The following is a conversation with Zach Bitter, ultra marathon runner and coach who held multiple world records in the 100 mile run and other ultra endurance events. He is currently training for a run across America which for now is planned for September this year. Like many of the things Zach has done in the past, this is a big fascinating challenge.

Quick mention of our sponsors Ladder, Valcampo, Noom and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Zach has been advising and coaching me on my own running journey. I want to mention that Zach sent me some running shoes from Ultra which I think is a company that sponsors him.

When I put those shoes on I feel like Zach is watching me and I get that extra motivation to make him proud. And by that I mean I want to put a lot of miles on those shoes. Running is something that has always been difficult for me but I love it because it is difficult.

The hardest part is I'm left alone with my thoughts for one or two hours. Some thoughts are dark like thinking about mortality, my own and that of others. Some are self-critical like personal weaknesses or dreams not realized. Some are simply human feelings of loneliness, personal and existential. And yet there are the moments during a run when all that fades and I'm left empty of negative thoughts and full of appreciation for the beauty of experience, of nature, life, the whole thing.

This is why I return to running. Not to get in shape but to face myself and to run through it. That's why I'm inspired by people like Zach and by David Goggins and others like them who seek to find the limits of their body and mind. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here is my conversation with Zach Bitter.

Where does your mind go when you're running an ultra marathon? Are there a lot of positive thoughts, negative thoughts, demons, inspirational things, maybe no thoughts at all? - Yeah, that's the really interesting part of the sport I think 'cause you can, essentially what it is when we're looking at like the hundred mile distance or anything that's like all day long is you're gonna have the full range or the full spectrum of emotions, of mental processes, both kind of positive, negative and in between.

So it almost feels like you've lived multiple lives or full life maybe is the way to say it in that one time period. It's almost like a simulation of what you may experience in a long period of time in a very condensed period of time. And I think that's just a weird mental process to reflect upon.

And that's what kind of draws people back to it. But I mean, it's a battle too, because if you're looking at it from a performance standpoint versus an experience, you obviously wanna minimize the negative mindset stuff. You wanna try to keep those emotions and those thought processes at a low.

And I think when you can keep yourself from letting those thoughts creep in, you end up having better races and it can spiral in either direction. I noticed like there's kind of like this scenario that occurs where in the beginning, like a negative thing creeps in your mind, it's like super easy just to slap it down and say like, "Get out of here.

I've did the training, I'm fit, I'm feeling fresh still. Everything's going well at this point in time." You get a little further along in the race and you're starting to feel a bit of the fatigue. I mean, a little bit of self-doubt creeps in. You start asking yourself, "Well, maybe I should have done one more long run or did I not quite taper long enough?" And those things can kind of spiral into a negative way.

And if you let it keep going, it keeps going all the way to like, "Why am I here? Why am I doing this? This is stupid." All the way to like, "There's another one of these two weeks from now, I'm gonna drop out of this one and sign up for that one instead." And then you just find yourself in the exact same situation.

So, you kind of have to go through the process, I think. It's why I think there's kind of a – I won't say it's a rule of thumb necessarily, but something I think is fairly valuable is if you do a hundred mile for the first time, make sure you get it done, even if it means like death marching is what they'll call it in the alternating community, the end of the race.

Just to say like you got that full experience, you experienced the highs, the lows, the full thing, the starting, the crossing the finish line, that release of emotion when you're done and all that stuff. So that when you go back to do it again, you have like a template to build off of and you know – or you just have some data to pull from about how your mind is gonna work as well as your body so that you can start practicing, "Well, what do I have to do to kind of keep my mind from spiraling in a negative direction or how do I catch some positive momentum and kind of keep sending it that way?" And things like that.

And that just, I think, you just add to that over a career of running them or a series of running them and it sharpens. It's kind of like any sport with that where you always have this balance between the youthfulness that you may have early in your career versus the wise intelligence that you have maybe near the end of your career.

- So in terms of wisdom, is there mechanisms by which you kind of observe the negative thoughts and let them go? So you have people like the David Gogginses who kind of, he seems to almost like separate his mind into, there's the weak David that he hates and then there's the strong one.

I mean, there's like a very contentious relationship there. So he basically says like, "I refuse to be that person." And he's almost like angry at that person. It's almost like sometimes literally yelling at that person, the weak version of themselves. And then there's another more sort of Sam Harris-y approach, which is like just observe the thought and let it go.

Maybe knowing that this too shall pass, like no matter what, this moment will not last forever and kind of sort of accepting the natural flow of things and taking one step at a time and allowing whatever the negativity, whatever the pain you're experiencing just to pass, even if it means a death march.

Which one is more effective for you? Which one, like would you say generally speaking to the population is more effective? Yeah, that's a really good question. It's probably unique to the individual. I wouldn't argue that David is finding success with his approach. Some may argue it's an extreme version.

Sam has obviously thought about these things and really probably, I see those guys as kind of two ends of the spectrum in just the way that they come across in general, where David's really at you, kind of high energy, and Sam's kind of this calming, soft presence, and he's just going to slowly, methodically lay it all out there.

And I think there's value in both of those. I think most people are probably going to get a benefit from pulling some from each. I mean, there's times where I need a kick in the ass, and then it's like have the strong Zach, tell the weak Zach to get moving.

But there's also times where it's just like a subtle voice entering my head about, "I don't know if I feel quite right now. Should I maybe pull back on the pace?" And I think that little subtle voice is best approached with a subtle positive voice where it's more like, "Okay, well, let's think this through here for a second.

You're 40 miles into a 100-mile race. You spent four months preparing for it. You know from the workouts you did that you're ready for this. There really isn't any real reason for you to slow down or to fall off your goal or your pace or reassess what you're doing.

Let's just give this another mile or two, and then we can reassess if we need to in order to kind of figure out if I'm doing the right things or not." And I think in that situation, you definitely probably want to lean more towards the Sam Harris approach with that because there's really no reason to.

It's almost like the same thing you see with just training and even nutrition to a degree where some folks, they just want to be kind of drilled. They want to be yelled at and said, "Get going. Get doing this." And that helps and that motivates and that helps them stay accountable.

Other people need some softer love with it where it's like, "This isn't necessarily your fault. You were put in this environment that kind of created an atmosphere of lethargy and maybe poor nutritional choices and things like that." But it's correctable. So we need to step away from that and we need to kind of start heading in the direction that we know is going to bear fruit down the road.

And that person may respond better to that. So I think both those guys have great value with their approaches. They're just probably polar ends of the spectrum. And I think most people are probably going to benefit, like anything, right? You get the polarizing ones, and those are going to work great for the polarizing people.

But then most people are going to fit somewhere in the middle. So they're probably going to be able to kind of pull from both of those if they're able to sit down and kind of assess which one's going to work better in which situation. - So the quitting thing that you mentioned, like the final stage, which actually I get to much quicker than you seem to, which is like, why am I doing this?

I get there with basically anything I do. It's like, this is probably the stupidest thing I've ever done is the feeling I get often. And then immediately you have these excuses that are like, there's all these other better things you should be doing. Or the other alternative of that, like you said, I'm not prepared enough for this moment.

I'll be much more prepared in two weeks for the next event. So like, why? Let's try this again. Let's start over. Let's start over in two weeks. How do you deal with that quit? Like, so maybe do you still go through that process and by way of advice for people that are more sort of amateurish like me, how to deal with that quitting voice?

- I think a lot of times when the quitting voice kind of comes in, what it does is it kind of just, it comes in with the added disadvantage, I guess, in this situation of being kind of a narrow scoped view where you're looking at like what it's doing to you in the moment or how you're feeling in the moment versus how are you feeling about the whole process?

So one thing that I started doing in 2019, and I don't think it's necessarily, I think this was a big reason why I had one of my best racing seasons in 2019 that I'd had to that date. It was part of it was I started, I think, putting a little more emphasis on the big picture versus putting emphasis on like, this is one opportunity or one day of work and this is one emotional kind of flare up.

But how does that actually relate to my general broader picture? So when I decide to do a race or an event or something like that, it's often four or six months out ahead of time, you're planning to like kind of do a series of workouts and a flow of things where you're going through the process of getting fit, getting ready, preparing for the specifics of the day and all that stuff.

And then you get to the race itself or the event itself. And it's very easy to look at that and think that's an isolation. Like I'm going to run 12 hours today or I'm going to run 100 miles today or whatever it ends up being. And it's a lot easier to quit when you think to yourself, I'm 40 miles into 100 mile race.

That's just a 40 mile run, which sounds kind of silly to most people. But in perspective, and we're talking about the ultra marathon running community, it's a lot easier just to say like, well, I'll scrap this 40 miles and try again. It's a lot harder to say, I'm going to scrap the entire last four months, the entire reason why I was doing it, the countless hours I spent in there.

So I think I just try to reposition it of like, I'm in a bad place right now, maybe in my head or I'm hitting a low point here, but I'm 99% of the way towards the goal I set out four months ago when I add in all the work I did leading up to that.

So I think it's important to ask yourself why, because I mean, there are times when you're doing something and you ask yourself why and you don't have a good reason. And then maybe it is advantageous to step back and really reflect on that and decide, is this something I actually want to invest time and energy into?

Because someone like yourself who is very much into a variety of different things, it can be easy probably to overextend and get... I mean, I'm a very curious person. So there's like a hundred things I would love to do if I wasn't doing what I'm doing. And I know I would enjoy all of them.

So at a certain point though, you have to say, okay, which one is going to be the most meaningful for me? And if the answer keeps coming back to saying, I guess this is still the most meaningful to me out of that hundred things that I could otherwise be doing, then I know that I'm in it for the right reason.

Then I just need to identify some of those things. Like, well, why did this one take the top spot out of the hundred things that I could have picked from? And keeping like a list of those in your head, so that when you get to that point where you start saying, why am I doing this?

Why am I here? You just have those kind of ready loaded in your head to say, well, I already took inventory on that before I started this. And I knew this voice was going to come at some point, whether it's early, middle or late. And then you just remind yourself kind of what you were thinking when you had a little more of a level head.

- Well, there's something about the thing you mentioned when you mentioned the death march. It seems extremely valuable to just never quitting. Like in the moment, if you decide to do something, like never quitting, even if it, you do go through the process and realize that it's not the wisest thing to be doing within the full context of your life.

Like once you decide to do it, it seems like never quitting prevents you from sort of having that escape clause from other things in your life. So I've quit on a few things in my life. And I think I still, I deeply regret that because it opened that door.

It's almost like a muscle. I don't know. So I think I'm, I don't know, maybe everyone is, but I think I'm kind of a quitter. You know what I mean? Like, like I'm really good at coming up with reasons to quit. My mind is really good at that. And I, it feels like I have to come up with, like really work hard to make sure that there's no quit, that I never allow myself to quit, no matter how stupid the thing I'm doing is.

I don't know if any of that makes sense, but it just, maybe to rephrase this whole thing, do you think it's good to live life by the ethos of never quit? - Yeah, that's a really interesting thing. And I think it actually resonates with a lot of ultra marathon runners, because there seems to be a trend when you have someone who's been in the sport for a long time, where there's a point where they start the sport, right?

And they're like super excited about everything. Everything's new. It's very easy not to quit. Cause you're like, oh, this is the first time I've ever run a 50 Ks. The first time I've ever run a 50 miles. The first time I've ever run a hundred Ks. The first time I've ever run a hundred miles and so on and so forth.

And when you're doing that for the first time, I think there's a heightened motivation to not quit. Cause you don't want your first attempt to be a failure. And then you get a little further along and you start reflecting on the landscape and all the opportunities that are out there and you find yourself quitting on an event.

And there does seem to be a trend where once you do that once, now all of a sudden, like you described perfectly, that quit pops up in your head maybe a little sooner the next time. Or maybe a little bit before. And I've certainly had these experiences in my career as well.

And what happens I think if you stick with it, again, I think it is important to assess whether you really want to be doing what you're doing. But if you start recognizing that about yourself in a certain activity where it's like, I think I might be pulling the plug early on some of this stuff.

I think you just need to kind of get into a position where you just, at that point, you need to make a decision. Do I want to keep doing this? If the answer is yes, you hold yourself accountable to not quitting. And eventually what will happen is you'll find yourself in a position where, I'll use ultra marathons for example, where you're just clicking on all cylinders for that day.

And you still get those scenarios where doubt creeps in your mind. You have these low points. But for whatever reason, when those low points come, you're able to push through them better than you would have in the past. And then you push through maybe two or three more than you did after you had quit the time before.

Then it's accountability time, right? Because then you have to look back at that and say, well, why did this time was I able to be mentally more strong and kind of push through those extra opportunities to quit when I wasn't before? And it can be easy to look back and say and live kind of like retroactively in the sense where you're like regretting, well, why did I drop out of those races?

Why did I do this wrong there and that? And I just think that's where you have to kind of catch yourself and say, no, those things happened to me in order to put me in a position where I decided, well, this time I'm not going to quit no matter what, minus my leg falling off.

I'm not going to quit. And then you put yourself in a position to have that day where you push through more times than you ever have before. And you just redefine what you're capable of. And then once I think you do that, you start looking at those earlier lessons as lessons.

Were they failures on paper at the time? Probably. But can you pull things from them to learn as to like, well, where is your actual threshold? Where is the limit actually for you? And then kind of start redefining that stuff. So I think the never quit mentality can be good in certain situations.

But I don't think it's necessarily a holistic thing where you need to be in something where it's never quit, always do more. Because then you end up in a situation where you find this margin of diminishing returns, especially when it comes to training and workouts and things like that, where there are times where often there are times where you want to actually quit a little bit before you would have to, because the stress that was required to elicit a growth response has already occurred.

And just to do more is just going to require more recovery time to get back and do it again. Yeah, this is the tricky tradeoff. Living by the never quit mentality, you're not going to achieve optimal performance. In your head, you might. It seems like when you look at the full arc of human history, the people who do great things are more leaning towards the never quit.

Like, I feel like at any one moment, you're more in danger of quitting than you are being suboptimal. So like, in terms of advice, it just feels like never quitting is always the right advice. Unless you deeply know the person, maybe this is like wrestling mentality. I've seen too many, and because I'm annoyed with the current culture telling me to relax and have a work life balance and all those kinds of things, which all have a deep, deep truth to them.

But the reality is like, there's not enough people that walk up to me and like slap me and say, "Get your shit together." Like, "Don't quit. Work harder." I think we need to hear that more. And I can remember that from the wrestling rooms, like that when you're pushed that way, when you're forced to the very limit and you don't quit, that makes better humans.

I think people need to get that in their life. I think they need to have situations where that becomes kind of the reality for them so they can see that avenue, experience that avenue, where I think it's maybe to the extreme as if it becomes like your entire life philosophy where like every little thing you do is never quit.

But life is short, Zach. I mean, this is the problem I have. This is probably the programming thing too is over-optimization is dangerous. It's like every once in a while, I mean, you're, you do this kind of stuff. You're not, for example, with a hundred mile run. I mean, you could just be doing that for the rest of your life and do like the most optimal hundred mile run ever, but you keep taking on like new challenges and there's a lot more chaos in that.

And there, it feels like the muscle of never quit will be much more important than the optimality of your training. Yeah. So there's probably a couple sides to me with that kind of a thing where for one, I think when we talked about the why, so like, I think the why can kind of shift a bit and it probably will if you do something long enough or evolve maybe is a better way to call, let's put it.

And for me, like one of my big drives and one of my big passions within ultra running is to first of all, find an event that I really, really love to train for and participate in. So for me, I feel like I've kind of identified that to a degree and that's kind of runnable hundred milers.

So once I found that it became more of a driver for me to see like, well, how fast can I run a hundred miles in a very controlled environment? So let's eliminate weather, let's eliminate, you know, elevation, let's eliminate like having to wait extra long to get crew or support and that sort of thing.

And that's how you find yourself on a 400 meter track running a hundred miles. But for me, like that, the important part of that is that I can control the environment enough where if I come back year after year, I can retest myself and have a decent ability to kind of say I improved or I regressed or I stayed stagnant.

And I think that's a big driver for me. But one thing I've recognized within that is if you just keep doing that, like if I could probably pick three flat runnable hundred milers a year and optimally prepare, race, recover and repeat without like burning myself out. But one thing I think I learned also in 2019 was that sometimes you kind of need to step away from some of these really, really kind of important markers in your like your performance or in whatever you're trying to do and take a step away from it and try to do something a little different in order to kind of hit the reset button on just like what I would call just like your mental energy to be able to continue to do it at a high level.

So- - Almost like happiness. - Exactly. Well, and here's the example. Like, I mean, I love running in trails too. Most people would consider me a flat road track runner, runnable ultra runner, but I like to do trail runs too. So at the end of 2018, I recognized that I had been kind of pushing the gas pedal on trying to run fast hundred milers for quite a while without really a break in that where it was like, okay, I did one.

Now I'm gonna take a brief off season, but then I'm gonna ultimately build up and peak for another one. I might introduce some fun trail races in the context, but they're gonna be B races, they're gonna be training races, time on feet type of stuff that are gonna kind of mimic like a long run essentially.

But the main focus, always in the back of my mind was like getting on the track and seeing how much faster I can run a hundred miles. And that just kind of, that energy that it takes to continually think by that, I think the motivation to keep that stope high enough to really meet your full potential fades if you don't step away from it for a little bit.

So I took essentially half a year away from runnable stuff and just decided I'm gonna prepare for the San Diego hundred mile, which is like a much more elevation, technical trail type of an event. Is that trail run or no? Yeah. It's a trail hundred miler actually just technically just outside of San Diego.

And yeah, it goes through, it goes over part of the Pacific Crest trail and stuff. So it's very different than running on a runnable surface. So to give you some context, like I ran, what was it? I think just under 17 hours for that race. Whereas on a flat surface, I can run 11 hours and 19 minutes.

