a human, as an
- [78:00]
B
adventure athlete, and his journey through relationships and through life. To me, that was what hit me most of all, is how I feel like he has this. The Dark wizard refers to the fact that he has this deep, dark, competitive nature within him. And they talk a lot about ego in the documentary, too, and just how his ego comes into play. Play with everything that he does athletically and, you know, how that got shaped in time through relationships and just like, you know, living life and getting beat down enough that like, you know, your ego gets impacted along the way.
- [78:29]
A
And so many documentaries right now are puff pieces, right? Like, to get the access needed to do a documentary on someone, they're often producing these total bullshit things like, what, Bohemian Rhapsody or God forbid, the Michael Jackson Jackson thing that just came out. Like, they're. They're honestly gross because that's not humanity. Humans aren't like that. And those are obvious examples because we know the complications of those humans, especially, you know, the evil ones with Michael Jackson. But like, this Dean Potter documentary, it presents him in his full human glory.
- [79:03]
B
Well, I mean, still, there's like, it's still a documentary and there's still like. I feel like it's magnified to the extremes, to the point that, like, Alex Honnold is depicted within the documentary and gave some, like, he was just hilarious.
- [79:12]
A
He's the most entertaining person of all time.
- [79:14]
B
He was so funny. But he actually wrote an Instagram post that he was upset with how the documentary portrayed him and that it didn't accurately portray his relationship with Dean, which he called much more of like. It portrayed them as like, these, like, fierce competitors that were always, like, positioned against each other and they weren't necessarily like that. Like, it magnified that.
- [79:31]
A
I'm not saying it's like, true to, you know, a zoom in a way. I mean, how do you Describe a life and the complications that in a way that HBO will take, that is still, you know, telling the whole story. What I love about it, though, is that Dean Potter is presented as. There are times where you might love him. There are times where you will hate him, and by the end, you will feel heartbroken for him in some ways. But then the part that I want people to take away, if you're going to watch it, is to think about just how much his art was, like, you're left feeling it and wanting to bring that out in your own life. Not by going through the notch or something really complex and dangerous like he did, but by expressing yourself and going for it. Like, I think while I don't like Dean Potter necessarily from this, it's not like I want to be his best friend.
- [80:21]
B
I kind of do. I mean, I kind of want to. I kind of want to respect that. Yeah, I want to get to know him and his partner. Like, Dean, his partner at the time, it was like they were. I think the way that their relationship was and how she impacted him, to me, was a really cool story, but
- [80:32]
A
I respect him so much. I, more than almost any athlete I've ever seen, not respect him. And, you know, even knowing I wouldn't do what he did. We're not here to live forever, right? Like, it's Dean Potter's story being ending the way it did is beautiful in its own way, you know, and not. Not because he. It ended, but because of how much he impacted the world with the time he had. And so big recommendation for the Dark Wizard. It gave Megan and I a lot to think about.
- [81:00]
B
It gave us a lot to think about. Also made me think about, like, I don't think my brain has really thought about climbing and some of these other sports as art or like, sports as art. And Dean truly embodied that of, like, planning these adventures based off of the artistic take of that. And, yeah, some of that was, like, ego driven of, like, wanting to have this product to show about it. And I think sometimes that was a difficult narrative within his head. But at the end of the day, he was an artist. In addition, like, he was crafting art from the athletic work that he was doing. And to me, it's like, that's such a fun part of sport, is to think about that. That merging of sport in art.
- [81:31]
A
He very clearly would have done it if it wasn't being shown to anybody.
- [81:33]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [81:34]
A
And that's the part that I think is a cautionary tale about him is I think a lot of people like, oh, this is just ego. It's like, no, this is a human. That's complex. Interacting with a materialist, capitalist society and not liking what it brings out of them. And we're all facing that. Right. Like, we face that. Everybody does. And, I mean, we're all performers on a stage, even if that's stages to 100 Instagram followers or to some people on Strava or whatever.
- [82:01]
B
Or to a family dinner table. Yeah.
- [82:03]
A
Or whatever it is. And thinking about how you're being directed outside of, you know, what your true purpose is, I think is meaningful. And that's maybe the place I thought the most about it, because then that's also why I respect him so much. It's like he would have done all of this without the cameras, and the cameras messed it up for him, you know? And so. So, yeah, it's a million different complex thoughts, which is what every documentary should do if it's an honest story, and that's why it's so well done.
- [82:31]
B
Have you thought about that in the context of this podcast? And we spent a long time doing this podcast. Now, obviously it's a running podcast. It's mostly just that. But I feel like it's also, in some ways, given us the skill to practice humor. And as sometimes I go into different situations, I went back to my family this weekend in Pennsylvania and found myself using humor in ways that, like, when you're in a new environment, you recognize it more than when you're just baked into the environment in which you always exist. I was like, man, like, I don't remember using humor this much. It's just. It's a way to get through the day and to bring entertainment and enjoyment much. Kind of like an art form in some ways. And I think this podcast has helped us flex that muscle. And I don't think I realized that until going to a new environment.
- [83:09]
A
Oh, yeah, absolutely. You're. You've always been the funniest person.
- [83:11]
B
No, no. I mean, that's not. I mean, it's. But it's not like trying to be funny. It's just that, like, there's moments where humor becomes an art form, and it's actually really fun. No.
- [83:18]
A
And I think art is such a broader definition than people, and that's what
- [83:22]
B
I took away from this thing is, like, I don't view myself as artistic, and I wish I could be, but I think art can expand to a lot of different things and a lot of different mediums.
- [83:29]
A
Well, if you're not going to watch Dark wizard, please just Watch the last five minutes of episode two for Alex Honnold's quote. I don't want to say what it is right now.
- [83:37]
B
He was displeased by them though.
- [83:38]
A
We rewatched it like 10 times. I understand he was displeased but I also understand why the filmmakers and he
- [83:44]
B
also said it too.
- [83:45]
A
So I understand why they took him out the of context because it is the funniest thing I've ever seen shared by anyone. Alice Honnold is maybe my favorite human in the world. But interestingly I like Alex Honnold a lot more. I respect Dean Potter more as much as, you know, I respect them both infinitely. But Dean Potter is so like real in the sense of.
- [84:06]
B
Well so is Alex.
- [84:07]
A
But by that I mean real. Real's the wrong word. Like analogous to, to humans that like more attainable. Maybe that's the better.
- [84:16]
B
Okay. Attainable. Attainable feels good.
- [84:18]
A
Alex Honnold is such an outlier beyond belief.
- [84:21]
B
Well I think the thing that was so obvious was that Dean Potter was working through a lot of fear out there. And I think it feels like when you watch Alex Honnold like he's willing
- [84:28]
A
to fear but not.
- [84:29]
B
It's not fear on the same level that most humans feel fear. And I feel like Dean brings that to a human level in which like you know, he did some solo attempts and you could see just how much fear he was working through. And it reminded me a lot of like pre race nerves and you know what a lot of athletes go through and there was some kind of like warm hug, warm small of the back feeling in that.
- [84:47]
A
Don't say that. I also just don't know why people ever talk to journalists or documentarians. That's a weird comment.
- [84:55]
B
But I mean he's dead.
- [84:57]
A
He's dead. Yeah. I don't understand what you're saying.
- [84:59]
B
Yeah, he has. No, I mean, I don't know.
- [85:02]
A
What I mean is, you know we get tons of requests from journalists and stuff like it doesn't do anything for you, it only risks.
- [85:08]
B
You mean like Alex Honnold?
- [85:09]
A
Yeah.
- [85:10]
B
Well, I mean he probably felt like it was going to be a tribute to him, you know.
- [85:13]
A
Yeah, I understand.
- [85:16]
B
Like if they're, if they're doing this about Jim Walmsley and they wanted to interview us or like maybe a better example, like you know, a female athlete that I love so much, like Rachel and I'd be like I'm going to go, I'm going to say how much I love her, I'm going to uplift her this is going to be great. But that's also. There's going to be nuance. You know, there'll probably be like with every.
- [85:30]
A
If you make one joke, if you
- [85:31]
B
make one joke, it gets pulled out, you know.
- [85:32]
A
Yeah, that's my point. Why even do it?
- [85:34]
B
Well, you. And I just. I want to uplift them.
- [85:36]
A
I don't. I understand. I. But I am kind of confused. Confused, like to be just behind the scenes. Not all the time, but a lot of times when journalists reach out, it's this huge amount of entitlement about like your time.