So just the environment alone added an extra, you know, five plus hours to the day. So it's just a different experience, different skill set. And what it did is it allowed me to kind of step away from kind of focusing on like splits on a track, running flat stuff, like preparing for things specifically for a flat environment and start training for something that's more climbing and descending, more technical running skill sets and things like that.

And the cool part about it was, uh, first of all, you know, when you step away from something and enter something a lot different, I mean, it's still running. There's still a huge advantage I had from the running I'd done in the past. It was going to put me in a good position to be successful, but there was a much higher, uh, or a much bigger range of potential improvement for me.

So through the like, you know, four plus months I spent preparing for that race, you know, I noticed, oh wow, I'm getting faster on this climb or I'm getting better at descending this technical trail. It was one of the most fun races I've run actually. So it was kind of a cool experience.

I ended up, uh, taking the lead at like 93 miles. So you were racing, racing, like you were trying to get first. So it's still a race. Yeah. So what was the enjoyable aspect of it? I don't think I recognized it so much while I was doing it. Actually it surfaced afterwards.

I mean, the enjoyment of the race itself is like when you find yourself in a position where you're sitting in basically second place all day long, and then you take the lead at 90, I think it was like 91 or 92 miles. It's like, yeah, that's kind of a cool way to race.

Um, it, but afterwards I recognized a few things just about kind of pacing and you know, how to maybe pace the first half of a hundred miler versus the second half. I also recognized shortly thereafter, uh, once I finished recovering and decided my next event was going to be a flat runnable race that, wow, I really was way more excited to do the workouts that I needed to do to get ready to run a fast, flat hundred miler.

And I don't think that would have been the case had I just tried to do another flat, fast hundred miler earlier or during that year and end up in a situation where like I maybe had like normalized a suboptimal like a outlook on like something that I had just done so many times already.

And I recognize that it was just every workout I did. I was like, I did this workout a year ago and it was not nearly this much fun or, you know, you, then the interesting thing about these track hundreds too, is like, you find yourself doing like your peaking phase where you're running your long runs, which for me are usually like, you know, around 30 miles or so.

And I'll do them on back to back days. And, you know, I try to replicate the environment that I'm going to race on. So I'm finding myself on a 400 meter track. And it's like, when I started doing that again, I just felt like I was super motivated to go out there Saturday and Sunday and do those back to back long runs and see the progress and then head out again the next week and do it again.

So I had some of my more enjoyable long runs, which are going to be the most specific to race day environment that I had in quite some time. And I think that was really beneficial and kind of putting me in a right spot to be able to push through barriers on race day and put me in a position where quitting was going to be much less of a likelihood given the enjoyment I had in the months leading into the race itself.

Yeah. Even the thought of quitting. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned the track. You've also ran 100 miles on the treadmill and the trail 100 mile broadly. If we zoom out, what does it take to run 100 miles for most of the world? That seems like a crazy distance to run.

So maybe it's interesting to ask, not only is just setting the world record, but purely running. What does it take to run that far? Yeah. I mean, I think people probably overestimate what it takes in terms of just getting it done. I think this is consistent in just running in general.

I think the marathon was always a big one with that where people thought like, well, you have to do this training or you just literally won't physically be able to complete a marathon. And then we got into an era of kind of like running as more of an enjoyment thing versus a performance thing.

And then you'd have people running, granted much slower. I think if you look at the Boston marathon, average finishing times, it goes from like, or maybe it wasn't the Boston marathon. It might've just been marathons in general went from like three hours to five hours or something like that.

So it's like people, I think, got past the fact that you can only do it if you're optimally prepared to, well, I can do it and maybe not meet my full potential if I'm going to like not do much training, which I wouldn't necessarily advise. But I mean, I've talked to people who basically run 100 miles sometimes almost off the couch.

And it's like, to me, what that says is just the human body's incredible and what it can tolerate above and beyond what it's been exposed to if it has to, or if it feels like it has to. - So that's the basic sort of getting from point A from the start to the finish is the human body and the human mind is capable of doing it without much preparation.

But then you start to increase the goal of performance and you try to get actually a good, like the most out of your body that you can. How does that start to change then? Going from fun to performance. - Yeah, I think once you start putting marks or goals on outside of just finishing, that's where it starts getting interesting because now you can maybe go on with multiple goals where like if one falls off due to something that you didn't expect, then you have another one to target.

But you can always build those up and try to think like, well, I want to run faster than last time or I want to break a course record or an age group record or something like that. And that I think is just going to be a little bit of a different mindset because now you're looking at every little thing from what do I need to do to prepare as well as what do I need to do to be efficient on the day itself.

So like transitioning aid stations and things like that or do I want to pace or not or does this race allow someone to like hand me a bottle at a certain spot or do I have to be in specific areas to get that type of stuff. And what it ends up doing is it ends up bringing a lot more variables to the table.

And I think it's interesting because there's always going to be more variables on the day than you are able to account for. So at a certain degree, you have to kind of find yourself in a position where I'm going to make sure I take care of the big ones or the ones that are like obviously I need to be ready for like my fueling strategy, my hydration strategy, my pacing strategy, what workouts are going to put me in a position to physiologically have this process go as well as possible.

How am I going to like hold myself accountable in aid station transition so I'm not like having a ton of non moving time versus moving time and things like that. - This is so cool. So there's these like big variables that you're aware of and you're trying to optimize over the space of variables.

- Yep. - So you get to start to play with that when you're looking for performance. - It's almost like moving from checkers to chass, right? You have like, or maybe even like connect forward chass or something like that, where it goes from just kind of like, well, one foot in front of the other.

And when I get to the next aid station, I'll just eat whatever looks good, drink whatever, you know, quenches my thirst and then move on to the next one to like, well, which one of these food products is actually going to make me move a little faster to the next aid station or, you know, which one of these pacing strategies is going to get me to the finish line faster than the other one and that sort of stuff.

So it gets more complicated, more interesting and in my opinion anyway, also there's, I mean, but there's a breaking point with that too, because like I said, there's an endless number of variables you could account for. And as the distance gets longer, that list gets longer too. So you find yourself in this position where you have to at some point say, okay, I've accounted for everything I can reasonably account for.

Now I need to be in a mental space where when something happens that I wasn't able to account for, I'm able to respond to it with the right decision and keep going and not dwell on it. Because that's another thing, I mean, you're running slow enough when you're doing a hundred miles, where if you make a mistake, you can sit there and just fixate on that mistake and say, why did I do that?

That cost me 10 minutes, blah, blah, blah, blah. When in reality, what you need to do is that happened. Everyone else out here is going to have a situation like that at some point. Mine happened now. I need to figure out how I can move forward at the fastest sustainable pace and not think about what happened back there.

And that's where I think it gets really interesting. - What would you say it takes to set a world record in the hundred miler? - Well, first of all, I think you probably have to focus on that specific event. I mean, the interesting about ultra running where it maybe deviates a bit from just other endurance sports is there's such a wide range.

I mean, we talked about a little bit when I talked about the San Diego hundred versus kind of the flat runnable stuff. - Can you maybe paint a picture of what are, there's a huge range of different kinds of ultra marathon events. What are like the big ones in your mind?

So marathon, we know the distance for a marathon, there's 50K, what are different kinds, there's a hundred mile that in your mind, like kind of these islands where people gather often. - Yeah. So there's a few that really stand out. I would say the three biggest ultra marathons right now, even from a historic, maybe not necessarily a historical standpoint, but in modern day ultra running is going to be the Western States 100.

That's the biggest, most competitive hundred miler. It's on the trail side of things in the United States. Then there's ultra trail Mount Blanc, which is probably the most competitive hundred miler on the planet right now. In previous years, it's been debatable as whether Western States or ultra trail Mount Blanc is more competitive.

I think in the most recent few years, you're just seeing a lot more of the bulk of international talent on the trail side of the sport heading over that way. And then you have the road running side of things where the comrades marathon, which is technically 56 miles, but they call it the comrades marathon is going to generally be the most competitive ultra marathon.

The weird thing is the distance thing, right? Because most people when they think of endurance sports, they're thinking about precise distances, like five kilometers, 10 kilometers and all that stuff. And then you get into the ultra running world and it's like, sometimes it's the event. So like the Western- - The course itself is much more important than the distance.

- Right. Yeah. So the Western States 100 is actually a hundred point two miles, which isn't that big of a deviation when you think about it, especially when you figure like tangents are going to probably account for more than point two miles on a hundred mile race. But the ultra trail Mont Blanc, that's listed as a hundred miler, but it's actually, I think like 104, 105 miles.

So, it's more, there's different cultures too. So the United States is definitely more motivated, I think, to try to get as close to the exact distance. You're going to hear maybe a little more grumbling if someone says, I signed up for this a hundred miler and it turned out to be a hundred and three miles versus like over in Europe, they don't really care too much about the distance.

They're more interested in like a specific route or a loop. - Is consistency important in terms of the exact length of the route? So like you can compare performances from previous years, or are they a little bit more flexible? Like they redefine the trail from year to year. - Yeah.

I mean, it's definitely hard to compare. I mean, there's events that, take for example, I would say the best ultra marathoner in the world today on the men's side is Jim Walmsley. The reason I think Jim Walmsley is the best is because he is the most versatile and not only is he the most versatile, but he's arguably the best at almost everything up to a hundred miles.

So there's a race called the Angeles Crest hundred miler. The trail has drastically changed from when they originally had that event. And it's a different time of year. So it's much warmer on that course. And Jim's not the kind of guy who would sit back and say like, I can't chase that record.

But I think Angela Crest, when he looks at the segments and the pacing for that one, he's like, that one is maybe not even the same event anymore. So you have that, you have some that are a little more controlled and a little more kind of like preserved, I guess you would say, but I think it gets really rare on the trail side.

I mean, Comrades is going to be very comparable from one year to the next, because that's a road race. And that's where you get, you maybe get like the split in the sport from people who really want that kind of like, I want to compare myself to someone who ran this course in 1970 versus like someone who just says, I want to be competitive today.

And maybe the weather is going to be 30 degrees different from one year to the next on this course. But if I beat everyone on this day, then I'm the champion of that big name race, like ultra trail Mont Blanc or Western States 100. And my legacy will be cemented because I won that big race.

And it doesn't matter when or how the course was or what the time even was to some degree. - When you were optimizing for trying to set the world record in the 100 miler, were you doing like analysis of maybe like, what were the variables you were looking at?

Is it more in the realm of the actual race day, the track, what it looks like versus like the variables of the training leading up to the race? - I mean, it evolved a bit. Like I think the, as I learned more about just like what is required to kind of really do that stuff.

So there's some variables you can control for. I try to control for as many as I can. The big one that kind of stands out that you can't necessarily control for is it's pretty rare where you get an event where they're just doing 100 miles on a track. It's usually like an event of like a series of different events where they might be like, some people out there doing 50K, some people out there doing 24, some day, like the event I did, there's six day folks out there.

They're trying to see how far they can get in six days. So you have like this much wider range of pacing just due to like the distance. So, track protocol is always like you pass on the outside. So if you're running one of the faster paces of the day, which when you go on up to six days, you're gonna, and you're doing 100 miles, you're probably gonna be running faster than most people out there.

Then you just end up running more because you end up running in lane two around the turns, unless sometimes lane three around the turns. - So it's down to those little details that have a big impact. - Yep. So I had to build that into my pacing strategy. I also have to build into the pacing strategy, like relative non-moving time.

I did a race just recently, it was the US track and field 100 mile road championships. And I did not stop once other than like, I guess I technically stopped like in the aid station for like a few seconds to like grab bottles and get myself wet. Cause it was like 94 degrees that day.

But I didn't like stop at all during that race from like, what I would say is like a long period of time where we're getting up to like a minute, but that's pretty rare. Even on the track, like when I ran 11 hours and 19 minutes, I think I stopped three times for maybe a total of like, I believe I have to look back for sure, but I think it was like three to four minutes or something like that.

So you gotta figure that into your pacing strategy, especially if you're chasing a specific time. Cause if I'm pacing for, at the time the world record was 1128. So if I'm pacing for say 1127.30 or something like that, and I don't account for that three minutes of stoppage, then I might run the exact pace I had planned on, but then I'm a minute off of the world record.

So. - 1128, we're talking about 11 hours. We're talking about a hundred miles. Can you mention what the world record was? What kind of world record you set? Can you tell your own story here of what you were able to accomplish? - That world record that I broke actually just recently got rebroke by a guy over in Lithuania, Alex Sorkin.

Phenomenal race. I mean, he's won the 24 hour world championships. He's won the Spartathlon, which is another big historic ultra marathon race. It's 153 miles. So it's getting a little more lengthy than some of the stuff that I've traditionally done. He ran 1114, I believe it was 56 or 57.

So his pace was 645 per mile. Mine was 647 and a half in terms of just like the pacing strategy. I mean, it's just really cool because for me, the motivation with chasing the world record was, it was multifaceted. I think there was, as I kind of moved through, because I mean, it took me almost six years from the day I decided I wanted to chase that time to the day I actually did it.

And through that five to six years, I think I merged from just like my number one goal was to try to break the world record to my number one goal is how fast can I run this thing? And then ultimately what needs to be done for a human to break 11 hours in a hundred miles?

Because I think that's going to happen soon. I think it's going to happen in the next few years. What pace would that be? Sub 11 would be, I think it's like 635 right about per mile. You're moving quick, but not so quick that you're void of being able to think about everything as it's happening.

So what's the pace in terms of, if you look for each of the one mile segments for the hundred miles, is it pretty steady? In order to break 11 hours, would it be pretty steady? 635? Does it go up and down? Do you speed up at the very end?

What's the pacing? Maybe how much variability is there in the pacing for an optimal performance here? Yeah. So if you're talking about someone, let's say that there's someone, well, let's just take me for example. Let's say that we could just, we had this infinite knowledge and we knew for a fact a perfect performance for me would produce to 1059, but I'm not going a second faster and I need to do everything right in order to run a 1059.

I would definitely want to either have a slight negative or a slight positive split. And I think there's a range in there where like being a little bit faster the first half and the second half isn't going to necessarily change your outcome or being a little bit slower the first half and a little bit faster the second half isn't going to drastically change your outcome.

So that's what you're referring to the split is you're looking at the first 50 miles and the second 50 miles. And you can break it down as tiny as you want. Like I think when you take out the outlier laps where I stopped to use the bathroom, which would have been that like three to four minute non-moving time that I talked about before, my splits were really tight.

I had a couple that were, it was weird because that track that I did that on was actually like 400 and some weird number like 438 meters or something like that. So I actually like ran like my numbers based on that. So normally I'm dealing with 400 meters and then it's a little more like clean as to like what my lap splits are going to range from one event to the next.

- So we're talking about running 100 miles on a track. - Yeah. - And so then you can be really scientific about getting the pacing right. And you're running on the inside lane or is there some kind of tricks to this? Like are you alternating directions? - Yeah, they'll switch directions at most events every four hours.

So you'll do four hours one way and then they usually put a cone out. And once it hits like, like let's say it hits four hours, you finish the lap you're on and then you do a loop around and then you start the next, your next lap. - Would you say you take the exact same number of steps?

Like when you're really in the groove, when you're taking the pacing, are we talking about that level of precision or is it a little bit more feel? - You mean like foot strike frequency? - Yeah, like frequency then over the distance of the lap, would you say it's so precise that you're like, you get in this groove where it's like perfect.

- Yeah, gosh, you're making me wish I would have strapped more like a foot pod to my, but like, yeah, so I think like my guess is it's pretty precise. - Is there a video of this? Sorry, I keep interrupting. Is there a video of this? I've actually, this is now three years ago, build a computer vision algorithm that counts foot strikes.

- Oh really? - Yeah, for fun. - Yeah. - I was trying to understand, we'll talk about this later on. - We have the same definition of fun when I find myself on a track for all day and you find yourself counting foot strikes. - I was trying to understand if there's how much variability there's in extreme like elite performers within a particular race, but also across races.

It was just interesting to me from a robotics perspective, if like how much variability there is in the human body in the way they use legs to move quickly. - I think my guess would be that at the individual level, it's gonna be pretty precise, assuming the pacing is consistent.

So you get, so my pacing on that day, I ran two minutes faster the second 50 miles than I did the first 50 miles. So my splits were very even most of the day. I actually ran some of my fastest miles at the end. So there's gonna be probably a slight variance from my fastest mile to my slowest mile in like your cadence or your foot strike, but probably not by a huge margin, but you might have a pretty big variance from one person to the next.

So you get someone whose gait is just a little bit different. So like for me, I supinate, which means I kind of come down on the outside of my foot and I'm kind of more of a mid forefoot striker. So that's gonna kind of impact my cadence to a degree.

Whereas you might have someone who is kind of more mid to rear their foot or heel striker, and they might pronate where their foot kind of rolls in. So that person may have a little bit of a different cadence as well. So you get someone, and I think you see this in elite marathoning too, which is gonna probably just be a much larger data pool, much more probably precise from just like a number of opportunities to study this.

And I think even their ranges from one person to the next can be, I wouldn't say drastic, but to the degree of like 10 to maybe even 20 steps per minute or something like that from one person to the next. But most people, the faster they go, the higher their cadence is gonna be, the slower they go, the lower their cadence is gonna be.

But there's gonna be probably a range of optimal lowness and I don't know, probably optimal highness too. - If you can just linger on 11 hours, the person, first of all, would you like to be the person that breaks 11 hours? And second of all, the person that does break 11 hours, like what would it take?

And third question is, is it even possible in your intuition? - Yeah. I mean, I would be lying to you if I said I didn't wanna be the first person to break 11 hours in 100 miles. I think that would be a cool barrier to be the one to usher that in.

But with that said, I think I'm much more motivated in seeing it done from the sense that like, I think when we're talking about records, it's something that is inevitable that it's gonna get broken. So I mean, we were talking about happiness before this, right? So I've contemplated this in the past where I was thinking to myself like, if my motivation is to break a world record or any record for that matter, course record, and have that be my defining reason or my defining motivator, I probably need to do an assessment of where my mind is at and where my focus is at and just reflect on how I'm behaving in life because it's gonna get broken, right?