- [85:46]
B
Oh, it does take a lot of time.
- [85:48]
A
And I just don't understand sometimes in the modern era when you have. You can just create your own platform.
- [85:53]
B
Well, sometimes a journalist reach out to me about a science topic and I'm like, nah, I'm good. But if they reached out to me about Rachel, I'd be like, yeah, I want to honor that. Bad.
- [85:59]
A
I was just thinking about that when I saw Alex's post.
- [86:01]
B
Yeah.
- [86:02]
A
Because like, he doesn't need to do any of this. He was doing it out of the kindness of his heart. You assume I want to watch all 10 hours of his interview, you know, like, or whatever. Because that would be indicative. But long story short, dark wizard, 10 out of 10 recommendation, absolutely incredible.
- [86:16]
B
It would also be so good. We watched it before bed. I think it would be better to watch it while training just because I got quite activated from it. And so if you're on the treadmill, if you're on the bike, it's a great show.
- [86:24]
A
Okay, let's get on to questions. Let's do one question before that quick promo for Wahoo. Go to the link in our show notes. I'm going to read that real quick. Someone said also wanted to say we used your code and got the Wahoo treadmill over the winter. It's been amazing. The Wahoo treadmill is freaking awesome. Use code swap. Han Stroyer just posted a video of him running along at sub six minute pace in zone two. So he's ready for western states.
- [86:45]
B
Oh, it looked so good. And now he's off to Flagstaff for training camp.
- [86:48]
A
Yeah. So he is a beast. And the Wahoo treadmills are amazing. And if you put in our code, you get like a 400 fan. That just makes it absolutely game changing. So try that out. All right, which question you want to do?
- [86:57]
B
Um, do you want to do relationships or death and ultras? I feel like we've done a lot of science so we should do some sort of different Topic.
- [87:04]
A
Some sort of different topic. Okay. So I did the relationships one on the bonus episode.
- [87:10]
B
Let's see how we vary.
- [87:11]
A
Okay.
- [87:11]
B
Now that I'm here.
- [87:12]
A
Okay, we'll do it.
- [87:13]
B
Yeah.
- [87:13]
A
Hi, David and Megan. Bit of a different question for me from me here. I was just listening to this week's podcast and hearing about you on your Zwift ride, crying because of the love you feel for Megan and the difficulty of what she's going through made me tear up, because I've never had that kind of love in my life, and it's just so beautiful. My dating life is. Has sucked. I'm currently 25 and haven't had relationships last more than a year. I'm usually the one that ends it. I had a habit of just jumping into relationships to say I was the one. I was in one and feel cared about and wanted, and then after several months, figuring out that they're not my person. What would your advice be on finding a love that is similar to the one that you and Megan have for each other?
- [87:45]
B
Oh, that's beautiful.
- [87:46]
A
So beautiful.
- [87:47]
B
I think we're not anywhere near a gold standard.
- [87:50]
A
Definitely aspirational. I think find the love that you have, like, not our love. Our love is a totally different thing. And also, it's not exactly what you see on the podcast. I mean, mostly pretty much, but, like, you know, I think it's so easy to idealize what other people have and not understand that, like, what is truly happening for you is not. Is going to be so full of warts, and eventually you're going to hopefully love those warts rather than something that is, like, uniquely perfect, and you're gonna know that.
- [88:21]
B
And I think a lot of things happen, too. And 25 is actually really young. Like, I think about the people that we were at 25, and it's quite different to who we are now. And I. I think about you, David, and you put up with a lot. When I was, like, When I was 25 and you were 27, I was a bit of a wild girl. You were amazing. But the thing is, like, we as humans change a lot. And I think part of a relationship is showing up as who you are, authentically, 100%, and. And, you know, not being afraid to do that, because that's gonna be the relationship that's best for you, but also recognizing that, like, seasons of life mean that, like, as your partner and as you go through seasons of life, you're gonna look really different at 25 and 30 and 35 and 40 and go through a Bunch of different changes and love that person for the person they're becoming and commit to that of like, you know, this person has these baseline attributes and they're gonna change over and over and over again because that's life and love them for it.
- [89:11]
A
Okay, do you have any specific recommendations? Because the funny part of that is exactly the same answer I gave.