I mean, I could run 10.50 tomorrow and in 10 years, chances are that's no longer gonna be the world record anymore. Someone's gonna run faster than that. So if you're living to hold on to a record versus living to try to move the sport forward, which anytime you break a world record, you're moving the sport forward, then you have to look at that as like, that was my contribution.

And whether I contribute again or not is kind of besides the point. What you want is that your performance or your contribution brings new people into the sport who are excited, motivated, and they can make their contribution. And then we can ultimately see, well, how fast can someone run a controlled environment 100 miler?

And that's what I really wanna see 'cause I think I've gotten so much enjoyment from the sport. I mean, I've gotten so much enjoyment from the sport, I've been able to turn it into a career. And I think there's other people who can do the same thing, and it's not necessarily gonna come at the expense of my career, but it's gonna bring more attention to the sport.

It's gonna bring more interest in the sport. It's gonna open the sport up to people who maybe otherwise would have never thought about it, seen it, considered it. And to me, I think that's a much more rewarding goal than saying, I wanna break this record and I wanna hold it for decades, or I wanna die with this record so I never have to see someone go faster than me.

- Well, that's the progress of human civilization. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we keep creating cool stuff. - Well, and it's the other thing is just like, if you're honest with yourself too, it's, I mean, we're seeing this right now in the running world where new innovations come in, new technologies come in, new nutritional approaches come in.

And then we see the new crop of folks have advantages that the old crop didn't have. And it can be easy to look back on that and say like, hey, well, if I would have had that product or if I would have done that, I would have run this.

But then you're getting into that negative thought process again, which I generally try to stay out of. - I think the caveman, if I had fire, I would have done way better with this. - Look at these idiots up there with their cars. If I would have had a car back then, I would have been ruled the world.

- Let me just zoom up just briefly and ask you about kind of beauty and love. What's the most beautiful thing about running to you? Why do you love it? - I think there's kind of a couple directions to look at it through, or lenses look at it through.

There's like the in the moment, right? There's always gonna be that run where you're clicking along and things just feel great. You get some endorphins and you get the quote unquote runner's high and that sort of stuff. And that's just like this great feeling that you can kind of tap into on the real in the moment type of level.

My wife and I talk about this because she's a competitive ultra runner as well. And we'll have a day where we'll take a forced day off or something like that. And it's necessary, right? It's gonna allow the enjoyment to continue. But you get into this routine of I wake up in the morning, I do this run and that kind of gets my day started.

That gets my energies up. I get that runner's high afterwards. You remove that from the equation for a rest day and you just sort of like, "Oh man, I feel like I never got started today." It's just this weird thing. I think it's funny because non-runners don't always necessarily recognize it because for them it's the complete opposite.

They're like, "If I can get away from not having to run today, that's gonna be a good day." Yeah. But it's one of those things that I think gets more addictive the more you do it. So that's purely from the running perspective, there's this joy of the runner's high, of the post after the run you feel like you can take on the world, that kind of thing.

Yes. And I think that's one of the drivers from just a quality of life standpoint, and in the moment immediate gratification standpoint. But then there's like, I think, the bigger picture stuff or the longer term stuff. For me, that enjoyment is just the process of, "Okay, I'm starting at this fitness level and I'm gonna do these workouts.

By doing these workouts, I'm gonna see incremental progress from them." Then that's another kind of short-term gratification that's maybe a little longer than the day-to-day, but still shorter than a career or a buildup for a particular race where you're seeing yourself like, "Okay, maybe I'm focusing on short intervals right now.

And on week one, I covered this much distance in three minutes, but by week four, I'm covering this much distance." And you can just see that progress. It's almost like in elementary school when you get the gold star for reading a book, it's like, "Did that gold star really mean anything?

I don't know, but I felt great when they gave it to me." Yeah. Yeah. Something about just finding improvement. And people love to see improvement, I think. So that's where I think you can also get some value in it. We were saying, "I started here and I got there." And then I think there's also just like...

I would call this maybe more the cherry on top, which is where you express your work, which is the race itself, where that's gonna be the thing that shows up on the end result and where it identifies whether you did things right or wrong. Yeah. So there's a sense in which training is a kind of preparation towards race day, and race day being the thing where you get to be the artist.

You get to create this piece of art, and it might suck, it might be beautiful. I mean, in the grappling world, I see competition in that same way, when I feel the best about it, which is like... Sounds pretentious to say, but I'm trying to be the best version of myself in this particular day of competition and to do something that I'll be proud of in an artist way, not in some kind of numerical way, but as a holistic sense, like do something cool.

In grappling, that means for me, that means not stalling, taking big risks and trying to dominate another person in the context of grappling, and do it, like push myself to the limit, both cardio wise and technique wise, and just play beautifully. I mean, you see this in kind of chess, there's systematic chess players, and there's people that allow themselves to have those moments of genius, where they take the big risk that eventually pays off or doesn't.

And that to me is art. I mean, there's art within running, there's art within chess, there's art within grappling, and you get a chance. Like all the training is more like science, and then it feels like the competition day is art. Yeah, I think that's a really cool way to look at it.

And I think it's when you really open up the perspective of that too, it's like, even obviously, having a great day, winning the tournament or getting further than you were expected to, or beating someone who you've never beaten before, something like that. Or in the running perspective, achieving that goal time, that sort of stuff.

Obviously, those are kind of like the ones you, when you're honest with yourself, you really want, and you're going to probably get the most satisfaction out of. But even when they don't go wrong, like maybe with your grappling tournament analogy, maybe the guy you're grappling against does a move on you, and you're like, "I was not prepared for that move." So now the enjoyment becomes, "Okay, back to the drawing board.

Now I need to find out what do I do when that happens to me next time." And that's where I think the why comes in again. Same thing with running. Maybe I make a mistake and eat something I didn't really want to eat or thought was going to work, but didn't work, and it costs me more time than I gained by having it or something like that.

And then I go back to the drawing board and say, "Okay, well, I can't do that. That didn't work." Or if I'm going to do that, I need to be more prepared to be able to do it. And I love that part of the sport, just the rearranging of things and adjusting and tinkering.

There's some sense in which the mistakes and the flaws give us meaning. Because if everything, if you weren't able to find mistakes in something you've done, it feels like the life would be void of meaning. It's a lost opportunity too. When I look at even my 100-mile race of 11-19, I can find spots in there where I was like, "Oh, you know what?

I could clean that up a little bit. Maybe if I do this differently." And that's going to get me a little bit faster. If I sat back and said, "Hey, well, things weren't great that day. Cool. Let's see if we can replicate it." Then I'd probably run 11-19 again.

So can we talk about training a little bit? Yeah. What does your training look like year-round, day-to-day, hour-to-hour, like optimal? Maybe you want to pick a race in the context of what you want to discuss that. And also people should follow you on Instagram. You have a lot of interesting little glances into your training process and into your training thinking, which is quite fascinating.

But if you look at an optimal training process, what does that look like? Yeah. So I think if we were looking at it from a philosophical level or an approach level, I think there's some things that carry over from regardless of the distance. So I think working on your weaknesses and things that are least specific to what you're going to do on race day, but are still going to be important things in terms of improving your ability to perform on race day or maximizing your potential with the things that are specific, you do first.

I say that, but there's a caveat with endurance sport. I think maybe even more specifically with things like our ultra marathons or 100 milers where you want a really strong aerobic foundation or a base before you really start, I think, structuring things towards a specific one. So for me, I think a target for me is oftentimes getting really fit at what my pace would be at, my aerobic threshold or what a lot of people will maybe call a maximum aerobic function.

The running world is weird where we have these terminologies where there's sometimes multiple words that essentially mean the same thing, but one is from an actual physiological reaction and one is just a feeling and stuff like that. - You mentioned time on feet versus time in optimal physiological state.

How important is it just to get running done versus running in a particular pace? - That would depend on the event, I would say to a degree. And there's conflicting ideas about how to structure it. I think a lot of times, time on feet in most cases is just going to be like, "I'm running easy, whatever feels easy that day." And that can be different from one day to the next.

I might feel great and that produces a much faster pace than if I feel really miserable or something like that. So that's why I think a lot of times running, they'll do the whole perceived effort or perceived exertion. And you're looking at understanding the response your body has to a certain effort level and you're supposed to target a certain effort level in order to get a certain response.

So to maybe simplify that a little bit or make it a little clearer, I think I focus on essentially short intervals. I focus on longer intervals or tempo runs. I focus on race pace intensity, which is a lot of times what I'll build my long run around. But I'll also, those are the small pieces to the puzzle.

- Those are the options you're working with? - Yeah, but I'm going to always try to work with those options on top of a massive aerobic base, which is going to probably be like 80% of the work. - So how do you build that massive aerobic base? What are we talking about?

Just distance? - Distance and essentially, so I like to call it micro-stressing because you're going to always start at a different spot depending on where your fitness level's at and depending on where you're at as an individual. I'm going to be targeting my aerobic threshold. I'm going to get right up to it, but not necessarily cross over it.

It's been popularized as maximum aerobic function as kind of a training philosophy. That philosophy in itself, I think maybe is a little more holistic where they're saying, "Do this basically all the time." And by doing so, you're going to raise your aerobic potential by so much that you can kind of race yourself into shape at that point.

And this would be maybe more specific for shorter distance or endurance runs where you're not going to really race yourself in the shape of 100 milers, but for 5Ks, you might. You might do a huge base building phase where you're going up to that maximum aerobic function or that aerobic threshold and you're watching your pace come down at that.

So the rule there is basically if you're seeing improvement, that's the sign you're looking for or which would just be your pace dropping at that heart rate or at that intensity. And if you're seeing that continually go down, you're heading in the right direction. If you start seeing it go the opposite way, you're probably overreaching or you're trying to do too much of it.

So that's kind of dictates how much, the dose, I guess you'd say. - When we talk about max aerobic function, are we talking about heart rate as the ultimate, as the really important metric here? So maintaining a particular heart rate during the run? Is that the measure that, like how do you know you're in the right place?

- Yeah, yeah. And then that's where it gets a little tricky because like unless you go into a lab and get your aerobic threshold tested, it's really hard to have like an exact number on it. You know, Dr. Phil Maffetone with the maximum function process, he'll say 180 minus your age is gonna give you your- - Yeah, that's the math 180 formula that I thought was fascinating.

It's like in the same way E equals MC squared is fascinating, that there could be a formula that captures like optimal running. So that for people who don't know that's 180 minus your age, if you train at that heart rate, if you run at that heart rate, you're going to progress a lot.

- And here's the advantage of that. I think like with any of these things, you wanna look at it through where are the advantages here, and I need to account for those. And then where are the potential disadvantages and then decide for me as an individual, do these advantages outweigh the disadvantages?

And what's the alternative approach? And is that gonna produce more advantages or less? So with maximum aerobic function, here's some advantages. Like it is low enough intensity where you can train pretty consistently at a fairly high volume with a very low injury risk, with very low like things that are gonna maybe lower your quality of life, like muscle damage and things like that.

It's a more efficient way in the sense that you're gonna be like prioritizing like fat metabolization, which, I mean, if you're looking at like Jeff Folek and, or Dr. Jeff Folek and Dr. Dominic D'Agostino, some of their research and things like that, like they're gonna show that, that's gonna be a little cleaner way to go about things from just a recovery standpoint, a breakdown standpoint.

- So they could be like a, what they call like a fat adapted athlete. So you can go to your fat stores for energy if you're applying this. What is it called by the way? MAF 180? - Yeah. - Is that a good, is it good? What are your thoughts about in general for yourself and for the broader population?

- I think the MAF 180 formula is about as good of a formula as you're gonna find in terms of capturing as many people as you can get away with capturing with a kind of a universal thing. Like any of these things, I mean, it's more likely kind of on a bell curve where like the bulk of that 180 minus your age is probably gonna be a pretty good, at least starting point to kind of figure out where that is.

There's some other things you can like maybe use to kind of check it that I like to do. If I'm, let's say I did 180 minus my age and I went out and I started running and it was like, I'm running along and I'm just like, my breathing is labored.

I'm, you know, I'm struggling to get a sentence out without gasping for breath. Well, that's my body telling me I'm probably not actually at my true like MAF number or my true, like underneath my true aerobic threshold, like aerobic threshold and maximum function. You should be able to do that for hours and you should be able to breathe pretty efficiently.

- And talk. - Yep. Carry a conversation. Other people will say like you, another way to kind of gauge it, if you can breathe in your nose and out your mouth, that's not necessarily the best way to do on a, from a performance standpoint, but it can be a good kind of governor that will allow you to, like, if you can, if you can no longer breathe in your nose and out your mouth, you're probably going too fast to actually technically be at your MAF pace or under your MAF pace.

- Yeah. I had a, actually when I was in better shape, I had trouble getting to that MAF number. I found myself like, I would be doing way too much work. Like- - It was too hard to do it? - It was too hard to get to that number.

I was running a much lower heart rate, like 10 to 20, what do you call that? Beats lower. And that's, I was still for myself, happy with the pace. It was a good pace and I felt good. I was smiling and enjoying life. And the moment I take myself to that level of like the MAF 180 level, that's like, that felt like a real work.

And it felt like I can't do that for five, 10, 15 miles. Like I started feeling it like this is a one or two mile thing. But I think his answer to that, I feel Mephitone's answer is maybe you're supposed to like, what, maybe do some more sprints or something like that, or build up your, maybe like I'm too weak, musculature wise to like, yeah.

Like that's a sign that you need to work on some stuff. You can't just keep enjoying life. - There's two ways to look at that, I think. And I think you're right on. I think that what the advice from that kind of a process would say is either you're doing too much of it.

So it's getting too hard for where your skeletal muscle system is currently at for that particular activity. So like, it can be different too. Like if you're cycling versus running, that's a little bit of different mechanic where it can be different where you could take a super fit cyclist and then put them on, the amount of volume they're gonna be able to tolerate relative to what you're gonna do when you remove like impact forces and things like that is gonna be lower if they haven't been practicing that activity.

So for you, like, you know, you're prioritizing like wrestling and mixed martial arts, or not mixed martial arts, but jujitsu type stuff. So, you know, running is maybe kind of that secondary activity versus the primary activity. But yeah, so what they would say is probably like maybe instead of doing that, let's say you were doing that for like 30 miles a week or something like that, and it was getting too hard to continue, they'd say, you know, come back to 20, get used to 20, get comfortable with 20, then let's get you up to 25 and 30 and kind of just like inch you along.

One of the intuitions I had about the ways I was failing at running is the form was probably not great. Like the way to get to those 30, 40 miles is to get the form right. Maybe I was doing too big of steps, not the, so like playing with a different gate, playing with a different kind of the form.

- Economy of your form. - The economy, the efficiency, yeah. So that was the intuition, like I was doing something wrong, but I suppose that's the benefit of these kind of formulas. It challenges you to think like, how can I improve this kind of stuff? - Well, and it also, it simplifies it so much that you're forced to, right?

You're forced to optimize within that real strict parameter versus, am I doing my short intervals right, but my long runs wrong? Or am I doing my like long intervals right, but my short intervals, and then you just, it kind of complicates things when you start throwing a lot of stuff there.

And for most people, especially when they're first getting started, you know, you can't overcomplicate it, or you're just gonna like, you're gonna do like a bunch of half right, half wrong things, and then not really know where your progress or your deficits are necessarily at. So I do think this is an amazing approach, especially for people who are just getting into it and building that foundation, where I think maybe you want to deviate from that a little bit, especially when you start to get into these events that are operating well outside that intensity.

So you take something like, you know, let's say it's a race that takes you in the neighborhood of around like 12 minutes or something like that, then you're gonna be running significantly faster than your maximum function pace. So most of the research is gonna say at some point in time, you need to get around to practicing the pace at which you're going to perform at, and really fine tuning the mechanics, the efficiencies, how it feels, how to judge it, how to pace it at the pace you're going to try to compete at.

So there's obviously like a large range of targets there when we talk about the endurance world in general, where, you know, you have these shorter events, like five kilometers, and then you also have 100 mile races, which are going to typically be quite a bit below your maximum aerobic function in especially on these trail races.

I need to admit something. So I don't measure the runs at all in terms of time. I get competitive with myself. So I kind of decided that running for me is going to be this thing where I just go by feel. Is it possible to be that kind of runner and, you know, still have running as part of your life and be a good performer in running?

- I actually think that's where you want to get to. The problem is most people have a hard time getting to that because they'll go out and they'll run with a friend and match their pace, or they'll go out and they'll say, well, I want to run this pace.

So they'll target that pace or target a specific heart rate, which is, you know, not necessarily how they maybe feel good doing it. So I think like once you, I mean, obviously I think when you put a race on the calendar, if your goal is performance, it's a little harder to just say like, well, I'm going to run whatever feels good today.

Because eventually you have to get around to doing what's specific. But from just a fitness standpoint, health standpoint, enjoyment standpoint, I think it's totally fine to go out and say, I'm going to run what feels good today. And, you know, maybe someday you will feel like at the end of the run, I'm going to do a couple of sprints just to get some, you know, that, because it does, that one's a hard one to kind of jumpstart.

But once you do it and you realize how kind of good it feels maybe to throw in a few accelerations at the end of a run, and then you, you say, oh, wow, that feels pretty good to do that. I feel a little more accomplished. - That's right. That's a forcing function.

But I like to finish runs with sprints anyway. - Okay. Because you're already there. - Without, right. You don't need to, the timing, I'm afraid of the time of becoming a drug, but the flip side of that, it's a useful tool to get you to learn the right form, the right feel, like what it feels like to have, to be in good shape.

And then you can throw out the time. - Well, I think too, with, with feel running and what I mean by that is that it's kind of back to that perceived effort thing where like you do enough of it and you start being able to recognize, like I can go out and if you said, okay, run, you know, 60 minutes at your aerobic threshold, I could go, I could know where that is on my heart rate.

And I could go up there and just say like, okay, I know what that feels like and go out and run that feel. And I'm going to hit that spot. Like I bet you if we'd looked at my heart rate data after that, it'd be right in there. And I wouldn't have to look at it.

Some of that's just experience. - Yeah. - Some of it's just understanding, like, when, like noticing the physiological responses when you cross over versus step a little bit too below it. You can catch yourself daydreaming and forget. I'll do this sometimes too where I'll be tired. Cause I'm kind of like you too, where when I'm getting really fit, especially with my foundation, like I got to, you know, I'm moving pretty quick at my aerobic threshold.

So like if I start daydreaming too much, I can notice, oh, I'm drifting back a little bit. I look down at my heart rate, my, oh yeah, I'm 10 beats under. You know, so you do it, it does take a little bit of, I think just awareness. But it's also not necessarily something where you have to be so exact that you're hitting, you know, an exact heart rate all the time.

There's usually a range. And there's even like some fluctuations where like, if you've been healthy for a year or two without any injuries and you've been fit, that you can probably add five beats to your maximum aerobic function if you're using that as kind of your target from the 180 minus your age formula.

- So let's try this, lay this out for yourself, but for others, you offer ready-made plans for people, you know, depending on their, I think the key thing there is the distance. Maybe you can elaborate, but what does that plan look like usually? What are the key options as you've already kind of mentioned, and how does your week look like?

How do a lot of people's week look like in terms of splits? Are we talking about, you know, in terms of rest days, in terms of how often do you speed work versus longer distance? You mentioned long runs. Like, is there something you could say that's generally applicable about the structure of these plans?

- The ready-made plans, I definitely follow like a philosophy, and it's going to be like kind of like lockstep in that. So for those, like, there's just always going to be a sacrifice when you do like a ready-made plan because you're removing the individual context there. So for folks who are like really want to get into the weeds, I usually do like a personalized coaching plan with them where we sit down and we actually look at their strengths, their weaknesses, and really kind of go in from that perspective and fine tune it.

And it also like, it avoids a situation where, oh, my ready-made plan says I'm supposed to do this run today, but I don't feel great today. So what do I do? I mean, some people are fine with that because they're aware enough of like the process that they can adjust it themselves.

Other folks just need a little more support. So that's kind of the difference there. But in terms of the structure of it, it kind of goes with an approach where we're saying you build this foundation, you're going to spend, you know, usually anywhere between 8 to 12 weeks just building up your aerobic foundation.

You're going to be doing a lot of stuff that are kind of at, I call them base runs, but they're basically your maximum aerobic function or you're up to your aerobic threshold type stuff. And they're really going to get really fit with that. And once they kind of have that foundation laid, then it's time to get into the specifics of whatever distance they're doing.

So if it were, it will differ will be like if they're doing right now on those plans, I think I've got 5k half marathon, marathon, 50k, 80 to 100k and then 100 miles. So if they pick a 5k plan, the order of operations is going to be different than if they pick the 100 mile plan, you're going to see some of the same workouts show up in that plan.

It just can be different areas of it. So once they're really fit at that, you know, that foundational level, then, you know, if they're doing say 100 mile plan, they might start doing some short intervals, which I would on my plans, I usually range between 30 seconds up to four minutes.

It's kind of that short interval range. Can you describe what you mean by short interval? It's like a sprint and then a rest? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll use basically like I'll use like a basically a 12 minute time trial. And that's going to kind of like dictate for them what the intensity and the pace is going to be for some of those when they're under a minute, they'll push past that a little bit.

But usually when we're up to like above a minute, and certainly up to four minutes, like whatever pace or intensity that they get for that kind of 12 minute time trial, where they're just seeing how far they can go in 12 minutes is going to be kind of like about where they're going to target for those intervals.

So then those intervals are going to be structured. Let's say they're doing two minute intervals, they're gonna do two minutes at that intensity that they could do for 12 minutes at a time trial, then they're gonna do a two minute real easy jog, or maybe even walk just to kind of bounce back.

And they're going to repeat it. How do you figure out how far you can go in 12 minutes? Is that just a trial and error you build up to it? There's formulas? What? Yeah, there's some newer formulas that are probably a little less brutal. Where you kind of, I haven't really dove into these that that in depth yet, I know like, that you can kind of replicate it by doing like a short, a very short interval, and then a slightly longer one.

And then like another one where like at the end one, that last one will kind of indicate what it is. And so you're doing less of it to get the same answer to the question. But sometimes I think when it's someone who's new, I'd rather than just do a 12 minute time trial, because it's easy for them to execute in the sense that it's pretty clear, you do a warm up, you do some strides, maybe some dynamic stretches, and you just run as hard as you can for 12 minutes as evenly paced as you can manage.

And I mean, if it's going to produce the data I'm looking for. And I mean, it's also- No matter what happens, it'll produce the data. Yeah. I mean, you can you can screw it up, I guess you can go way too fast. And then you have this scenario where like, oh, it looks like your, you know, your first two minutes were drastically faster than your last two.

And then it's like, oh, we maybe screwed that one up. But I mean, really, like, you don't even need to do the time trial, technically. A lot of times you can go off of feel like what we described with the threshold stuff. And, and, you know, it's a high enough intensity where, where like, you can start to kind of like, your body's going to kind of limit you to a degree where if I said we didn't do the time trial, and just started doing the intervals, we could figure out that, you know, if they're doing them right or not, if we see a scenario where oh, it looks like these first two intervals were significantly slower than the last two, chances are we're still not quite dialed in in terms of what the intensity is that you should be targeting for those.

And as you do a few, you just get to know the pacing of it a little better. And then you start seeing more even splits. So like, you know, their first two minute intervals pretty close within a couple seconds of their second, or, you know, I guess we'd be looking at distance if we're doing time.

So like you went approximately the same distance on that last one as you did the first one. And then we're just looking for improvement over time. So you know, we might spend four, six weeks kind of focusing on improving that we're going to still include kind of foundational running volume where you're going to be running like an easy pace and enjoyable pace kind of in the interim, and then there's gonna be some rest days.

And that's gonna be where the levels come in my like level one plans are gonna be like four day a week training plans level two are gonna be five day level three are gonna be six day with one day off. And you can obviously operate outside of those, those those are just the ones that I put up for the ready made when I'm coaching people kind of personalized, we just we look at like what their history is with running their schedule, all sorts of stuff, because oftentimes people get hung up on like, well, what are the elites doing?

What are the professionals doing? What are the Olympians doing? It's like, well, it's like, what the Olympians are doing is they're waking up and they're living and breathing everything around this one race that they're gonna do in four years, or so it's like, we need to step away from that if you're working, you know, 10 hours a day, and you got kids and all this other stuff, too.

So there's a lot of variables that make it more interesting to coach someone who's actually like not an elite athlete, or someone who's a professional athlete, I should say. The but but yeah, so they're, they're gonna do that stuff, those those shorter intervals for probably about like four to six weeks, if they're doing if they're doing a longer race, like 100 miles, if they were doing, say a 5k, we'd start bringing those workouts in near the end of their plan, because that's gonna be specific to their race pace, that can be the intensity that maybe they're doing for, you know, like a 3k or 5k or something like that.

So it's gonna be more relative to what they're going to use. So it follows that philosophy, the plans follow that philosophy of weaknesses and least specific stuff early. And then we start phasing closer to most specific stuff and strengths as you get kind of near to the end of the plan.

And then the distance of or the time that you're going to spend out doing whatever event is going to dictate how those kind of get ordered in there. I wonder if I could ask you for some sort of advice, maybe almost maybe look at me as a case study of a particular runner, and then see how we can plan stuff out.

So which context to give? Okay, so I have been first, let me say how much we're currently in Austin, I want to say how much I love Austin for many reasons. First and foremost, people are super kind and just like, there's so much love that I've experienced immediately when I came to the city versus many of the other cities I've been in.

It's, it's not quite as welcoming and full of kindness immediately. I mean, I really love it here in Austin. And because I've been going through a bunch of stressful stuff, I just kind of gave myself a chance to say, okay, I'm going to stick to a diet of carnivore keto, but I'm going to eat as much as I want.

Because primarily because just barbecue was part of the love I was getting here. And I was like, either I resist or just give in, I decided to give in and actually use this as an opportunity to relax and have fun for the past three, four months, plus whiskey, and so on.

And then the training kind of all I also let go of the training a little bit, just to relax to really focus on the work, focus on the love I've been getting all those kinds of things. But now, I just kind of want to set a goal for myself to get back into both competing and grappling, but also doing a hanging out with David Goggins and doing a conversation with him.

But almost this is my own personal kind of race that I'm looking forward to. And in terms of distance, that means running with David, something like a marathon plus plus. It's like, it's unclear what plus so my goal would be to continue eating carnivore, which is a whole nother topic I'd love to talk to you about.

I feel great psychologically, sort of in terms of mental performance in my work when I eat carnivore, and physically, I love it. I've never felt any kind of need for carbs to improve performance in my running or anything else. Combine that with fasting, intermittent fasting, or eating once a day.

I just, that's when I feel the best. What else? I also feel best, and this is something you can push back on. I feel best when I just run every day, like no breaks ever, and usually the same way every day. So like, I know this is suboptimal. It'd be interesting to hear your opinion of just how suboptimal that is.

So I think that actually lays out like where my mind is. I'm happy eating carnivore once a day. I like running every day. The goal is to run a marathon in two months-ish, two months plus, and then about three months to do a bunch of competitions and grappling. - Okay.

With those parameters, I think like you actually probably would be a great candidate for a maximum aerobic function training strategy. Like you want that consistency where I'm going to do the same thing each day. You don't want to beat yourself up so much any one day that you can't get out and do it the next one.

That's the sweet spot with maximum aerobic function is the trademark there is that you can keep going and keep doing it again and again and again, because as long as you're not going out one day and trying to do twice as much as what you're ready for, for that one specific...

The key for you is going to be picking the right starting point and then building from there on what that day kind of entails in terms of how much running you do. So where you could maybe get creative would be if you decided that it's a hard, fast rule that you run an hour every day, seven days a week, but we find out that to run your maximum aerobic function means you probably are better off sticking to 30 minutes.

Then what you would maybe do is you would run underneath your maximum aerobic function for the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes. Maybe throw some of those strides in there if you want to do that at the very end. And then that middle 30 minutes is going to be maximum aerobic function target.

- Got it. - And then maybe after four weeks, you start noticing, you know what? This 30 minutes isn't wearing me out near as much as it used to. I feel like I could easily push past that. Well, let's up that to 40 minutes. So that's 60. You're always staying within that 60 minute parameter that keeps your schedule consistent, your routine consistent.

- I'm wearing a heart rate monitor as I run to monitor it. - Sure, yeah. - Actually. - You could do that. You could go perceived effort. I like to use them in tandem in the sense that early on, I'll maybe look at my heart rate a little more often, especially for shorter length.

Heart rate can get messy the longer you go. So I end up kind of maybe stepping away from heart rate a little more than some will at a certain point because ultimately I'm going to be usually training or working with someone to run a race that's really long and they have cardiac drift, dehydration, heat, and things that are going to make the heart rate super messy.

- Yeah, but probably your ability to measure perceived effort is exceptionally good. Mine is actually really weak. - Okay, heart rate then. - I need to do the still the work of connecting heart rate to the perceived effort. - Yep, and that's exactly what I would use heart rate for then.

And you'll get to a point probably by like in the first couple of months where you can still lean on heart rate if you want, but it'll be kind of one of those things where you keep looking at it, you're like, "Oh, wow, I can guess it." And you play a game with yourself too.

And you say, "Well, how close can I guess?" - Yeah. - You'll get it. So like for me, what I'll do is I'll go, I'll do the run and then I'll look at the heart rate afterwards and be like, "Oh, cool. I was right there." Or I remember feeling like I was speeding up a little bit there and the show is right there on the heart rate.

- I also love sort of something we haven't talked about. I love pushups and pull-ups, so like bodyweight workouts. Again, it's mostly mental. I just enjoy the mental challenge of it. I also like, it makes me feel like if all I'm doing is running, it makes me feel I'm not like- - One dimensional.

- Yeah, one dimensional. I mean, there's some aspect to running that's not to be like hippie about it, but like, you know, you're with nature, you're running. It's like we're born to do this thing. And that same way, I feel like when I'm doing pushups and pull-ups, I feel like I was born to do that kind of stuff.

Like it's like this bodyweight exercises have that way about them. It doesn't have that dumbbell feel or doing bench press or squats, squats with weight. When you're just doing squats, bodyweight, when doing pushups and pull-ups, bodyweight, even just basic ab stuff, core stuff, bodyweight. I don't know. I just love the way I feel doing that.

So it's usually, I forgot to mention that part. I combine that with the running afterwards, doing some basic bodyweight stuff. - Yeah, and I think like you're gonna get from, if we're not looking at it from like specifically like training a pace in order to get both the skeletal muscle adaptations as well as the cardiovascular benefits, you're probably tapping into some of the higher intensity stuff with that bodyweight stuff.

Unless you're doing, I guess. - No rest. It's very quick. - Okay. So you're getting pretty high heart rate from that? - Yeah, yeah. Very hard. - Okay. - Higher than running. Yep. - So you're checking that box there from just like a lifestyle, enjoyment, fitness, overall fitness standpoint.

I think you wanna keep your running more aerobic then because you're getting that, and you're probably getting it from like your grappling workouts too, I would guess. So there's just not as big of a need for you from a big picture standpoint to be doubling down on that stuff with your runs as well.

And it sounds like you prefer not to. - That's right. So I mean, what about the distance of marathon versus a hundred miles? Is that a big difference? What's a good goal to work towards? Is it marathon and the rest of it just takes care of itself? - Yeah.

So you wanna do a marathon and then ultimately do a hundred mile after that? Is that what you're saying? - I have no idea what the guy- - Oh, so he's gonna tell you spot on what you're doing. So you have to be ready for anything. - For anything.

My own personal goal is to feel somewhat challenged, but comfortable running a marathon. The longest I've ever run is 22 miles, but there's been many stretches in my life where I would regularly run, like the long run would be close to 20 miles. And then I was comfortably running 10 miles four months ago.

It was like forever ago until I injured myself a little bit by running in the snow and stubbing my toe to where it was like, you don't realize how much you appreciate your toes until you stub them. - That big toes where all that power comes off. - Yeah.

And so it was surprising how long it took to heal and how essential it was and how unpleasant running, how much I hated running with it. And then I kept like coming, trying to get back out there to run to think, I think it's okay. And no, it's not okay.

You really need to let it fully heal. At least that was my experience. I couldn't like just suck it up. It was making it worse every time. It was one of those injuries that could really feel, even though it's so small, but it's essential. So is there any difference between the goal of marathon or a hundred miles, would you say?

Should I be prepping for a hundred miles if that's at all a possibility? - The big difference is going to be like you're dropping intensity significantly by going up to a hundred miles versus the marathon. So the maximum aerobic function, I think is actually going to feed into that maybe a little bit better.

It's probably gonna be a little closer depending on where, I mean, it all varies a bit. Cause like people will focus on specific distances and they'll get very efficient and very adapted to that. So like the, it kind of like, it's what makes running kind of messy where like you'll get, for example, like the average person can hit their like lactate threshold for probably about like 60 minutes or something like that.

Whereas you get these elite marathoners who've been basically spending their entire life preparing for a marathon race. They can push almost up to their lactate threshold and at their lactate threshold for almost like two hours. So it gets a little messy when you start looking at it from that lens, but you don't really have to worry about that too much because you're not really focusing on being the best possible hundred miler or the best possible marathoner you could be.

You want enough overall fitness that you can just do either one of them without absolute misery because you did the couch to a hundred miles. So I think like for a hundred miles, the biggest difference, I think, given your context is just like the more physical things you are doing, the better prepared you're going to be for the hundred mile.

So it's almost given your context, I wouldn't say irrelevant. You want to be doing running, but you're going to be doing that once you put it in your program. It sounds like it's going to be pretty locked in. You're going to want to also like, like if you view it this way, it's probably going to be more mentally beneficial to where, hey, today I did my run.

I did my body weight exercises. I did some grappling practice. I spent three hours working out today. If you think of it like that, then you're moving your body, you're doing things that are active for a good chunk of the day, especially relative to most people. So that's going to actually be very helpful for you.

The problem or the battle to get over is going to just be like, you're going to break down physically running a hundred miles. And you're gonna break down physically running a marathon too. So like the, you might just have to push through a little more discomfort, like from a physical standpoint, compared to be if you decided I'm gonna do everything I can in these next like 24 weeks to be able to run a full hundred miler.

Would you say it's physical or is it mental discomfort? Like, I mean, isn't everything physically uncomfortable? Like what do you train for if you're training for the chaos of, so it's not necessarily the hundred miles, it's the chaos of the unexpected, which might include a hundred miles, but it might also include a thousand pushups in my case.

So like- - You need a big jack of all trades is what you need to be. - Yeah. But also like building up the confidence or maybe not, I don't know. How do you survive a thousand pushups? It's a combination of confidence that you have to know that you can do that kind of thing.

Not necessarily the actual number, but like doing crazy stuff. And the second is probably, well, okay, the base strength and endurance and also just the practicing that process of not quitting. I feel like that's one of the things I really need to do in the running space is like doing slightly unpleasant things where I'm practicing that, like bringing my mind back and saying, nope, I'm going to keep doing it.

And part of the running every day has that benefit because some days you really don't feel like running and doing that, then you're practicing that muscle of doing it anyway. I don't know if there's something you can say in terms of advice, how to practice like doing something unpleasant every day, frequently.

- Yeah. What I would do with that is I would try to make the unpleasant thing be different from one day to the next, if you can. So the fear I would have with making running unpleasant every time would be it becomes like a negative feedback loop in your physiologically, potentially, as well as mentally, where if the entire running process is miserable, you're going to be miserable when you step on that starting line, whether it's a marathon or a hundred miles.