- [89:17]
B
Is that really the exact same answer?
- [89:18]
A
I talked about loving different use as you've grown.
- [89:22]
B
That's. That is wild.
- [89:24]
A
And I have not listened to also 100% authentically showing up as yourself right away.
- [89:28]
B
Like, oh, immediately. Because that's a. It's a test.
- [89:30]
A
And that. And I was pointing out with myself, that's the one place that I did differently with you. And that's why I didn't have any good relationships before.
- [89:37]
B
I didn't realize that were you. Did you feel like you had to, like, just, like, hide yourself for other relationships?
- [89:42]
A
You make everyone feel at ease, you know, you make everyone feel loved and warm and just like at home, you know? And I mean, literally, you could. On the first night after it became a date and we closed that place down, it's like, I'm going to love every version of her, and I'm going to tell when it's. When she's comfortable enough with it, I'm going to tell her she can trust that I'll be there through everything no matter what happens.
- [90:00]
B
And you surely have. Like, I've changed a ton, you know,
- [90:03]
A
and didn't I tell you that? I mean, I told you a couple years after, I was like, no matter what happens, no matter what goes on in your life, you can. I can promise you I will be here.
- [90:10]
B
And you have. And I think, like, even when you
- [90:12]
A
tried to get rid of me, I
- [90:13]
B
tried to break up with you, like, three different times.
- [90:15]
A
And it's not that I was like, putting my hand on my saw your back. It's more just like.
- [90:18]
B
You're right. I mean. I mean, I understood.
- [90:19]
A
I understood what was happening.
- [90:20]
B
But the way that you showed up in the breakup times was really beautiful, too. And I think sometimes I, Like, I. I think you're very much like a porch light. And this. The Noah Khan song. Noah Khan song made me reflect on that of like, a porch light is someone that's, like, always there and always on no matter what happens. Like, you always come back home to that light being on. And I feel like that's how you've been in our relationship is like, you know, just because of life's differences. Like, you know, I knew you at 20. And I'm a very different person than I was at 20. And that porch light has been on since I've been 20. And how cool is that? And how amazing is that? That, like, you've loved different versions of me just because, you know, I'm a mom, I'm an athlete, I'm all these different things. I might retire here, who knows? And all of those versions look different. And the porch lights on.
- [90:59]
A
Getting ready to play.
- [91:00]
B
You getting ready to drop me off the side of a rock cliff.
- [91:04]
A
First thing to learn how to tie a shoe knot.
- [91:06]
B
I should have referenced that.
- [91:07]
A
If I can tie my shoelaces, I can tie a bottom.
- [91:09]
B
We're literally always in the airport and someone's like, your shoe is untied. Excuse me? Your shoe is untied. I'm like, yeah, it's always untied.
- [91:17]
A
Karen,
- [91:20]
B
you should probably learn to do bunny ears before you blame me.
- [91:22]
A
Fuck you, Karen. This is the devil leaving me. So you. Yeah, I mean, showing up a hundred percent authentically is the big thing. And then, you know, understanding that, like, I don't know, it's just okay to keep putting yourself out there as much as you possibly can. Like, you have to shoot so many shots in these types of environments, and then just mechanically. This is the other part that I want to see. If it overlaps with you, how should they find someone?
- [91:47]
B
Oh, I think just do a bunch of different things that you love. Like put yourself out there in a bunch of different ways. Be authentically. You in every running group. You go to every group and then. And just. Yeah, just see what happens.
- [91:57]
A
Okay. I said things you're passionate about.
- [91:59]
B
Yeah, exactly. Well, same thing. Yeah.
- [92:00]
A
Not yet. Not because you're. And it doesn't have to be running. I. The example I used was Scrabble. If you're really into Scrabble, that's a good way to identify with other people. Not because you're going to play Scrabble together, you might stop playing Scrabble, but because you're the type of people that get addicted to Scrabble. And that says more about you than a lot other things would. And those touch points are so important. So, like, let's say worst comes to worst and you can never run again. Us meeting through running is not about us running together or whatever it is about. We are the types of humans that gravitated towards that in the first place.
- [92:33]
B
We didn't really meet through running.
- [92:34]
A
No, not at all.
- [92:35]
B
Yeah. Isn't that wild? Yeah.