- You've trained yourself that running equals miserable. - Well, and here's the thing, if you look at just like, here's where the literature says on paper are like the dozen workouts you should do in a training plan. And this is how you should structure them right down to the minute.

And you just say like, I'm going to give everyone this schedule and they're going to do this every time, rinse and repeat. My biggest concern with that approach is you are potentially putting them in a position where the training is so boring and so monotonous that like if they hit a roadblock mentally, they're going to fall apart very quick because they've already exhausted themselves mentally just trying to do the same old interval every time, doing the same old workout.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be like one specific plan in its entirety. It could just be like the mix of things within it. So like rather than like, if I just said, oh, we're going to do three minute intervals, this entire short interval process or two minute intervals or four minute intervals or 60 second intervals, by that sixth week, they might be so sick of that, that they're not actually maximizing their potential within that because there's no flavor there.

And then they're also actually getting less out of themselves than they would if we just got a little more creative and said, okay, let's mix this up and let's do four one minute intervals, then take a little bit of a break and then we'll do three minute intervals or at least changing it up from week to week so that they have something different showing up, even though we're addressing the same kind of physiological adaptation.

So like, I think what you want to do is you want to introduce the misery, you want to be able to test yourself to the degree where like when you can recognize these points of I don't want to be here, but I can do it, push through it, but recognize that like, there's not necessarily going to be one event that you want to lean on to get that from because you won't want to make that one event so miserable that you don't want to do it when it comes time for the challenge.

So if you can possibly say like, okay, on Tuesdays, the pushup workout, I'm going to go 10 pushups more than I want to, I'm going to get to that point where I'm like, there's no more, and then I'm gonna do 10 more. And you're going to make that one miserable.

And then maybe on, you know, Thursdays, you decide to do like some of those sprints or something at the end where you do a few of them, and you're like, okay, this is where I'd be comfortable to stop like, well, I'm going to do two more of them because I know I don't want to do two more of them, but mix that up.

So you're not, so at least you're getting enjoyment from some of it and not just getting complete disgust from the entire process. - Yeah, there's actually quite a lot of ways that I can introduce misery into the pushups and the running, get creative, including, you know, even just like stuff outside of the running, like taking a freezing cold showers, those kinds of things, just introducing random kind of chaos into the system or having conversations with people as an introvert, it's terrifying.

- More podcasts. - More podcasts. So I'm now starting the training and Zach, you've been kind enough to also kind of be willing to help me out throughout this process. So I look forward to where that goes. It's kind of fascinating. On the diet side, you're one of the many things that make you fascinating is you've played with diet as well, and you're somewhat famous, I would say, for doing low carb or playing with low carb or meat-based diets.

Can you describe the potential, like how you're thinking about that has evolved and the potential beneficial role of a carnivore diet or a keto diet or a meat-based diet in training as an ultra marathon runner? - Yeah, and I think like where a lot of times things get confusing for people here is the context of it too, where it's like they want an answer as to what do I eat for endurance sport?

And it's like, well, endurance sport is quite wide ranging as we've talked about many times here. So there's going to be differences, I think, in just like what you want to maybe necessarily prioritize both for the event you're doing and the intensity that's required for it, the training that's required for that event.

And then also the individual component too, where I think this one often gets overlooked, where we tend to say like, well, we've got all these Olympic medalists at the marathon and below distance who are eating a moderate to high carbohydrate diet. So everyone needs to do that if they want to reach their potential in say the 3K to the marathon.

And in a perfect world, maybe that would be true, but there's a lot of other variables that often get forgotten then that could positively or negatively impact that decision choice. So I think Dr. Jeff Volk has done a great job of kind of highlighting this in the sense that when he works with people, he works with people in the health sphere as well as the performance sphere.

And he's one of the main guys at Virta Health who's, they've got like a 60% success rate with working with folks with type 2 diabetes to reverse their type 2 diabetes. And I mean, that's an astounding, when you think of just any nutritional protocol, it's success rate, they're all incredibly low.

They're very, very low. And the big difference with his is the coaching aspect of it. Like they give support. So these people like have someone to turn to when they make a mistake, or if they're thinking about doing something differently, or they don't know what to do, rather than just kind of throwing, throwing it all up in the air and quitting, they have a resource there.

And that's probably a big reason why that's the success rate that they have with that is they put those support mechanisms in place. That picture needs to be carried into the performance world or the running world to where, you know, we may have just been identifying that, you know, Olympic distance athletes that can tolerate a very large portion of their diet coming from carbohydrate is gonna just, it's gonna filter those ones towards the Olympics, filter those towards the Olympics.

Yeah. And that doesn't mean that like, if we would have taken, say, the gold medals in the 5k and put them on a low carb diet, they'd run faster, they probably wouldn't, because we may have already selected that that person's thriving on carbohydrate. What I would be interested in is like, you have, let's say we have someone with equal talent, but got weeded out along the way, potentially because for whatever reason, they just weren't able to tolerate like the both the training and the nutrition requirements that they're being told to do.

So the coaches can, there's a culture where the coaches would really push a carb heavy diet, and that that would in itself would do the filtering process of people that are not, it would filter out to people that are not able to tolerate carbs as part of their training.

I mean, I might be an example of this actually, where, you know, you take someone where they, for whatever reason, the carbs aren't working for them, like it's unsustainable for them to continue that path, or if they do, they might have a shortened career. So they might be able to eke out a few really good years, but then, you know, they're not gonna be the person they're like, wow, that person's 38 and they're still competing at the Olympics type of a person.

And, you know, you put them on a low carb diet. If you can control everything else, like their entire lifestyle is based around training and racing, then, you know, they may still have better potential by introducing carbohydrates at a higher level. But if that's not gonna be sustainable for them as a person, then, you know, what's the point kind of at that, unless they wanna be like a kind of a spark in the pan, so to speak.

- I just feel good eating meat performance-wise. - Well, I think there's that group too. They may just not be the Olympians. - Yeah, and so we're not talking, I guess this conversation has several layers. One is for the Olympics and one is for like, what is it? Active athletes, they're like amateurs, whatever category I put myself into, like people that exercise regularly.

And then maybe people, and then there's people who like exercise rarely. So on all of those fronts, I mean, do you think it's possible to live a happy, active life eating meat only or mostly meat? - Yeah. - What have you learned about this? - Yeah, I think so for some context, like I followed what I would call a low carbohydrate diet for the last 10 years.

And just like kind of the training, I'd periodize it to a degree where there are parts of my training where I do bring back a little more carbohydrate. And there's periods of my training, especially like the off season where I'm like very low and I might be like kind of in that ballpark of like ketogenic, strict ketogenic or no carbohydrates for periods of time.

- And what kind of food are we talking about? What's a strict low carb diet? - I've ranged everywhere from like mostly plant-based low carb keto to like mostly animal based. I've very rarely gone much more than like two weeks strict where it's like I'm strict carnivore or strict plant-based or anything like that.

Like we're talking probably more like 95% at the peak in terms of any type of like longer lasting. From my personal experience of like being like either in like the animal food camp or like the plant-based camp kind of a process. So I've tried all of them, things have stayed consistent over the 10 years as a kind of the macronutrient profile that I've done throughout the course of- - So one didn't win over the other in terms of meat-based versus plant-based?

- Oh, for me, meat-based definitely. I mean, I was my highest meat consumption in 2019 and that was by far my best racing season. - Yeah, we keep coming back to that year. That was a good year for many reasons, philosophically and nutritionally. - Yeah, only 2020 happened and now I haven't had a really good chance to replicate it.

- To improve, yeah. - We'll see, hopefully I've got some more in the tank. - That's strange, most athletes that compete at your level have more carbs integrated into their diets. So what have you learned about using meat in a high performance? - I think it's maybe less about the meat and it's more about like, what is it replacing?

So if we step away from like me specifically and just like the people that, 'cause I mean, we're getting to the point where I get it's anecdotes, but like that's what we have at the moment 'cause there's, I mean, there is actually a study being done on like, I think, I guess they call it hyper carnivore where they're like, I think above 80% of their intake from meat.

- Into meat. - And they're looking at a few different things there, but. - It's so weird and I keep interrupting, but it's so weird that it sounds unhealthy, hyper carnivore. - Yeah. - But it makes me feel really good. - It's the individual thing, right? - Yeah, it's the individual thing.

- There's countless people now who like, and I'm not saying that they could not have found another route, myself included, like in 2011, when I switched from moderate to high carbohydrate to low carbohydrate and saw some very noticeable differences in the way I felt, the way I performed in all this stuff, that doesn't mean that there wasn't another path.

I just did not find that path. And the fact that I found a path that was producing the results I was looking for is really all that matters in my mind. You know, like I don't really care if there was a parallel path that works just as well, or you know, something like that, because ultimately we only have one shot at everything we're doing.

So like, it'd be great if I could go back and try four or five different things. - Well, the annoying thing is that the body adjusts to whatever the heck you're doing, so it's hard to do good science even on yourself. - Yeah, I've referenced my 2019 racing season a few times, and it's like, it'd be silly for me to put all of the emphasis on my nutrition plan for that, because it also comes with two decades of endurance training.

So it's possible, and it's very likely that a huge portion of that success was just the culmination of a lot of work over time from the training side of things. I just think like, anytime you hyper focus on one area, or pick a couple variables and just target those, you find yourself in a position where you're putting other things in the most uncharitable light possible.

So then you have this situation where like, it's actually a combination of a variety of different things, so where are the big movers? And for me, nutritional shift was pretty clear that that improved my sleep and my recovery. And I mean, people can say, well, there's the placebo effect, which is a very real concern.

But for me personally, a 10-year placebo effect would be a quite lengthy placebo effect. And I do think it's individual, though I emphasize that a lot, because I mean, I've worked with tons of people with this, and I do see a range from person to person. I've worked with people who come to me, and they're like strict keto, and we raise up their carbohydrates a bit.

And they're like, OK, I feel way better doing it this way. And I've worked with people who they come to me, moderate carbohydrate, but they're interested enough. They want to try a lower carb, so we titrate them down. And I've had clients where I'm like, OK, I'm going to give them this workout, and they're going to wish they brought back a little bit of carbohydrate.

And then they go and they nail the workout, and I'm just like baffled. Because they're different from me. And every time when you have your own personal experience, the first guttural response is, oh, if I had done it, it would have gone this way. Why did it go the complete opposite way for them?

And you have to just step out of your own perspective a bit and say, OK, well, they're different. For whatever reason, they're getting along like this. I've had several moments in my life where you realize the body is weird, and it's weirder than the average advice. One of them is how well I perform for my own standards when I fast.

First of all, intellectually, but that's more known and understandable. But physically, the fact that I could train, not eat 20 hours, 24 hours, and then do a hard jiu-jitsu session for two hours, hard, it's incredible to me. This makes no sense. Because I used to eat many times a day.

Of course, you have to eat. You don't want to eat too close to the training session, was my thinking. But you definitely need to load up on carbs three hours before in order to have enough energy. The fact that I could not eat and have incredible focus, but also athleticism, both endurance and explosive.

Jiu-jitsu is a special thing. It's more like chess. It's not like powerlifting. No, not powerlifting. Olympic lifting, where it's like true explosiveness. But that's fascinating. And it makes you wonder, what other things are there to discover about yourself? The annoying thing about food is it's delicious. So it's hard to do good science on yourself.

For two weeks or a month to do strict no carbs, and then maybe next month you add 20 grams or 40 grams of carbs and see how you actually feel. Not in that moment, but over a period of several weeks. And then doing everything else right based on best available science, like with electrolytes and the vitamins.

But then also remove all the humans from your life that affect you positively or negatively, because you might feel amazing because you're hanging out with cool people. And then removing basically all the variables. It's fascinating. And you all of us land in a place where we find something that worked for us.

And then we maybe use some of the placebo effect to help us out to stick in that place. And then I suppose that's the way to live life. It's possible to find the optimal for any of us. But carnivore is an interesting new kind of caveat, a new challenge to the nutritional community, because more and more people seem to be doing well under carnivore.

Yeah. Well, the nutrition community is probably like, we just got done dealing with the vegans. Now we got this opposite end of the spectrum coming at us. But I think-- well, I mean, what this all tells me is there is, for one, in our food environment, the failure rate of any one approach at a population level is going to be incredibly high.

It's why we have-- what is it, like 88% of the population has some sort of metabolic syndrome. And it's because there's an endless quantity of everything that you can get your hands on for relatively cheap. And I think that presents a problem if your mindset is going to be, we need this set of parameters for nutrition, and everyone needs to adhere to that, or you're wrong.

And it's like, well, tell that to the person who went carnivore and cleared up some crazy skin ailment or something like that. That's a weird one. Yeah. Like where the carnivore seems to treat depression. Like mental stuff. It's fascinating. There's all these stories. Again, it's anecdotes, but it's like-- The mental one, I think, may-- I'm stepping out a bit on a limb here.

But I want to say some of the research of Dominic D'Agostino and Jeff Volokh was looking at the ketogenic diet, which a carnivore diet is basically going to be a part of a ketogenic-- I mean, you could always go way too high on the protein, I guess. But most people that I see doing carnivore, they're cognizant enough that-- at least if they're doing it for therapeutic reasons, they're not going 50% protein, 50%-- they're more like 70/30, 80/20, something like that.

And I think you do see some work with the brain and some of the mental stuff. I know some of the-- I'm not sure if this was part of the DARPA funding that Dr. Dominic D'Agostino had, where they were looking at things like mental stuff, like post-traumatic stress disorder, and that sort of stuff with a strict ketogenic diet.

So I wonder if some of that, like the depression-related stuff, has to do with that, where now their body is just fueling their brain differently than maybe they were in the past. But that's just wild guesses on my part. And I'm deviating from the conversation. But-- - No, that's brilliant.

In terms of your own story on food, can you say something-- I think we were kind of referring to diet broadly. Can you say something about how you like to fuel your-- whether it's race or great training sessions, like maybe the day before, let's go even that far, during, and maybe a few hours after?

- OK. It'll be a little different for racing than it will be for a big workout, just because the interesting thing about ultra running is just you never do the race even-- like most endurance races, you're going to cover the distance. You're going to replicate the race almost up to it in training, whereas with 100 miles-- - You can't.

- You might replicate a third of it. So I'll walk you through kind of my approach for a 100 mile race, and I can tell you maybe what I would do differently on a training day. But yeah, so where the community is in agreement is that you do want to be very good at burning fat for ultra marathons.

I mean, the intensity is low. If your ratios are skewed very high towards carbohydrate metabolism, then you're going to have to defend your muscle glycogen through tons of carbohydrate consumption. And that's just going to be very hard to do over the course of an entire day, even at low intensities.

So it's a fuel tank thing. I mean, it's like your leanest endurance athletes have way more fat than the new glycogen stores. When you're doing low intensity performance, you want to be burning high levels of fat and sparing that muscle glycogen. What I tend to do is I want to start the race burning really high levels of fat.

So I'll maybe have some carbohydrate the night before for dinner, but then I'm going to lean into the overnight fast, breakfast the morning of. I'm going to stay away from carbohydrates for 100 mile or anyway, and I'm going to have something that's pretty high energy, low volume. So I'll do an S fuels life bar.

They've got like-- What's in an S fuel life bar? Are we talking about carbs? Are we talking about protein? It's basically fat and protein. Fat and protein. Yeah, fat protein bar. And then they make some-- That's awesome. Yeah. So it's not as low carb. Yep. Yeah, they make-- S fuels makes a whole product line that's like kind of positioned for a low carb athlete.

So they have some products on their lineup that offer some carbohydrate, which is perfect for me because I do introduce some carbohydrate on racing and some of my bigger training sessions and things. But the majority of their products are low carb. So like they have like, you know, how you get like the powders that you put into like your drinks that are like high carbohydrate, you know, sports products.

They make a version of that that's like fat based. Oh, cool. Then you can mix in with water? Yep. Cool. Yeah. So they've got like a creamer version and then a fruity flavor version. So you can like replicate the taste and the feel of drinking like a, like, you know, a sports drink.

Science is awesome. I know it is. Well, and that's so much of it too, because people are always like, "I don't know. I just like to have my Gatorade or whatever." Right, yeah. It's like, well, you can have it now. Just it won't have all the carbs. And you can see you can bring that kind of thing with you.

Yeah. So I'm leaning on a lot of those like kind of liquid calories, like those low volume, high energy fat protein stuff the morning of so that when I start the race, my body is gonna be encouraged to start out burning high levels of fat. Once I get going, probably about 45 minutes in, I'll start introducing small amounts of carbohydrate.

So at that point, my body's been revving pretty high fat metabolism. And by introducing some carbohydrate in the context of the, you know, let's say my 100 mile personal record, you know, I'm running approximately nine miles every hour. So I'm probably going through about a thousand calories in an hour's time.

I'm gonna start just like defending muscle glycogen by burning super high levels of fat. At the heart rate I would do for that, I'm probably burning somewhere between 80, 90% fat. You know, 12 hours of that, you can chip away at your muscle glycogen to the point where you don't necessarily want to go zero carb.

So I'm basically just trying to defend what I know I'm gonna be burning from the carbohydrate side of that 80 to 90% fat, 10 to 20% carbohydrate by taking in like, usually, you know, I've gone as low as about 15 grams of carbohydrate per hour and as high as 40 grams.

And the reality is somewhere in between is probably the sweet spot, but 40 I can get away without any digestion issues. So I'm not really concerned pushing up to that during a race since I'm only concerned about performance on that day. - Is it the carbs that's the problem or is it fiber?

- Oh, from going above 40 grams? - Or just, 'cause you mentioned digestion issues. Like one of the things for me, like one of the cool things about fatty protein, protein and fat is like my stomach just feels way better. So like carbs introduce like bloating and just not feeling great.

- Yeah, and I think the funny thing is like, if you look at the position paper for ultra marathon single day events and it's, you know, it's very limited in the sense that it's not anyone's fault, it's just that we don't have a lot of great research on 100 mile race.