- [92:36]
A
Yeah. And I'm going To learn to tie knots.
- [92:38]
B
And hopefully it'll come full circle on that.
- [92:39]
A
You're going to be okay.
- [92:41]
B
No, actually, I have a lot of hope here. But it's been. I mean, how you've handled. Like, this is another time of a different. You know, these last few weeks, this. I can't do anything have been a different. I mean, not really a different version of me, but a different, like, mechanical version of me. And. And it's just. I think having that faith in a porch light of, you know, your light's gonna be on for whatever that version of me is so comforting and amazing. And I think that's an important quality to find in a partner, too.
- [93:03]
A
Yeah, well, I think just not being in. One foot in, one foot out, just be all in. And I think that must be the weirdest part of modern dating, is that everybody's kind of one foot in, one foot out.
- [93:11]
B
Oh, and that has to be so weird. And not knowing that, like, status.
- [93:13]
A
Yeah, I hate that.
- [93:14]
B
Be like, tell me about your feet. Please. I need to know.
- [93:17]
A
You don't need to know. It's just like.
- [93:19]
B
I mean, I would need. I mean, I think just. I want that certainty. Yeah.
- [93:21]
A
Just fucking commit. And when it doesn't work out, just commit to the next thing.
- [93:24]
B
Oh, then you're. You're learning.
- [93:26]
A
Let your heart be broken. Like, just be vulnerable. Shoot your shot. Same thing as everything else. Like, you're not going to learn unless you're at the edge. And so stop staying away from the edge. Get close to it. I don't know if that makes any sense.
- [93:36]
B
I don't know.
- [93:37]
A
Shit. I have had no dating life. What am I even fucking talking about? Let's go on to listener corner.
- [93:41]
B
You were telling me about a middle school girlfriend the other week.
- [93:44]
A
Yeah. You had a middle school boyfriend?
- [93:45]
B
I did. Yeah. I was telling you about. Actually, I had a dream about a. A elementary school boyfriend last night. Maybe it's about my trip back home. I don't know. It was weird.
- [93:52]
A
Yeah, okay.
- [93:54]
B
I told you that.
- [93:55]
A
And I understand. I'm just. I'm just processing it. Something to talk to my therapist about.
- [94:02]
B
That elementary school. I mean, basically all we did was played. We played basketball, like, over and over again and played, you know, pig or horse. And that was the extent of our relationship.
- [94:09]
A
Oh, my God. Is this why the pig I gave you meant so much to me? Are you thinking about jealous?
- [94:14]
B
It wasn't. It wasn't lavender scent and.
- [94:16]
A
Are you thinking about Colton?
- [94:18]
B
It was Charlie.
- [94:20]
A
Oh, my God. Chuck. Even worse. Okay, quick promo. For John g go to john.com j n j I.com I think sl swap
- [94:30]
B
actually it is sl swap. Yep.
- [94:31]
A
So many great things there. You can see our favorite products on that site. I love the Multi short. All their shirts are amazing. What do you got to promote?
- [94:38]
B
I'm taking the Atlas Pant. These are my pants that you've been wearing. I took them back and they're so great I can't stop wearing them. I love them. Them also love the long bra for storing stuff and their shorts are just like the trail shorts for storing. A number of different gels are great.
- [94:50]
A
Yeah. Okay, let's go into listener corner. I think we've gone a little too far.
- [94:54]
B
We've gone really far.
- [94:57]
A
So I'm not going to read the big long listener corner. I'm going to read one of our questions and we're not going to answer it. Hi David and Megan. You guys are so awesome and have brought a lot of laughter and joy and hope to my life recently. If you have taught me anything about running is to have crazy dreams and go for them. A wild dream I have is to run the Crazy Mountain 100, but I'm relatively new to running consistently in life and it makes it hard to get in high mileage weeks. I ran a 50k in January and have been maintaining 20 to 30 mile weeks since. What would it look like to build towards my dream race even if it took a few years? You guys are the best.
- [95:23]
B
That's so exciting to think about that. I mean I feel like if you ran a 50k in January, you should go for it.
- [95:27]
A
Just go for it now. And so that's the Glistener corner. Go for it.
- [95:30]
B
Go for it now.
- [95:31]
A
Whatever.