It's really hard to study what's going on when someone's running 100 miles, but they'll say moderate carbohydrate diet is recommended, but they'll also say that it's like something like 60% of participants are gonna report some sort of like digestion issue during the event. So then it kind of becomes an issue of do you wanna flip that coin?

Do you wanna flip that coin? - Yeah, it'd be the 40%. - Right, exactly. So for me, what I found is like, I can push up to 40 grams without getting any digestion issues. Do I need 40 grams? Probably not, at least not based on kind of the numbers that would be like, that I would see on like, if I went and actually got like a metabolic heart test or something like that.

But it's possible, I mean, if I had a really good race that I would get close to burning that per hour. Most folks that are following a moderate high carbohydrate diet are gonna be recommended to do like 50 to 70 grams during a single day ultra marathon events. And you'll see some, you know, some recommendations of up to like 100 grams, not so much for ultra marathons, but just in general for like a performance standpoint, which I mean, it's one of those things where it's like application versus like what you can do in a lab for one hour is gonna be a lot different, especially when you're stretching out distances well past that.

And there's, I'm diverting a little here, but I mean, there's like an approach of like training your gut so you can like be able to tolerate that much carbohydrate, which you can do and you may have to if you're gonna follow a high carbohydrate diet. But again, we go back to that practicality standpoint of if you're a professional Olympian, who's living and breathing performance, and you're burning two to three times your resting metabolic rate on some days, like you, you may be able to actually consume 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour during your training sessions and just, you know, barely stay on top of your nutritional needs.

Most people who are running ultra marathons aren't gonna be, you know, probably training much past 10 hours per week. And they're probably not gonna have the, I'll call it their dietary budget to tolerate 100 grams of carbohydrate consumption during their workouts and still be able to stay healthy. And, you know, so I think that's kind of like a bit of a, of a non, a non starter for the majority of people, unless we want to talk about like a tiny percentage of the 1% of top performers.

So maybe you can talk about the training, like fueling yourself during training as well. Is there, and also as part of that, is it possible to train mostly fasted? Because as a side comment, let me just say, I like, again, not anywhere, not even like one 10th of your level of performance, but you know, I try to push myself and I just feel much better when I'm fasted.

So water and maybe some salt for longer runs for anything over like 10, 15 miles, but no food. Yeah, I think, I mean, I like to train on an empty stomach. I do most of my, my biggest training session usually in the morning. And it usually, what will determine whether I eat something or not before that is like, how much do I need to eat that day in order to stay on top of it to be able to train again the next day.

So I'll, I'll usually do something similar to what I do before a race if I need to kind of stay on top of calories for the day. So I'm not like at noon with like no calorie intake and like 5,000 calories to try to consume before I go to bed that night and get out and do the same thing the next day.

But yeah, I think if I were, if I were doing what you're doing, like if that were my lifestyle, I think I would do almost all my runs fasted. I don't see why I would be eating a lot before it because it's like, I'm just introducing something that could, especially if you're noticing, like, here's what I'd say.

If I was doing that and I was like, wow, this run sucks. And then I introduced something beforehand and now my run was feeling great and my progress was getting better. That's when I would maybe consider having something before. But if you're running both of those, those like self experiments, you're noticing, yeah, if I eat something before I go on this workout, the workout's less enjoyable.

I'm not noticing any, any increased improvements on it. Again, it's a little messy. Like we said before, it's hard to really, you can't go back and try it a different way on that specific day. But I think, I think most people, if they're just like, they go at it with like no bias in the sense that they're like trying to make one work versus the other, you can get at least a good enough look at it.

And if absolute peak performance in one activity, one very specific activity isn't your goal, then it's like, do you really care if one has a 2% performance increase that you won't even probably notice? Because there's other variables that will clearly overpower that 2% one way or the other. - And there's some benefit in terms of freedom and letting go of like having to think about some of these variables.

I see sort of fasting is, even if it's like a hit on the performance, it's worth it to just not think about it. There's some really nice aspect to just putting on shoes, not caring, like what shorts you wear or like what your outfit is like, not being optimal in every way and just not caring and just enjoying the purity of just running no matter what.

Just enjoying the natural aspect. - Yeah, there's a side to me that sometimes just like craves a lifestyle where it's like, I have like such a small house and only what I need and just like a handful of food products I know I enjoy and work well for me and I don't even have the distraction of the other stuff.

There's almost like a weight that comes off your shoulders when you think, even just thinking about it, like it's so simple. - So the reason I'm mostly a minimalist like that, the reason I have stuff is I realized like you probably have to fit into society and if you want to have other people in your life, you should probably get used to having stuff.

Because most people like stuff. - Right, yeah, well, yeah, there's that side of it too. And there's a whole, you don't want to ostracize yourself too much. And I think anything you can kind of like, you can manipulate that a little bit where there's things that are like not specific to, that's going to negatively impact the people around you or your experiences with them.

So there's a balance like everything, I guess. - Yeah, I mean, that's why I drink, I think I mentioned to you offline, drink vodka, whiskey, sort of alcohol, because I don't feel good about it the day after or sometimes multiple days after. So I know it's not good for me.

So I do a lot of stuff that's good for me, everything we talked about, exercise and diet and all those kinds of things. But the alcohol almost symbolizes embracing the chaos of life, the wild and the amazing things that could happen. And I think that's really important because if you optimize everything about life, then you're going to miss most of the fun stuff that happens in life.

So it's not all about the optimization. It's some of it, like everyone has different things and how they introduce that chaos in a controlled way. For me, alcohol is that, because I'm okay drinking, not too much. So I can control that aspect, even though it's unhealthy, it introduces just the right amount of fun.

Yeah. I embrace it. Yeah. And I mean, it is one of those things where it's like, I'm going to benefit now and pay later a little bit too, where like, and hey, if you go and you go out with some friends and drink and you have memories that last a lifetime from that experience and you paid for it for a couple of days after, then hey, maybe that's a fair trade off from a life experience.

And part of the vodka thing is I need to honor my ancestors. It's like you have to, you know, you can't, you can't turn your back on your past. Let me ask about the hundred mile world record on the treadmill. So for most people running on a treadmill is really boring.

So that's kind of their experience of it. That's probably the first thing that would say that seems like really boring to run a hundred miles on a treadmill. Would you say it's boring? Like what were some places your mind went to make that happen? So this one is interesting to me because I definitely recognized the boredom and the difference.

The thing that the question I can't quite answer, I think with it is like, could I have remedied that with better preparation? Because the scenario that put me on a treadmill for a hundred miles was, you know, it was March, 2020, basically the cascade of every race on the planet got canceled.

And I was in a position where I was going to be doing a runnable hundred miler on a track in mid to late April. So I had like the majority of my training under my belt. So I was like kind of putting the finishing touches on that. And I was like, oh, great, here we are.

Like, you know, what do I do with this fitness? Do I just scale back and hope the events come back in the fall and then peak again? Or do I find something to use this fitness for? And the treadmill was the closest thing to what I had been training for in terms of just like a mechanical, like flat running, essentially, that I could think of.

And my thought was, OK, well, I'll just live stream myself on a treadmill and see what happens. It ended up turning into like a quite a big event. But you don't usually incorporate treadmill running into your running into your training. I don't not incorporate it. I just don't incorporate it in the way that would be necessarily conducive to, you know, dealing with the mental aspects of being on a treadmill for a hundred miles.

Was it that different than running on a track? It was from the sense that here's the way I describe it is when I'm on a track, it's a controlled environment and everything can be very uniform. But there are tiny little micro adjustments and pace that that I'm doing subconsciously that give me the sense of control.

Right. You know, I might run the exact same split, but there's like a fraction of a second or, you know, a fraction of a second faster than a fraction of a second slower that equals the same outcome. It gives you that sense of control. You're determining how fast you're going on a treadmill.

You're responding to the belt. So the advantage is you can set a pace and know you're hitting it. The disadvantage is you're being told what to do by that machine. And that gets very frustrating. I felt like I wanted to step off like you get to like certain points where you're just like, like even stepping off what I noticed.

I learned this on the day of actually I noticed there's something where it didn't really matter how long I get off. Like I get off to use the bathroom and that was a little bit of a longer break. Then I had like a hiccup during my event where we ran so much power through one end of the house that the screen on the treadmill was blacking out.

So we ended up, so I ended up jumping back and forth on treadmills for quite a bit in the beginning. And I noticed even turning it off, stepping on the other one and starting the other one up gave me like, you know, a handful of seconds between was enough of a mental break of just like that release of being told what to do to reset.

So maybe if you were in the future, you would figure out what exactly how much is needed to have that method. I never actually thought about that, that, I mean, obviously for you, but also for people like me, like amateur runners, that that's a source of frustration with the treadmill, that there's sometimes a small adjustments in pace that we do running, not on the treadmill on the ground that feel like essential for that feel, just like you said, that experience of control, like feeling like you're in control somehow that's really, I don't know, that's somehow liberating in the way that a treadmill can be just the source of frustration.

- The funny thing though, about the treadmill is I actually like to do faster workouts on the treadmill, like long intervals or something like that, or tempo runs, because for that, for that type of stuff, sometimes for those, I want to release the brain power required to hit that pace and say, you take care of that.

And for that, it's fun, but those are over quick, so you don't really run into the times. - Yeah, that's fascinating for like precise control of pace. You've also during that stream got to interact with one of the greatest athletes of all time, Bert Kreischer. What's your, he's actually doing, I don't know if you're paying attention to this, but I guess he has a goal of running 2000 miles this year.

- Yeah. - I've gotten a chance to talk to Joe Rogan yesterday about this, which is fascinating. I think he's a little bit doubtful of Bert's ability to be the ultra performer that he so naturally is. - Yeah. - What's your thoughts about Bert as a runner? What's your advice to him?

And what was your interaction like as part of this treadmill challenge with him? - I love Bert because he's such a nice person. I mean, as a guy who's just accelerated in popularity over the last few years, he is super kind. So for folks who are curious, I've met Bert a couple of years earlier and I just randomly asked him, "Hey, I'm doing this live stream thing.

We're doing it for Fight for the Forgotten. We're trying to raise some funds for them. Would you want to come on the live stream for a bit?" And I thought maybe he'd come off like five or 10 minutes. And I thought that'd be amazing if he did that. He ended up coming off like over an hour.

He said he went past his slot, sat in the next slot and just started talking with some of the other guests. He's just-- Bert is definitely-- I feel like he's as unchanged from his popularity as one can get away with. And it's just like his lifestyle, I think, is very unpredictable in the sense that if he wants to run X time for a specific race, that's going to pull away from his lifestyle so much to focus on that.

Luckily for him, he's actually a great athlete. It's under that layer of-- Of fat, yeah. So for people who are not familiar, Bert Kresher is a comedian who takes off his shirt often, has a elegant layer of fat around him. He's also a party animal. So he's a weird balance of healthy and unhealthy.

So he drinks a lot during-- I think there's some debate about that-- but certainly after his performances. But at the same time, he's into kind of the running thing. And he does quite a bit of treadmill running, I think. And like I said, has this challenge of running 2,000 miles this year.

So it's fascinating to have somebody who so fully embraces life and the full joys of life as represented by the huge amounts of drinking and partying and just being a wild man. But also at the same time, being at least curious about this challenging yourself in the physical realm.

It's kind of fascinating. It reminds me of one of my favorite comedians, like Eddie Izzard, who has been doing those challenges basically off the couch, just running a marathon a day kind of thing. It's fascinating to see the purity of those challenges when exercise hasn't necessarily been deeply ingrained in your life.

And you kind of just embrace the challenge anyway and take it on. And that's another way of looking at it. Because we've been talking about running as a performance optimization thing where training is such a huge part of this process. Like race day is just the cherry on top.

But there's for some people where the race is the cake. - Yeah. - It's like they just take it on as a pure challenge, as the thing you haven't really trained for, as the thing you don't understand the intricacies of, but you take it on anyway. And that reveals something about the human spirit as well.

- Yeah. And there's definitely like a switch that flips when you in your mind decide I'm going to do this. Where then all of a sudden it goes from like you stop thinking about, oh, that's not possible to like, well, I'm just going to do it. And I think Bert highlights that perfectly in a lot of cases where like he's maybe not even thinking it through enough to get to the point where it's like he gets the point where he thinks this is not possible.

Where most people would look at it and think, huh, I don't know if I can actually physically accomplish that task. Bert's just like, oh, yeah, I'm going to do it. And my thought with Bert was the 2000 mile thing is where are we going to find him at the end of the year with like 36 hours to go on a hundred miles?

- That's right. That's right. That's what's going to happen. And it's going to be hilarious. So speaking of things that are insane and like taking on challenges that don't seem like you didn't think through, you're thinking about running across the country in a challenge you call the transcontinental run.

Can you describe this challenge and what the heck you're thinking? - Yeah. Yeah. So this is, you know, one thing that is exciting about ultra marathons, I think in a lot of places, especially early in someone's ultra marathon adventure, if they decide to do that as a part of their life is you have like these early years where you're doing things for the first time and it's like so cool and scary at the same time to think today I'm going to run a hundred miles and the furthest I've ever run before is 50 or something like that.

And you just know you're going to do something that you've never done before. You're going to experience things you would have never been able to predict. And it's like this really interesting, unique, like human experience, I think. So for me, I've spent most of my career at this point, like doing, I got through that phase and a lot of the events I'm really interested in.

And then it was like, now let's repeat it and see if we can do it better. And you get into that mindset for a while, which is also a fun mindset, but there is that kind of like desire to kind of have that human experience again of like, you know, not knowing what could happen or is this doable type of a thing, but still doing it and figuring it out along the way.

So I would describe the Transcontinental Project as something like that. It's not anything unique to me or anything new. There's been a lot of people who've done it before, but essentially it's a route. There's different routes. There's one kind of main one that's done for like, that is used as the record route, more or less, that you go from San Francisco to New York and essentially you live out of an RV while you're running.

So you run as much as you can during the day, then you go to bed at night and then you get up and do it again. And you're handling all the logistics in the process of trying to make sure you can get up the next day and do again what you did the day before, which is going to be the biggest difference.

So for me, I've done all single day ultra marathons where you're going to wring yourself dry at knowing the next day or week or however long you need, you're going to be able to just kind of like shut everything down and let everything catch back up. Whereas with this, you're doing it again and again, again.

And the record is by a guy named Pete Kostelnik who averaged just over 72 miles a day, finished in 42 days, six hours and 30 minutes. And I mean, just like 72 miles, 73 miles. And then like next day again, next day again, just knowing every day when you finish, you spend a whole day running and then, okay, I'm going to go to bed.

I'm going to wake up in the morning. I'm going to have to do this again. And then have that happen for six weeks. And that's if it goes very well. So luck, I assume, is a big part of this. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's just so many variables that are uncontrollable on this type of an experience, just because I mean, you go over the Sierras, maybe you hit a storm.

You know, you try to time it. Most people do it in September, start in September. So you can get over the mountain passes without a big storm coming through. But then also get to the East Coast before it's like the middle of winter. So like September, early September start is kind of ideal.

But you can, you know, I mean, Pete was very fortunate from a weather standpoint. I think he made one big mistake. We got a little too aggressive in the beginning. I had to take a full day off. So he actually averaged from a moving day standpoint, closer to 75 miles per day.

But yeah, I mean, there's going to be things that I can't prepare for, won't know it's going to happen. You know, a lot of that will get a lot of the logistical stuff will get leaned on with the crew. So that's I mean, that's the hardest part right now is just like getting all that put together where it's like, OK, I need to have the RV ready.

I need to have all the stuff. I mean, we need to have the places figured out where we're going to stop. And and the people that can dedicate that much time to an activity like that, you know, there's a lot of moving parts even before you start the adventure itself.

When are you? So you're taking the San Francisco to New York? Yeah. And when are you doing the run? September 1st is when, you know, barring anything like catastrophic between now and then. It's really exciting, but I mean, it's incredible. So you'll probably have a bunch of people just randomly running with you.

Are people going to be tracking where you're located? Yeah, so I'll be documenting everything because I mean, my hope is that I'm doing it primarily to raise awareness for Fight for the Forgotten, Justin Wren's charity. But with that said, I think I am capable of if I have a good experience, you know, chasing the record or going after the record or at least getting close to it.

So. Oh shit. So you're going to try to beat this record? Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to go out with the I'm going to structure the process in a way that leaves that door open is the way I would describe it. I'm going to try not to do anything that would potentially put it in a situation where that becomes the primary goal, just because I want to make sure that the reason I decided to do the first place was for Fight for the Forgotten.

So I want to make sure that I don't end up two thirds way across the country with a broken leg and I'm like, hey guys, I guess the donation buttons turned off. So focus on like, don't sacrifice that. Right. That goal. But also there's a community aspect to it that I feel like are you going to I mean, so you're going to document and post.

Yeah. But are you going to also is there a safety perspective here? It's like the Forrest Gump thing. You might have large numbers of crowds that run along with you for a while. Yeah. Worried about that kind of thing? I wouldn't say I'm worried about I mean, I think there's probably there's remote enough spots along the way where you'll get some alone time or more likely I don't necessarily mind if people want to jump in there'll be some people that will definitely want to do that and they can come in.

And but the reality is like, it's probably not going to be a scenario where there's like, you know, 40 people following me at all times. You say that now. Yeah. You never know. Just wait for this podcast. Yeah. And then if Joe finds out you're doing this, then we're in trouble.

All right. So I mean, what are the things that you think will be the hardest for you? And also like, how do you train for this kind of thing? And what are the hardest things you anticipate? How do you train for them? Yeah. So the way I'm looking at this is it's much less about performance from the traditional sense where I need to be able to be X fit.

I think I need to be injury proof. That's what's going to be a detriment. If you think about it, like, if I managed to average nine minute mile pace for a day, that would be 80 miles in a 12 hour time frame. So I'll easily have 12 hours of moving time per day.

Nine minute pace, I think, is slow enough that it's not an unreasonable clip. So like when you, I mean, obviously there's things that slow you down or I'll probably take walking breaks, you know, stopping breaks. You got to stay on top of nutrition. That's the other big thing too.

I'm probably eating like anywhere between 10 to 15,000 calories a day, which is, you know, I could probably count on my hand a couple of occasions where I've eaten that much in my life. So now I got to do that for six plus weeks in a row. - And you don't want to have any stomach problems.

- Right. - Or try to minimize the amount of stomach problems. So would you estimate about 12 to 13 to 14 hours of running every day? - Yeah, that's probably like from the first step to the last step, it'll probably be somewhere around like, say 14 hours, 13 hours or something like that would be a pretty good estimate.

- And then getting rest. And so, and then minimizing the risk of injury, which could be as small as like, like literally uneven surfaces resulting to like stepping the wrong way. I mean, that's going to be a lot of steps. - Yeah, yeah. - So the probability of injury, are you worried about that kind of stuff?

Can you strengthen the ankles or those kinds of things that prevent possibility of injury? - And that's where I'm putting a lot of my focus in is, I think like just being running fit is going to be like, generally speaking is going to be important. I'm going to, I think just from a lifetime of running is going to be a huge advantage.

A lot of these like kind of like mechanical movements are going to be very established. It's just going to be about, can I tolerate that volume of it? I think that I'm doing more strength work. I think this is something where it's like, you know, maybe adding five pounds of lower body muscle is going to be an advantage versus a disadvantage when you're looking at power weight ratio.

'Cause I just really don't, I never need to be running a 648 mile for this adventure. And so I'm looking at, I'm doing a lot more of that stuff, focusing on that. The training is changing a fair bit where it's more polarizing versus kind of being, I mean, I've always had some polarization in my training, but this is even to an extreme where like I'm going to do some simulations where, you know, I go out and do two or three days where I target the exact thing I will be doing on the Transcon.

- You were on Instagram posting about these simulated runs. So you legitimately like trying to perfectly copy what would happen in one, two or three day segment on that run. - Yeah, just to kind of start to weed out where are the potential problems. So let's say I do a two or three day simulation where I'm averaging 70 miles a day and I find out at the end of three days, there's a really weak spot here.

I need to address that or I need to find a way to make that not a weak spot. I think that's the only way to really get as close as you can to avoiding injury. - Have you done that yet? Have you done a two day, 70 mile? Like even that's incredibly difficult.

- I haven't yet, I'm going to build up to it. Because that's the other thing too is like, I don't think you want to be so aggressive with that where you get injured trying to figure out how not to get injured. So what I'm going to start, what I just started last week is I've, it looks really weird on my training schedule because like last week, I ran almost 150 miles, but I took two days off.

So it's like usually for me to get to 150 miles, that's a seven day training week. So that's the way I'm doing it. Like I did a day where I did, you know, two like just over 20 milers separated with by just a couple hours. And within that couple hours, I did like a three mile walk.

The following morning I woke up and ran. I think it was like just over 36 miles first thing in the morning just to get an idea of just like, kind of like, what is it like to be? I mean, this was in Phoenix too. So it was a hundred degrees for the majority of that.

- So just suffer, then rest, suffer again. How that feels. - There's enough precedent with this sort of an activity where like everyone I've talked to so far has told me like, there is going to be like this kind of like gradual decline in the early stages where you're just like, okay, it's getting worse, it's getting worse, it's getting worse.

And you hit a point where you're just like, it hits kind of rock bottom. And then like, it starts to kind of gradually improve. So you kind of have to let yourself get, it's weird. I think I can maybe eliminate, I'm trying to find a way to eliminate some of that by doing the simulations.

Whereas I, from what I've seen, I haven't seen a lot of people do the simulation route yet. I've seen people just do like a lot of training and then say like, okay, I'll spend the first seven to 10 days adapting to this. And then I'll get comfortable within this environment and be fine.

Whereas I'm going to try to get to a point where like some of that is already kind of cleared up before I start, but not so much that I'm like adding like an extra essential week to the trip worth of running. - What do you think will be the hardest simulator run leading up to it?

Like, will you do three days? - Yeah, I think I'll probably try to do three days, somewhere between 70 and 80 miles each will be kind of like the goal. - Will that be in August? Do you think how close to? - Yeah, I would like it to be in August.

Like early August would be ideal. I think like maybe the first week in August, 'cause that gives me kind of three weeks to let things kind of settle down from that. - This is crazy. This is incredible. - It's actually interesting 'cause like, if I did, let's say I did the simulation now, the problem with that is like the adaptations from just like the breakdown and the strengthening would likely be gone unless I did it again.

So I wanna inch up to it so that like, and get close enough to the starting date so that I'm still kind of like, you know, holding onto that adaptation when I start it. So then those first few days maybe aren't quite as miserable. - And you said if everything goes amazing and you're challenging the record, it would be like a 42 day run?

- Yeah, so that's what the record is, almost exactly six weeks. And that's at 72 and a half miles per day, so. - Will you be posting online and like-- - Yeah, Instagram's gonna be a big one. I think I might do a few like YouTube stuff along the way too.

Yeah, I'm still ironing out exactly how much. I think at minimum I'll do some Instagram stuff. I think I'll go live on Instagram a few times during the day when I take like walking breaks, partly just to kind of, I think keeping people in, I mean, it stays true to the goal of raising awareness, but it also, I find when you bring people in, there is an added pressure to that.

But there's also this sense that I've learned from the treadmill experience, since we had like a pretty big production for that, in the sense that, I mean, as much as you can turn on a camera in your own house, but like I remember thinking we had like 30 people lined up to come in and guest speak during that.

And there was points of that where I was like, you know, you get that voice we talked about at the beginning where it's like, you know, maybe you could quit. Like, do you really need to run 100 miles on a treadmill? Is this really going to be valuable for you?

- Yeah. - And then you think about, oh, you know what? There's, you know, Courtney DeWalter, one of the best female ultra runners to ever exist, is taking 30 minutes to an hour out of her day to come on in two hours to, you know, help me, you know, amplify this event.

And do I really want to be sending emails out to these people saying, hey guys, I know you were gracious enough to block out time of your day. You know, I think there's a little bit of that to do where you're like, you're jumping in with the community that is following along and saying, here's how things are going, show them the best, the worst and everything in between.

And then ultimately have that hold you accountable a little bit too. It's like hard to get up in the morning and not go back out. - I don't know how you are, but I had to, whenever I did any kind of physical stuff, like the 48 hour challenge or just any kind of running, I hated turning on the camera.

I hated it. Like, cause you have to like smile and be friendly and stuff. - Oh, I'm just gonna be super miserable if I'm- - Miserable. Well, that's it. So like, exactly. In some sense, that's what people- - Are we gonna get a happy Zach or an angry Zach?

- Exactly. It's like you're making bets. And I'm sure there'll be some days, maybe not many, maybe very few where you're truly happy with yourself. Like for some weird ecstatic reason, maybe if you get over the hump, whatever that you mentioned, that this dip. I mean, it's fascinating how much suffering this actually entails, I wonder.

- Well, and one thing I'm gonna definitely try to leverage to my advantage. And one of the reasons why I think Fight for the Forgotten was the charity that really triggered me to decide to do this. The transcontinental route was something I learned about early in my ultra running career.

And I thought to myself, I wanna do that someday. But it was one of those kind of far off distance things that had never really like actualized in your mind until you put a date down or, you know, mention it on the Joe Rogan experience or something like that.

- Yeah, exactly. - But then it's like people wanna know when is this happening. And, you know, what I try to think about is, you know, the reason Justin identified the Pygmy tribe was because they were super forgotten where, you know, we think about just like some of these third world countries where it's a scenario of like some people, it's easy for us here in the US to think to ourselves, well, why don't they just industrialize?

Why don't they just like, you know, start to innovate a bit? Why are they so primitive? What's wrong with them? And in reality, like when you take, when you scale things down to the degree where you need the entire day because of the situation you're in just to take care of your basic needs of water and food, you never get the opportunity to even build a real, like establishment or, you know, a build on that.

Like you need the free time or you need a portion of your population to have the free time available to innovate. And the Pygmy tribe just hadn't had that historically. In fact, they weren't even considered humans by like the local government for quite some time. And, you know, the people that really pay the price in some of these situations are the women because they're the ones that get saddled with like the water gathering and things like that.

So the reason that Justin picked wells to build was 'cause he thought to himself, if we can get them wells, then now these women don't have to spend all day walking and carrying water. Now they can just get that water. And now we have half the population freed up for other things.

Now maybe they can start farms. They can build some housing and stuff like that. And it just, it exponentially improves once you take care of some of those big key early things. So when I'm thinking about like, you know, do I really need to go out here and travel another 12 hours a day?

My mind's gonna hopefully go to, well, if one of those women woke up in the Pygmy tribe one morning and decided, you know what, do I really need to go get water today? It's like, well, yeah, you do. You really do have to. - Yeah, you're running for that.

Yeah, and that will give you fuel, hopefully. - Yeah, I mean, the reality is always there where I don't have to do it. Like they do have to do it. So, you know, but I think just keeping that perspective, it puts us back to the beginning where this is one of those situations where I think it's like a no quit situation.

You have to put yourself in a no quit situation here because it's, you know, it's just bigger than you. - I can't wait to see like the dark places you go. I mean, there's some, yeah, the quit situations. And hopefully we get to have a glimpse of those 'cause I think those are really inspiring when somebody is, both gets broken by them 'cause you know how tough you are, but also is almost broken and overcomes it.

I mean, that's just fascinating stories. I can't wait. I know, does Joe know you're doing this, by the way? - Yeah, I sent him a note a while back 'cause he was the first spot I mentioned it on. So I think he knows. I'm not sure if he's followed along about the exact starting date or not.

- Well, he will know. This is great. (laughing) He'll probably think you're crazy MF-er for doing this, but I think he'll love it. And I think I love it. And I think the world will love it. A ridiculous question. Who's the greatest endurance runner or endurance athlete of all time?

- Oh, that's a good question. I think I'd probably go maybe two directions here. I think Heli Gebrilassi is one of the best, in my opinion, because just, I mean, 27 world records. Like not all the different distance, but like breaking and re-breaking and that sort of stuff. I mean, he ran two, what was it?

203.59 before the shoe technology came in. That is estimated at anywhere between a two to 8% performance advantage. - You're talking about a two hour marathon, two, zero, three. - Yep. - Two hour, three minutes marathon. - Yep. Yeah. So he did that with the old shoe technology, which essentially dates back to anything.

If you were a Nike athlete, it could date back to as early as, I think, early 2016 is when the first prototype started showing up. So if you're before that in your career, you're guaranteed to be using the old shoe technology. And I mean, just the range of it too.

And yeah, it's hard. I mean, there's, it's a- - Is he a marathon runner purely? - No, he did everything. That's why I pick him, I think, because he went everywhere, everything from the 800 and is like at a national level. - 800? - Yeah, at a national level.

I don't, he wasn't competing at like Olympics or anything in the 800, but he was mostly like 5k to marathon. Yeah. Yeah. So just incredible. I mean, I could go a totally different direction too. I think like Steve Prefontaine stands out in as an American runner, just because if you look at it outside of just like performances and stuff like that, I think he based, like you can't find an American male runner who probably didn't get some motivation or some catalyst into their running journey from a Prefontaine story.

- What would you say is inspiring about Prefontaine? Like from the philosophy, from the technique, from his story? - I think there's a few things. I mean, there's a lot of things, which is why he is who he is. It's one was just his attitude about it where he wasn't like this picture ask runner.

I mean, he was obviously talented, but you have the perfect story of like, he wanted to be good at something. Most American kids tried football. No hard work was going to get Prefontaine starting in varsity for football. Starts running, fell in love with the mile. His college coach told him, no, you're not going to be a miler.

You're going to be a 5K guy. And he popularized the 5K in the United States or three mile in some cases. And I mean, the way he would race, I think is what really made him interesting for folks where he was just like all guts runner, where he's like, I mean, one of his famous quotes was like, if you beat me, you're going to have to bleed to do it.

'Cause he's going to be an all guts race and in a sport where it gets very tactical at times, especially at the like, or I shouldn't say national, but at the like competition level, the championship level, where it's like kind of more of a sit and kick approach. A lot of times where everyone's kind of waiting for someone to make a move, like Pre was going to make a move really early.

- Yeah, so this idea of leading from the front, which I guess is tactically really a bad idea. - Well, from a running a PR standpoint, it's a bad idea in most cases. - But so race, I guess, is not just about the PR. - It's about winning in a lot of cases.

And that's what he thought was going to put him in the best advantage to win, I think. - It's just the run from the front. I mean, what do you, 'cause you mentioned this, the 100 mile you ran, you were in second place. And then in nineties, you were able to get to the first place.

How hard is it to run when you're in first place? - You know, I think this is really different. Some people thrive under it, where it's like for them, I mean, like I talked about Jim Walms before, I think he loves being in the front. If he's in the front, he loves it.

That's where he's excited. That's where he knows he's doing what he's doing, where he's pushing his limits and things like that. Pre was probably the same way. And then I think there's other folks who are much more comfortable kind of saying, let's let things settle down here a little bit.

And then I'll make my move when it's time to make my move. Or they think of it as, and this is a very important, I think, lesson for the average ultra runner is just like, knowing what you're capable of is gonna be an important piece to the puzzle because you can try to say, I wanna run faster than I'm capable of in an early part of a hundred miler, but then you're gonna pay for it at the end.

So really, unless you're trying to go for the win, and that's a tactic that you think is gonna produce a win versus trying to run your fastest time, you gotta run within yourself, within your parameters. Obviously, there's a big question mark about where those parameters are in a lot of cases, which makes ultra marathon even more interesting 'cause it's like, there's so much unknown about it.

It's like, well, maybe you can go faster and we just don't know yet. - So there's, in the face of that uncertainty, there's something admirable, like it was with Prefontaine, where you take the risk and run faster than you think you might be able to run in terms of pace that you can hold.

So push the pace that's possible. - Yeah, explore the unknown. - Explore the unknown. - It's like a pioneer spirit, right? - Yeah. - You know, the next frontier kind of a thing. And I mean, Prefontaine, also there's other angles with him too, where he was like in the amateur era, where to be an Olympian, you couldn't be pro.

So he's turning down, I mean, the guy was on food stamps and living in a trailer because he wanted to run at the Olympics. And there was a lot of like politics involved with not being able to take sponsorship money and things like that, which has changed since then.

So he was huge in the movement for that to kind of like, you know, have a situation where now as an athlete, you can finish, in most cases, finish college, sign a big contract with a sponsor, and then also still compete in the Olympic Games and go to the events that are actually ones that are gonna likely catapult your career in most of the Olympic distance endurance events.

So he just revolutionized the sport. And then to add even more flavor to the whole thing, I mean, he died a very premature death. He got in a car accident and died before he would have likely probably medaled at the Olympics. So he-- - And there is a tragedy of the fact that he didn't.

- Yeah, well, he was fourth place at the Olympics, the prior, his first go of it. And it was kind of one of those things where it's like fourth place at the Olympics is the first man looking out or the first woman looking out. And for a guy that had as much hype as him, I think like a medal was something he really wanted to take home with him there.

- And especially how that race went. I mean, I don't know, it's tragic, the whole thing, but that's one of the things that makes Olympics amazing is the tragedy of it. Like one race decides the story of a lifetime, which is like, that's why it's amazing. Even if a lot of people get hurt because of it.

Tragedy makes the triumph special. - Right, yeah. And it makes life like a movie almost. - Yeah, exactly. - If everything's all sunshine and rainbows, then it's not as entertaining to watch. There's no adversity to overcome. - You mentioned shoe technology. How much has shoe technology advanced through the past few decades?

How much has it changed running generally, but also running like ultra marathon running? - I would say in ultra running, it's had much of a less of an impact because ultra running is still heavily skewed towards the trails. So the technology, at least from what we know, isn't necessarily translating over to these like massive varied terrain, certainly not the technical terrain and things like that.

Now on road races, flat stuff, like the track stuff, the roads, the run, I guess a runnable trail, where it's just like basically crushed limestone, more or less, you definitely get an advantage from it. And essentially what happened is in, this probably dated back actually before 2015, Nike decided their development team was ahead of the curve.

They've developed this new foam, they call it like a Peebok foam. And they realized that, like when you step down into a shoe, the reason like racers a lot of times would wear these flats is 'cause they're trying to take out any of that lost energy into the foam in the shoe.

Well, this foam that Nike came out with is so good that it actually returns way more energy than the average foam did. To the point where like when they test these things on like force plate treadmills and things like that, it's like depending on the person's gait and some of the things is like a two to 8% improvement in performance.

I mean, we've seen records just across the board get broken since this came out. - All distances. - Basically, yeah, yeah. I think from at least from the 5K up through the marathon, and I mean, we've seen some insane improvements in the marathon. I think like the women's marathon went from what was considered relatively untouchable, like 216 to a 214.

And I mean, like it was like 218 was like just world-class. Like if you could run a 218 marathon as a woman, that was like, I mean, it still is to a degree, but then now you have someone run a 214. Like that's a huge jump. - And you attribute a lot of that to the shoe.

- Yeah, yeah. I think there's probably other things that come in mind too. Like now that people know there's a performance advantage from a mechanical standpoint, it's also a confidence thing where it's like, oh, now I can probably try going five seconds per mile faster and maybe they could have anyway.

And they just, now they think they can, so they are. So there's probably a little bit of that that's just adding to it. - Do you think there's a lot of extra innovation that's still possible? Like what, if you could do this kind of big leap with a little innovation of foam, is there other stuff that you can do or further innovation of materials that make up the foam?

- Yeah, so they can definitely go much more advantage. They put a cap on it essentially. So there's also a carbon plate element to this too, where they put like this carbon plate in there in between the foam. So like I believe when Kipchak Ghi broke, well, when they did that kind of the sub two hour project, he actually had on a shoe, if I'm not mistaken, that never got to market because they put down some parameters on it after, before that one came to market, where it was actually like stacked up to, I can't remember how many millimeters, it was an insane amount.