- [95:31]
B
The thing is, I mean do it with base training obviously something and support and. But I feel like at this point. Make the leap. Go for it.
- [95:37]
A
Yeah. I mean just jokingly talked about living at the edge, you know, but like that is the thing. Live at the edge. Running is so cool and athletics is so cool because you get to explore the edge in ways that hopefully aren't high stakes. So like make sure your health isn't at risk. Like apply the things we talked about for that, you know, do do some steep downhills or whatever so you don't get rabdo. But like other than that, everything that you do is just things that are grist for the mill. Help you become a better person outside of running and develop more like character essentially. And so this is just an opportunity for character. So go chase it.
- [96:08]
B
Yeah. Crazy Mountain 100. I kind of want to run that now. That sounds fun. Where do you think that is? Wyoming.
- [96:13]
A
It sounds like a Wyoming thing.
- [96:14]
B
It sounds like a Wyoming thing. I bet you it's beautiful.
- [96:16]
A
Idaho. Idaho.
- [96:17]
B
Should we. Let's look it up.
- [96:18]
A
Look up. Crazy Mountain 100 location. Also, I don't know if it's okay to call it the Crazy Mountain.
- [96:24]
B
I'm over that.
- [96:25]
A
I feel like they should.
- [96:25]
B
We got. We got messages from people saying that we can't say crazy. And I've just. Oh, it's Darcy Piccoo on the.
- [96:29]
A
Oh, yeah. She's the best.
- [96:30]
B
Oh, that's beautiful. Look at those wildflowers.
- [96:33]
A
And then they have a quote on the front page. Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live. Okay, so they're embracing it.
- [96:39]
B
It's Montana. It's Montana.
- [96:40]
A
Montana. Okay. Same same shit, same deal. Same same deal, different day.
- [96:47]
B
So.
- [96:47]
A
Yeah, I love that idea.
- [96:48]
B
Also, it's a Hard Rock and Western states qualifying race.
- [96:51]
A
It's called. It's the Crazy Mountain range.
- [96:52]
B
Yes. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [96:53]
A
They're using it as a double meaning.
- [96:54]
B
Yep. Yeah. Ah, okay. Okay.
- [96:58]
A
I mean, I was already thinking.
- [96:59]
B
Did you think they're just calling it Crazy Mountain?
- [97:00]
A
Well, I was thinking of my competitor.
- [97:01]
B
Like, I knew the Crazy Mountain range existed. I just didn't know whether it's in Wyoming or Montana.
- [97:05]
A
I. I didn't know that I was gonna do the skit paranoid schizophrenic mountain. 50 as a competitor.
- [97:12]
B
Sign me up.
- [97:13]
A
As always. Hey, mental health stuff. We are so uplifting. Like, you know, everyone has different mental health contexts. No, like, open up about it, talk about it. It is all beautiful and part of what makes us human. But also, sometimes you need to make jokes about it. I feel like it actually helps when you make jokes about your shit. Like, hopefully people saw that when I went through Western states and had a pandemic panic attack on the live stream.
- [97:35]
B
I feel like that gives you credibility. It's like, insert your credentials, see citation. But you can talk about this stuff because you had a panic attack for 200,000 people to watch on YouTube.
- [97:45]
A
Unless you've had, like, tons of people hating on you for your mental health crisis on a live stream, then we
- [97:52]
B
should just refer to some of the comments too.
- [97:55]
A
Things have been chill as shit recently.
- [97:57]
B
It's been great.
- [97:57]
A
It's been nice. See, this is what's great about.
- [97:59]
B
Or maybe I just ignore it. I don't know.
- [98:01]
A
And maybe I blocked all the people I need to block. Maybe it's all coming from, like, a small enough group of people that you ignore it.
- [98:07]
B
I don't block. You block people with, like, pretty low threshold. I have a very high threshold for blocking.
- [98:12]
A
Yeah. I do.
- [98:12]
B
To me, I block, like, three people.
- [98:14]
A
Yeah. Interesting. It's just the Internet, though. I mean, or just humans in general. I think it's easy to think that it's like, us. But I saw Rachel actually was interviewed by Zach Bitter, and the very first clip that he posted was of her saying she's had to avoid the Internet since Cocodona.