And they had like, I think maybe even three layer plates in there. - And that was a Nike shoe he was wearing? - Yeah, yeah. So what makes it kind of controversial or difficult is Nike came out with these prototypes. So a prototype for people that don't understand shoes, like these companies, they'll develop a shoe and it usually takes like somewhere in the neighborhood of like probably 18 months to hit the market.

So if you're like a sponsored athlete or work for the company, you can get your hands on these shoes before they actually come to market. So we had an issue, I think, this wasn't necessarily as big of an issue in the ultra running community, but in the track and field Olympic distance stuff was a big issue because you had Nike athletes having these prototype shoes before anyone could get them.

And then you had athletes who were sponsored by these other brands who couldn't wear them even when they did come to market. So then we had this like chase to catch up where other companies are starting to make their own version of it. And now we're getting to a point where most companies have a version of that shoe.

But we had a huge transition phase that impacted the Olympics big time. I mean, think of it, here's an example of it. There was an athlete, Kara Goucher. She was not, she was a Nike athlete, wasn't when they came out with this shoe. And she ran the Olympic trial marathon and got fourth place, first person out.

And two of the people had her had that shoe on. And she was maybe a minute or two, like I'd have to look to see exactly, but it was within the performance advantage range. And so you could argue that she was the first person in modern running to lose an Olympic spot due to a technological disadvantage.

- Wow. - And it's like, I mean, it's one of those-- - It's kind of profound. - Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where like, it's a transition, right? So there's gonna be bumpy road and there's gonna be people that get caught in that transition that it's unfortunate for.

But it's also like, once everything does catch up and every shoe company has a version of this, there's still problems. I mean, these are incredibly expensive shoes. It's like a $250 shoe. So it's like, at what point do you tell a wealthy family with a high school kid that, you can get that $250 shoe, but then you go and this kid's family can barely afford a pair of shoes for them, much less a $250 pair of shoes.

Like, where do we draw that line? And that sort of stuff. Also just, here's the other big one. Like, let's, I mean, two to 8% is a massive range. What if you're on the 2% versus someone's on the 8%? You know, chances are, if you're, you know, blowing a record out of the water, you're probably closer to that high end percentage versus someone who's maybe getting incremental gains, you're probably closer to that lower end.

So is it fair to have a piece of equipment that has that big of a range when we're talking about less than a percent determining these races when all is held constant? - Those are fascinating, like philosophical questions that I think it's nice to solve that for the shoe or to raise those questions for a shoe, because the more complicated place where they will be raised is probably like genetics, genetic engineering, all those kinds of things.

- Yeah, you'll get a lot more complicated. - So it's nice when you have like a particular piece of technology that's just like right there, it's a shoe, we can understand it, we can study it. - Right, and we may be coming on the precipice of like human powered sport performances no longer being something that we like look at as this like pinnacle of, like, I don't know, maybe entertainment's the wrong word, but like, is that a pursuit?

You know, do we end up just going a different direction? I mean, I think it's like, it's so hard for us to think about that right now, because it's so part of like the culture and the lifestyle of the average person, where like sport is a hobby of theirs, as well as a passion to follow.

And it's like, how complicated does it need to get before people lose that interest? - And there could be a future where most of the Olympics is eSports. Somebody told me that eSports is in the Olympics. I've been meaning to look this up. - Oh. - Huh. Which is, you know, like what video, so video games are in the Olympics now.

- Yeah, yeah. - It could be as like a trial that they're doing. - Mm-hmm. - But if this is true, I'm trying in real time to look it up, but if this eSports joining Olympics in 2024, wow. So that could be just a, that could be a fun side thing, but it could be a first step into a complete transformation of what sports mean.

- Yeah. - 'Cause you can control video games better than you control for genetics in humans. - Well, and in reality, we've been dealing with this problem in other areas, just with the performance enhancing side of things with drugs and all that stuff too. And anyway, that conversation's flared back up with track and field too, where we are seeing a lot of records get broken.

A lot of it probably is to shoot technology, but you know, in 2020 with the COVID stuff, you have all these out of competition testing protocols that a lot of these top tier Olympic athletes are getting to try to eliminate, like, is it, like, if you just do inter competition testing, like there's potential for people to do things that are gonna give them a performance advantage, but not gonna show up on that test on the day of or after their race, where now you have these, like, limitations of being able to test.

So do we have a group of athletes now who decide, oh, I'm not gonna get tested in 2020 due to COVID restrictions. Is it the time to dope up and then, you know, hit some stride in some records and then taper back off when they get this thing fired back up again?

And so there may be some of that as well. And I mean, that's always been an ongoing problem. - Yeah, but the boost you get from performance enhancing drugs could be tiny relative to the stuff we have in the future. - Right, yeah. - So you might be the last generation of, like, natural, unmodified humans that were running.

- And who knows, maybe that's already over. Who knows who's modified. - That's true. You might, we might be living through that transition to the new Nike shoe, but broadly defined. - Uh-huh, yeah. - So you'll be, in some sense, in the history books as humans used to run without any modifications.

- They used to destroy their body and let it recover and then do it again. - And they used to be impressed with an 11-hour, a hundred mile time where we could do it in under an hour now. - Yeah, yeah. - So, but nevertheless, it is incredible. The four mile, the four minute mile was incredibly impressive.

I really love the 11-hour mark for the 100 miler. And the two hour marathon by most people for the longest time was thought to be impossible. There's still people that think it's impossible under certain constraints. So, Elliot Kipchoge of Kenya, as you mentioned, ran a one hour, 59 minute, 40 second marathon.

But he had, like you said, the prototype shoes and he had the pace setters. - Yeah. - I don't know how essential that is, but it seems quite essential. Do you think it's possible? First of all, what do you think about that accomplishment? And he is one of the greatest, if not the greatest marathon runners of all time.

What do you think about that accomplishment? And do you think it's possible to run a two hour marathon without any assistance? - Yeah, I mean, I think there's no question about it, regardless of technology, he's world-class, if not the best. I think he could go under two hours, someone equivalent to him could go under two hours with the shoe technology.

Probably, what it'll take is it'll take a fast course, a course that has like very few tangents, because like turning on a course, they estimate it adds about a percent to the distance. So, when we're talking about a marathon, you're getting up to like a quarter mile extra running, you know, that alone could potentially put you down near two flat based on what we're seeing.

'Cause I mean, Kipchakee's got a, was it 20140, I believe, is his actual world record, where it's actually like certified. So, I mean, he's right on the door, knocking on the door there. We had the prototype he had, since then they put in a regulation where you can't stack a shoe for the roads more than 40 millimeters.

So, you can only have so much of that energy returning foam, and you can only have, I think, one carbon plate in there now. So, that puts a little bit of a ceiling on that technological thing. But who knows what else will come out in that. And to be honest, who comes out with it?

Because the fact that Nike came out with this technology is the reason why it's being allowed to be used. If it would have been like, you know, another running company that came out with it, I'm sure the regulations would have been slapped down on it immediately. And they would have probably just thrown it out altogether.

- Also, there's politics. - Yeah, oh yeah. Well, and I mean, you can go super negative with that and say like, "Hey, this is terrible, or this is super nefarious." When in reality, it's like, you have a company that has billions of dollars and is interested enough in the sport that otherwise doesn't generate a ton of revenue to pick up a big tab and support track and field and things like that.

But with that, you want to be the guy who says, "Yeah, thanks for the millions and millions of dollars, but we're gonna... All those years and money you spent on that phone, you wasted it. We're not gonna let you use it." But if you're another company who revolutionizes the sport in potentially a negative way, maybe you say no to them.

So it gets interesting. - That's the way of humanity. - That's how it always happens. - Yeah. - Yeah, there's really no way around it. - I think Phil Mephetone, I think it's him, that he wrote a book about a two-hour marathon. What are the limits? How fast could we run?

And I think he puts it like an hour and 42 minutes, something like that, or 40-something minutes. It's kind of an interesting question of what are the limits. Do you think we'll just keep pushing the limits of what humans are capable of in the ultras, in the marathon? Is this just like the way of sport?

- I mean, I think ultra for sure, because that is a vastly growing sport. And there's a lot of potential for a much bigger pool of talent to pull from that could really push the needle down on some of these performances and things like that, especially as it becomes more popular.

If people start realizing, or I shouldn't say realizing, but if a scenario happens where like, "Oh, I'm one of the best endurance athletes in the world. "I make more money running ultra marathons "than I do running the marathon." Then all of a sudden we see every record get broken in a matter of a couple of years.

For the marathon, I mean, it's gonna get faster, I think, but to what degree is so hard to know. It's very hard to know. - The one hour and 40 minutes seems like-- - That's pretty fast. - That's very fast. - I mean, for folks for some perspective there, the current world record is in the 440s per mile.

- Per mile. - Like just to add a little flavor to that. - You're basically sprinting. - Yeah, I mean, go out to a track and run one lap as fast as you can and then reflect on what time you get and realize like the world record for the marathon is that lap at just over 70 seconds per lap.

So a minute and 10, just over that, but you're doing it 26.2 miles. So over a hundred times, it's mind boggling. - But watching Elliot Kipchoge just, first of all, he was like smiling at the end of it. So there's an extreme efficiency here too. So he's able to just find the right way to maximize, yeah, maximize efficiency.

It makes it look easy. I mean, that's true for basically every Olympic athlete. When you watch gymnasts, they kind of make it look easy. But there's like tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours behind that training. - Yeah, just to be comfortable enough to even attempt some of the moves they do in gymnastics is mind boggling.

- Well, that one is super awesome because how tragic it is, like one little slip up. - Yeah, four years of work. - And you're, it's all gone. Not just four years of work for many of them. - A lifetime. - It's like a lifetime of work. - And they're teenagers.

- And they're teenagers and they get dedicated everything to it. That's what makes the pursuits of humans so fascinating. We kind of talked about this a little bit already, but is there something that stands out to you as one of the hardest things you've had to overcome in all the either training or the competing that you've done?

Has there been moments that kind of stand out where you're proud of yourself that you were truly tested and you overcame it? - I think I'd be more inclined just 'cause it stands out to me much bigger than any one hard decision or outcome I had from a particular race is just like the trajectory of doing what I'm doing now is so much different from what I would have ever expected.

I was a talented enough runner where I could make the state meet by my senior year at a small Division III school and compete at a Division III college and be pretty modest talent comparative to my peers at the top level of Division III. To think that I'd be doing anything that was revolved around running as an occupation is I still second guess that that's actually occurring.

Makes me wonder about the whole simulation theory thing. (both laughing) It's like, who's got my joystick and what am I doing with it? - Exactly. (laughs) They got the cheat codes. - Yeah, exactly. Yeah, 'cause I mean, I went to school to be a teacher and I really loved that profession.

I taught for about five years and then I got to a point where, you know, some of it's just perfect timing too, like the sport gained enough popularity where there's enough money in it, where like I could start a coaching business, I could get sponsorships and things like that and actually look at it and say, financially I can make a go of this or at least risk it.

But there's such a fine line between like deciding to do that or kind of staying comfortable because I mean, I was at the perfect teaching spot for me. I was at this like project-based learning school and just outside of Madison, Wisconsin, loved it. One of the hardest decisions in my life to make was to step away from that to pursue running more holistically.

And I mean, I almost didn't. I had a co-teacher who was, I was thinking to myself, I knew that it was like a decision I was gonna have to make the next few years, but it was such an easy decision to say, "Well, wait one more year." And he was just like, he was a little more of a free spirit than I was, certainly at the time.

He's like, "Dude, what are you waiting for? "Just go. "Why are you here?" Like after I told him that, every time I'd come into school the next day and he'd be like, "Why are you still here?" But I mean, there's a tongue in cheek for sure. - But it's hard to know that you're gonna be successful in that kind of leap, given your, like, you know, 'cause it's easier when you're like an ultra performer early on, but to have the faith that you can accomplish something.

- In some regards, it's a blessing in the sense that like, you know, failing would have been fairly predictable. - Right. - Whereas if like, you know, I always wonder, I mean, I think of these like, especially the big sports, like baseball, football, and basketball, and you get, you know, guys who, guys and girls who are like identified in like early high school as being the next.

And it's like, what kind of pressure is that to think like, well, if I'm not like literally one of the best players in the NBA in 10 years, I failed. - Yeah. - It's just mind boggling to think if I'm not one of the best at one of the most competitive sports on the planet in what is an athletic, I think an athletic state of an NBA basketball player is probably one of the most athletic human beings on the planet.

And to know like in a teenage year that your success bar is being the best, one of the best in the league or the best ever. And that conversation is floating around everywhere you look and see versus being able to kind of quietly fail and go back to teaching.

(laughing) It makes it a little more digestible, I think. - You have a little bit more freedom to be great. - Right. - Because nobody's expecting you to be great. (laughing) Is there, from that, is there advice you can give to young people today, high schoolers, college students, taking on, trying to figure out their career, trying to figure out their life, advice on how to succeed in either?

- Yeah, I think, you know, one thing I was always interested when I was teaching was like, you'd have these, you'd have students who had like interests, they had what they were good at. And sometimes those ran in unison with one another. Other times they didn't. And it was always interesting to me when you'd have a student who's like, I'm really into like, you know, guitar or I'm really into skateboarding or something like that, where it's like pretty small, like success rate on that avenue versus what you can maybe accomplish by focusing on just something like a little more standard.

And I think like, really like, besides the likelihood of it becoming something you can turn into a profession or not, you should just ask yourself, like, is this something that I wanna spend my free time doing? And 'cause if it is, then you wanna keep that in your life 'cause that's something that's rewarding, motivating.

It might be the catalyst that gets you out of bed in the morning and go to another job in order to go do that thing afterwards. And I think nowadays, we're getting to a point where like, your reachability from even a really small, like unmonetized thing previously is now an option where if like you live in a city where there's only two other people interested in your topic of area, so you're not gonna be able to turn into a job now with the internet, you have the world at your disposal.

So that two to three people in every town can turn into thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of people. And if you really focus your time and energy into that thing, then who knows where you can go and how much more enjoyable your life can be if you're able to turn your career into a passion of yours.

So I think like, that is something I would tell people, focus on that. - See the thing you're good at and it kind of sparks that flame and go with that, even if society doesn't really want you to, like it's non-traditional and the odds are low of like traditionally defined success.

Just do that thing. I've struggled with that. It's like, it was always clear, especially like in school, there's stuff I'm actually good at and stuff that the world wants me to do. - Right, yeah. - And I kept doing that. - The world wanted me to be a plumber when I took that test my sophomore year.

(laughing) - Yeah, right. But even like academically, just going to university and academia, there are certain ways, even in, I would say, even in the thing you want to do, the way you do that thing, the world will want you to do it a certain way. And even just like finding your way of doing that thing is really powerful.

Like for me, the way I do research, the way I learn is different than colleagues of mine. And I've realized that, that I really like to follow things I'm passionate about versus sort of the rigor of studying like the fundamentals all across the board and building up in CASEL on the fundamentals, like layer upon layer.

It's just, there's a bunch of details in the way I pursue the very thing that I currently do that's different than others. And it took me quite a long time to accept like you don't need to do it the way everyone else is doing it. It doesn't, not everyone else, but majority of people are telling you to do it 'cause one, it's beneficial to do it different 'cause then you'll more likely stand out.

And two, like why the hell are you doing it the way it's not working for you? - Yeah, yeah. You know, I saw that all the time when I was teaching. I was dual certified. I was, my certifications were in history and broad field social studies. So like econ, psychology, history, all that stuff.

And then I also had a certification of special education, which was, you know, people think of special education a lot of times as like, oh, it's the, you know, the kid who is not smart enough to do the regular thing. When in reality, it's like, I mean, there is some, you know, there's obviously like, you know, like certain things like Down syndrome and stuff like that.

But like, there's also like a huge population of groups of both like gifted and talented on one end of the spectrum where they're incredibly smart and they're like the geniuses. But for whatever reason, the standard method of learning does not click with them, does not work with them. And then they just need a slightly different path or maybe a drastically different path and they're gonna just flourish.

And you have kids that end up falling on the other end where, you know, maybe it's really difficult for them to be able to read at the speed of other students. But if you give them this specific direction, they can just thrive in a certain area. And just seeing that like, you know, that there's multiple ways to do stuff and there's not necessarily one path to the end is I think such an eye-opening thing to learn, especially if you learn, maybe that's what I should answer the question that you've asked me with is, you know, keep an open mind as to what paths are forward and know that, you know, maybe just because, even if you look to your left, you look to your right and all your classmates are successful doing it one way, it doesn't necessarily mean that's gonna be the way for you.

- Yeah, so that could land you in eating a meat-based diet running across the country. Like the incredible madman that you are, Zach. I'm a huge fan, as I've told you many times, you're an inspiration to many. I'll be there checking in every day if you somehow make it out the starting line on September 1st.

I know Joe Rogan and millions of others will be as well. So I'm excited to see all the suffering that you're gonna go through. I wish you the best of luck and thank you so much for talking today. I really, really appreciate it. - Well, thanks a bunch, Lex.

It's been an honor to come on your podcast. I've been a fan of it for quite some time and I thought about wearing a white suit, but Michael Malice already took care of that one. So it was off the-- (laughing) - Well, and I think it would be really good for the ratings of this conversation if you end up dying during that run.

So-- (laughing) - I'll do my best. - So everything that could happen, it will be positive for the world. (laughing) - So you're saying I should try to average 100 miles a day. - 100 miles. (laughing) Well, I think you're gonna push yourself to, again, it's not the main priority, but it's trying to beat that record.

That's probably gonna take everything you have and that's truly inspiring. I wish you the best of luck, man. - Thanks a bunch. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Zach Bitter. And thank you to Ladder, Belcampo, Noom, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

And now let me leave you with some words from Steve Prefontaine. "I'm going to work so that it's a pure guts race at the end. "And if it is, I'm the only one who can win it." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) you