- [98:29]
B
Oh. I mean, she's gone viral in a way that is probably very challenging to
- [98:32]
A
deal with, but because so many people are accusing her of doping.
- [98:35]
B
What?
- [98:35]
A
Yeah. Which is wild, right? Like, obviously, anybody who knows the sport knows nothing in her profile indicates that she's the exact opposite of someone who you would think would ever be risky for that. And it reminds me so much of, like, when I had failures. People said I was a piece of shit, right? In. In so many different ways, and I've learned to just laugh at that. But then maybe the weirdest part is when you have success, it's like, oh, you're so the same. People are like, oh, you're so good. You must be cheating. I'm like, it's one or the other. Either I'm a people of, or I'm just. Okay.
- [99:07]
B
Well, it's so funny. On my heart post, which was talking about myocarditis that I had in 2020, one of these, like, continued heart struggles, I had a bunch of people just comment with, like, syringes on it. I'm like, are they accusing me of doping? And then I realized they're actually talking about the COVID vaccine and, like, comments like, jabbity jab and, like, things like that.
- [99:21]
A
Like, you got a jab.
- [99:25]
B
Like, what's happening on there? And I was like. My first thought, I was like, what are they talking about? They think I'm doping with these heart issues. And I was like, oh, no, it's a vaccine. Interesting. Isn't that funny?
- [99:33]
A
Okay.
- [99:33]
B
Yeah.
- [99:33]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. Jeopardy. Jab. I got someone commenting on my post about you, which I always do. The first day you travel, I write a tribute post to you because I can't contain myself.
- [99:42]
B
Well, you did it from the hospital, and people thought I was still in the hospital. I got text messages to me. I'm like, I'm good. I'm actually on a plane to Philadelphia right now. I've rebounded from this cardiac camp.
- [99:52]
A
Philadelphia is the only thing that. That's worse than the er. But yeah, there was one comment that was like, someone saying something that just was, like, weirdly. It had, like, weird insinuation continuations.
- [100:03]
B
Oh, about what? I didn't see that.
- [100:04]
A
Something about myocarditis, which I now makes sense that they were probably talking about similar ideas.
- [100:07]
B
Oh, yeah, People have this whole thing about. I mean, I mean, obviously. I mean, Covid vaccines are in some sense linked to my predecessors. Yeah, exactly.
- [100:15]
A
Basically, a lot of things are. But, like, I block them just instantly, like, get off my wife's, like, attribute post, you know, like, that's not what you're here for. But it's just interesting to think about the type of personality that I should use my voice for this.
- [100:30]
B
Yeah. Well, I wonder how many. If they have, like, a filter for, like, myocarditis and they're just, like, going around commenting, like, jabbity jab on everything.
- [100:38]
A
Honestly, Honestly, Maybe it's a fun way to go through life. Maybe the problem is we're trying to live in this nuanced, like, loving space. Maybe all we need to do is just go comment mean things.
- [100:47]
B
We should.
- [100:48]
A
No, Megan, maybe that would be.
- [100:49]
B
I would panic so hard.
- [100:51]
A
Maybe I would just let the devil out of me.
- [100:53]
B
Yeah,
- [100:55]
A
okay. Back to the listener. Go for it.
- [100:58]
B
Go for it.
- [100:58]
A
And everybody just go for it. Whatever the thing is, whatever the scary thing is that you can't do, go
- [101:02]
B
for that crazy comment.
- [101:04]
A
Yeah, the crazy mountain rage comment.
- [101:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. Uplift those mountains. All right.
- [101:10]
A
Give me something to believe.
- [101:13]
B
Oh, man. We're just going down the chimney tonight. You have to have a complex, brief, green. Loop that back to that.
- [101:25]
A
That's true.
- [101:26]
B
We're leaving that in.
- [101:27]
A
We're leaving that in. We'll see.
- [101:30]
B
I want a girl. I want to teach you how to play.
- [101:35]
A
I'm just stopping the podcast. I love you guys. Take that out. That was dumb.
- [101:43]
B
Oh, it's really not.
- [101:44]
A
I know, I know.
- [101:45]
B
I'm sorry.
- [101:47]
A
I'm gonna tag this one on at the end.
- [101:48]
B
Yeah.
- [101:49]
A
That was the dumbest reference I've ever made it back. Now I'm going to say something.